EGAD

Tree

And while I'm online and posting, a photo.

We're likely to get our first thunderstorm of the season in the next few days, which is a prospect that I'm relishing. (The thunder-snow we had a couple of weeks ago, while neat, isn't quite the same thing.) So with the thaw basically complete, and spring about to pounce into green any day now, let's recall the long winter just past with a tree.

Good accompanying reading: around the time I took this picture, I spent an entire evening engrossed by Wikipedia's List of Notable Trees.

Update

Happy passover -- chag Pesach same'ach -- people. How do you know it's pesach in Israel? Here's a hilarious (and true) list: You'll know it's passover in Israel. Seriously, the fact that there's an Arab dude in Abu Gosh who theoretically owns all the remaining bread in Israel for a week is probably the most delightful thing I learned the whole time I was there.

And since the advisor has been in Israel for the holiday, you'd think this would have been a slow week. Not so much. I'm actually having an astonishingly busy spring, which isn't terribly surprising if you consider that we have to pack up our experiment and leave for the field in something under three months. This has been annoying to a number of people, as my tight and shifting schedule has made it hard to commit to things very far in advance.

In other news, contact lenses are curious things.

See, I have at last gotten fed up with my ancient, battered, scratched, pitted, and soldered-back-together glasses, so various activities are in process to remedy this situation. One of these is that I am wearing an evaluation pair of contact lenses. Ignore for a moment the trick that was suppressing my finely honed reflexes enough to literally stick my finger in my eye without blinking. Optically, they basically work by reshaping the cornea, which is a totally different mechanism than the pre-eye correction done by glasses. Overall I think the vision correction isn't as precise as what good glasses can achieve (I also have new glasses coming in the mail any day, so I'll soon be able to directly test this assertion). On the other hand, for as long as I can remember I've been plagued by some subtle visual artifacts, like chromatic abberation caused by thick lenses (I can tilt my head and be a human spectrograph!), and ghost images around high-contrast borders (e.g. I see double or triple images of stars, which as you can imagine is extremely annoying to me as an astronomer) due I think to some asymmetric abberation of my cornea. Both are now gone, which is awesome and totally bizzare. While I wouldn't wear contacts all the time by any means, I'm really looking forward to trying a public observing night with these things.

Addendum

P.S. I'm still alive. I was in Montreal last week attending this conference, which was very educational. A full report and pictures will follow. But since I spent the whole week preceding working on my talk (20 minutes on EBEX, room full of our competitors, no backup), and came back to things like a broken dishwasher and a serious coding backlog, I've been a little bit preoccupied.

And since I've been kind of delinquent in posting photos, here's a sunset from February:

My Life, My Reading

So it's been an entire month since I posted here. Huh. That's rather impolite of me.

Story is, I've been a bit occupied with the whole grad school thing of late (more so than usual, that is), and side projects (like blogging, e.g.) have taken a hit. One thing is that on my experiment, we've reached the point where the subsystems I develop have suddenly become crucial for day-to-day life around here, and now I'm supporting considerably more users than before. Let's see, what else? Oh! I've been accepted to attend and speak at this workshop, so I get to visit Montreal at the end of the month. My attempt to give a 20-minute practice talk today turned into a two hour debate about the correct philosophy and strategy to use in approaching this audience. But I also got some good tips on my presentation.

Also: I have a minion now. Just a freshman undergrad, who requires enough babysitting that I'm not sure he's a net gain yet, in terms of productivity, but he seems to be a pretty quick study.

I'm enough of a politics/news junkie that I've read an enormous number of things since last time I posted. I'll just highlight two. One is an actual book: just after the invasion of Iraq Dahr Jamail declared himself an independent journalist and headed there to try and report what the embedded media wasn't. He wound up spending large chunks of 2003 - 2005 there, living and reporting from among the Iraqis, until it simply became too dangerous for a westerner to do that anymore. Now he's written a book: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. It is not an especially easy read, especially if you're American (and thus, by extension, largely responsible for this mess). The writing reflects the Iraqis', and Jamail's own, evolution over the three-ish years chronicled in the book: at the start optimistic, if dismayed by the ongoing chaos and evidently poor planning, with time the mood grows darker and, yes, angrier. On the ground the occupation is seen first as bungling and ineffectual, then progresses to arrogant, dangerous, and finally malevolent and tyrannical. By the time Jamail left for the last time, the Iraqis with whom he interacted were mostly of the opinion that things were better under Saddam Hussein's regime. According to the afterward, most of the people he knew there have either fled Iraq or are dead.

Beyond the Green Zone, I should note, isn't a political text, and doesn't purport to explain why things turned out as they did, nor does it even try to describe in any systematic fashion what exactly happened. In fact, it reads like a diary: often scattered or hastily written, moving simply forward in time the reader is mostly allowed to discover things as Jamail did. Great literature it isn't, but if you don't read Arabic it's probably the best source out there to learn what the Iraq war looked like from the outside of a Humvee.

The other: Jack Hedin is the farmer who runs Featherstone Farm, to which my house subscribes through a CSA membership. (We're still finishing off the enormous amount of assorted greens pesto I froze last summer.) Anyway, Jack had an op-ed in the Times a couple of weeks ago on the farm bill and a problem for supporters of local agriculture: in some cases, it's illegal to plant those watermellons! In particular, there's an obscure provision of the farm subsidy rules, jealously protected by the California growers in particular, that effectively bans planting fruits and vegetables on land that used to be used to grow staple crops like corn or cotton. Which is, basically, all farmland around here. Funny, that.

Freeze

It's generally likely that last weekend's cold snap was our last dose of seriously Arctic air, and we won't see the negative double-digits until next winter. But they said that three weeks ago, too. They also keep predicting snow that fails to materialize. The river is still too warm to maintain it's ice.

Anyway, it's official -- my experiment's test flight has been pushed back to the fall. NASA (technically, the CSBF) is still trying to qualify their largest balloon for the weight class we were planning to use. Evidently fully inflating a 37-million-cubic-foot helium balloon poses some engineering challenges. (Here's what it looks like for our (smaller) sister experiment, BLAST.) So CSBF will do another qualifying flight in the spring, and with any luck we'll be first in line to use it when the winds turn back around in September or so.

In fact, this is a pretty handy delay. Not just because it was going to be a real scramble to get the payload ready to launch by May. I mean handy for perfectly selfish reasons: I probably won't have to miss the ScavHunt, and won't be flying in from the field for my sister's wedding.

Fine, Fine Line

As a postscript, from Elena (who moonlights, or rather daylights, as a code monkey) on coming home from work in a musical mood:

(Sung, obviously, to the tune of "Fine, Fine line" -- sadly the internets have failed me and I cannot find a video of the original to link to. While the sound is somewhat poor, this gives a general idea.)

There's a fine, fine line
between the database, and a mess
There's a fine, fine line
between it's working, and it ain't
And you don't even know until you've taken your break
if it was even worth it to compile
Because there's a fine, fine line
between the code ... and a waste of my time!

Not Brrr -- Ouch

The thermometer outside my window read -1°F when I started getting dressed, and the weather pages said it was two degrees warmer than that when I got to the lab. Not far from my house, there's a section of sidewalk that got covered in slush during the thaw, which is now frozen into a rock hard uneven and cratered moonscape. Biking over it this morning, I figured I'm pretty much just an air tank away from riding on the surface of Europa. (No, I don't generally bike on sidewalks; this is the sidewalk that runs in front of my house, which I take for a block when there's too much frozen muck plowed up in the driveway.)

It occurred to me that this is why Arctic cultures have umpteen words for things like cold, and snow. Because what it is outside just now, is a completely different thing than what I grew up calling "cold." Cold was when you put on thick socks and a jacket before going to school, when you could see your breath and if you stood around outside too long you'd start to shiver. Biking on a sunny subzero day there's no danger of shivering if you're dressed at all appropriately (which is to say, a bit like an astronaut). Outside the cold is like a form of radiation that you must shield yourself against. Choosing what to wear becomes a tradeoff between the ability to see and the fact that your face will hurt when you arrive from exposure to the outside, the ability to operate brake levers versus fingertips that will be red and stinging as though scalded.

Tomorrow it will be even colder, and if I go out I'll take my chances with the brakes, and wear the big warm gauntlets.

New Year

I suppose global warming can mostly be said to be rendering Minnesota more habitable. Still, it was pretty weird spending yesterday morning slogging around in ankle-deep ice water trying to clear melting slush from the walks. With limited success, I should note: you could definitely ice skate in the breezeway beside my house.

While it's maybe a little late for new year's memes, since I've been doing this one for a couple of years now, I feel like keeping up the tradition.

So, to summarize EGAD's year, in 2007 I published 108 posts, a little under half of which were categorized as Narrative (then, in descending order, Politics, Science, and Entrances to the Labyrinth). EGAD got 15,308 hits, probably one-third of which was my dozen or so regular readers. Most of the rest came from Google. For most of the year, the top draw appears to have been my maps and photographs from the trip to the Sinai back in 2005, but starting in November I started getting a lot of visitors looking for information about Comet Holmes. The internets at large continue to care not one whit about my musings on grad student life, politics, or science. That's pretty unsurprising, as Jorge Cham takes care of the first, and there's whole blogospheres devoted to the latter two.

And as for every year, here we have the first and last sentence of each month of 2007:

January

... I apparently was on blog-vacation all month.

February

First: Groundhog Day... ...is as good a day as any to bring my blog-vacation to a close.
Last: Via Pandagon, because cows with guns are catchy:

March

First: So it looks like the Duluth zoo's porcupine was right -- here we are in our fourth week of rather conspicuous winter since the conflicting predictions of Groundhog's Day.
Last: In an effort to keep you folks up-to-date, let's assume a couple-posts-per-week schedule for now while things percolate.

April

First: I am, however, amused by the fact that the United States Postal Service webpage now has a "Star Wars Experience" on/off button.
Last: The list also includes a bunch of medieval European inns and breweries, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about Europe.

May

First: I was probably six or eight when I picked up Azimov's Foundation trilogy.
Last:: Just a quick question to brighten your Sunday morning: does it invoke Godwin's Law to point out that the Bush administration is actually lifting its doublespeak from the Gestapo?

June

First: Collaborators leave town tomorrow; then I rejoin the outside world.
Last: Okay, I'll go to bed now.

July

First: Life with the CSA has been an adventure so far -- you don't realize the degree to which laziness nudges variety out of your diet until you're confronted with eating from a box full of whatever happens to be ripe this week.
Last: And finally, I would be remiss if I failed to cite the newly-discovered Cheney Superposition (via Dean)

August

First: So first of all, I was nowhere near the bridge.
Last: Best of luck to Sean Fritz and Tim McQuillan; I think the next few months will be very interesting for them.

September

First: Friday night I was out at O'Brien running a Universe in the Park event, and throughout the evening I and the attendees kept noticing a highly unusual number of bright meteors in the sky.
Last: I also learned some trivia about brown eggs.

October

First: No, I haven't abandoned the blog.
Last: Since we've got clear skies here, I plan to take the telescope for another spin, even despite the cold I'm battling.

November

First: It's Guy Fawkes, er ... Counterterrorism Day.
Last: Which might explain why I enjoy cranking up the old refractor and fiddling around until I can take acceptable photos with whatever cheap equipment I have handy. It's just fun.

December

First: First of December, and right on cue it's snowing.
Last: I'll be here in Texas, thawing out, for the next week.