a geocentric view

It's Official

2009-03-14T12:45:00.000-04:00

Assumptions: Quote of the Day

2009-03-07T02:57:00.001-05:00

Godel says you have to assume shit; physicists just give an explanation for why it is brown and smelly.

Snow Days are for Lazy Wusses

2009-01-28T12:23:00.001-05:00

President Obama would like for you to all grow up and deal with it. "It" in this case is the weather. Quit being lazy, suck it up, clear your roads and get to work.

... Obama said he wanted to make an unrelated comment to the press. In a slightly amused tone, he noted this his daughters' school, Sidwell Friends, was canceled today because of a snow and ice storm that hit Washington.

The suburban schools systems and many private schools in the region were closed today and the District public schools opted for a delayed opening because of the sleet and freezing rain that made some roads and many sidewalks treacherous.

"Because of what? Because of some ice?" Obama said to laughter around the table. ...

He concluded by saying: " ... I'm saying that when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things."

In the meantime, half of the graduate students in my department were here this morning for Coffee. We even talked about science for forty minutes, in a way that didn't resemble Lord of the Flies at all. No one else has shown up yet.

Books about Kitties: Dewey and Cheezburgers

2008-12-08T13:00:00.002-05:00

The Winter Solstice is quickly approaching, so I know you're looking for gifts for the special people in your life. Lots of people like both kitties and books, so here are two book reviews of recently read kitty-themed books.

Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron:

On a cold winter night in 1988, someone dumped a small kitten into the book slot at the library in Spencer, Iowa. Naturally, the cat was dubbed "Dewey" and subsequently adopted by the library. Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, while nominally the story of this apparently adorable cat, also tells the story of the librarian, Vicki Myron, who was Dewey's principal steward for the next 18 years. OK, I confess, I got this book nearly two months ago, from the publisher for free in exchange for reviewing it, no less. I had it read less than two weeks after finishing it, but I just couldn't review it. I was already having a fairly difficult month (why do you think I haven't been blogging like I used to?), and then here comes this book that I think is going to be chock full of adorable stories about a cute kitty being cute in a library. So I read it. And, sure enough, there are lots of funny stories about Dewey being a kitty, but there is also a lot about what corn-growing Iowa was like in the 1980s and 90s ... and about the ordinary yet difficult life of Myron herself, and how like many pets since humans have started having pets, Dewey somehow made everything a little bit better. The writing is straightforward and unpretentious—it's really just a librarian talking about her cat—but as the book is a quick read (and enjoyable, once you've located your box of tissues), it's sure to be a good gift for anyone who likes stories about cats or libraries.

For something more upbeat, here's a review of I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun with more words in the review than in the entire book, by probably an order of magnitude:

It's great having a hardcopy of lolcats (years from now this will still be a conversation starter, whether it lives in a bathroom or on a coffee table), and I was majorly looking forward to receiving my solid dose of happiness-in-book-form in the mail. As expected, it is pretty entertaining, but as other reviewers have noted, it seems that somehow the funniest lolcats were not selected for the book. (Of course, there's no selection which would not engender this kind of response from some group of people, but even though I'm one of Those People who check icanhascheezburger.com several times a day [I bought the book, this shouldn't be surprising, OK?], there were several picture/caption combinations in here that made me just go, "wtf? I don't get it. At all.") The bigger complaint that I have with the book, however, is the presentation: it could do with being a tad bigger, and having some space around the pictures. As is, it is sometimes difficult to tell immediately whether or not the two facing pages are one big lolcat or two completely unrelated ones, and the result is a bit of information overload (and not in a good way, unfortunately). There are several pages on which the presentation is really well done; some space around the picture, a cute little (unrelated) drawing. A few pages are "instruction manuals" or "classroom styles," teaching cats what such terms as "invisible" and "in ur" mean. (Though, again, these pages suffer from the page-size issue.) It's nice to see, in these cases, a presentation which isn't merely "paste picture from int0rnet into book."

Regardless of all these complaints, this LOLcat Collekshun is still a book of lolcats, and any fan of the meme will be happy to get a copy for Christmas or a birthday or a "just cuz." Srsly.

Book Review: Autism's False Prophets by Paul Offit

2008-10-01T09:35:00.004-04:00

I recently received and read Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and The Search for a Cure by Paul Offit through the ScienceBlogs Book Club. Offit first details the history of various attempts at defining the cause of and curing autism, focusing the most on first the MMR vaccine and then thiomersol (which contains mercury), which is contained in many vaccines (though not MMR).

In general I found this book interesting and educational (all I knew going in was that the "vaccines cause autism" nonsense was both quackery and dangerous), and I recommend it to anyone interested in the so-called controversy—there is no controversy as far as the science is concerned—as well as for the book's interesting discussion on the interaction between science and the public via the media. People distrust science and its authority figures all the time; usually this just leads to ignorance, but in the case of "let's not vaccinate our kids" it can lead to death. Which isn't cool.

Summary: Autism's False Prophets begins by offering a pre-vaccine history of autism and attempts to cure it. A pattern is established: people come up with some desperate theory, put a lot of time and effort and money in trying to "cure" their children, some of the "cures" wind up doing severe damage, parents move to next theory. Then enters the vaccine theory, which is actually two-fold. It begins in England with Andrew Wakefield announcing that the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine increases rates of autism; he's even got an (unsupported) idea as to why this should be the case. (People seemed to not mind that he's had it out against MMR since the 1980s.) Meanwhile, as the MMR-autism link isn't able to be reproduced in independent studies and Wakefield is exposed as a fraud, a panel in the US realizes that the amount of ethylmercury in vaccines (used as a preservative, which makes the vaccine both cheaper and safer to use) is higher than the amount of recommend safe-levels of methylmercury. Spurred on by parents who have decided that their kids got autism after getting their vaccines (most austism symptoms become the most apparent about a year or so of age, right around when kids get many of their vaccines, so the emotional causal link isn't unsurprising), the panel figures that there isn't any harm in being cautious. So they announce that while there isn't any reason to be afraid, they will be looking into the situation. And all hell breaks loose.

Offit traces this aftermath right up to the Omnibus Autism Proceedings, a huge court case of thousands of parents claiming that vaccines caused autism in their children; the court's decision is due out early 2009. Offit then discusses how this controversy is a classic example of fear, scandal, and headlines driving the media narrative more than responsibly informing the public of the facts: the scientific case showing no linkage between vaccines and autism has actually been established for some years now. But, Offit argues, the public equates going online and reading what shows up on a Google search with scientific literacy, and our culture likes to buck authority, and so the result is kids dying of measles. The book closes with a short look into what actually does cause autism (it's genetic), and how a few parents of autistic children who know vaccines weren't the cause—and who don't like having their children referred to as "mad," "damaged," or "soulless"—have been responding to this whole fiasco.

Review: In general, I liked this book and found it easy to read. However, there were several stylistic points which were downright annoying. (I get the impression that while the author did his job, the editor did not.) First, there are several simultaneous storylines weaved throughout the text, yet as the story is not always told chronologically, it's difficult to keep any of the dates and the relative orderings of different "plots" straight. In this same vein, the book is written with the understanding that vaccines do not cause autism, but often the story is told like it is a story, a thriller: the case against vaccines-cause-autism isn't made strongly and irrevocably until well into the book, so someone could easily read halfway and think "zomg! conspiracy!!!" Also, as this is a book talking about how important believing the scientific consensus is, I would have appreciated it if the end notes listed at the back of the book were actually marked in the text itself. The organization of the book is also somewhat shaky, causing some interesting points get a bit buried in the text. For example: if vaccines-cause-autism really is this big conspiracy, then how come the scientists, etc. supposedly perpetuating this conspiracy vaccinate their own kids? Or that kids absorb more methylmercury from breast milk and baby formula than from vaccines in their first few months of life anyhow, a fact which is just mentioned in an off-hand kind of way in the middle of some chapter.

The two chapters towards the end of the book on science and the media and how the general public portrays science were both interesting and elucidating. I can't come up with solutions to these problems, but Offit at least lays out the issues well.

More Outliers from the Mass–Metallicity Relation

2008-09-15T11:38:00.005-04:00

Last week, my second paper on outliers from the mass–metallicity relation showed up on astro-ph. In the first one, which I described here, was on the low-mass high-metallicity outliers from the relation; I described in that first post more about what this so-called "mass–metallicity relation" thing actually is. We concluded in that paper that those galaxies must be running out of star-forming gas, and thus nearing the end of their star formation.

In Paper II, we are looking at the other corner of the mass–metallicity plane: massive low-metallicity galaxies. (Yes, it is easy to get tongue-tied in this game.) Most of the 42 galaxies in our sample look like this:They are very blue and what we astronomers called "disturbed." That's fancy-talk for "they've been playing rough with their neighbors and so their gas and stars have been all moved around so they look morphologically... disturbed." The key here is that simulations have shown that as galaxies interact, gas from really large scales will typically get drained into the centers of the galaxies. As it turns out, this large-scale gas will generically have a much lower metallicity than the gas originally at the galaxy center, so the large-scale gas inflow will effectively dilute the central gas. Relative to the amount of time we can expect for the star-formation to continue, it won't take very long for this new gas to get re-enriched by metals formed during the star formation itself, so we can expect for these luminous low-metallicity galaxies to be relatively rare.

Book Review: Halima Bashir's Tears of the Desert

2008-09-08T20:06:00.002-04:00

Over the weekend I read Tears of the Desert: A Memoir of Survival in Darfur by Halima Bashir.

Tears of the Desert details the life of Halima Bashir, a doctor who grew up in Darfur and now lives in the UK. Her story is told in a straightforward manner: how she grew up and how her family and village were important to her, how she went to school and enjoyed it and eventually went on the medical school, how war crept into her life until it became un-ignorable and eventually destroyed her life, her home, her family, and how she finally escaped from Sudan and managed to put together a new life in England. It most places—even the childhood stories—the story is riveting (which, unfortunately, also means that some of the explicit statements of foreboding come across and cheesy and unecessary). The storytelling is also often unexpectedly hilarious; I found myself laughing out loud quite a few times.

As a personal accounting of the history of the Darfur conflict, Tears of the Desert is a powerful story of how innocent lives are completely torn asunder. Bashir has lived through things that most of her readers cannot possibly imagine (yet, of course, as the book is written in the first person, we the readers know that, she at least, has survived). Her story thrusts raw emotion into the too easily glossed-over refugee and death statistics streaming out of the region. However, I found the book almost too insular at times; for example, the only year explicitly stated (aside from in the short epilogue), is the date of Bashir's birth: 1979. I was constantly adding and subtracting to determine approximate dates, and so as an actual history Tears of the Desert unfortunately falls a little short and does not serve well as an introduction to the Darfur crisis, and I fear that in ten to twenty years this fact will make it an even more difficult read. Likewise, no map is offered and only a brief description as to the underlying cause of the conflict and why the UN is doing little to stop it is given in the epilogue.

Regardless, a reader who first spends half an hour reading about the Darfur situation online should have plenty of context in which to set this book, and Tears of the Desert provides a far more personal and accessible accounting than anything the internet (or most anywhere else) has to provide.

Tears of the Desert will be on sale in the US on September 9, 2008.

Book Review: Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

2008-09-07T19:40:00.000-04:00

(Two posts in less than a week. I know. Don't get too excited.)

I recently finished reading Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way. I admit: it was on a recommendation list somewhere and I was intrigued by the title, so when I saw it at a local used bookstore, I snagged it. I have not been disappointed.

Summary: Coming of Age in the Milky Way tells the story of how humankind came to know its place in the universe. Though the book has three distinct themes (Space, Time, and Creation), the main focus is on Space: how did we learn the size of the Earth, the extent of and laws governing the Solar System, that the Milky Way is a "galaxy" and only one of many, and that the universe is giant and expanding? The other two sections expand on this history of revelations. The Time section discusses how we discovered that the Earth (as well as humans as a species and the universe as a whole) are not unchanging, static and infinite, and the Creation section focuses more on the marriage of quantum physics and cosmology: how did the elements and subatomic particles and, indeed, the universe itself come to be?

Review: As an astronomer, none of the actual science here was new to me, but I can say that, unlike many popular treatments of physics, very little of the descriptions made my inner "but that's not really true ..." voice cringe. (There were maybe two pages like this, and one of them may have actually involved something that was believed to be true in the late 1980s.)

Primarily, though, this is a history book, and I found the history fascinating. Ferris paints a detailed and colorful portait of the personalities and worldly changes (politics, well-timed supernovae, etc.) that led to these revelations (and occasional setbacks). The writing is lyrical, poetic even, and yet detailed and straightforward when need be. The book is stock full of quotes, none of which feel out of place or difficult to read (as thousand-year-old quotations are apt to be). The transition of this writing style into the modern age—when quotes were garnered via interviews instead of meticulous combing of however-the-hell people figure these things out—was seemless. Though published in 1988, Coming of Age in the Milky Way is surprisingly not out-of-date 20 years later; as the views of the 1980s are not treated as The Answer, a 21st century reader will only notice that the story seems to stop a little earlier than expected.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of science, the process of science, or general astronomy or physics.

Citations and Paper Length

2008-09-05T09:25:00.000-04:00

Interesting paper on astro-ph this morning from Kris Stanek. As it turns out, in general, longer papers tend to get cited more. The exception is that, in astronomy, two of the major journals have a "Letters" section, which limits papers to 4 pages. These Letters do tend to be cited more than other short papers (presumably because they are Really just longer papers squeezed into a shorter format). Thus the graph of number of citations versus page length looks an awful lot like the state of Ohio:
The paper also includes some silliness-tinged career advice.

In Which I Disucss What I Have Been Doing Instead Of Blogging

2008-07-11T22:20:00.000-04:00

The astute reader has pointed out that I have not exactly been "updating" this blog lately, which is to say, I haven't posted anything in basically two months or more.

Thing is, I haven't really had much to say. I spent a week at the beach (oh, such a perfect beach it was) in June with my family and the significant other. There was sand and ocean and sky and rum and sleep and shrimp boil and sunshine everything was good. I've been reading a lot. In the last two months or so, I've re-read the entire Kushiel series (except for the middle part of Kushiel's Scion since that one isn't really all that good anyhow) in preparation for Kushiel's Mercy, which I got from the library and quickly devoured. This week I read Angelina Jolie's Notes From My Travels, which is essentially a publication of the journal she kept when beginning her work with refugees and the United Nations. (I'm particularly interested in Cambodia, and so her impressions of regions she traveled through some 4 years before me were particularly interesting, though the timing of her trip to Pakistan to see and meet Afghan refugees there in August 2001 is perhaps the trip with the most interesting timing.) I'm about halfway through Obama's Audacity of Hope; having read Al Gore's The Assault on Reason in February (which was actually the inspiration for this post, though I did at the time fully intend for a book review to be forthcoming...), I have decided to try to read more, you know, non-fiction. So far the Audacity of Hope is making me realize why so many people seem to be "in love" with Obama—he uses the word "damask" in the second paragraph of chapter 1 ... how can you not love that?! So far the book seems straightforward and honest, but then, I'm pissed off about his FISA vote and the lame-ass excuses he gave over it. I'll still be voting for him, of course—in the last eight years, McCain has gone from interesting to downright frightening—but it is good to stay informed and realistic. I also started reading Daily Kos—a totally unbiased source of information, I know, but what is? and I like the snark—which has managed to make my morning coffee-and-blogs time erm slightly longer. I also finally finished Freakonomics and The Know-It-All in May ... and I've become totally addictd to LibraryThing and its vast cataloguing and statistics-generating power. While visiting my parents, I also helped them scan in a few hundred of their books; why are such things so immensely interesting?!

Oh, yeah, and I guess I've kind of been working. The first few weeks after the beach were rough (there was a dearth of ocean, rum, and soft breezes in my office, and I'd gotten used to the 10 or more hours of sleep a night), but I had a paper accepted for publication around the end of June. I had gotten around a dozen emails about it after it first showed up on astro-ph—many of which were not just asking me to cite some obscure paper of theirs! So I think this is a case where the paper—and the interpretations—did substantially improve between revisions. So now I'm working on the "sequel" paper: paper #1 was on low-mass high-metallicity outliers from the mass–metallicity relation, so paper #2 is going to be on the high-mass low-metallicity outliers. I convinced myself today that the metallicities I'm measuring for this new sample aren't bogus, so now it's time to start compiling all of the data and building an explanation for why these galaxies are the way they are. The current plan is to present the main results at a conference in August so that some of the helpful back-and-forth that happened after the last paper showed up on astro-ph can perhaps happen before the paper is submitted this time.

I've been working on several other things as well, but getting into all of that would mean *gasp* explaining in part what my so-called "thesis" is about, and we wouldn't want to rush back into this relationship too quickly, now would we? Besides, I have a book to go read.

Solving the World's Problems, One Plot at a Time

2008-05-30T14:45:00.001-04:00

Whereby "the world," I really just mean mine. Some time ago, I stated that the worst part about being a graduate student (in the astronomy department!) at Ohio State is that our offices get stupidly ridiculously hot for several weeks each year. Apparently our department chair, however, finally got the message across to The Powers That Be that 85° offices are not conducive to productivity, and this year we were spared the fortnight-long saunas.

Well, at least the temperatures were fine during the days, but come weekends, or heaven forbid, after dinnertime, the office temperatures would once again climb. The department secretary, who of course is only in the building during "standard" office hours, tried to assure us that this was because "if the AC breaks over the weekend there isn't anyone around to fix it." Then how come, we wondered, every Monday morning at 9am the AC was so quickly "fixed"? One of my officemates was convinced that the patterns we were observing were due to the AC being simply turned off outside of business hours. So, we started recording the date, time, temperature set, and temperature recorded (by the presumably reliable thermostat):

That little peak on the right there corresponds to Memorial Day weekend. On Monday I was clever enough to leave before the office reached 90 (the thermometer on the thermostat, by the way, maxes out at 85°; someone in another office had a real thermometer and mentioned such numbers the following day). Tuesday morning, the temperature decreased dramatically. We sent this nice little plot to the department chair, who then forwarded on to The Powers That Be, who, we found out this morning, used it to unravel the great "mystery": the air conditioning in this building was being automatically turned off at 5pm and turned back on at 8am—and left off for the entirety of any given weekend. We have been assured that this miscalculation of when astronomers work has been remedied.

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2008-05-18T17:40:00.002-04:00

So this afternoon, the significant other and I decided we needed to see a movie. I voted Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was told this is not actually out in theaters yet (I don't really follow these things, but I finally saw a trailer for it for the first time last night, which made me want to go see it immediately). So we settled on a 1:50pm showing of Prince Caspian. We get to the theater and pay for our tickets, but my credit card got double charged. So I had to wait at the little desk for a bit to get my card reimbursed. As this is happening, a group of people (carrying legal pads!) comes in, looking mildly confused, and the lady helping me asks, "Indiana Jones?" My head does several 180s; she explains it's a press showing. "I have a blog! I can write a movie review!!" I go join the SO, who is standing in line to buy some popcorn. I do a recap, and a man in the next line over explains to us that it's in Theatre 15, and they aren't asking for credentials, only a name and affiliation. We decide we're too nervous (and maybe too moral) to try for it, and it's about five minutes before Prince Caspian is supposed to start, so no go. Well, actually, Prince Capsian wasn't finished yet, so we went and sat on a bench for a while, whereupon we realized that if we didn't try to see Indiana Jones—it's Indiana Jones !!!—then we would regret it. So we walked over to Theatre 15 with our popcorn and I told them we were from an Ohio State newspaper, and we walked right in.

Now, I promised a review, but, first, there's a slight problem, a dilemma if you will. See, I hate spoilers. I abhor them. I think people who spoil movies or TV shows without fair and ample warning should be drawn and quartered, or at least stripped of their right to enjoy any entertainment ever again. I don't read movie reviews because, if I know I want to see a movie ahead of time, why would I want to know what someone else has to say about it before I go see it?? I'll make up my own mind. And if I don't want to go see a movie, then why the hell would I be caring enough about it to read reviews?? It's just not logical. (And, no, I don't think that the first new Indiana Jones movie in 19 years will qualify for many under the third case of "and if I haven't heard about a film...")

As it happens, however, I happen to be dating someone who, while also having a strong aversion to spoilers, does not hold the same reservations towards movie reviews as I do. So the SO will be doing the actual review:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the first Indiana Jones movie to exist in the history created by the earlier films. I mean, did Indy ever talk about the stuff he'd already done before? The movies are pretty stand alone, right? There is, I believe, one little blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Raiders in Last Crusade, but that's it. The Indy we meet here, however, has done everything. He found the Ark of the Covenant. He found the whatever-they're-called stones. He found the Holy Grail. And he's done 20 more years worth of stuff that we didn't get to see. He fought in World War II, one way or another. He's done all this, and he's no longer afraid to talk about it. He's a guy starting to see the end of the tunnel and has learned that he likes telling his lifetime's worth of stories. This is not the Indiana Jones we met before, nor should it be. He's lived 20 more years, grown, maybe even learned a little bit since we saw him last.

This means, of course, that the movie takes place in the 50s, and if you manage to forget this fact, you'll be reminded as the film traverses every archetype (or should I say stereotype?) of the nostalgia decade before the end of the first reel. Shia LaBeouf does a reasonably good job of inhabiting one of those ----types. But not as good as Cate Blanchett, who, in her unending streak of impressing me more than I expect her to, may very well have crafted the best Indiana Jones villain ever from what is really an underwritten role. She's a wonder to behold, and she and her minions never quite manage to fall into the incompetent villain class, despite being constantly outsmarted by the heroes.

Now, I have to say something about the title. When I first heard it, my response was something like "'Crystal skull'? Really? I mean, seriously?" It really didn't seem like a sufficiently substantial object, particularly compared to the Ark or the Grail. But the movie sold me. It totally sold me. I don't want to say how exactly it does this for fear of spoilers, but it does.

My biggest complaint is that the movie sometimes seemed too eager to underdevelop a character or a dramatic situation in order to get back to another in a very long line of witty action sequences. I think that if you go in expecting the Second Coming of Spielberg, you'll be disappointed. This is not really an important film. It won't change the face of cinema as we know it like Raiders did, and it won't take Indiana Jones to a place he's never been before or will again like the Last Crusade did. All it will do is give us a few more events in the unusual life of Henry Jones, Jr. I suspect that nothing that occurs in Indy 4 is really so spectacular for him, which makes this new (older) Indy different, but it is fun to spend a few days walking around underneath his hat again.

An Engineer's Guide to Kitties

2008-04-25T14:06:00.002-04:00

To ensure it doesn't get too serious around here, here's some Friday afternoon fun:

Personally, I prefer the phrase "snuggle attack" to "corporal cuddling," though the alliteration in the latter is appealing. And, for the record, δ Carina is about 18 inches by at most 5 inches, for an aspect ratio of about 3.6; this is why she has graduated from "furball" to "furslinky."

Paper Summary: Metal-Rich Dwarf Galaxies

2008-04-22T12:50:00.000-04:00

Towards the last week of January, when I was hugely absorbed in trying to figure out a thesis proposal thing, a professor came into my office and started talking about the mass–metallicity relation. I knew about it, of course, but here was a new, simple idea: are the extreme outliers from this locus of galaxies real? In the spirit of a short "one month" project, it's now about three months later, and we've "finally" got a paper on said outliers on astro-ph. (I think this is a great example of: if anyone ever offers you a great idea, take it and run with it.)

So to back up a bit. What's this "mass–metallicity relation"? The short version is that a correlation exists between galaxy mass and metallicity such that the more massive a galaxy is, the more likely it is to be "metal rich." Originally this was the luminosity–metallicity relation, since how bright a galaxy is is much easier to measure than how massive it is, so on the right here I've plotted metallicity versus "absolute magnitude" in small grey points for a large sample of star-forming galaxies (remember: magnitudes are silly, so the right-hand side is brighter than the left-hand side, even though the numbers don't increase in that direction). Our outliers are, well, the larger red and green outliers from this relation; the different colors simply denote slightly different ways of selecting different subsamples. Astronomers being astronomers and not material scientists, when we say "metals" what we really mean is "any element which could not have been made in the Big Bang, i.e., basically anything not Hydrogen or Helium (or maybe Lithium but there's so little of that we'll completely ignore it)." There is of course a nice slew of caveats. The first is that the easiest way to measure the metallicity of galaxies is to limit ourselves to star-forming galaxies; all of those nice new young stars heat up the gas around them, and then as this gas cools it gives off emission lines. We can then look at the spectra of these galaxies and by measuring the how how strong various lines are relative to one another and combining it with some black magic (a.k.a. "spectral synthesis codes") we can measure the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen in a star-forming galaxy's gas. So I (and others!) basically use "metallicity" and "oxygen abundance" interchangeably, and, more precisely, I basically always mean "gas phase" abundance.

One of the interesting interchanges between theory and observation is that sometimes there will be some interesting observation (such as the obervation that galaxy mass and metallicity are correlated). So theorists will come up with a bunch of reasons why this is the case, and a few will even attempt to give explanations fo the scatter about the observed relation. A robust theory will also be able to explain seemingly strange galaxies: if a theory is able to explain why low mass galaxies have such low metallicities, then it should also be able to predict in what ways a low mass galaxy with high metallicity is different from its more mundane cousins. I spend a lot of the paper exploring various explanations (and then eliminating them) for why these galaxies could be so "weird," but I eventually hit upon one explanation which, in retrospect, is blindingly obvious.

The idea is that low mass galaxies have low metal abundances because they have low star formation rates and relatively high gas fractions (i.e., the fraction of their mass that is in gas rather than stars is large). An easy way to think of this is like so: stars turn hydrogen and helium into more massive elements (metals). As stars are formed, they the most massive ones die quickly, throwing their metal-rich selves back into the surrounding gas, thereby raising the metallicity of that gas. But a low star formation rate in a high gas fraction environment will not be making enough metals in order to fully pollute the gas around it, and so the fraction of metals in the gas will be relatively low. (This argument only really works for low-mass galaxies, but since those are the ones we're interested in, I'll ignore that subtlety for now.)

So how do you get high-metallicity low-mass galaxies? Well, presumably the galaxy would need either a very high star formation rate (so the massive stars can actually pollute the gas) or a very low gas fraction (so each supernova has a higher impact on the gas). We find that these outliers don't have unusually high star formation rates, so we conclude that they must have rather low gas fractions. But this is the same gas the stars are forming out of! So the star formation must not have very long left to go. A nice bit of supporting evidence for this scenario is the occasional mention in the literature that so-called "transition" dwarf galaxies tend to have low gas masses and higher-than-expected gas-phase metallicities; these galaxies are known as "transition" objects because they are between regular star-forming dwarfs and quiescent non-starforming dwarf galaxies. The especially neat part is that several of these galaxies have the star formation limited to their centers (like this galaxy to the left: blue in a galaxy is a sign of lots of young, recently formed stars). One way to interpret this is that star formation used to occur on all scales in this galaxy, but the gas has since been extinguished (or blown out of the galaxy) at the larger scales.

Passover

2008-04-20T14:48:00.002-04:00

I'm in San Francisco this weekend for my first celebration of Passover. As I've never observed a religious holiday in a purely secular setting (and, no, Christmas doesn't count), this should be fairly fun and educational. Growing up, I always thought Easter and Passover occured around roughly the same time of year, but of course this isn't strictly the case. This year Easter was really early: it falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of Spring, which this year all happened to make Easter three days after the Vernal Equinox. And, of course, leave it to an astronomer to explain all of the intricate calendar calculations and relations between Easter, Orthodox Easter, Passover, and Rosh Hoshanah. Basically, the confusing arises when the Vernal Equinox is approximated to be (as opposed to basing these holidays on when the Vernal Equinox actually is).

2nd Blogiversary

2008-04-16T18:41:00.001-04:00

Today is apparently this blog's 2nd birthday. I'm too out of it right now to do anything special, mostly because I finally submitted the paper I've been working on for the last few months to ApJ (i.e., a journal) and the arXiv (it'll be up Thursday night and I'll probably write something real about it this weekend), and I've still go this "thesis proposal" thing to prepare for Friday. So, in the meantime, here is a word count breakdown of the paper. Your job is to guess the subject matter.

Word	Count
the	417
galaxy, galaxies	164
mass, masses, massive	105
metal, metallicity, metallicities	98
sample	78
we	76
star, star-forming, stellar	75
low	59
gas	41
correlation, relation	39
abundance, abundances	37
dwarf	30
relative, relatively	27
outlier	26
oxygen	22
less, more	22
e.g., i.e., vs.	20
seventeen, 17	18
therefore, thus, hence	17
effective, effectively	10
spurious, spuriously	6
pathological	2

Definitely a Link Dump

2008-04-07T20:59:00.001-04:00

I'm tired, and therefore you're not going to get a real blog post out of me. So here are some interesting and/or funny things I've seen on the internet lately.

Class and National Service as well as Social Class and Educational Access tackled at Uncertain Principles

And then there's Sean at Cosmic Variance discussing even more evidence for why funding and curriculum standards for public schools should be nationalized.

From Freshome we have a house that looks like a toilet and a sideboard with a glowy full moon

Are Homophobes Aroused by Homoeroticism? from Dispatches from the Culture Wars

a funny kitty:

A delightful discussion of typography and political campaigns, via Deadly Mantis

Hat tip to Blake for pointing me to the Relativity Song from everyone's favorite Max Tegmark and 8.033:

And finally, via the Friendly Atheist, a nice explanation of how Jesus and Tetris are really the same thing.

Brunch Review: Spagio's in Columbus, OH

2008-04-06T11:17:00.000-04:00

My brother was in town last weekend, and being inspired by my previous two brunch reviews, decided that some "Is it breakfast, or is it lunch?"-y goodness was in order. So last Sunday morning we went over to Spagio's in Grandview, the closest thing I have to a "default" brunch place in Columbus, and this Sunday morning (after visiting for a second weekend in a row!) he has reminded me that I never got around to writing up what I think of brunch at Spagio's.

First off, Spagio's is one of my favorite restaurants in Columbus. It is one of the default places several people in the astronomy department take visitors (colloquium speakers, prospective graduate students, and the like); I unequivocally recommend it for dinner. The restaurant is attached to a decent wine store, so the wine selection is understandably good (and unlike many restaurants, they have a decent list of wines they serve by the glass). The decor is kind of random: there are hammocks hanging from the ceiling (which certainly hundreds of people who have dined there never noticed), random art hanging on the walls (including a weird wooden sculpture of a pig's head and a napkin one of the restaurant's owner's [or the chef's?] friends spilled some wine on and then went to town on turning into Art), and generally just an eclectic collection of decorations which somehow jive together into a neat atmosphere. Pretty much everything I've tried there for dinner I've enjoyed, so it was a natural choice for a first attempt at brunch in Columbus.

So, brunch. Spagio's is a few doors down from Columbus's Stauf's Coffee, and so that is what they serve. Delicious. Unfortunately, this is Ohio, and so no alcohol can be served before 1pm. So much for a bloody Mary for my brother. My normal fare is the croissant French toast with maple cream cheese; oh gods it's so good. Last week I decided to try to jump out of my comfort zone, and I tried the steak and eggs. The steak was fine, but the eggs were kind of flaky and weird and I didn't end up eating them. My brother at least enjoyed his eggs a la maison ("it was food"), but generally I was unimpressed last week. But hey, if someone else is willing to pay for it, I wouldn't turn it down. Just stick to the French toast.

Another Peanut Star: This One's Yellow!

2008-04-02T10:26:00.001-04:00

This was actually discovered a few months ago, but now there's a press release and even a movie: a peanut-shaped binary star system has been discovered (with the LBT!) in the dwarf galaxy Holmberg IX, a companion to the beautiful spiral galaxy, M81:

And, yes, despite the unfortunate date chosen for the press release, this is a real star, and it is actually exciting. And I take full credit for the term "peanut star." Just please ignore the fact that the movie makes the stars look like they're being externally illuminated instead of, you know, generating their own light.

Proposing a Thesis Thing, Part the First

2008-03-28T20:25:00.000-04:00

Sometime in November or December I started writing a blog post (most of which is included in this one, with the tenses slightly changed) on how I have to do a thesis proposal this year and what all that entails. So this is going to be a roughly five month saga compressed into a multi-post few week funfest, seeing as how there's been this Date set for April 18 or somesuch.

As I alluded to at the time, I spent several days just after Thanksgiving at a conference in Tucson. One of the ironic aspects of attending a conference on galaxy and black hole evolution is that I have done very little work which could be construed as directly relating to most of the topics discussed those three days. And yet I kept being drawn to galaxy evolution and I kept saying it is what I want to work on... The idea, I supposed, was to actually get around to doing just that.

See, I was supposed to present a "thesis proposal" in February, as the next step in this whole getting a PhD thing (the previous step being the candidacy exam last summer). (Or so was the case at the time. April is the new February, apparently.) The thought of choosing a thesis topic somewhat terrifies me, mostly because of the stereotype that choosing a thesis topic is equivalent to choosing what I'll be working on for the rest of my life. My aversion to such a decision stems from the same aversion I have to say, traditional marriage: it's not that I can't see myself working on something for the rest of my life, it's that I wouldn't want to work on one thing to the exclusion of all else.

Luckily, real life isn't a pure manifestation of stereotypes, and what a "thesis" (or, more relevantly, a "thesis proposal") should be varies from advisor to advisor. If all goes as planned, I'm essentially halfway through graduate school (or at least I was in December), which means that I will be applying for jobs in (eep!) about a year and a half. My advisor seems to think that the thesis proposal should basically be a default plan for how I am going to write enough interesting papers in that year and a half so that people will want to give me a job. In other words, it's not so much what I will be doing, but what I can do if nothing else more interesting comes along. Yet, despite the seemingly nebulous nature of said proposal, I was still somewhat freaked out over the whole thing back in November. And December. And January. Then in February and March I just kind of ignored the problem, hoping it would go away ...

DoorKitty

2008-03-24T21:05:00.000-04:00

δ Carina recently figured out how to get on top of the bathroom door. I haven't seen her actually get onto the door, but she's pretty funny and proud of herself once she's up there. For your lolcat captioning pleasure...:

Brunch Review: L'Antibes in Columbus, OH

2008-03-23T14:05:00.001-04:00

This morning we tried out brunch at the fairly new French restaurant, L'Antibes, in the Short North. We were clever and realized yesterday that today is apparently a holiday on which lots of people like to have brunch out, so we even had reservations this morning. The restaurante is on the small side, but the atmosphere was pleasant and comfortable. The brunch menu price is fixed at $18 per person; this includes drinks (I recommend the orange juice even though it was very pulpy and I do not usually care for pulp; the coffee was also delicious). The meal itself consists for two courses; for the first course the choices are toast with fresh cream, butter, and jam (what I got), a cheese sampler, and a small salad (what the significant other got). For the second course, you have a choice of poached eggs, quiche (my selection), lobster potato gratin (what the SO got), and stuffed French toast. I was pleasantly surprised with the quiche, mostly because I don't think I've ever actually had quiche before; people have the tendancy to fill it up with ingredients I consider nasty. This was just eggs, cheese (asiago and goat), and boar bacon; simple yet light and fluffy and filling. The lobster potato gratin (a soupy mixture with a sunnyside up egg on top) was apparently a disappointment, unremarkable and "not that good" (but the entire thing was eaten).

The CMH Gourmand has also weighed in (despite a sore lack of brunch reviews over there), if you would like a more professional sounding review. The pictures are from a review by the Restaurant Widow; we cleverly forgot to snap some photos ourselves.

The Subprime Primer

2008-03-17T18:04:00.000-04:00

Your questions (and mine) about the subprime mortgage crisis answered...

Paper Writing

2008-03-13T11:56:00.001-04:00

The Sunday before last, I finally got to the point on my current ~~distraction~~ project where I could begin writing it up as a nice paper. That evening I started coughing, no big deal, but by Monday afternoon I was completely overcome with the flu. As it turned out, over half of the graduate students succumbed to the same flu ... and essentially all of us fell sick within 24 ours of each other. As we explained to the prospective graduate students visiting Thursday and Friday, one of the great things about the department here is the high degree of interconnectivity... so that everyone is put out by the plague simultaneously. So last week became an utter waste, but by Friday I was beginning to feel like myself again. Then between Friday morning and Saturday night, central Ohio was visited by about 20 inches of snow—the most snow in one storm here ever. I managed to dig myself out and get into the office on Sunday. And so for the last few days I've been trying to remember how to write a paper.

The quote of the week, I think, comes from Tuesday when I told a professor (with whom I have co-authored a paper) that I can't remember how to write papers. I said I was in my "wandering the halls" phase. The response? "No, no, you seem to be remembering just fine ... this is how you've done it before, if I recall." I couldn't argue with that.

Then Wednesday morning a link was sent my way, and I had no choice but to rearrange the books on my shelf.I discovered that a large fraction the textbooks I own are black or blue; apparently I am not a mathematician (because, as everyone knows, all math books are yellow). I don't know how long I will be able to keep the books like this; normally I sort by genre and then by size within genre (I think I'd need at least an order of magnitude more books before I considered sorting by author, which is apparently how God intended).

The amazing thing is that I'm actually making vague progress writing the paper; I'm almost finished filling everything in—including figures and tables—so soon I'll officially be at the "revision" stage... when I go back and redo everything so that it is at a quality level where I am not embarrassed to show the manuscript to my coauthors. Whee fun.

A Kitten's Decision Tree

2008-03-03T14:28:00.002-05:00

How δ Carina decides whether or not to attack something:
Basically, she wouldn't have attacked Iraq unless she was feeling hyper that day, and I'm not 100% looking forward to flipflop season.

Why I Will Be Voting for Barack Obama

2008-02-27T20:17:00.000-05:00

Let me preface this with two statements: first, the reason this post is so well-written is because most of it is written by a friend who for various reasons wishes to remain anonymous. Secondly, if in the unfortunate event of the November being Clinton v. McCain, then yes, I will vote for Clinton. As it should be clear to anyone who has attempted to make the Obama v. Clinton decision based on policy alone, the two candidates simply don't differ substantially on the issues, forcing us to make our decision based on other reasons (see the end of this post for a better-phrased rendition of this point).

Practical Reasons Why Barack Obama Should Be the Next President of the United States, and Hillary Clinton Should Not

Much of the media coverage surrounding Barack Obama's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has focused on the Illinois senator's theme of "change." While Senator Obama downplays the obvious and awkward race/gender implications, he has deliberately framed the contest as a generational conflict. While a conspiracy to prematurely put the Baby Boomers out to pasture is indeed seductive, it does not earn my vote. Irritating as it may be, there must be substance. So, here are my practical reasons why Barack Obama should be the next president of the United States:

1. "He Has No Experience. Nobody Knows This Guy." That's the Point.

Senator Clinton's most durable and effective jab against Obama's potential as President is that he just does not have the necessary political resume to assume the highest political office in the land. After all, he's only a first-term senator (more on that later). To Obama's supporters, this argument misses the point. They support him because he does not carry forty years of political obligation with him into the Oval Office. He has not spent the greater part of his adult life learning what can't be accomplished on Capitol Hill. The political climate in America is perhaps more polarized and vindictive than it has been since the late 1960s. Hillary Clinton can endure that climate. Barack Obama can change it. It is counterintuitive to argue that a politician whose entire public life is emblematic of the political polarization of a nation is somehow most qualified to unite it.

Perhaps equally importantly, he is not saddled with the cult of hatred that has burdened Hillary Clinton since 1992. Whatever Hillary Clinton would gain as president from her political "experience" would be negated by the fact that so many legislators and citizens would reflexively stonewall her purely by fault of what (they perceive) she is and what (they perceive) she stands for. Is anybody under the impression that another Clinton administration would not be the target of a new generation of Kenneth Starrs and Ralph Reeds? That we wouldn't all have to endure another round of Whitewater and similar absurdities? We would, and it would mean, once again, neglecting the real business of the nation.

2. Now, Let's Discuss Experience...

Hillary Clinton is neither an experienced politician nor an experienced administrator. She has won only two elections, and that only with a massive financial base, almost-universal name recognition and—of course—the strong and vigorous endorsement of an ex-president. The majority of her public life has been spent in the capacity of First Lady, first of Arkansas and then of the United States. Being in close proximity to power is far cry from wielding it, and Mrs. Clinton hopes that the voters will not realize that. She over-estimates and over-represents the breadth of her political experience. Her argument that Mr. Obama is either not electable or not an able politician ignores the fact that he more or less single-handedly built a political base rivaling hers in the past twelve years. He has won more elections than she has with fewer resources. His recent work as a ground-level inner-city community organizer gives him a much better perspective on the realities of race, class and, yes, gender, than does Clinton's work as a prominent corporate nearly attorney thirty years ago.

3. ...And Gender.

Among Hillary Clinton's most reliable supporters has been a demographic of baby-boomer women frustrated at what they perceive as entrenched patriarchy at the highest levels of national power. They lived through and led the women's liberation movements of the sixties and seventies. For them, a second Clinton administration has the potential to complete a feminist narrative that began with suffrage. The problem is the first Clinton administration. It is difficult to understand why a generation that has identified so strongly with the idea of feminine autonomy chooses to champion a woman who spent a quarter century supporting her husband's rise to power. And after her husband fulfilled his every ambition, he allowed her to use his political machine to achieve some of hers. A feminist triumph indeed. References to her long-ago legal career notwithstanding, the majority of Clinton's public life has been spent in the capacity of First Lady. Furthermore, unqualified feminist support for Hillary Clinton assumes that any woman, by virtue of her gender, will be a better advocate for women's issues than any man. If this is indeed why Clinton enjoys such strong support from women of her generation, it is a sad testimonial to the state of contemporary feminist thinking. Modern feminists should consider not only which candidate is most representative of their struggle, but which is most able to build the consensuses and piece together the coalitions necessary to continue real progress towards gender equality in America. Much of America has already decided—by no fault of her own—that Hillary Clinton is a dangerous and radical relic of the more bizarre elements of the women's liberation movement. Barack Obama does not have this image. By virtue of his strong and charismatic masculinity, he will be more able to successfully continue the work to which Senator Clinton's generation is committed.

4. P.S. - The Rest of the World.

No foreseeable political event could redeem America's standing in the world more than Barack Obama taking the oath of office as President of the United States. His election would represent a clean break from the face of America which has earned us such antipathy from enemies and allies alike. Consider his potential for international credibility: the biracial son of a Muslim African, raised in Indonesia, who was a vigorous opponent of the Iraq War from the beginning, could hardly be cast as the Ugly American. He would have a wealth of international political capital completely unavailable to Senators Clinton or McCain, largely because nobody could argue that he doesn't care. His insistence on meeting with problematic world leaders such as Chavez, Ahmadinejad & Co. challenges the dangerous and juvenile American myth that you can make progress with a nation by ignoring it. Furthermore, don't be concerned that a man so liberal will be perceived as a push-over. I doubt his administration will have trouble convincing anybody that a tall black man from inner-city Chicago is aggressive enough.

More than a few political reporters have noted that the two Senators have remarkably similar political platforms. Their observation is accurate. Quibbling on particulars of health care plans aside, there are few glaring political or ideological differences between the two politicians. In very general terms, therefore, it is a contest of both image and leadership. Senator Obama is a bold and capable leader. He is not encumbered by the political baggage or obligations of a quarter-century at the highest levels of American politics. And he represents a vision of America that the rest of the world did—and could—love. Through his political intuition and force of personality, he has the potential to advance a strong progressive agenda at home and abroad. These are my practical reasons why Barack Obama should be the next President of the United States.

Because Political Surveys Are Fun

2008-02-25T19:46:00.000-05:00

I'll get into it more later, but I've decided to amp up the political presence on this blog—or, rather, have one. But before I start doing my best to bias your political opinions, here is a survey based about political candidates a reader has asked me to forward along (yes, I took it, and yes, it was fast and painless:

------------------------------

The purpose of this survey is to examine how people think and feel about the political issues, parties, and candidates in the upcoming election. In the survey, you will be asked a series of questions about two political candidates, John McCain and Hillary Clinton. We are very interested in how individuals that find information on the web think about politics, and your participation would be greatly appreciated. In total, the survey should take about 15 minutes to complete. The survey is completely anonymous and you can skip any questions you do not wish to answer.

Click here to take the survey.

Please feel free to contact Chris Weber (crweber@notes.cc.sunysb.edu) at Stony Brook University with any questions or concerns. Thanks for your help!

Brunch Review: Mahogany Grill in Ithaca, NY

2008-02-24T16:02:00.000-05:00

Brunch is arguably the best meal ever invented: more filling and alcoholic than your typical breakfast, more eggy and bacony than your typical lunch, and so slow and lazy you need all the time normally allotted to both. The question then becomes: it's Sunday morning (or afternoon) and you want to settle in for a nice long meal over coffee, omelettes, crab cakes, waffles, Bloody Marys and mimosas.

Whenever I am in Ithaca, the Significant Other and I always go to The Mahagony Grill for Sunday brunch. The Mahogany Grill definitely tops my list of favorite places to go for brunch. It's elegant, yet casual enough that I don't feel odd showing up in jeans. The prices are reasonable, at less than $25 including tax and tip for two people. The food is always good; I almost always get the brandied french toast with cinnamon and nutmeg, but the specials are always delicious as well. The significant other usually gets an omelette or eggs benedict, or perhaps the crab cakes, and today I had one of the specials: a Belgian waffle with Bailey's cream sauce and bananas. And to top it all off is a little-known secret: all entrees served after 12 noon come with complimentary mimosas or champagne.

In other news, I wrote this entire post without functioning 0, ), p, :, ;, or / keys.

Solar System Analog Revealed by Microlensing

2008-02-17T21:47:00.001-05:00

Normally I don't blog about astronomy in the news, usually because it's either boring or poorly spun or everyone else has already done a more thorough job of it than I'd be willing to anyhow. So I'm stunned that even though it was announced three days ago, I have seen no mention on my portion of the blogosphere about the first discovery of a solar system analog—even the Bad Astronomer only mentioned the independently discovered and announced merely Jupiter analog, though the solar system analog is arguably a much bigger deal since it has both roughly Jupiter and Saturn mass planets.

So how was this system found, why is it important—and why do I suddenly care about planets? The last question is easy: the lead author on the paper is Scott Gaudi, a professor here at Ohio State, and in fact much of the modelling and work that went into deciphering the event's lighcurve was done by one of my officemates. I say "event" because these ~0.7 and ~0.3 Jupiter mass planets around a roughly half solar mass star were found via gravitational microlensing; the star system happened to pass immediately in front of another star relative to Earth, thus magnifying the background star. The change in apparent brightness of this background star is affected by how the mass in the lensing star system is arranged, and so a detailed analysis of the lightcurve can reveal planets in the system. (If you want real details, I think the press release does a fairly good job.) What is so exciting about this particular event is that this is the first time there has been a bright enough microlensing event that has been followed closely enough to be sensitive to a Jupiter+Saturn planetary arrangement—which strongly suggests that such systems (such as our own!) are extremely common.

UPDATE (02/19/2008): Apparently I didn't do a very good job explaining why this is exciting. An astronomer asked me:

I'll grant that it's interesting, but is it really unexpected? The first extrasolar planet discovered was potentially exciting. Now, hundreds are known, and it's clear that their discovery is limited only by the amount of time and money devoted to finding them. Extrasolar multiple-planet systems are also known. Or to put it another way, I'd perhaps be more shocked if a Jupiter-Saturn analogue hadn't been discovered after a little more than a decade of finding massive extrasolar planets.

My reply: Surprising depends on who you ask, but while there have been plenty of exoplanets found (and maybe 2 dozen systems with multiple planets), most of them have been close-in planets, so-called "hot Jupiters" ... planets with periods of only a few days, maybe up to several tens of days. Radial velocity studies have only been going on for about ten years now, which is why they are just now (as in, last week) announcing planets in roughly 10-year orbits: they are restricted to monitoring nearly full orbits to be sure what they are detecting is a planet. Microlensing is the only planet-finding techinque that is actually more sensitive to far-out planets than close-in ones (both the radial velocity and the transitting signal are higher for close-in planets), but people haven't been using it to look look for planets as extensively and as long as they have RV and transits. So it is more comforting than "surprising" that we have found a solar system analog: for years the only systems found were crazy things that looked nothing like our own solar system.

LibraryThing

2008-01-25T22:04:00.000-05:00

I know this was a fad a few months ago, but I've just joined LibraryThing, home of the ever-brilliant UnSuggester, the lovely piece of science which tells us that people who own Kushiel's Dart are unlikely to own John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian religion.

As it turns out, typing ISBNs into the computer is more fun that it should be, and now that I have run out of books (I apparently own 201, 44 of which live in my office) I feel the need to keep going. I've made sure as many of the books as possible have the correct cover images associated with them, and even put notes on some of the obvious ones.

Fun facts: my library apparently shares two books with Tupac Shakur's and three with Thomas Jefferson's (but none with Amadeus Mozart—his are old and German anyhow). I apparently have three books autographed by the author; in order of date acquired, these would be The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, I Sold My Soul on eBay by Hemant Mehta, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling. There are only three books which I have in common with only one other LibraryThing member; one of these is a friend who I did not know used LibraryThing but apparently took the same silly French class in college that I did. I would guess now that there are at least half a dozen books which I am the only user who has (somehow I was unsurprised I am a 1905 copy of Lanzo's Applied Mechanics or one of the Thai massage books I bought in Chiang Mai); unfortunately, while I can easily get the number of other users who have a certain book, I cannot sort my entire library by this parameter.

I also apparently have 30 unread books (or, if they are textbooks [which one rarely "reads" cover-to-cover], essentially never-been-used). I find this to be a surprisingly large nmber; I know I have a stack of about half a dozen books in my "to be read" queue (mostly new ones like Freakonomics and The Assault on Reason), but really?? Thirty?! And here I am wanting to go and buy other books? At least this will give me an excuse to start using the date started/date finished cataloging feature LibraryThing provides.

In unrelated-except-that-it's-also-on-the-internet news, I finally uploaded δ Carina to Kittenwar. She has currently won 4 battles and lost 2 ... how could someone not realize she is the cuttest kitty in all of existence?! Silly people.

Mystery Hunt 2008 Post Mortem

2008-01-22T20:46:00.000-05:00

I spent this past weekend at MIT for Mystery Hunt, and like last year, I was planning on doing an "obligatory hunt post." But this year's hunt, to be blunt, was simply not fun. The puzzles were too hard, required too many leaps in logic to solve, relied too much on flavor text, and often came with a basketfull of extraneous information and red herrings. Hunt started at noon on Friday and by 7pm I was ready to stop ... and it just kept going until 9pm on Sunday (by the time the coin was found, our team was almost completely cleaned out of headquarters, in the middle of a team debriefing, and setting up a dinner mob). I could say more, but since the winning team is known to write a good Hunt (they wrote last year's, for example), and I'm actually not in the mood for a full-fledge rant, I'll share with you this Sesame Street gem that came up in the middle of an "oh my god I'm so sick of trying to solve impossible-to-solve puzzles" conversation Saturday night:

Awesome

2008-01-16T14:05:00.000-05:00

This paper by Conroy, Wechsler, and Kravtsov has got to have the best footnote I have ever seen. They put forth a straightforward way to model "galaxy clustering through cosmic time," and their model does a surprisingly good job of mathing the data. The text to sum this all up reads: "Overall the agreement is excellent on all scales for all four samples.⁸"

Footnote reads: "⁸ Booyah!"

A Belated iPhone Post

2008-01-06T19:47:00.000-05:00

Yesterday marked the end of vacation, complete with the last leg of all-day driving, this time from South Carolina back to Ohio. Hanging out in the car all day can be really boring, especially when preceded by a day of hanging out in the San Francisco airport watching what we were told was the "worst weather in over ten years." So, naturally, I started playing with the (not my) iPhone:

I just learned that I can't upload photos directly from an iphone to blogger. But now we are at a toll plaza in West Virginia. Typing on the iPhone is hard so I don't think I'll finish this post here. Also the road is curvy and Carina wants a belly rub.

Here is said picture of δ Carina sitting on my lap:
The problem with these kinds of "vacations" is that they are not at all relaxing—and yet it is still really hard to even pretend to get work done, so they are just exhausting. I doubt that going to sleep at 8pm the night before returning to the office is a sign of renewed enthusiasm ...

The One Thing Humans Can Agree On

2008-01-01T02:56:00.000-05:00

New Year's Eve (and Day, I suppose) is my favorite holiday of the year for the reason that it is an entirely human celebration ... there is no "giving thanks" or implicity-but-now-commercialized worship to some deity that most people don't believe in anyhow. It's quite simply a celebration of saying goodbye to the old and hello to the new, an arbitrary reason to try to "start over." But moreso than that, I like New Year's because the time and date is the one thing that we as the human race can actually agree upon. No one right now is actually saying, "no, no, it's really February 17, 2086."

I'd say more, but in five minutes it's going to be 2008 here and then I can go to sleep, so I'll end with the lame question of: can you come up with anything else that everyone agrees upon?

Clay Sculpture: a Bhuddhess

2007-12-31T14:45:00.000-05:00

I mentioned in November that I took a clay sculpture class last summer (as in, I started this post on July 26, apparently), and now that the majikle day has passed, I can share the formerly Top Secret product (a Christmas present for my dad):
This is a Bhuddhess for my dad's massage parlor (formerly my bedroom). The inspiration was the weeks we spent touring Thailand (and other various places in southeast Asia), replete with daily Thai massages and many famous Bhuddhas. This Bhuddha is in the meditation position, which I figured was the most similar to the mental state achieved in a good massage. The base on which she is sitting is supposed to be a lotus flower, a la this picture from a lake near Battambang, Cambodia:
I'm also rather disturbed at how disturbingly similar this picture (which I took) is to one of the iPhone's (and, apparently, newer versions of Apple's OSX) default wallpapers.

Hotel Mauna Kea

2007-12-30T14:05:00.000-05:00

What is it like to observe on Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in Hawaii? Hat tip to the Angry Astronomer:

Bismuth and Copper, on a Tree

2007-12-24T10:56:00.000-05:00

(NB: I would have made this post earlier, but alas, my camera has broken. Santa?)

I have been taking a jewelry class for the last few months, and as those who know me in Real Life invariably ask upon hearing this tidbit: "Jewelry?!" Well, good point. But one of the projects I have spent the most time on was making bismuth crystal Christmas tree ornaments out of copper:

This particular crystal is one of the ones a friend gave me last year, shortly before I discussed making bismuth crystals here (see the crystal on the top-left in the first picture in that post). Next steps include getting better at making my own bismuth crystals (it's a lot of fun, but rather tricky as it turns out), and turning them into more pieces of art and jewelry: necklaces, earrings, pendants, and more ornaments.

More astro-ph Nuggets

2007-12-19T11:33:00.000-05:00

Today's first piece of fun on astro-ph is a short paper by Travis Metcalfe on "The Production Rate and Employment of Ph.D. Astronomers," or: how difficult is it to get a tenure-track job given that you have a Ph.D. in astornomy? I haven't actually read this preprint, but Travis had a very interesting poster at the AAS meeting last May on the same topic, so I am guessing it is based on the same information.

The second is a short conference proceedings by Chris Stubbs on the Crisis in Fundamental Physics, or, what will happen if w really does equal -1. Translation: what if the properties of the dark energy really are the most boring vanilla stuff we can come up with ... and thus also boring both theoretically and observationally. This, combined with Simon White's screed from a few months ago, paint the question of dark energy as inherently interesting (there is something going on in the universe that we really don't understand, and it might be related to why our really-good-for-everything-else theories of quantum mechanics and gravity don't play nice together), but in the meantime it poses a scientifically and sociologically potentially crippling/stagnating problem.

How to Measure the Masses of Galaxy Clusters

2007-12-15T15:14:00.000-05:00

I've spent some time recently thinking about the usefulness of galaxy clusters in astronomy and cosmology (aside from them being interesting in their own right). As the most easily identified most massive structures in the universe, one obvious parameter that is often desired of them is their mass. But how does one go about weighing the most massive objects in the universe?

Stellar light: This is the simplest and most straightforward way to measure the mass of a cluster, but it also requires the most assumptions. The basic idea is that if you know how much light the stars in the cluster are emitting, and if you have some good guess at how much mass a cluster of a given luminosity is (i.e., the "mass to light ratio"), then you can estimate the cluster's mass. An even simpler version is to just count up the number of galaxies in the cluster, and say, "well, clusters with this many galaxies have on average about this mass ..." And, counting the number of galaxies in a cluster is actually rather trickier than it sounds because it takes a lot of telescope time to verify that individual galaxies are in fact cluster members.

Galaxy velocity dispersion (also stellar light): If you're going to go through all the trouble of verifying which galaxies are actually in the cluster, then you can actually measure the mass of the cluster rather than merely estimating it. By taking the velocity dispersion of the galaxies along the line of sight, and assuming that the cluster is relaxed and in virial equilibrium, you can measure the mass, which is essentially proportional to the square of the velocity dispersion.

X-rays: Galaxy clusters have a lot of hot ionized gas in them. This hot gas emits high energy photons due to what is known as "bremsstrahlung": when an electron changes course as it goes whizzing past a (positively charged) ion, it is accelerating, and therefore gives of radiation. We can measure the temperature of the gas from this radiation, and like with the galaxy velocity dispersion, when we assume the cluster is in virial equilibrium—not always an accurate assumption, especially if, say, the cluster is merging with another cluster, or just forming—then we can calculate the mass of the cluster. This is one of the most popular and straightforward way of measuring cluster masses; the only tricky part really is the fact that one has to go to space in order to get X-ray data.

Weak lensing: As light from galaxies passes near a cluster, the cluster's gravity causes the light's path to bend slightly, which in turn causes the shape of galaxies behind the cluster along our line of sight to appear slightly disorted on the sky. (If you want a less hand-wavey explanation, you can look at this post I wrote last year. The mass and the physics are the same, even if the regimes are slightly different.) By measuring the average shape change of background galaxies in different annuli around the cluster, we can measure the surface mass profile of the cluster. Many people will argue (including me, perhaps) that weak lensing is the only way of measuring the entire cluster mass—gravity only cares about where the mass is, not what is causing it, and so gravitational lensing is sensitive to the underlying dark matter profile of the cluster, not just where the gas, galaxies, or light happen to live. Weak lensing is also a nice technique because it can be done with ground-based telescopes using visible-wavelength (or near infrared) light, but it does not require a plethora of spectra like galaxie velocity dispersion measurements do. Converting a measured weak lensing profile to an actual cluster mass estimate, however, involves converting a surface mass density excess to a surface mass density (i.e., the "background" surface mass density must be well-estimated) and then converting the surface mass density to a mass (i.e., assumptions about the three-dimensional structure of the cluster must be made in order to turn a two-dimensional map into a three-dimensional mass).

Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect: One of the most exciting and promising new ways of measuring cluster masses is through their imprint on the cosmic microwave background (CMB, or as "real cosmologists" call it, the "camb"). As a CMB photon goes through a cluster, it will interact with some of the high energy electrons in the cluster's hot gas (the same ones responsible for the X-ray emission). The result is that the CMB photon gains a little bit of energy, causing the CMB to appear hotter in the direction of the cluster than it would be in the cluster's absence. Through a conspiracy of math and physics, the change in CMB intensity is essentially due to the cluster's mass alone—and because the clusters are relatively close by compared to the surface of last scattering (the origin of the CMB photons), the SZ signal is basically independent of the cluster's redshift. The redshift independence is both a blessing and a curse: while we can theoretically detect high-redshift clusters with the SZ effect, we have no way of constraining their redshift using the SZ effect alone—and high redshift objects are exactly the ones which are more difficult to detect and study using the other techniques I've described here. The SZ effect has been observed for several clusters, but to date no clusters have been conclusively discovered from their SZ signature. This may change soon, however, as two telescopes (the South Pole Telescope and the Atacama Telscope) capable of detecting the SZ effect have come online in the past year. At the very least, the SZ effect promises to be a powerful technique for constraining the measurements from the other techniques described here.

Citations and arXiv.org

2007-12-10T18:38:00.000-05:00

A couple of years ago, a paper came out saying that astronomy papers posted on astro-ph get about twice as many citations as those which do not. Plenty of people think that if you are going to post a paper to arXiv, then you should time it so that it, for example, shows up near the top of the daily astro-ph listings. The second paper on today's astro-ph list takes this a step further, showing that the papers appearing near the "top" of the daily astro-ph listings receive essentially twice as many citations as those further down on the list. The interesting question here—one which it's fairly difficult to disentangle—is whether this difference is really purely due to a positional bias (people glance at the first few papers on astro-ph in the morning and then stop, and thus are more likely to remember and cite those first few papers), or if it is a selection effect (people who care enough to make sure their paper is near the top of the list might simply have better science to share, or be better at self-promotion in other contexts, like conferences).

Astronomers Stuck in a Cloud

2007-12-01T23:12:00.000-05:00

I've been at the MDM observatory near Tucson since yesterday around sundown, and last night I started a blog post which looked something like this:

Well, I'm back on the mountain, and it is raining. A lot.

And then the power went out, and since the generator was down as well, we had no power, no heat, no internet, and—after a few hours—no phone either. We were in the middle of a cloud, a white windy rainy mass, wherein we had no connection to the outside world. It's an odd thing, being in a dark building with only a couple of flashlights in the middle of storm after everyone else has gone to sleep, and I (having been staying up late in this time zone for several days already) was the only one awake. So I sat around for a while thinking about galaxies and stars and clusters how everything is interrelated and how I'll never come up with a thesis topic.

Today has been more lighthearted—and more of an extended hurricane party, but with more astronomy and rampant silliness. The first year grad students are here this weekend, nominally to learn how to observe. (Does learning how to do a lightning shutdown count?) They have finals next week and so there has been a lot of questions buzzing around along the lines of "Why are metal poor stars bluer and fainter than metal rich stars?" and "What's the difference between the Tully-Fisher relation and the Fundamental Plane?" Between this and the conference last week (more on that later), I feel as though I've been walking in an astronomy-saturated fog for a week.

The power came back around 2:30pm and the internet and phone followed around 4. With the return of the outside world, there has been a lot of online Scrabble (yes, I've been converted) and now the watching of the Oklahoma-Missouri game on the small TV in the kitchen ... something about if Oklahoma wins then it is good for Ohio State and if Ohio State wins the national championship then alumni will want to give more money which will eventually be good for the astronomy department.

Cat Conversations

2007-11-30T10:06:00.000-05:00

While I am in Arizona this week, Carina is spending her time with one of my officemates who has a giant kitty of his own. I wonder if their interactions are anything like this:

Science and UnScience

2007-11-27T11:46:00.002-05:00

I'm headed to Tucson, AZ today for an astronomy-laden week, complete with a conference and some observing (weather permitting). Among my flight reading material is an essay Edwin Salpeter (yes, as in, the Salpeter IMF [initial mass function]) posted to astro-ph last week with some interesting anecdotes and observations on astronomy pre-1957. On the other hand, if you're looking for something less informative, but perhaps more flavorful, you can read any one of the numerous screeds on the recent hogwash in the New York Times about science really actually being faith in disguise (which, by the way, it's uhm not).

A Day to be Thankful For

2007-11-22T23:59:00.000-05:00

My new idea is to send people to and for whom I am thankful Thank You cards for Thanksgiving. I didn't think of this until today, but maybe it will happen next year. I love the Thanksgiving holiday because it is so unpretentious: get together with loved ones (or at least, people with whom you can vaguely get along during a meal) and eat lots of food. And, of course, the undercurrent of "being thankful" is perhaps a good one, only normally people take "being thankful" to mean "remembering there are a bunch of things taken for granted that perhaps should not be." This happens even when there is a person who should be the receiver of the thanks: why is it, "I am thankful you are here today" instead of "Thank you for coming today"? Any other time of year, it would be the latter, so why the passive voice when we are actively trying to "give thanks"?

Off the soapbox and back to the food. This year, the significant other came to Ohio and we are spending the weekend alone and away from family. We had a duck and sausage stuffing for dinner; even though neither of us had ever cooked a whole bird before, preparing the duck turned out to be even easier than this ostensibly simple duck roast recipe we found online. Staying true to the spirit of the holiday, we made enough food four four or five people even though it is just the two of us. We also bought a bottle of gerwurztraminer, and discovered that wine bottles can be easier to open with a corkscrew than without, and that most of the people in the grocery store on Thanksgiving can be observed talking on the phone asking if there isn't "just one more thing" needed. There was also bread and goat cheese, hot spiced apple cider, and pumpkin pie. We're halfway through a puzzle bought yesterday, and so far, Carina has only tried to eat one of the pieces. I think she's still got a bit of food coma from the bit of duck she had. The next project will be to see what she thinks of the bucket of Legos once its opened and we try to build a Lego castle...

A Dose of Not the Daily Show

2007-11-16T21:56:00.000-05:00

Miss the Daily Show? Here's what one of its writers has to say about the WGA strike:

You Asked For It

2007-11-13T17:53:00.000-05:00

As the lone commenter (so far?) on the previous post pointed out, apparently kitty posts get more comments than art or science posts. So, here is a picture of δ Carina in a trashcan:
I'll probably have another science post sometime this weekend, but in the meantime, anyone have a good lolcat caption?

Science: Still Awesome

2007-11-10T11:48:00.000-05:00

Just in case you were wondering, science is still awesome.

First up, synesthesia—the mixing of senses so that, for example, one associates or experiences certain colors with individual numbers and letters—is always cool. I have this to enough of an extent that I would totally love to have it even more. For example, in my mind Thursdays are a deep mustard color, but Tuesdays are a rich green and Wednesdays are a pale blue; I wouldn't be surprised if this association is one reason why I don't have to keep a calendar or datebook. The recent incredibly wonderful thing I've found out about synesthesia is that apparently colorblind synesthetes can experience colors via associations that their eyes are not actually capable of seeing. Brains are so fantastic.

I've been taking art classes at the local cultural arts center since June. Over the summer I took a clay sculpture class, and when I went back on my second week to look at what I had started, I was rather freaked to discover that the piece was partially covered in mold. Turns out, the more microorganisms there are living in clay, the more aerated the clay is, and thus the higher quality it has the potential to be for sculpting. Also in the art department, last week I was working with two pieces of sheet metal (I'm taking a jewelry class now) that I wanted to have have identical borders, so I superglued the two pieces together so they wouldn't move relative to one another as I filed the edges. But then I wanted to, you know, unsuperglue them. The most efficient way to do this, apparently, is to simply anneal the metal—that is, put it under a big torch until the superglue burns away and the pieces come apart. I was working with copper, which normally when annealed turns a nice deep red color, but with the superglue on it, turned a dark grody grey.

It's been all over the news, and I obviously didn't get around to writing this post yesterday, but the Auger collaboration has finally come out with their first big result: cosmic rays appear to not be isotropically distributed on the sky. They come just short of saying that comsic rays are produced by supermassive black holes (specifically, supermassive black holes actively accreting matter), but due to a liberal use of the subjunctive in the paper, this is essentially the take-home message. Chad has already done a detailed analysis of the paper and all that jazz, but he fails to mention the fact that the effective size of the Auger detector, located in Argentina, is roughly the same area as Rhode Island—and they're looking to expand. I'm not sure if this is just a statement of how large their detector is, or how small Rhode Island is, though.

The Indie Art Capital of the World

2007-11-04T00:05:00.000-04:00

So, apparently Columbus has been named the Indie Art Capital of the World. I'm not really sure what this means, but it is true that I have become a lot more aware of art—and people creating art—since moving to Columbus. In fact, the guy I got δ Carina from (thanks, Craigslist!) is an independent artist; he even gave me a self-printed short comic book (about SPACE! and Dylan Thomas being cool!) as a thank you for taking my new shoe-sized meow-monster.

Probably part of Columbus's new title can be attributed to the monthly Gallery Hop in the Short North area of town (the aptly named neighborhood shortly north of downtown). Art galleries littered along about a ten block area stay open late on the first Saturday night of each month, as the crowds wander from gallery to gallery, bar to bar, shop to shop, navigating the random music being played and jewelry and other random things being sold on the sidewalks. And, in these cases, a place doesn't necessarily have to be a "gallery" per se in order to attract people looking for visual and mental stimulation; if you have open wall space to hang a few paintings on, you're in business. Just tonight bought my first piece of what could be considered, you know, real art: a 12"x18" print of the above pretty lady, Sernity, from Robert Walker, an artist displaying his paintings at a realty office. I was also lucky enough to see the original of Rachell, this purple-haired vixen on the right, who I might have just taken home with me had I had $1000 to spare...

δ Carina: A Narrative

2007-10-31T23:40:00.000-04:00

So the new kitty's name is now officially δ Carina. You may call her δ, Carina, or Carrie for short, but she probably won't respond to any of them. The choice of δ Carina as a name, in retrospect, was incredibly obvious. I had originally been trying to decide between Cassiopeia and Carina (and so either Cassia or Carrie for short), but for such a hyper little hairball, Cassiopeia seems a little to sophisticated. So Carina it is, but the all-too-obvious nickname/association with Carina is Eta Carina, the stupidly massive old cranky variable star in the constellation Carina. And my little bundle of skittish cord-chewing energy is neither massive nor old enough to be an η Carina, so the obvious other choice was Epsilon Carina (since in the land of mathematics ε is generally small but nonzero quantity). But as it turns out, eps Car is a binary star, and since I've got one cat and not two (though, seriously, ε Carina A and ε Carina B would be awesome names for sibling kitties), that was Right Out. So, in the spirit of taking the limit of small delta and epsilon-delta balls, δ Carina became the new name nominee; the only remaining question was: what kind of star is δ Car?

Well, as it turns out, there is no star δ Carina. The Bayer designation of stars names stars in a constellation as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, etc. from brightest to, er, less bright; so, for instance, Alpha Centauri is the brightest star in the Centaurus constellation. So how can a consellation have no fourth brightest (i.e., Delta) star? Glad you asked. See, back in the day, Ptolemy made a list of the 48 constellations in the sky. One of the largest was Argo Navis, the Southern Ship. So there was an Alpha Argo Navis, a Beta Argo Navis, etc. But when the constellation got broken up in 1752 into Vela (the sail), Carina (the keel), and Puppis (the poop deck [hehe]), astronomers, being astronomrs and thus logical in all ways, decided to also split up the stars and keep the Greek lettering instead of, you know, re-assigning the names to the actual nth brightest stars in each new constellation. So, α and β went to Carina, but γ and δ are in Vela—leaving the name δ Carina free to be assigned to my new 9-week-old clingy attacking striped meowing fuzzball.

And so, as she attacks my hands and legs and arms and keyboard and oh my god I hope she's going to get tired out so I can get some sleep tonight, I present to you δ Carina, The First Day: A Narrative.

Oh no!! A new place! What do I do? I'm all trembling and scared.
Cords! And a ball! How do I choose??
Shoes!!!! My favorites! How did you know??
OK time to read some but how do I choose?
That was lots of hard work now it's naptime.
Whoa. I fell off that was scary. I'll hide here and let Athena the Raccoon protect me.

Kitty, Part 1

2007-10-28T21:00:00.000-04:00

I got a kitty today!! The apartment I was living in for the last two years did not allow pets (something about undergrads being irresponsible creeps), but now I'm in a pet-friendly place and in town for a while, so ... I will do my best to not let this devolve into a cat blog, but first, there's this post which has been sitting in draft for for almost a year ...

Why I need a kitty:

Because my at-home vocabulary is too large:
Because I need another website to check obsessively.
Because traveling frequently will be just that much easier.
So I can take silly pictures and attach dorky captions to them.

Also, KITTY!!!

Turning a Sphere Inside Out

2007-10-22T21:30:00.000-04:00

Ever wanted to see what it looks like when a sphere gets turned inside out, or simply know what is meant when people talk about turning closed surfaces (like a sphere) inside out? Hat tip to Scott Aaronson for this video:

As it turns out, I actually recognize several of the intermediate steps (for a few of the algorithms they show) as neat-o sculptures that often show up near math departments.

Dumbledore is Gay, and Authority is Not to be Trusted

2007-10-20T01:16:00.000-04:00

So tonight was The Night with J. K. Rowling. I'm pretty tired right now, and perhaps rather inebriated, so I'm going to keep this short. No promises on a longer post later, but we'll see. If you haven't actually read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, well ... at least one horrid spoiler follow.

The obvious highlight of tonight's event was the question-and-answer session. The questions were all picked ahead of time, and were largely plot-centric (which meant that questions relevant to writing process/style such as the one we submitted were right out). As much of the internet already knows by now (I'm such a slacker, going out for chocolates and wine afterwards instead of writing a blog post immediately), one of the most interesting answers was in response to a question about Dumbledore's past. A general meme with the questions being asked was "I'm such a big fan, your books have had such a big impact on my life, here's my question." The person (a young teenage girl, if I remember correctly) who asked about Dumbledore actually phrased these compliments fairly well, talking about how the books had taught her a lot about relationships. She then asked, since Dumbledore is such a champion of the power of love, "did Dumbledore ever find love?" Rowling's response was essentially, "Well, since you've been so honest with me ... I always saw Dumbledore as gay." This was followed, of course, by a huge applause and lots of cheering; and, of course, the idea that this wonderful (even if fictional) role model that so many people have come to know and love is *gasp* not straight is fantastic. As far as the Harry Potter plotline is concerned, however, it is also relevant: apparently Rowling thinks of Dumbledore as having been in love with Grindelwald, which is why he was so devastated when he realized Grindelwald's true nature... and then was so reluctant to confront him later in life. Another of Rowling's comments on this revelation: "Wow, if I'd known people would be so excited by this, I would have mentioned it sooner," and "Oh my god, the fanfiction now."

I found another exchange to be particularly interesting not so much because it was enlightening, but because Rowling delivered a particularly juicy quote. The question had to do with whether or not the Death Eaters were influenced from history by the (obvious choice of) the Nazis. Rowling basically kind of avoided the actual question, but she did say, "You should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth ... the entire series is a prolonged argument against intolerance and bigotry." Very well said, Ms. Rowling.

“This is because taking the derivative of something makes it redder.”

2007-10-16T21:26:00.000-04:00

Hat tip to Blake:

Also, I totally want a Derivative Machine now, especially if I can run it backwards!

Fine. I'll do a Harry Potter post.

2007-10-12T18:25:00.000-04:00

In about a week—at 7p.m. EDT Friday, October 19, to be precise—I'll be in New York City to spend some quality 2000-on-1 time with the one and only J. K. Rowling. Apparently this is the first time she has toured the US since 2000; the stint in NYC will be the only not-for-just-kids appearence on her jam-packed four stop tour. Now, I don't particularly consider myself a Harry Potter "fan" ... you may have noticed the lack of zomghp7!!!$!!%!!!! posts here back in July. I do, however, enjoy the books (even if I don't actually own all seven yet—I'm holding out for a boxed set of paperback copies of the UK adult version). They are enjoyable to read, and the world Rowling has created is simultaneously entertaining and interesting. And, yes, I picked my copy of the Deathly Hallows up at midnight the night of July 20, and had it read by dinnertime that night.

Interjection: Just now, as I was writing this post, a friend messaged me and started talking about the band "Draco and the Malfoys," who are the foil to "Harry and the Potters." I am now disturbed.

So the reason I am bringing all of this up is that I need help. See, we've been told that there will probably be some sort of question-and-answer session at the event, but everything I can possibly think of wanting to know that could be gleaned from a one-question-one-answer situation is along the lines of, "So if the Potters were all alone the night that James and Lily died, the how did Dumbledore hear about it before everyone else in order to send Hagrid over there, and how come it took so long for Hagrid to arrive with Harry if he was one of the first ones to know?" This kind of technical nitpicking is right out for this particular venue, but I haven't got any better ideas.

So: if you could ask J. K. Rowling one question, what would it be?

Update (10/16/07): It's been pointed out to me that Rowling is a rich person. Wouldn't she like to donate money to astronomy like all of the other cool rich people?

Update (10/17/07): We just submitted this question to the website:

You've been writing this series for 17 years. How difficult was it to keep the style consistent over all that time, even when you as a writer surely must have evolved considerably?

I don't think they read 'til the end of the story ...

2007-10-06T15:50:00.000-04:00

Clouds, Clouds and More Clouds

2007-10-01T04:45:00.000-04:00

I'm in the middle of a six night observing run at the MDM 2.4m telescope on Kitt Peak near Tucson, Arizona. This evening threatening clouds at sundown turned into enough lightning at the horizon to do a lightning shutdown—that is to say, after not bothering to open the dome and try to look at anything, I had the pleasure of shutting down the half dozen computers that run the telescope and its instruments, etc. as well as their UPS backup power supply. I've heard plenty of talk before of how annoying it is to be an astronomer on a cloud-covered mountain, but I always thought the irritation arose mainly from the lack of ability to take data, when in reality it's more like an irritation arising from the lack of anything to do. The last few nights have been cloudy off and on, but mostly with the patchy kinds of clouds that tease you as you chase for holes between them, or like last night when everything was beautiful and clear and we were efficiently going from one target to the next until around 1a.m. when in less than fifteen minutes the humidity rose by 10% and the sky became a thick blanket of white and we had to close up for the remainder of the night.

The run I am on is for "queue observing." The basic idea behind queue observing is that if a bunch of people have objects they'd like to have looked at once a night for a period of time, then they can combine resources and take turns observing all of the objects. In this case, "resources" are "graduate students who feel like getting some observing experience and perhaps their names on a paper or two." The main part of this queue observing run is to take spectra of supernovae for SDSS. SDSS is good enough at finding supernovae that, while they're looking (i.e., in the fall) there is always a list of supernovae to observe, and, unlike other kinds of transient objects (like gamma ray bursts), supernovae are generally bright for about two weeks.

This 2.4m telescope is, I believe, the largest in the world that does not have a regular night operator. That is, larger telescopes have a staff of people whose job it is to actually run the telescope: they open the dome and turn on the instruments and take the calibration images and make sure the telescope is pointed in the correct direction with high enough precision and is nicely focused and that everything is working nicely. Not so here. Here it's just me (well, there was another graduate student here the last three nights, but no staff at night), and so when it's actually safe to, you know, turn on the telescope, then I get to make sure that all of those things happen. The first night or two is usually hell because there are so many things to remember and it takes a while to completely nightshift and get used to the higher altitude and lower humidity; tonight is hell because there isn't anything to do and I didn't get up until 4pm so it's not like I can "just go to sleep."

Well, actually I did bring some DVDs from Netflix with me. I've already watched a disc of Lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I've only recently started watching both shows). Seriously, all alone in the dark on an empty quiet mountain... I'm now surprisingly jumpy. And I'm not liking the forecast of it not clearing up until Tuesday night.

Apparently, I Exude Physicistiness

2007-09-27T05:01:00.000-04:00

So I'm going to be observing in Arizona for about the next week. This evening, I was waiting for the other graduate student to get off of the plane in Tucson, I was just standing next to my luggage. A Japanese man, about 60 years old, comes up to me (as he's leaving the jetway) and asks (I kid you not): "*mumble, mumble,* are you a physicist?" Me: "*stammer, stammer,* yes." He asked what I was doing here, and I said observing at MDM, and he was like, "oh, okay," and went away. I didn't realize the weirdness of this story until after he'd left (I'd been asleep on the plane so I was not exactly "awake" yet) ... but I don't think there was anything about me that screamed, "I am a physicist!" I checked, and I wasn't wearing a physics shirt or even anything particularly nerdy (is a Hawaiian shirt, black slacks, and black loafers that unusual?). The other graduate student postulated that perhaps he had been in earshot of our conversation at the beginning of the flight over which temperature scale is superior (which included calculating the average body temparture in Celsius); apparently the guy across the aisle from me had been shooting us weird looks for the duration of this discussion. But does a discussion of temperature scales really give it away that I'm a physicist?

More Saturday Morning Ramble-Blogging

2007-09-22T12:29:00.000-04:00

Fall quarter started on Wednesday, which means that the little ones are back, and even though I'm not taking any classes, everything has this shimmering buzz about it that was lacking during the summer. We've already had our first CCAPP seminar—the lack of colloquia and seminars are one reason summers have so much copious free time—and the coffee and sandwich shop on the first floor of our building has reopened. There have already been several home football games; I went to my first a couple of weeks ago thanks to a pair of tickets someone else couldn't use. We played Akron, and as games go, it was OK: the first half was abyssmal with a halftime score of 3-2, but the second half actually played like a real game rather than a lazy Saturday afternoon practice. College sports like this (i.e., football and basketball) still kind of disturb me: why bother with the messy premise that these atheletes are also students? Why not just have a "young professionals" league for players under, say, 23? What's the point of college "spirit"? Am I the only one who finds it mildly sickening just how clearly laid out the gender roles are in this arena?: man fight, woman cheer. My dad was a high school guidance counselor when I was growing up, and I remember it being a big treat to go to the Friday night home games with him; I was never interested in trying to follow the game, but I would always run down to the bottom of the stands to watch the cheerleaders. I know ther eare people reading this who don't think this dichotomy is a big deal, so tell me: how come there are no big popular women's games, and especially none with male cheerleaders on the sidelines enthusing the vast crowds?

Scientists in Movies (and TV)

2007-09-08T20:26:00.000-04:00

I saw Pi last week for the first time since about when it came out in 1998. Back then, I didn't really see what the big deal was, but then, I probably was unable to follow the "plot." This time around, I really don't understand what the big deal was: it's an artsy-fartsy film that is trying way too hard. Everyone knows that Contact (the book) does a better job of hinting at the mystique of number theory—even though it's nominally a book about astronomy and aliens and religion!—and even Kushiel's Avatar does a better job at trying to guess what it would be like to hold the supposedly unholdable Name of God in one's head.

But what really disappointed me about Pi—and thus made all of the number theory and religious mumbo jumbo just silly and contrived—was the utter stereotypical nature of the main character, Max. He's clearly supposed to be the troubled genius, an antisocial outcast rife with self-destructive hallucinations and unthinkable mathematical insight. No. Just, no. Even if mania/insanity/depression/whate-have-you and intelligence are linked or correlated, the movie still screams, "Ooooh, look at me! Isn't this disturrrrrrbing?" No. It's ridiculous. Now get over yourself.

Even most movies which clearly try to be realistic fall short. Take for example the play-based Proof. In it, Gwyneth Paltrow is supposed to have proven this really amazing theorem about "prime numbers," but she is also battling various mental issues. While the psychosis in this film still comes across as a bit off, I think it's a good effort; where the movie is utterly painful for me is whenever the characters attempt discussing math. This is the problem the writers face: they can either have the characters speak naturally like real scientists or mathematicians would—and thus have essentially no one in the audience understand any of the jargon-laden sentences, or they can have the characters repeat definitions to one another that they would have realisitically known since they were six years old and have the conversation come across and stilted and forced. Most movies I can think of choose the latter path; they'd rather hold the audience by the hand and let them feel like they can follow the conversation rather than have a realistic exchange in which the tone of what is spoken—the jokes, the tension, the insults, the interruptions and half sentences—are the drivers of the plot rather than the actual words.

The only two movies I can think of that take the latter route (and even then, still let the words be the plot driver) are Contact and Real Genius. The particular scene in Contact that doesn't try to painfully explain the details to the audience is the one in which they are taking the Vegan signal and converting it to a TV visual and audio output; the dialog exchanged is reasonably realistic, and the audience doesn't have to understand it all because it all makes sense when the TV is turned on—and part of the humor in the scene is that the nasty miltitary man doesn't understand the conversation either. Contact has its own shortcomings of course—you can seriously not convince anyone who has spent time trying to decipher puzzles lacking instructions that "we can only get three sides to fit together!" doesn't scream "I'm a cube, damn you!!!"—but it is still one of the best movies with scientists as characters I know of.

The other, of course, is Real Genius. The students and scientist-types in it are all obvious caricatures, but they are exagerations of something realistic and along the correct axes. Sure, many of the characters in the movie are the stereotypical "oh no I'm smart and can do math so I must be a total social dork!" but the main character, Chris Knight, is clearly well outside of this box. I couldn't even begin to list the number of movies and TV shows featuring a scientifically intelligent character who is white, male, with glasses, doesn't shower often enough, can't get a girlfriend, can't carry on a "normal" conversation, and is uncomfortable in big groups and pretty people. Of course, this is a travesty because it's through pervasive moves and television that most kids subconsciously learn the cultural stereotypes of many professions and different kinds of people. It is extremely difficult to fight stereotypes once they are planted.

Are there any movies, or even TV shows, out there that I'm missing which depict scientifically minded folk in a realistic—or at least non-condescending—fashion? Even the West Wing, which clearly respects characters with intelligence, treats mathematical intelligence as inferior to the ability to yield verbal rhetoric. I think the main problem is that (good) writers write what they know, and almost by definition very very few writers know what it is like to be or be around real scientists. This, combined with the fact I mentioned above about writers being scared to write conversations their audiences can't actually follow, is why even those writers who want realistic technically-minded characters on screen don't achieve them.

Ceci n'est pas un "link dump"

2007-09-01T11:32:00.000-04:00

So I was fairly dead to the world (of the internet) in August. But with September comes a whole new month! I've been so slack on reading blog posts (probably a good thing, of course, given the general inverse correlation between number of blog posts read and amount of work done) that I've started using Google Reader to keep track of the unread posts. Seeing as how I've also recently bought my very own coffee pot so I can enjoy real coffee at home, this morning's internet perusal is also slightly more caffeinated than usual. In reality, I was actually planning on reading a set of papers on absoprtion systems in close quasar pairs, but I cleverly left the stack in my office. So you, whatever little readership is left after such a month of non-posts, win.

The Friendly Atheist talks a little bit about an article in the Columbus Dispatch on the recent surge of atheistic books; the article itself isn't terrible enlightening or interesting, but I think it represents a response to the overwhelming support the editor of the Faith & Values section was sent after innocently asking in February whether or not nontheists should enjoy a more representative sampling of articles in the F&V section than is typical.

Elizabeth Wood over at Sex in the Public Square rightly points out that the whole "debate" over whether sexual preference is chosen or biological is completely irrelevant to the fact that it isn't something that should be a basis for discrimination.

We also saw (and are seeing) all sorts of people fleeing from the White House like rats from a sinking ship; see this recent AP story on Tony Snow for a probably complete list. My favorite quote is:

Snow, ailing with cancer, had said recently he would leave before the end of Bush's presidency because he needs to make more money.

See, he could have said, "for health reasons," or something completely believable and forgivable like that ... but "more money"?! Sheesh. And certainly the timing these sudden desires for more money and wanting to spend more time with family are mere coincidences rather than being due to knowing something we don't know and not wanting to be held as accountable later. Certainly.

Speaking of people focussing on all the wrong things, Mark at Cosmic Variance provides a nice superposition of people worried about action rather than hypocrisy and baggy clothes rather than crime.

On a completely unrelated note, it seems that ScienceBlogs is doing a 500,000th comment contest, and it appears that the winner will be sent to Cambridge (the one in the UK, that is). Personally, I think Boston is the "greatest science city in the world," and I'm completely unbiased, but I also think most people (myself included) would rather score a free trip to England. I'd be perfectly happy to get my hands on one of those Sb mugs, though.

This is also one of the more fantastic times of year for those of us on the evil quarter system, seeing as how plenty of other places have already started classes and are being innundated with floods of undergrads. Best part is: I'm not taking classes this term! Or next term! Or, really, ever again! I doubt the gloating will ever get old.

And then we have this delightful gem showing us that I may not be representative of those educated in South Carolina:

Google Sky and Astronomy for the Masses

2007-08-22T18:00:00.000-04:00

So some lady just called me looking for the Political Science department .... I told her that I am in the Astronomy department, not Political Science. So she asked me if I believe the universe is expanding. Yes ... "That's because of the redshifts, right?" Yeah ... "So who owns the Hubble telescope?" Uh ... "The US Government owns the Hubble telescope, right?" Well, I wouldn't put it quite like that. "The French government doesn't operate it, so it must be the US." Does that really follow? "Astronomy is a science, right? What's the phone number of the chair of the science department?" Uhm ... It's 6pm... I don't think anyone is going to be in their offices right now.

Sigh. I clearly need more practice talking to crazy people while still allowing them to remain "interested" in astronomy, though this one seemed rather well-informed, albeit with big warning bells going off all over the place. In other news, Google announced today that the Sky is now part of the Earth, in that Google Sky is now part of Google Earth. This was enough of an incentive for me to finally download Google Earth and waste lots of time looking at pretty galaxies and galaxy clusters and nebulae and other such fun things. Constellations and planet orbits are included. Much like Google Earth, Google Sky is much more in the hokey fun category than the useful category, and unfortunately the objects I'm prone to looking at first are the ones I know well enough to be annoyed at how poor some of the data is. The entire sky has been mapped by the Digital Sky Survey (DSS), and a fourth of it by the more recent and absolutely fantastic Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The Sloan images include all of the delightful astrometric precision of SDSS, as well as all five wavelength bands of the survey. Then, for the popular select few objects, the Hubble Heritage project has kicked in with "informative" blurbs about "zoom lenses" (also known as "the Virgo Cluster") and other such things, though one useful bit about these is the links to outside sources like ADS for said objects. The Hubble Heritage project by itself is a pretty interesting archive to nose around in if you haven't already, as well as the recently released Hubble Legacy Archive (which is actually good for scientific purposes).

I Guess It's Official

2007-08-19T12:05:00.000-04:00

Seeing as how I no longer live next to a set of rather active railroad tracks, I've gone and changed my Blogger profile to reflect the now official move to a better, less undergrad-saturated area of town. The old apartment wasn't all that bad; the only noise problem was due to the people upstairs, and their 3:30a.m. trysts had cut into my sleep one too many times. And the bathtub was horribly disgusting, as it was shaped such that the lowest point was in the center of the tub rather than at the drain. The front door could never be open for more time than it took for one or two people to go through it due to a nasty fly problem, and the laundry room was three times as far away as the railroad tracks and down a flight of stairs. So it was time to get out, but I hate hate hate moving: I hate putting stuff into boxes, I hate taking stuff out of boxes, I hate standing in the middle of a room with some random thing in my hand wondering where it should go, and I hate having stuff everywhere. I've taken several half days and three full days off (and it would have been many more and would have been a lot more painful had my mother not decided to drive up and help), and I'm completely ready to get back to thinking about astronomy instead of where the permanent location of the box of stuff will be. And, now that I've got internet at the New Place, I might even start blogging more than once a week.

Box of Stuff

2007-08-14T23:27:00.000-04:00

When I was little, I had a "game" box that I kept neat things in: stickers, neat shells (small ones), odd game pieces, a multicolored crayon that I never used because I didn't want to waste it. I mostly used the objects in this box to design games around; of course, one important rule in all of these games was that I could always add new rules, and therefore always win.

I'm moving to a new apartment this week, and as such everything in my apartment is finding its way into boxes. This afternoon, I went through the Box of Stuff that has been sitting relatively ignored in the corner of my bedroom since I moved here two years ago. It's called the Box of Stuff, by the way, because everything in it originally came from the Drawer of Stuff back when I was living in a dorm. I figured a Box of Stuff I have barely touched in two years is probably full of stuff that can happily make its way to the trashcan, but boy was I wrong. This Box is like a treasure trove.

I found seven boxes of matches, two boxes of sparklers, several candles (one of which smelled kind of funky), and a small thing of green glitter I bought for about ten cents in Taiwan (I think). There was also a dozen matchbox cars and a mostly used tube of super glue, from back when I spent hours trying to glue matchbox cars to the ceiling of my dorm room freshman year—turns out getting super glue to stay where you want it on wheels that turn, and then getting the wheels to stay where you want them, is more difficult than it had seemed at first thought, and so the plan of having a city on my ceiling never really panned out. The Box of Stuff also revealed a box of 100 poker chips, five six-sided dice (in an unopened box), about eight decks of cards including one unopened one with the kings and queens of England on it from when I visited the UK when I was ten. I was delighted to find a can of silly string, a leftover remnant of the first year I ran HMMT and got to pick out all of the prizes; there was also an HMMT frisbee. There was also a leaf of Lothlorien (a clasp like the ones in the movies), a long roll of Caution tape (borrowed from some place), a long roll of CAUTION INFINITE BUFFET (caution) tape, a thing of Magic Grow Safari Animals, an Exacto knife, a surprisingly large collection of paint (about 10 different colors, also from when I was attacking the ceiling and door of my freshman dorm room). I found (and threw away) two large road reflectors (one yellow and one blue); these were from when my dad was going through a phase of collecting road reflectors of all colors and giving them to friends. (My mother claims he wanted to give them to all of this friends so that they could each bring one to his funeral, but since he's stopped, it must mean he thinks he isn't going to die, or else he's gotten distracted by something else shiny.) The Box further revealed a large collection of Mardi Gras beads, several pocket tools with belt holsters, twine (off-white, yellow, and neon orange), and a box of the most excellent colored chalk you can imagine.

Hopefully my next generation of treasure collecting won't be in the form of Horcruxes... What's in your box of stuff?

France, circa 2004

2007-08-06T22:50:00.000-04:00

Well, I apparently haven't felt like blogging lately, but since I see other people are giving me credit for it, I figure I might as well share this little gem with you:
I can't remember who sent this to a francophile mailing list I was on at the time, but the timestamp on the image is December 2004, back when "freedom fries" were still all the rage. (And, by the way, FFE: I have a vague idea just how much clicking it must have taken you to find this image. Man you must have been bored.)

UPDATE: According to this Digg post (from 12/2006), the company is Tom Bihn designs, but I can't confirm this. Anyone?

How Do They Do It?

2007-07-31T19:34:00.000-04:00

The latest from Quirkology:

I have my own theory, but I don't want to spoil the thinking for anyone. Leave your ideas in the comments!

Simply FOBulous

2007-07-29T11:35:00.000-04:00

Friday night's AstroMovie was Simply FOBulous, sponsored by a graduate student whose boyfriend is on of the Also Starrings in the independently made film. The movie is about the oldest daughter in a Vietnamese-American Seattle family which is pressuring her into marrying a nice Vietnamese boy. The solution is a mail-order husband from Vietnam who she doesn't really want to marry. He arrives in the US seemingly Fresh Off the Boat (or FOB) and naive. Hilarity ensues as various people try to teach the new arrivee about life in America.

While there are parts that scream "low budget!"and many of the characters are strongly stereotyped, Simply FOBulous is simply hilarious. There were lines that many of us didn't catch because we were still laughing from the previous exchange. You can support independent film by buying the DVD, which was just relseased last Tuesday.

Philosophia Naturalis #12

2007-07-19T08:39:00.000-04:00

So I decided a while back that in doing Philosophia Naturalis #12, I was going to have a really awesome theme, but I haven't been able to come up with a good one. At first, I was thinking I'd do a magic or Harry Potter themed post, and indeed there have been several reports in the blagosphere about the science behind Harry Potter. Anne-Marie at Pondering Pikaia has tackled such issues as the botany of wands, the genetics of wizardry, and other such biological quandries. Or, if you're like me and much more worried about things like energy and momentum in your fantasy stories and movies, Blake at Science after Sunclipse will remind you exactly which aspects of physics need to be ignored (or simply to become more, ah, flexible) in order to actually enjoy, say, the X-Men. But even though I'm going to be picking my copy of Book 7 up from the local Barnes and Noble at midnight Friday night, I'm really not enough of a fangirl (and, indeed, all of the hype is getting rather annoying, though the geeking is rather fun) to allow this analogy to go much further.

With Brian May of Queen finally getting his PhD (and giving a few talks along the way), I considered doing some sort of rockstar themed post, but really, there isn't much else there.

The adventure role-playing game theme can be applied to most anything. You could be a skepchick doing research out in the middle of the Indian Ocean, forced to send blog updates in via a co-blogger (such as parts one, two, three, four, five, aaaaand six ... and while you're over there, you might as well vote in the Mr. Wizard video competition). But then, as you're going along, minding your own business as you try to steal a shopping cart, you're thwarted! Blake Stacey at Science after Sunclipse has the story.

Or, not. And this is where I remember that, oh yeah, I actually find themed blog carnival posts mildly annoying because they're usually really difficult to read. I just want a nice list of blog posts, with perhaps a few words of description for each.

Surprisingly, I only saw one mention of the science behind fireworks, even in a time period covering Canada Day, (the American) Independence Day, and Bastille Day.
Scott Aaronson wants to know: why are mass and charge so different? One affects the geometry of the universe, but the other ... not so grand.
If you're trying to keep track of the current count of interesting planets without actually trying to digest astro-ph every day, Steinn over at Dynamics of Cats can help you out. In particular, there is supposedly an extrasolar planet now with water detected in its atmosphere; how much stock you put in three data points with large error bars is up to you. Steinn was also particularly excited over the first "true" Jupiter analog outside our solar system.
Pamela Gay has a few words to say on some recently very high redshift galaxies and their possible implications for the epoch of reionization.
In the realm of the small, Charles Daney at Science and Reason has a few words to say about axions, a likely candidate for the elusive dark matter.
In other news, the Sun is not a cause of global warming, but the snows of Kilamanjaro may be disappearing for non-global warming reasons.
If you like your blog posts interesting, but with no unique theme, check out Jennifer Ouellette's recent discussion of fast hybrid cars, cloud chambers, and iron science teachers.
There has also been some discussion over what happened before the Big Bang; Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance discusses why a "bouncing" universe doesn't really make sense.
Clifford Johnson finally got to use the post title There Will Be No Dawn, as he discusses the future of the Dawn mission to go visit the asteroid belt.
Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous has a neat post on the history of the moon's orbit—based on geological evidence.

Alright, that's it for this month; I hope you've found something to enjoy and keep you busy while everyone else is reading Harry Potter 7 multiple times this weekend. PN #13 will be held at Cocktail Party Physics on August 16.

Blended iPhone for Sale

2007-07-16T23:58:00.000-04:00

For those of you who haven't seen it:

And, yes, the remains are for sale, currently going for $1126 with more than three days left on the auction. It comes with a "Will it blend?" DVD, a t-shirt, and one of their blenders. (By the way, if you've got that much to blow on such a "used" iPhone, then would you please just give me the money instead? I've got some student loans that could use a good knock in the teeth.)

Man, that's a nice blender.

UPDATE: Oh my god I am so awesome I EMBEDDED A VIDEO ....

What is Math?

2007-07-14T17:28:00.000-04:00

Apparently, math is within the purview of the Phiolosophia Naturalis blog carnival (*nudge, poke*, suggest articles!), which has got me thinking again of a discussion I had a couple of months ago with a group of MIT alum I didn't know very well. One of the guys in the group was trying to promote the view that math is a science, but the scientists at the table didn't like this idea very much. There are actually three distinct questions at play here. At the most fundamental level, what does "mathematics" mean and encompass, how do we approach and go about learning and discovering math, and how should math be marketed so as to not scare people away from it?

So, is math a science? Webster defines "mathematics" as "the science of numbers and their operations, interrelations, combinations, generalizations, and abstractions and of space configurations and their structure, measurement, transformations, and generalizations." But any real mathematician (except perhaps a number theorist?) would be quick to say that mathematics is about mere numbers. Keith Devlin claims that mathematics is "the science of patterns." I grimaced when I first heard this proposed definition, in part because it shifts the definition from "mathematics" to "science" and "patterns." I think what sets math and science apart is a certain degree of allowed imagination: for example, it is possible to create a self-consistent theory in which gravity goes like r^-3 instead of like r^-2, and the only problem with this theory would be that it doesn't describe the world we actually live in. One has to go and look at our universe to realize this, however. With math, however, one can theoretically sit in a closed room with a good brain and an endless supply for paper and pencils and derive and prove all of math—in math, something either is or is not true, and there is no way to even self-consistently describe the stuff that isn't true. That is, math is, at its core, universal truth.

From a marketing perspective, though, would it be better to treat math as a science? If the idea is that "numbers are scary" but "patterns are fun," then treating math like something to be explored and investigated instead of memorized might help fewer people get turned off by it. Such an educational approach, however, is the kind that is expensive and difficult to test the results of... though an approach that teaches how there are patterns in the multiplication table rather than insistance on memorization might have benefits. I can't really speak to this, however, since I've never been an educator, and moreso, I can't imagine what it's like to not grasp elementary level math as intuitive.

I had a friend who majored in the "philosophy of math" at Harvard. He said they didn't do math; they thought about doing math. When people actually "do math," i.e., prove new theorems and such, I think the process is rather scientific. You have some idea, a "hypothesis" perhaps, and you start with your assumptions and poke around until you prove or disprove the idea, or decide it's too difficult and the idea needs simplification. Science has a lot of trying new things to see what kinds of results can be produced; in this functional way, perhaps math is much more like an experimental science than a theoretical one, but where the "data" are trains of logical thought rather than measured values.

Of course, there are those who claim that math is a construct of the human mind, and, of course, we have no way of disproving this theory until we can communicate with other species. So you behavioral biologists and neuroscientists better get working on that.

Announcement of Philosophia Naturalis #12

2007-07-07T13:55:00.000-04:00

I'll be hosting Philosophia Naturalis #12 right here at a geocentric view on Thursday, July 19. Philosophia Naturalis is a blog carnival for the physical sciences. If you'd like to suggest an article, you can email me at pn12@mit.edu or leave a comment here. The carnival webpage also offers a more detailed explanation on what kind of articles we're apparently looking for, as well as a few other ways you can suggest a post. I'd like for submissions to be in by the night of Tuesday, July 17 so I can have at least a little time to organize my thoughts. Anything since June 20 is fair game.

And, yes, I did use a mailto link up there. I'm not sure I approve, but you should email me anyhow, unless you're a spambot.

ActBlue: Daniel Biss or Kakistocracy?

2007-07-04T16:41:00.000-04:00

For those of you wondering this Independence Day what you can do to "get more blue states," I'd like to direct you over to ActBlue, "the online clearinghouse for Democratic action." The idea is that, through the ActBlue website, you can find out who the Democratic candidates are for given elections, and also through the ActBlue website, you can donate money to these campaigns. (They even have a blog if you'd like to get some up-to-date statistics.) Through ActBlue, you can learn about such candidates as Daniel Biss, who is a (very cool) University of Chicago math professor running for the Illinois House in District 17—he's also someone you can actually believe when he says his top priority is education, and that he thinks everyone should exercise their right to vote, regardless of their political leanings. Or, if you like to get entertainment value out of your donation money, you can donate to Maine's Hancock County Democratic Party by purchasing a Kakistocracy bumper sticker. (For those of you in need of a vocabulary lesson, a kakistocracy is a "government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.")

Miracles and Missions

2007-07-01T14:09:00.000-04:00

Last Tuesday morning I went with my family to the groundbreaking for the new "community center" at the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ). I've mentioned DJJ on here before; my dad is heavily involved with volunteer efforts out there, and apparently he was building coordinator for this multi-million entirely-donated dollar effort. The idea behind the community center is that, compared to once they re-enter the real world, it's relatively easy to get an incarcerated kid back on track while they are still behind bars. But in the real world, normal high schools—let alone colleges—don't want these kids in their halls. It's harder to get a job, to become a fully functioning member of society... and so they slip back into old habits. If I understand it correctly, the idea behind the community center, which is being built for cost on the DJJ campus, is to serve as a place where kids can become more integrated into the community before their release date. I can't keep track of how many years have been spent on this project to get it this far, and I have only the vaguest sense of how much effort and work it has taken. As such, I was completely taken aback when speaker after speaker at the little ceremony talked about how this is "a miracle from God." Seriously? It's one thing if you don't give yourself any credit for all of your hard work, but what about your coworkers and those who have donated money? Wouldn't a true miracle have been having this building just show up five years ago so that it could have benefited all the kids who have gone through DJJ during that time? I understand that these people think that God works miracles through people—I don't understand why they think this, but I understand that they do—but wouldn't it be a more positive message to send to people trying to put their lives back together before they've barely started that if you work really hard for something you can achieve it, rather than saying if you work really hard for something, that's nice and all, but it's not your accomplishment in any case?

So then Tuesday afternoon, the girl I was best friends with growing up got into town, and I got to hang out with her for the rest of the day. (Our parents lived two houses apart since I was five.) In July, she's off to Nicaragua for three years to teach at a school for children of missionaries. She'll be making barely enough to live off of, and since the school doesn't have a large influx of money (the kids have to pay tuition, but you can imagine how much spare money missionaries have in the first place), they want for the teachers to donate a good chunk of their salary back to the school. The solution? "Stateside" support, i.e., have your church, friends, and family back home "donate" money for you to live off of for three years. While I am worried about some aspects of this venture, I do think it will be a good experience for her, especially since she wants travel and adventure and has been trying to get a job teaching elementary school for the last year and a half. But this whole thing has gotten me thinking a lot about mission work; Nicaragua is an officially Roman Catholic country, but more and more people are becoming protestant. Why a christian country needs missionaries is a little bit beyond me, but over lunch on Tuesday, my uncle was explaining to me how his kids have been involved in mission projects in Mexico. These projects are to build a house for a family in a short time frame, free of cost. In the meantime, the kids get to learn about poverty, form a bond amongst themselves, and learn the personal benefit of helping others—all good things independent of any religious motivation. (Again, Mexico is extremely Catholic ... why would they need evangelizing to?) It seems that Chad over at Uncertain Principles has been thinking along these same lines this past week (see here and here, and be sure to read the comments): are there any atheist/non-religious charity organizations that provide both this kind of charitable work and such an enriching experience for the people involved? Values and religion are not the same thing, of course, and it is important for children—regardless of the religion or lack thereof of their parents—to learn values (whatever that might mean) and the importance of hard work and the power of people in action instead of praying that some god is going to miraculously fix the world in his own sweet time.

There might be a lesson or two in here somewhere ...

2007-06-29T22:39:00.000-04:00

The plan was for me to come back from South Carolina on Wednesday and do my oral exam on Thursday. Roughly speaking, that's what happened, but like many stories, there's a nice "travelling sucks" story stuck in the middle.

So Wednesday morning, my mom drove me up to Charlotte and it was no problem at all getting to Detroit (I was flying Northwest). As we were landing, a nice thunderstorm broke out, and so we got to sit on the tarmack for about an hour before someone would come out and bring out the jetbridge so we could get off. I grabbed a sandwich and talked on the phone for a bit (long layover) and worked on my presentation some. I was working enough that I didn't even notice my flight back to Columbus had been delayed a bit, but I didn't care since I didn't have a tight schedule. When they finally let us onto the plane, the two people ahead of me in line got all huffy with the boarding ticket lady because they didn't realize that they couldn't bring their big suitcase onto the plane and had to check it planeside. Oh, and they were rather drunk. Finally get on the plane and one of them is sitting across the aisle from me and smells like a nice ashtray—quite unpleasant. Eventually someone comes onto the plane and asks to "talk" to them "for a minute." They go; I get two seats to myself. We then sit at the gate for another twenty minutes for security to deal with the drunk people (why they needed the plane there to do that is beyond me). We then go sit on the runway for about an hour before the pilot tells us that we don't have enough fuel to get to Columbus because we're being rerouted, so they take us back to the gate before letting us know the flight has been cancelled. By this time it's after 8pm, and I was supposed to be back in Columbus before 6:30. Needless to say, Northwest was fully uninterested in getting me back to Ohio that night; they said they "might" be able to get me back "tomorrow." Tomorrow? Might? I have an exam at 2:30 that I'm—oh yeah—unprepared for! In the meantime, I had made friends with some ladies in the back of the plane (apparently watching smelly drunk people get kicked off a plane is a bit of a bonding experience). One of them was able and willing to rent a car on her company credit card and drive the four of us back to Columbus. (Thanks, Robin!) By the way, this is another example of why to never check luggage; I was the only one in the car with all of the stuff I had been hoping to leave with. I pretty much never spend time around "real" people, so I was pleasantly surprised when the conversation was lively and interesting the whole way back—and it definitely made for an upbeat ending to a rather shit-tastic birthday. I was dropped off at the airport, where I picked up my car and finally made it home sometime after 1 a.m.

Thursday, I was fairly dead to the world. I was reeeeeally hoping that some combination of caffeine, adrenaline, and maybe even anxiety would suffice for waking me up, but not so much. The hour before the presentation I spent trying (unsuccessfully) to nap on my desk. The talk itself went okay; somewhere in my academic past I have learned to give a half-decent presentation on auto-drive. The more than an hour of questioning afterwards, however ... let's just say it was a rather embarassing experience I'd rather not reminisce over and leave it at that. I passed of course, and I went out for wings afterwards (BW3s has finally re-opened near campus), but I am forced to wonder how it would have gone if I had actually been cogent and lucid, and actually, you know, prepared for the ordeal instead of taking a five day joy trip to a place that has the power of giving me a really thick accent.

A Brief Visit "Back Home"

2007-06-25T22:17:00.000-04:00

In an unexpected turn of events, I'm in South Carolina visiting my family this weekend. It's not very often that I get on a flight booked less than 48 hours earlier. Nothing bad, but I don't really know yet why I agreed to come... more on that later.

Now, as I've not lived here for many years, and I only visit two or three times a year, I have gotten used to the house being slightly different on each return: new refrigerator, new truck, new camper, my dad's new motorcycle, the upstairs area where my mother used to tutor now set up as a "home fitness" area, my old desk moved downstairs to be my parent's computer workstation, pictures on the walls changed, all of the beds re-arranged for a complicated set of reasons only my mother can be hoped to understand, and so on. This visit certainly has the biggest change yet, but at least I was warned about it—my dad even called and asked my permission before doing the Severe Rearrangement.

You see, my old bedroom, the one I lived in from the summer I turned 5 until the summer I turned 17, is now a massage parlor. This is because my father is in the process of becoming a licensed massage therapist, and for a complicated set of reasons only my father can be hoped to understand, my bedroom is the only room in the house suitable for being transformed into a massage parlor. So I now sleep in the guest bedroom when I visit, which is strange as it is a room I know fairly well, but (until a few nights ago) had never slept in.

I spent some time today cleaning out my old beside table, as my dad now wants to use it as a place to stash massage equipment. This was an entertaining exercise as the bottom drawer of this particular piece of furniture seems to be where I stashed every single note I passed (or was passed) in middle or high school, along with pretty much every letter I received during the same time period. Meanwhile, my mother and my brother have been unpacking all of his stuff from his two years as a graduate student, and preparing him for starting basic training (and then officer candidate school [OCS]) tomorrow morning. The army has sent him nice little informational booklets about both of these ventures. For example, the future soldier handbook is quite explicit that future soldiers should not show up with a thong in their posession. Just in case you were wondering.

It is really difficult to get work done here. You know, real work. I was supposed to give the oral portion of my general exam tomorrow, but well, as my mother wanted me here instead, I was able to get it moved to Thursday. After less than 48 hours of preparation. So, I've been trying in vain to actually prepare for it while here, but the only place in the house even remotely acceptable for working happens to be right outside of my brother's room ... and therefore directly in the floodpath for all of the ruckus that is my mother and brother trying to "get organized." It's been a good visit so far and we've had a lot of fun together, but I'm still rather, ah, antsy about Thursday ...

Galaxies!! Part Two

2007-06-21T17:48:00.000-04:00

Waaaaay back in June—as in, last June—I wrote a long post explaining the background, mostly about galaxies, needed to understand the work I've done on the connection between how strongly barred a galaxy is and what kind of structure its circumnuclear dust takes on. (If you want to understand the results below, I recommend reading the background post first. Also, the poster for the conference I presented this at last year can be found here.) The paper was published on December 1, and it is this paper that I will be presenting next week for the oral portion of my general exam, so I figure it's about time I get around to explaining to y'all some of the actual, you know, results.

The first step in preparing next week's talk was to re-read this paper I haven't touched in nearly a year. This has been fun, not only for the "wow! galaxies are cool!" aspect, but also because I can think things like, " 'Employ'? We employ this technique? Didn't we really just use it??" Also, all of those figures I thought were gorgeous a year ago? Turns out the font is too small on most of them, and at least one of them has a typo (as well as one table).

Our first main result was that tightly wound nuclear dust spirals are primarily found in galaxies lacking bars. This isn't all that surprising due to boundary conditions: for the dust in a circumnuclear spiral to connect to the (radial) dust lanes in a bar, the spiral must unwind somewhat, and tightly wound spirals are not somewhat unwound.

So what kinds of circumnuclear morphologies do strongly barred galaxies take on? One common feature is what we term "large grand design" (LGD) spiral structure. A LGD spiral has two prominent symmetric spiral arms which, in 90% of our LGD galaxies, distintegrate before reaching the galaxy nucleus. One frequent end for these spiral arms is at a circumnuclear starburst ring. A circumnuclear starburst ring is just what it sounds like: a ring of intense star formation and thick dust surrounding the galaxy nucleus, like the example to the right. Here, the LGD structure are the dark dust lanes on the top left and bottom right of the image, which connect onto the ring itself. Inside the ring, we see a loosely wound nuclear spiral which is distinct from the ring itself, and is likely to be "native" dust; that is, the bar is probably ineffective at funneling material to the very center of this galaxy. In our most strongly barred galaxies, those lacking LGD spirals simply have very chaotic centers (at best, a chaotic spiral), potentially with a lot of ongoing star formation.

Tradition!

2007-06-18T14:24:00.000-04:00

I've been in the greater Boston area this weekend (Boston-Cambridge-Sommerville-Allston) for a wedding. As my significant other was one of the groomsmen, we were involved in all of the wedding-y things: the pre-wedding dim sum Friday night, the square dancing Saturday afternoon, the rehersal dinner Saturday evening, the pre-wedding setup and endless picture taking Sunday morning/afternoon, the actual wedding Sunday afternoon with partying extending to late Sunday night, and the post-wedding brunch this morning. I've never been square dancing before, but it was a lot of fun (aside from the occasional big fat sweaty man who I really didn't want to be anywhere near); it's something I might want to try again.

The actual ceremony was a Jewish ceremony, and as I had never been to a Jewish wedding (or anything else, for that matter), I found it all quite interesting. Because this was an "interfaith" wedding, the rabbi was kind enough to explain what each part meant as it was happening. Weddings strike me as something in which a little bit of tradition is a good thing (circle of life and all), but too much is just plain hokey and impersonal. This wedding had the katubah (Jewish marriage contract) signing, a wedding canopy, poems and blessings spoken and sung by friends, ring exchange, and some nice glass smashing at the end. I especially liked the canopy (because it can be kept) and the glass smashing (because it'ssimultaneously sweet and destructive), and I think I would have been all choked up and teary throughout the entire ceremony had it not been for the occasional god-reference for comic relief. The more personal bits included friends change ringing on handbells, in part because both members of the couple ring bells, but also because that's how they met. For the uninitiated. change ringing is not the same as "tune" ringing; it is a British form of ringing that's been designed to be able to be done on large bells that take a couple of seconds between the "ding" and the "dong." Some pretty neat mathematical patterns can come out of it, but that's another post for another day.

I've also been able to spend some time this weekend with friends who I do not get to see very often, mostly in food-centric events. It amuses me that I lived here for four years and there are still so many parts of the city I know nothing about; this weekend I have gone further on both the red and green T lines (that's Boston lingo for "subway") than I ever have before. On the other hand, some things stay the same. I've written this blog post on one of the computers in the computer lab where I wrote most of my undergraduate thesis, and there's a lady in the corner over there who was in here most of the time I was writing it two years ago.

The Internet Before Blogs

2007-06-10T21:35:00.000-04:00

Before blogs (which, for me, means about a year and a half ago when I decided to find out about "some of those blog things"), I spent a lot of time goofing off on the internet every day, just like I had since 1998 or so. (Before then, it was just some time goofing off on the internet.) Nowadays, "goofing off on the internet" is fairly synonymous with "reading blogs" ... so what the hell was it I was doing on the internet before these blog things?

Anticlimatic

2007-06-06T21:25:00.000-04:00

I forgot to mention that I am now done with classes. Forever. In a rather anticlimatic move, I discovered on Sunday that apparently my final class will not be having a final exam this week. As such, I did my final classwork about two weeks ago, when I actually turned in a problem set late (I had the due date remembered wrong). Apropos, I suppose.

Also, apparently this exam I'm trying to stay awake all day to work on is a "candidacy exam." It seems that I am not yet a PhD candidate, and somehow being a PhD candidate is different from having been admitted into the PhD program. Or something. I get the point of the exams, I do, but the language and the bureaucracy come across as forced and arcane. And buraeucratic.

General Exams Begin

2007-06-04T21:44:00.000-04:00

I start my general exams today. I think that's what they're called. I've been informed they are definitely not quals or qualifying exams, but I don't understand the difference in semantics, and seeing as how they're just something I have to do, I don't really care either—thought I might again in a month.

As I explained last time in agonizing detail, our department just changed the policy for the exames-taken-after-classes-are-finished. I, like everyone else, chose to do the "new format," which is to say, I'm going to be learning a whole lot about the Lyman-α forest in the next ten days. (It's supposed to be two weeks, but thanks to extenuating circumstances, well, ten days is kind of like two weeks, right?) Then, a little less than two weeks after I turn in a pile of summary papers to my committee, I have an oral presentation scheduled ... on a completely different topic.

I spent today reading the Rauch (1998) review article of "The Lyman Alpha Forest in the Spectra of Quasistellar Objects." ("Quasistellar object" is a back-in-the-day word for "quasar.") Man, review articles are intense. The first review article (fine, it's actually from a lecture series, but anyhow) I ever read was Narayan & Bartelmann's discussion of graviational lensing. For the two years I worked on gravitational lensing (starting from absolutely no knowledge whatsoever), every time I went back to the article, I discovered some little nugget of information that simply hadn't penetrated my skull previously. Hopefully in the last four years I've learned a little bit about how to learn, as well as gained a tad of astronophysical background ...

Let this also suffice as a warning that blog posts might be somewhat more intermittant than usual for the next couple of weeks.

Day 3 at the 210th AAS: I Am So Tired

2007-05-31T14:42:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a slow day for me. While there were several individual talks I was interested in going to, there weren't any sessions I was willing to stay in for more than half an hour. But since yesterday was the first day my poster was up, I spent most of my time hanging out in the poster room. The two posters on either side of me were getting a lot more traffic. One was simply an interesting idea involving the gravitational lensing of gamma ray bursts by primordial black holes as will be viewed by GLAST; instead of a "classical" lensing, an interference pattern should be seen in the signal. While the probability of such an event is low (10^-5) and contingent on which model of primordial black holes and subsequent destruction you take, it is still a neat idea. On the other side of me was a poster about the dynamical origins of the local Hercules stream—they think it's due to a dynamical ripple thanks to the Galactic bar. People like hearing about the structure of the Milky Way, so this project was one of the three discussed at the press conference I attended (as an interested listener) in the late morning.

In the afternoon, also in the exhibit hall, I got the chance to go inside the Star Lab they have set up in the corner of the hall. For the low low price of $15,000 you too can own the ultimate tent for camping out in the living room. The Star Lab is essentially a portable planeterium, a big grey plastic bubble that you crawl into, with the stars projected onto the inside surface. The inside of the bubble goes up to 10 feet high and is large enough to lay down in while the presentation is being given. The presentation I was given focused on Hawaiian navigation: how did the Polynesians and Micronesians find Hawai'i? Apparently there was this big controversy about four decades ago over whether or not the Hawaiian islands were "stumbled upon" or purposely found. I don't really understand how you can purposely go find something you do not know (or have reason to believe) exists, but anyhow. In the 1970s a group called the Polynesian Voyaging Society formed themselves and learned how to navigate cross-ocean using no instrumentation. They built a few double-hulled canoes and went from Hawai'i to Tahiti... with no instrumentation. In canoes. We re-learned all of the familiar constellations and asterisms with their Hawaiian legends, and a few of the more southern constellations I have never seen with my own eyes.

Today is the last day of the conference, and things will be pretty much done by lunchtime. I have no idea of details yet, but I'm hoping to find some people to explore the island with... I've gotten only a few blocks from the hotel and convention center since arriving here on Sunday.

Day 2 at the 210th AAS: Wide Field Surveys

2007-05-30T13:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday there were no big invited talks, only posters still up from Monday and three day long topical sessions: Astrophysical Ionizing Radiation Sources and their Impact on Life (think about how nearby supernovae or the orbit of the Sun around the Galaxy might have affected evolution type thing), Turbulence in Diffuse Astrophysical Environments (the majority of the talks here had "turbulence" in the title), and Wide-field Surveys in the 21st Century. I spent the day in the Wide-field Surveys room, and I got to hear a lot about how Pan-STARRS is going to be amazing, but in general I liked most of the talks because I like it when astronomy can be a "real" statistical science instead of mere stamp collecting. The two main reasons, I think, why people keep talking about Pan-STARSS here is because it's starting this year and because it is largely based in Hawaii. (In the afternoon I finally heard why I had gotten the impression that people outside of the Pan-STARRS collaboration speak of it with a bit of a sardonic or deriding tone in their voice; apparently it got its funding as a rider on some bill in Congress... was it the Iraq war bill?)

Lunch yesterday was the calmest of my meals here; I went out with just one of my officemates who is here, a former grad student from Ohio State who is now planet hunting at Space Telescope Institute (and actually finding them, unlike when he did his thesis), and another guy from STScI. It's been less true even this meeting than when I attended the 2005 winter meeting of the AAS in San Diego, but one of the nice things about these kinds of meetings is seeing people you haven't seen in a long time. I've been meeting a lot of new people, certainly, and as I guessed before coming, attendance here seems to be dominated by grad students and young postdocs.

Today will be much more interesting: my poster goes up today and I'll be attending a press conference, so stay tuned for tomorrow's report!

Day 1 at the 210th AAS

2007-05-29T14:02:00.000-04:00

To the left is the view from my room. It is sunnier this morning, but yesterday I enjoyed watching the fog (or perhaps that is rain?) in the valley lift up and re-descend. Jet lag here isn't so bad; I like the concept of being a morning person, but in practice it never holds.

The conference kicked off yesterday morning with a talk by John Tonry on Synoptic Sky Surveys. Essentially, the Sloan Digitial Sky Survey (SDSS) is coming to a close. Sloan has mapped about a fifth of the sky in visible wavelengths, with stupidly large numbers of cataloged stars, galaxies, quasars, and what-have-yous. I think in some ways the holy grail of observational astronomy is to have the entire sky mapped down to the faintest magnitudes possible, at all wavelengths, and to continually observe the entire sky for time variability. According to Tonry, we are rapidly approaching the first goal for visible wavelengths; it is likely that in ten to twenty years, the entire optical sky will be mapped down to the faintest magnitude allowed by the atmosphere. Surveys like Pan-STARRS and SkyMapper are coming online this year. In 15 years, will astronomy be a field of searching databases and waving the wand of statistics, or are we practically already there with SDSS?

After the first talk, everyone trickled down to the room with the posters and exhibits; more specifically, the room with the pastries and coffee. I like going around to the exhibits and talking to the people there; I've already collected half a dozen bookmarks (to make up for forgetting to bring one with me) and more stickers than I know what to do with.

Then it was time to break into individual sessions, with five minute "normal" talks and fifteen minute "disseratation" talks. Several people simply did not show up to give their talk in a few of the sessions I attended; I cannot understand how someone can not only just not "show up," but also be rude enough to not inform the organizers that their plans have changed. I managed to miss most of the talks I had wanted to go to, since I was skipping around the galaxy evolution and galaxy cluster and variable star sessions, but most of the talks I heard were in fact interesting.

At lunch, I found myself with a solar physics group from Boulder, Colorado. This meeting is in conjunction with the Solar Physics Division, which is to say, there are a lot of astronomers here who have taken the "day shift." The sun is fascinating; one would think that being the nearest star, we would know everything about it we might want to. But people don't even agree on simple-seeming things, like the amount of oxygen relative to hydrogen. It is also an interesting field in that we can measure all sorts of things from the sun that we can't in other stars: details of sunspots, coronal mass ejections, granulation, helioseismology, sun flares, etc. etc.—things we would looooove to know about Other Stars, but we just can't make the measurements yet. After all, the sun is just a star, and what we really want to know about is stars, and in many plots, we only have the one data point. A few of the solar folks I talked to are excited about the upcoming missions to search for extrasolar planets; by making exquisitely accurate measurments of the light coming from stars, we can also hope to learn about astroseismology (literally, starquakes) of stars not our own.

Speaking of extrasolar planets, apparently the big news release yesterday was on a bunch of new ones being announced. (One of the breakout sessions yesterday was on extrasolar planets, but I did not go.) There have been rumors circulating for months that 2007 will see a huge increase in the number of known extrasolar planets; many of the ongoing searches for transiting planets are finally coming to fruition. It is heartening to see people announcing more than a handful of planets at a time; it means that the field is growing from one of stamp collecting to one in which they can actually do statistics and begin to really learn about planet formation.

In the afternoon, I went to the COSMOS session. I have a soft spot for the COSMOS project since it was my first real introduction to astronomy; the summer I spent at Caltech in 2004 was centered on playing with all of the HST COSMOS data that was available at the time (about half of it). It's a gorgeous data set. Apparently the S-COSMOS data set, the Cycle 2 Spitzer data of the COSMOS field, is now available. Many of the talks were about these infrared bright galaxies, though the talk I found most intriguing was the one on asteroids found in the COSMOS field with Spitzer: one person's trash is another's science.

After all of the talks, I went over to some nearby beach with a group of graduate students mostly from the University of Hawaii. Yesterday being Memorial Day, there was a Lantern Floating ceremony; people light little lanterns on little boats in remembrance of lost ones, and at sunset let them out into the sea. There was music and ceremony and many many people. I took lots of pictures, but none of them are very good. I didn't care much for the overly fancy rituals projected onto the big screen by the people running the shindig, but watching the people who had brought their own personal lantern boats walk to the ocean, I think I like this way of honoring and remembering the dead. As the sky grew darker, the water became more and more littered with bright lights.

Day 0 at the 210th AAS: Honolulu!!

2007-05-28T13:35:00.000-04:00

I flew in yesterday afternoon via Chicago on American Airlines. It was a 9 hour flight, and yet they didn't have any food resembling a meal back in steerage class, just things like overpriced chips and overpriced cookies and sodas. I guess I've been spoiled by the only four hours longer trans-Pacific flights where they have two real meals, as well as snacks. So when I arrived at the hotel yesterday afternoon, I didn't know if I was more hungry or more tired.

I've never been to Hawaii. It's 7 a.m. here, six hours behind the east coast of the continental US. This kind of jet lag isn't so bad, as I can both sleep for a long time (still recovering from a cold) and feel like I'm getting ujp early. From my hotel room (which comes with a nice balcony!), I can see two moutains with either really thick fog or rain between them. From what I've seen so far (airport, mall, convention center), this is a really indoor-outdoor place; I like it. I like how I can not realize that I'm outside until the ceiling above me disappears.

Last night there was a small reception on the roof of the convention center. This is another way of saying, there was a small amount of food, but enough to make me not want to go foraging for a real meal. I only keep mentioning the food because I really haven't eaten since like Saturday, but I'm not a breakfast person, so I still don't feel like eating now. Anyhow, I met a group of people from the University of Texas, a girl who plans on conquering the infamous eigenvector 1. In the increasing darkness over dumplings and fresh fruit, we discussed said eigenvector and other AGNy things like the broad-line region, FeII, FeVII, and NeV, with Greg Shields and Richard Green. I sometimes wonder what's going through people's minds when they ask me the simple question of what I work on, and I stammer a little, explaining that I am presenting here on variable stars at the Galactic center,
but now I'm working on the Lyman-α forest. Do I seem well-rounded, or indecisive and noncommittal?

Today is the first day of talks and posters. The posters will be up in two batches; the first batch today and tomorrow, and the second batch Wednesday and Thursday. Mine is in the second batch. There are several simultaneous talks I know I will want to go to, and I haven't decided which I'll actually go to yet. One thing people always complain about with the AAS meetings is that they are so big; talks are limited to 5 minutes each (and, of course, people routinely go over, which mostly serves to annoy the audience and the moderators). The irony is that since the meetings are so big, no one comes. They say it's good for undergrads and graduate students (and, to an extent, postdocs) to go and meet people, but if no one who "matters" goes, then who is there to schmooze with?

A much more relevant question, though, is whether I give this post an EST or an HST timestamp.

Ready for Honolulu

2007-05-26T10:52:00.000-04:00

I leave tomorrow morning for Honolulu for a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). I just want to assure everyone that astronomy conferences are not always in exotic locales. Here, for instance, is a picture from the last conference I went to, in Ishigaki, Japan.

While I'm sure there won't be any talks nearly as interesting as this one at the AAAS this March, it will probably be a fun and interesting conference. I will have a poster on variable stars at the Galactic center; the paper has been accepted for publication and I even bought a nice purple poster tube to carry it in. I might even try to post on the exciting goings-on while there.

A Sort-of Book Review: I Sold My Soul on eBay

2007-05-22T23:37:00.000-04:00

Hemant Mehta, also known as the Friendly Atheist and author of I Sold My Soul on eBay, will be at Ohio State on Thursday night to discuss his book. (Details on his blog; apparently he will also be at Easton on Sunday signing books.)

I bought and read the book about a month ago, and I've been meaning to write up a review-type-thing, but well, haven't. But since those of you who have a chance to go to the talk should go, and since anyone at all interested in religion (if you are a churchgoer, you count) should read his book, I might as well try saying something.

As he explains in the first few pages of the book, he didn't actually sell his soul on eBay; the title is a descendant of an (embraced) inaccurate headline. Hemant is an atheist who, because he was raised in a non-Christian religion in a nation innundated with Christians, is interested in learning about Christianity. He figured the obvious way to do this was to "go to church," but as someone who knew nothing about churches or Christianity, he decided it would be more fun to sell the right to pick which church to go to on eBay. The cost was $10 per hour in church; all money raised by the auction was donated to a secular organization.

The book is a fast easy read; I read it over the course of two short flights, though unlike some I wasn't interrupted by entertaining or annoying conversations. Unlike many in the religion debates, Hemant does not describe his point of view as something which he believes the reader should embrace. Take, for example, Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation (also an enlightening read). Harris explicitly tells the reader that belief in Christianity is harmful; as a prelude to the reasons why religion is bad, Harris details why it is first and foremost wrong. Hemant is less antagonistic; he explicity tells the reader why he does not believe in the supernatural, but he does not explicity pass judgement on those who do. In fact, one of the main selling points of the books is to tell Christians what they might want to try if they actually want to attract and convert (and not alienate) atheists. There's even a discussion guide for Christian groups at the end of the book.

If you are interested in more reviews and opinions, Hemant has a decent compilation of them on his blog as well.

My Mother, the Math Teacher

2007-05-20T17:49:00.000-04:00

The post a while back wherein I mentioned my dad's crazy doings was somewhat popular, so I figure I'll go with the flow and let y'all know about my non-stereotypical mother. Consider it a belated Mother's Day post. The actual impetus is Friday's xkcd comic:
My mother is a chronic middle school math teacher. She half-heartedly tried retiring sometime when I was in high school, but continued to work full time. Then, about a year ago, we had a big retirement party for her because she was quitting for real. So then she worked part-time for most of the last year... and announced earlier this week that she will be teaching part-time next year. My brother and I keep reminding her of the definition of "retirement," but the message does not seem to stick. We think she is beginning to think of herself as a "free lance math teacher." This new job will not be at the school she's been at for the last 15ish years; instead, she will be teaching at a "gender magnet school," teaching 8th grade girls Algebra I and Geometry. This will be her 40th year of teaching.

The xkcd comic also rings true because my mother is not the kind of person who decided what she believes about the way the world should work decades ago, only to stop thinking about it now. She still talks about what she wants to be when she "grows up" ... perhaps she thinks retiring is the same as growing up? Regardless, it's going to be interesting hearing her perspectives on same-gender education over the next year. She says she hasn't given it much thought yet; she took the job because it's a good job, not because it involves teaching in a gender-separated environment. The more I think about it, the more morally opposed I am to gender separation in an academic environment; but then, it's something I've never had to actually experience myself. The teachers and the students are the ones who can attest to how bad or good of an idea it is, and how it does or does not "work." I'm yet to meet a student who has had both co-ed and gender-separated education and believed the gender-separated to be superior.

And, sadly, this is certainly one way to "politicize" math. Jerks.

UPDATE: Comments were disabled for unkown reasons. Everything should be working fine now, though.

People Study Astronomy; Hijinks Ensue

2007-05-17T19:55:00.000-04:00

Typically, one would be afraid that a 244 page anything showing up on astro-ph would be dry and boring in addition to being long, especially if it lacks figures. The recent summary of Astrophysics in 2006, which showed up on astro-ph Monday evening, is in fact a 244 page report sans figures. But it's far from dry and boring—instead it's fresh and funny and snarky. I like snarky. And I know you blog-reading types are more likely to look for ways to punt on Fridays than other days of the week, so here you go. Think of it as a an astronomy blog carnival, only, papers instead of blogs.

The paper goes into all sorts of "real" astronomy, like "things of which there is currently only one (habitable planets, the Sun, and the universe)," but what I find the most entertaining are the sociological-esque aspects. This is especially true as the suspicion is that one motivation behind this treatise is providing an opportunity for the first author to rant. See for example,

the departures of Wesley Huntress, Eugene Levy, and Charles Kennel from the NASA Science Advisory Comittee. Their error seems to have been in advising that science continue to be done.

Or, in Section 4.2:

Each year, anything from 10 to 50 folks respond to requests for suggestions of highlights of the past year. The request is intepreted in interestingly different ways, ranging from “My gut feeling is that, for the first time in my career, the most exciting things may be in the fields of solar system studies and the discovery of planets rather than in my own realm of the extragalactic” to a list of 17 papers on arguments for the respondent’s own ideas, of which he is the senior or sole author. The “he” is deliberate. None of the responses of that sort were from women, though this may be a selection effect − 10% of 10% of 50 is 0.5 (and you must supply your own hermaphrodiate joke). This year the author who collects most of these responses thought it only fair to be sure that at least one paper or topic proposed by each respondent get mentioned. A good many of the suggestions already had green circles, red rectangles, or other notebook entries; some were out of period (perhaps in Ap07) or otherwise not in the data base.

Can you imagine having collaborators like this?:

We caught at least two papers being retracted out from under their first authors, who either disagreed or were not consulted (Nature 437, 940; Science 310, 49; Science 310, 425). One of the first authors concerned plans to sue.

Of course, to the outside world, the biggest happening in astronomy in 2006 was that whole Pluto and "definition" of a planet mess. So, of course, this is mentioned on at length, including some of the press reaction:

Concerning Kuiper Belt and Trans-Neptunian objects, there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that 2003 UB313, the one that caused all the fuss and bother about what is a planet is now merely Eris, named for the goddess of discord, and her moon is Dysnomia, goddess of lawlessness and daughter of Eris. Those are IAU committee decisions and so to be trusted as much as any IAU committee decisions. But the LA Times article reporting the names also declared that Clyde Tombaugh named Charon after his wife Charlene. Yes, Tombaugh (1906−1997) was very much alive when Charon was discovered in 1978 (by James W. Christy of the US Naval Observatory), but he was not the discoverer, and his wife was Patricia (nee Edson) 43. You might want to start over and assume that Christy’s wife’s name is Charlene and that the LA Times has (at least) one editor like the one who just processed a chapter of ours for a book on evolution in general.

Given that I like the sociological aspect, the most entertaining (and potentially embarassing) section is the final one, "Misteaks Were Made." A few of these are clear honest errors (e.g., “four redshift bins over 0.1 Mpc < z < 3.0 Mpc"); others were just plain hilarious:

ISS is like an old suitcase whose handle is missing − it is totally useless, but you just can’t bear to part from it” (Nature 437, 1214).

They also mention at least twice the acknowledgements including the "faint praise" of "EB thanks the Israeli Army for hospitality during the last month of this project.” And did I mention the snarkiness?:

“Does it really make a material difference whether references are arranged by authors (alphabetically) or numerically?” (Nature 437, 1232). Oh, only to the grammatical structure of about every third sentence.

Mmm, snarky.

Abell 611 from the LBT

2007-05-14T19:40:00.001-04:00

I apparently still don't feel like blogging, so here's a pretty picture of a nice galaxy cluster, Abell 611, for you to look at:
This is one of the clusters we're looking at with the LBT for our weak lensing study. A nice example of strong lensing is the pair of blue arcs above and to the left of the center of the image; those are background galaxies being lensed by the cluster.

Some stats for those of you who care about that kind of thing, copied blatantly from the CCAPP webpage which was in turn copied blatantly from the observer who took the data and made the pretty picture:

Details: the image is about 2 arcminutes on a side, North is up, East is to the left. The integration times were 20min in Uspec, 60min in g-SDSS,and 15min in r-SDSS. The image quality in the combined images is about 0.6" FWHM in g and r, but they were smoothed them to match the 0.7" image quality of the u-band image.

The Lyman-alpha Forest

2007-05-12T19:45:00.000-04:00

It seems that I am now working on the Lyman-α forest, a fair cry from stars or the Milky Way. One of the great aspects of working on the Lyman-α forest is that it relates to so many other aspects of astronomy. And, recently, it's been difficult to spend much time here and not become interested in the composition and geometry of the IGM (e.g., this and this and this).

I had heard about the Lyman-α forest for quite a while before truly understanding what it is; in this particular case, it was a picture that made all the difference.

For example, this cartoon, shamelessly borrowed from Ned Wright's page explaining the Lyman-α forest. There are three separate pieces needed to explain what is meant by the "Lyman-α forest, " or what is commonly written as the Lyα forest. First, there's the Lyman-α bit, which involves a bit about atoms and rudimentary atomic physics. Then, there's the large reservoir of gas between galaxies creatively known as the intergalactic medium, or IGM. Finally, there are the notions of redshift and thermal broadening and other fun things that can happen to change the wavelength at which a photon of light is observed.

Atoms and energy levels: As you should recall from your high school chemistry class (or as wikipedia [or here] would remind you if you were asleep that year), atoms come equipped with energy levels, and the electrons can move between the different levels. These transitions have different names, and the Lyman-α transition is the one between the n=1 and n=2 states. (Lyman-β is n=3 to n=1, Lyman-γ is 4 to 1, Lyman-δ is 5 to 1, and so on. The series of transitions into n=other states are have different names; the Lyman series is just the one named after some dude named Lyman.)

When electrons move from a higher energy level to a lower one, a photon (or two if it's a super-duper-forbidden transition) is emitted by the atom in order to conserve energy. Because the photon is carrying away the energy the atom had when it was in the excited state (i.e., when the electron was in the higher energy level), the energy the photon has is exactly equal to the energy difference between the two levels. So, when one counts the number of photons as a function of energy of some source—this is called taking a spectrum—there are certain wavelengths at which there are lots and lots of photons because lots of atoms have undergone energy transitions and emitted photons with near-identical energies. These are called emission lines.

Of course, the same thing can happen the other direction. If a photon of just the right energy encounters an atom, the atom can absorb the photon, essentially moving the electron from a lower energy level to a higher one. So if we take a spectrum of some bright source, we will see regions where a bunch of atoms have absorbed a bunch of photons all of one wavelength. These regions are known as absorption lines/features/troughs/whathaveyou.

The Intergalactic Medium (IGM): Hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe; roughly 75% of all atoms in the universe are hydrogen atoms. Nowadays, most of the hydrogen is ionized, so instead of a proton and an electron hanging out together, they are separate. For electrons to be able to move between energy levels, it has to be associated with some nucleus, i.e., the atom has to be neutral. Even though the vast majority of hydrogen atoms in the IGM are ionized, there is enough neutral hydrogen around that Lyman-α (and other) transitions can trace the structure of the IGM. Of course, there are lots of other elements in the IGM, but we can only observe those with atomic transitions in convenient wavelength ranges; commonly observed other species are singly-ionized magnesium (MgII in spectroscopy lingo) and triply-ionized carbon (CIV).

As it turns out, the cartoon description above of the IGM as a bunch of isolated clumps of gas is wrong. A more accurate model has the gas distributed much more smoothly; the gas isn't perfectly uniform, and there are regions of low density and of high density, but the contrast between these regions is not large enough to think of the high density regions as "clouds."

Redshift, etc: The real key to being able to use absorption features to study the IGM is redshift. If we observed all of the intergalactic gas to absorb light at one wavelength, then it would be next to impossible to decipher any physical structure from a spectrum. Luckily, though, we live in an expanding universe, and so light travelling across long distances is redshifted, that is, the wavelength of a single photon gets longer as it propogates. (This is a redshift since longer wavelength means redder light.) The amount by which light is redshifted depends on the distance the light has travelled; this so-called cosmological redshift is the main thing for which Edwin Hubble is famous for figuring out. So, to return the the cartoon above, if we have some really bright faraway source, like a quasar or a gamma ray burst, then light coming towards us from this source will be redshifted. Specifically, light that was originally bluer than that of the Lyα transition will be redshifted to this wavelength, and if there is some neutral hydrogen sitting around where this happens, then it will be able to absorb that light. The more neutral hydrogen (i.e., the higher the neutral hydrogen density) at a given location, then the more Lyα light that will be absorbed. There is a lot of hydrogen in the universe, and the universe is really big, so spectra wind up looking more like this than the above cartoon:
The big peak on the right is due to Lyα emission from the quasar itself, and all the mess to the left (bluewards) of that is the Lyα forest. Lots and lots of absorption.

If this was the end of the story, then it would be fairly easy to go from a map of absorbed light to a density map of the IGM along some line of sight. Alas, this is astronomy, so there are lots of extra things going on. The first is that the gas in the IGM isn't perfectly cold; it has some temperature and so the atoms are moving around relative to one another, which causes individual lines to be smeared out. Observationally, this isn't all bad: we astronomers like knowing about temperatures as well as densities—and the relationship between the two.

As I mentioned earlier, astronomers now know that the IGM does not consist of discrete clouds floating around in a vast emptiness; the gas density instead fluctuates about some constant value. Part of what I am working on now is to try to determine what sets the scale of these fluctuations, or, equivalently, what sets the scale on which the IGM and the Lyα forest are smooth.

Let's Play Good Idea, Bad Idea

2007-05-07T23:54:00.000-04:00

Recently, a Chemistry professor at OSU had their house broken into. Among the stolen items were two laptops. Typically, when someone has their laptop stolen, it sucks for them, but that's the end of the story.

But this is Ohio. They do things differently here.

You see, the laptops were ones on which said professor stored class rosters. And, among other things, these class rosters included the social security numbers of approximately 3,500 current and former students. Which is bad. And so the university has had to find and contact these 3,500 some odd individuals and let them know their identity security has been breached. Some of these students were from many many years ago, and as such, private investigators and the like had to be hired. Which costs money. Apparently this has cost the chemistry department and the university something like $80,000 so far.

That was in February. In early April, some other computers on campus were hacked into and something like 14,000 SSNs were "exposed." These SSNs are a subset of everyone who receives a paycheck from OSU ... including various faculty and staff, which (it seems like) was enough to make people go from saying "this is a problem that should be fixed" to actually trying to, you know, fix it.

There is much specialness abounding in this situation. The most obvious one to me is that there is no reason why a professor should ever have students' SSNs. So why do they? Well, it's because at this prestigious university, SSNs have long been used as student ID numbers. (Yes, I have complained about this before.) What this means is that they are routinely included on all class rosters, grade lists, etc etc. Which means that someone somewhere along the way had to think that was a good idea. Sure, it might have been back before the days of identity theft when everyone was all good and moral ... but a lot of software (e.g., for grade submission) has been written since then that didn't need to include that information. And once it became obvious that this practice could cause problems, someone somewhere had to make the decision to "phase" in a solution (apparently they've been saying this for years) instead of doing a rapid change manouver.

Which is what they're trying to do now, but with a great deal more... panic. No one likes a lawsuit, so another brilliant decision that someone somewhere made was to hold individuals liable. Not just the poor sap who has SSNs stored in his mail from over a decade ago, but also the individual responsible for that computer, aka, your friendly local tech support guy who is really not enthused at the idea of policing a department's worth of computers for nine digit strings, but is rather motivated at the idea of keeping their job.

Best part is, someone has realized that all of this goes against FERPA regulations ... pesky laws. We're assured that it'll all be fixed by the start of Autumn quarter in September, and the Astronomy department is definitely being all pro-active in purging computers of these data records. Besides, it's not every day you learn that Professor X has found Famous Astronomers Y and Z's social security numbers on their computer ...

Jorge Cham at Ohio State

2007-05-04T19:01:00.000-04:00

So I've not felt like blogging lately, apparently. According to Jorge Cham, this isn't a bad thing; "procrastination is when you're doing what you want to be doing." I heard him say so himself Tuesday night when he gave a talk here at OSU to an auditorium full of graduate students. (Is it bad that though I knew there was a coffee shop on the first floor of the building, I had no idea what its name was?)
Anyhow, the talk was entertaining, even for someone like me whose been reading the comics regularly for the last, uhm, six years. It started with a routine "I had to learn about Ohio State before coming here" bit ... talking about how the Wikipedia article for OSU is gushing about how big and great of a university it is ... and then we find out that Larry Sanger apparently is an OSU alum and it all begins to make sense.

So this part isn't going to be funny; I know, and I'm sorry, but deal with it. Apparently one of the main points of Cham's talks is that many graduate students are depressed. Apparently, for many people, graduate school is the first time when the ratio of what they think they know to what they think they don't know becomes very small, the first time they feel as if they are not "one of the best" at something. Uhm, so that would have been ... 11th grade for me, at the latest. And if it hadn't happened then, a few days at MIT would have cured that right up. And it goes without saying that my self-confidence is muuuch higher now than it was when I was an undergrad ... although that really isn't saying all that much. My view of stress as an undergrad v. as a grad student is somewhat skewed; while MIT is a high-stress environment, it's also true that my current department most certainly is not, relative to other places (or what's portrayed in the comics). And, seriously, if people are unhappy as graduate students because they don't like what they're doing, then, uhm, why are they in grad school to begin with? People should be doing what makes them happy.

Anyhow, the talk was pretty good and all around entertaining; the only thing that could have made it funnier would have been if he'd actually made a L'Hopital's Rule joke instead of just alluding to the possibility of one. More jokes about how annoying undergrads are would have also been appreciated. They were, unfortunately, not selling the new book (which ships, I think, tomorrow). I'd even brought money from one of my officemates (which I should return ...) to buy one. Instead, I was one of three people to win a raffle for a free (old) book, which is funny because I already own both books. Two years ago Cham gave a talk at MIT, and instead of going, I took a nap. (I was thesing, OK?) A friend bought both books for me—and got them autographed—as a graduate gift. So, I decided to give my free book to one of my officemates, who had decided to not come to the hour-long talk because he needed to work. No lie. Severe workaholic silliness I try very hard to not compare myself to.

Regardless, how come there aren't any couches in my department? My brother, a graduate student in history, maintains his office has one exactly like this:

iGoogle?

2007-05-01T00:08:00.000-04:00

I'd understand if this was April 1, but it's May 1. And so I don't understand:

It's like Google is getting it on with my computer and/or iPod, and I'm just not sure if I'm OK with that. And why doesn't Apple already have iFoo trademarked for all Foo?

American Idol, Landfills, and Juvenile Justice

2007-04-25T21:09:00.000-04:00

Alright, I confess. I'm an American Idol fan. I'm all about the brainrot. It's pathetic, I know, but what's even more pathetic is that I don't even own a television and I watch a taped version of the Tuesday night show on Wednesday evenings. Last night's show revolved around "Idol Gives Back," this "big" war-against-poverty campaign they're doing. The big thing they kept mentioning is how for each vote, NewsCorp was going to donate $0.10, for up to five million dollars. They never really said where the money was going, except that it was to *gasp* Save Lives! Also nevermind that this is freaking NewsCorp and five million dollars is barely a drop in the bucket, if that. It probably did do some good and made a lot of people feel warm and fuzzy inside, so I can't complain too much.

So, last night, instead of forcing us to watch Bono "coach" the contestants (oh God thank you for sparing us that pain), we got to see a bunch of short segments of the host and the judges going around the US and Africa. The parts from Africa were ... familiar. (Nevermind that they never told us where in Africa they were; it's one big homogenous place, so it must not really matter anyhow. And while they did talk about how horrible of a disease malaria is, they didn't mention AIDS even once. American Idol is a family show, after all.) But, yes, the shots of people walking through landfills and of large groups of orphans happily eating in large bare rooms... it was a total deja vu, except the grinning kids in the video had darker skin that the ones in my memory.

In August 2005, in the middle of a month-long trip through southeast Asia, my father and I found ourselves in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. (If you don't know anything about Cambodia, quit being ignorant and go check out the wikipedia article or something. Especially the parts about the Khmer Rouge and Angkor.) We knew that Phnom Penh was going to be horrible, the worst combinations of a large dirty city and abject poverty in a country still recovering from large-scale genocide. Cambodia's tourist attractions are are elsewhere, and we were only in its capital out of necessity. My father's all-too-natural solution was to spend our one full day in town visiting the dump.

I'm not kidding. You just can't make this stuff up. We had met a couple in Siem Reap (the town near Angkor) who had spent a few days volunteering at the Centre for Children's Happiness in Phnom Penh. This organization actually runs two orphanages; the kids are separated by age and amount of time since they've lived in the landfill. Lived in the landfill. Like the girl in the picture on the left, these kids have all lived in the Phnom Penh dump as "garbage pickers" before coming to the orphanage. They go through the trash trying to find something, anything, they can sell for mere pennies in order to try to get enough money to buy food with. They literally live and sleep in the dump; the lucky ones might even live there with older siblings or even a parent. Most are orphans, or have parents in worse situations than them (e.g., missing a limb from the copious land mines scattered throughout the country). The CCH carefully picks children living in the dump to come live in the orphanage instead—and, importantly, the kids have to decide for themselves that this is a change they want in their lives. Usually the children coming straight from the dump have to spend about three months (if I remember correctly) in a hospital gaining strength and being treated for various diseases. (Actually, many only spend a few weeks, but some must spend many many months in recovery.) At the orphanages, they get a chance at having a "real childhood." They learn to read and write (in Khmer, English, and Japanese), they learn math, they learn job skills, they learn traditional Khmer dance and art, they learn how to care for one another and how society runs better if people treat each other with respect, have jobs, and take care of themselves. And, oh yes, they learn math. The walls of the courtyard in the main orphanage are covered with painted lessons: vocabulary, useful math formulas and ideas, proverbs, etc. I spent a while talking to one of the older students, a 16 year old boy who had been in the orphanage for three years. He said he really liked math, "especially trigonometry," and working on the computer. This is what we call a "motivated player." He said that when he turned 18, he wanted to work for the orphanage as a full-time employee; this was two years ago, and I do not know what he has wound up doing. The founder of CCH, Mech Sokha, is very open about the workings of the orphanage; the main office (where the computers live, and thus where many of the children spend much of their time) has a whiteboard dedicated to a breakdown of exactly how much it costs per child per day, and where all of that money both comes from and goes, as he is explaining to my father in the picture on the left. This is one of my favorite pictures (aside from all of the math!) from the orphanage because the kid you see standing next to Mech is so typical. For the first time in their lives, these children are somewhere safe, and it was so obvious just how safe they felt. Kids were running around, hugging each other, hugging Mech (like this one here), and generally just being happy. (I was the one with the camera, so many of them while I was there were taking turns having their picture taken, inspecting the preview on the screen on the back, informing me it wasn't good enough, and making me retake pictures. Oh, the cuteness.)

My dad actually got really excited by the entire experience. One thing we noted is that their computers were all really old and crappy; they had about ten, but only one or two would ever work at a time. My dad thought, "I have a lot of friends; we could easily get dozens of nice computers here." So he tried to help, to forge a bond, but apparently Mech just quit responding to his emails, the last I heard. I personally found the entire experience depressing rather than invigorating; it is difficult to see people making so much out of so little and not feel guilty for making so little out of so much opportunity in my own life. I'm still naive and idealistic; instead of seeing one potentially solvable situation, I see a whole helpless world full of Things That Should Not Be. In my head, I know what the world should be like, but the real world around me is so different that it's overwhelming to know how to go about fixing it. Well, there's that, and the fact that I'm incredibly cynical and impatient and people annoy me.

My father, you see, is different. (It takes a special kind of person to decide to visit the Phnom Penh dump on a tour of southeast Asia, yes?) He was a high school guidance counselor for almost 30 years, and somewhere along the way got involved with a volunteer organization associated with the state's Department for Juvenile Justice. Whereby "involved with," I really mean "founded," and whereby "Department for Juvenile Justice," I'm referring to "juvy," the prison where kids under 18 go. My strongest memories of Christmas morning when I was a kid don't center around getting up at the crack of dawn to run downstairs and see what presents I got; they revolve around getting up before the crack of dawn to drive out to DJJ to hand out bags of Christmas gifts to the teenage inmates there—gifts like pads of paper, pre-stamped envelopes, an orange, and a toothbrush. Since his retirement my senior year of high school, my father has poured himself into running this multimillion dollar philanthropic adventure. Explaining everything they do would require a whole other post, not to mention actually listening when he's going on about all of it on the phone.

My father's philosophy is that charity has its limitations; money can only go so far, and if you actually want to make a difference, then you need to actually do something. Charity is trying to treat symptoms ("we need to feed these hungry children!"), while philanthropy is trying to cure the cause ("we need to help these children's parents feed them!"). Charity makes people feel all warm and fuzzy inside; it has immediate gratification and results, and it's easier, but it the results aren't lasting. Philanthropy, on the other hand, is hard. Philanthropy requires thought, action, and inspiration in additon to mere money. It's one thing to give incarcerated kids prestamped envelopes, but it's something all together to try to change their lives and keep track of them so that when they get out of jail they don't go back to their old (criminal) habits upon returning home.

This is part of what has me cynical about the whole "Idol Gives Back" nonsense. I'm not saying it's bad; I'm saying it sounds like it isn't going to be as effective and useful as it could be. Money going to food doesn't solve problems; it merely postpones them until the next meal, while teaching people that they don't have to work for what they get. In Africa, wouldn't the money be better spent teaching safe sex and supplying condoms so fewer unwanted kids are born? Shouldn't we be trying to attack the problems instead of simply making ourselves feel better?

And, yes, I was glad to see Sanjaya go.

Please Step AWAY from the Dark Energy

2007-04-20T10:45:00.000-04:00

An interesting essay by Simon White showed up on astro-ph Wednesday night entitled "Fundamentalist physics: why Dark Energy is bad for Astronomy." The whole thing is an interesting sociological read, highlighting in very clear terms the adage (mantra?) that astronomy doesn't want to become like particle physics:

Dark Energy is the Pied Piper's pipe, luring astronomers away from their home territory to follow high-energy physicists down the path to professional extinction.

This topic is big enough that both Rob and Sean have already commented on it (I was travelling! no interenet!). As someone who got into astronomy because cosmology was so interesting (I didn't like astronomy as a kid, and MIT doesn't have a separate astronomy department), I find this topic to be quite enlightening. Sure, we could all be working on what is arguably the "most interesting" topic, but what's the fun in that?

What I found most interesting in the essay, though, were the cold hard numbers behind the reality of the situation, i.e., how the culture of writing and citing papers has changed in the last, say, 30 years. The final figure in the essay outlines how the number of refereed papers, distinct authors, authors per paper, and references per paper have changed from 1975 to 2006.

The numbers in parentheses are the 1975 values.

By 2006 the number of authors had quadrupled but the number of papers had only doubled. On the other hand, the mean number of authors per paper also doubled, so that the number of papers signed by a typical astronomer remained constant at about 2 per year. The size of the astronomical community has thus increased dramatically and a drop in the mean productivity of its members has been masked by the tendency for more individuals to sign each paper. In 1975 over 40% of all papers in the major journals had a single author and fewer than 3% had 6 or more authors. In 2006 only 9% of papers had a single author while almost 28% had 6 or more authors.
...
As an extreme example, the fourth ranked astrophysicist by citations to papers published over the last decade has never written a first-author paper for a refereed journal and has gained almost all his citations through his right to sign official papers by a large collaboration in which he played a purely functional role

Why these trends occur and just how bad (or good) they are is harder to pin down. I know that big long author lists are extremely uncommon in most fields; are there even any other fields within physics that support papers with more than 6 authors on an "oh, that's normal" basis? I doubt we've found a nice equlibrium within the collaboration system yet: the benefits of "more people means more ideas" has to be balanced out by the fact inidividuals can get lost, e.g., that after the first author, it's difficult to track down just how much each author contributed.

I'm a Published Photographer!

2007-04-17T23:59:00.000-04:00

Check out page 34 of the current edition (Spring/Summer 2007) of the Harvard Design Magazine! The issue, subtitled "New Skyscrapers in Megacities on a Warming Globe," has several articles discussing the interplay of urbanization and high-rise buildings. It's an interesting dichotomy I've never considered: on the one hand, it's presumably better for the environment for people to move to the cities and get around on foot and via public transportation than to live in the suburbs and guzzle gallons of gas each day, but on the other hand, if moving to the city means building tall buildings, then the fact that tall buildings consumer enormous amounts of resources should also be considered. This being a "Design" magazine, the role tall buildings play in their cities is also discussed at length; essentially, no one has yet found a way to pleasantly incorporate skyscrapers into cities that isn't off-putting or mildly hostile. They go over the history of skyscrapers; in the 1960s it was all about maximum volume efficiency, but then not only was it discovered that people are unhappy working in cubicle farms, but also that these new-fangled "computers" need lots of wiring, which requires extra space between floors. Additionally, all these extra electronics means extra cooling is needed; extra cooling in turn means more energy consumption. And so on. After several articles of people talking about buildings generating their own energy and being "green," they have a nice article entitled, "No Building is an Island." It pleases me to know that there are people actually thinking about these kinds of impacts, both on local and global scales.

The other aspect discussed at length is the rapid increase in skyscrapers: apparently, as of June 2006, "40% of the world's 200 tallest buildings have been completed since 2000." Furthermore, many of these buildings are in countries essentially saying, "Look! Our *ahem* building is taller than yours; we must be important!!" I definitely found this to be the ambiance surrounding the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpor (I took the picture above, which was featured in this issue, looking down from the skybridge connecting the two towers about halfway up). The Petronas Towers were basically bought in order to showcase Kuala Lumpor for the rest of the world: in 1998, people were like, "Kuala Lumpor? Where's that? They have the tallest building(s) in the world now??" They are situated in the middle of a large park, the Kuala Lumpor City Centre (commonly referred to as the KLCC). There are essentially no other tall buildings nearby; the Menera Maxis building is actually directly adjacent and connected underground to the Towers, but as it is more than half as tall as the Towers themselves, from ground level they are nigh indistinguishable. From the sidewalk, there is just no good perspective; sure, they're tall, but I for one couldn't tell they were all that tall. For comparison, in March 2001 I stayed for a few nights at the Marriott World Trade Center in New York, and, yes, the World Trade Towers seemed quite tall, in part because they were noticeably so much taller than their already tall surroundings.

Having never even considered picking up and reading an architecture magazine before, I'm finding this to be rather entertaining and educational. If you can, you should go pick up a copy and read it. And check out the most excellent photography on page 34.

Post #100: Happy Blogiversary!

2007-04-16T08:49:00.000-04:00

I apologize to my three loyal readers for having not posted much the last few weeks. I tried to make up for it by making the few posts much longer than usual, but the truth is, there has to be a good reason for my not mentioning such things as Coffee being mentioned on Cosmic Variance (apparently, we're fiesty!) or my winning a book for correctly picking The Number. You see, I am extremely silly and therefore had no choice to seize the opportunity to make my 100th post be one year after my first post. It wasn't very substantial, I know, and I didn't really start posting regularly until August or so, but still, a first post is a first post and a blogiversary is a blogiversary.

I could wank about how things here have changed over the past year (e.g., I no longer change the colors and template once a week, and I've even picked a title and everything), or ask for the zillionth time what people would like to read posts on in a desperate attempt to increase readership, but that would be both boring and pathetic. Instead, I've decided to celebrate this auspicious day by writing all about all of the topics I never write about.

First, there are all sorts of personal things I don't tell you about. For example:

Any significant other(s) I may or may not have or have had
The fact that though I live right next to a very active set of train tracks, the only irritating source of noise pollution in my apartment comes from the couple in the apartment above mine. They fight. A lot. Usually around 3a.m. (Hint: if she's yelling, "get the fuck off of me," you might be doing something wrong, man.) And then they freaking get up at 7a.m. and start banging around and vacuuming. Seriously, what kinds of people vacuum that early on a Saturday morning?? They must be vampires. Or, zombies. And I have started keeping my broom under my bed for just such special occasions.
Actually, there are all sorts of people who get on my nerves, and were this a non-anonymous blog, the title would probably be "a geocentric rant" rather than "a geocentric view," and you would be privileged with an explicit insight to one of my officemate's eating habits.

You may have also noticed I generally don't link to other people's stuff, blog posts or articles or youtube videos or what-have-you. Other than just not feeling inclined to, I suppose it's because I don't see much of a point in discussing what everyone else has already said. I also don't typically discuss "issues," though whether this is out of shyness or apathy depends on the specific topic. Take, for example, these two:

Gender/feminism/"women in math/science/technology"/blahblahblah: Apparently, this topic makes me rather snarky. The thing is, to first order, I just don't care. It's not that I'm particularly pleased with the current gender ratio in science, and it's not that I think "girls are dumb" (generally, I am inclusive enough to include all gender identifications in such a generalization). A lot of my frustration with this topic is centered on the fact that I don't think of myself as a "woman in science"—I think of myself as a scientist, and so when it comes to science, I get annoyed when people feel the need to apply such labels, even if it is to "applaud" all of the "obstacles" I've "overcome." The next level of frustration is do to the fact that, at least on the internets, a good number of the people who like talking about this crap are the types who blame every obstacle someone with two X chromosomes encounters on her gender. Maybe their parents didn't read "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" to them when they were little or something.
Religion or the lack thereof: I happen to have rather strong opinions on this particular topic, and like everyone else with an opinion on religion&c, I know my view is correct and yours is wrong and it's my duty as a human being to enlighten you. And, were we to meet in person in a non-professional setting and you were to bring up the subject, I'd let you know exactly what I think. But the interweb is different, and, for now, I'm just not ready to come out of this particular closet; in general, my family believes in a God and my readership does not, and it's up to the latter group to guess which camp my tent is in.

Well, now that I've effectively ruled out almost every non-science topic other science-oriented blogging types discuss, I'm sure I'll have no problem resuming a regular blogging-rate this week.

"a geocentric view" is Not a Geocentric Universe

2007-04-12T20:45:00.000-04:00

I recently got my first comment from some kook ascribing to the idea that the Earth really and truly is the center of the universe (of the, "I interpret the Bible as saying so so it must be true" type). I figure he can't be the only nutjob googling for support of the geocentric "theory" of the universe who finds themself on my blog, and every now and then geocentric whackos with too much power make the news, so I'll take this opportunity to make this perfectly clear:

Having a blog title "a geocentric view" is not the same as believing the Earth is the natural center of the universe; furthermore, anyone who actually believes that the Earth is the center of Everything is an arrogant, egotistical idiot of the worst kind.

Glad we got that settled. The idea (and the deluded who believe in the idea) that the Earth is the center of the universe is inane and archaic enough that I really don't see any sense in trying to explain it with off-center circles and diagrams and history lessons. If you are interested in the history and the math, though, I highly recommend the book "The Eye of Heaven: Ptolomy, Copernicus, Kepler" by Owen Gingerich. He gave a quite interesting talk here sometime last year which touched on a similar topic (though I think the material covered then was related to his more recent book, "The Book Nobody Read").

So since I'm on the topic, why did I choose "a geocentric view" to be my blog's title, if as an alive not brain-dead person in the 21st century I clearly know the Earth goes around the Sun? As I've already explained, the phrase comes from a poem by Auden; I like good poetry, so that's a good start. Partly from the context of the poem, the concept I get from the phrase "a geocentric view" is that regardless of whether or not the math and the paradigms are easier to stomach if the Earth is going around the Sun and the Sun is going around the Galactic center and the Milky Way is going towards Andromeda and the Local Group is going away from pretty much everything else in the universe—regardless of all of that—we are still people on Earth, observing the universe around us from the viewpoint of Earth. It's a geocentric view; no matter how much we know about the rest of the universe and our "real" place in it, those things that really matter to us (even to us astronomers) are those things confined to this pale blue dot, and no amount of learning will take that biased stance away from us.

On the other hand, the math really is easier if we let the Sun or the Galactic center the the origin of our coordinate system ...

Quals

2007-04-09T19:09:00.000-04:00

Our department's chair of graduate studies met this afternoon with the students who will be taking qualifying exams this summer to (unsurprisingly enough) talk about taking qualifying exams this summer. The matter is made slightly more complicated than usual because the faculty are apparently discussing a new format for the written component of the qualifying exam.

Let me back up. The general idea is that graduate school consists of two components: becoming familiar with the language and basic material of the field, typically via classes, and contributing to the field via new research and publishing papers. Because one needs to have at least a rough grasp of and familiarity with the material in the field, it's standard for the first two years of a PhD program to be primarily dedicated to taking classes, and for the following years to be class-free and dedicated to towards the "dissertation," i.e., research. At the end of the first two years (or, rather, the completion of classes), students have to take "qualifying exams" (the exact name varies from institution to institution) to demonstrate that they have mastered knowledge of the field; after passing quals, they are given a Master's Degree. In a PhD program, the Master's Degree really doesn't matter... it's like getting a shiny gold star, or a consolation prize if at this point in their academic careers someone doesn't go for the PhD. (This is, of course, a markedly different paradigm from programs in which the Master's is the end goal.)

In our department, we have to take nine classes our first two years. This isn't as heavy as it sounds, since we're strange and on the quarter system; at any given point, we aren't taking more than 2 "real" classes. Because we're a small department (compared to, say, a physics or engineering department), all of the students take classes at the same time, so the graduate classes are offered every other year. At the end of the year, the 2nd year graduate students (e.g., me, this year) take the qualifying exams. Typically, qualifying exams ("quals") have both a written and an oral component. Currently, the written component consists of being tested—again—on the material from the nine classes. There are nine 45-minute exams (or eight if the professor from the last class [i.e., the last class ever!!] we took is feeling magnanimous and is willing to use the final as a qualifying exam) spread out, morning and afternoon, over two days. Each individual exam is written by the professor who taught us the corresponding class. To pass, one must average at least 60% over all of the exams. As you can expect, these exams are preceded by lots of freaking out and studying, and the time spent freaking out and studying is generally not accompanied by nice productive research. We're told we shouldn't worry about quals, and that if we have a good research track record by the time we take them, we'll pass, but from what I understand, that message doesn't exactly... sink in, shall we say. It is true that it's almost unheard of for someone to flunk quals here—rumor has it that it has happened once in the last five years, but no one seems to admit to knowing who it was. This is quite unlike other places who try their best to weed people out of the program. Why admit students you're just going to try to get rid of later? You prospective graduate students out there: when you visit schools you're considering, try to get a solid answer of what percentage of students in an entering class pass quals, and what percentage of students in an entering class actually leave with a PhD.

So the format of the qualifying exams might change. The philosophy behind the possible new format is that we've already passed all those silly classes; why be tested again on material we've already demonstrated mastery of? So, instead, we could do an in-depth excursion into a field of research we're interested in, like "brown dwarfs" or "galaxy formation." The proposed format consists of three parts: (1) summarize three papers in the field (two to three pages per summary); (2) do, and write up, some order-of-magnitude calcuation related to the field; (3) write a 5–10 page description/review of the current state of the field. One complication is that the University wants a guarantee that this is our own work, so none of these papers can include a copy-pasted bit from some other paper we've co-authored elsewhere (even if it's published and we are the first author).

If the faculty approve this change—and as uninformed graduate students, we don't know whether or not it will be approved—then we second-years get a choice between the old and new formats, because we've been told since we arrived that we would be given the old format. We each get to decide individually, which is nice, I suppose. I currently don't know which format I prefer. One the one hand, I absolutely loathe timed, written tests, and I think I know what I would do for the research field excursion format. On the other hand, the test-taking format is over at a set time: if I decide half an hour before the exam is supposed to start that I want to study for another week, then I'm shit out of luck because I have to take the exam anyhow. But for the paper-writing format, if I decide half an hour before I plan on turning the stack of papers in that I'd like to put another week of work in, I'm basically free to do so... which also means that I'm more likely to spend more time than desired (i.e., being a silly perfectionist) on the paper-writing format than on the test-taking format. Either way, it's a chunk of time spent not doing research; the question is simply how to minimize that amount of time and effort.

The oral component of our qualifying exams consists of a short presentation on some (not necessarily published) research we've done while at OSU. The trickiest part of this component is timing: it has to happen within 30 days of the completion of the written component, and we have to have a committee for it. A committee means four faculty members who are both in town and willing to basically sit and listen to the presentation; ideally, this is the same committee as one's thesis committee, but doesn't necessarily have to be. The problem with that idea, of course, is that it assumes that we know what the hell we want to do our thesis on, which some of us *ahem* most certainly do not. One of the problems with the old sit-down-and-take-tests format of the written component is that, since they are tests, all of the second years took them at the same time, so the 30 day clocks were all set at the same time. This year, there will be 7 students taking qualifying exams, so if our clocks all started simultaneously, this would mean that in one thirty day window, seven days would have to be found in which four faculty could administer the oral component of the qualifying exam. Not impossible, but since it's probably June or July, lots of people are out of town, and therefore it's common for the same faculty members to end up on lots of committees, which tends to make them grumpy, and no one wants a committee full of grumpy faculty members.

The next stage of this complicated process is the thesis proposal. The clock for the thesis proposal starts after the oral component of the qualifying exam; we have one year to get our thesis committees together and propose some topic for our theses. This typically means that thesis proposals happen in the late winter, early spring; the third year graduate students are currently wrapping up this process. There are some places that require a written thesis proposal, but since that's just unnecessary paperwork, here it's just another 15-minute presentation. This is actually the part that has me the most scared, but since I've got another year to stall on thinking about it, it's not so bad quite yet.

It Seemed Better Than Getting a Real Job

2007-04-06T20:08:00.000-04:00

As a prize for myself for finishing my paper recently, I bought this t-shirt from PhD Comics. The text reads,

GRAD SCHOOL
IT SEEMED BETTER THAN GETTING A REAL JOB

Which is, of course, fantastic. It's also completely true, in that I didn't have any desire whatsoever to get a "real job," and grad school was really the only choice for someone wanting to make a career out of astrophysics research. Annoyingly, the shirt is short-sleeved, and it's been freaking snowing here in Ohio the last few days, so I won't get a chance to wear it for a while. And, yes, after complaining bitterly about how too hot it was in my office, now I am complaining it is too cold.

Incidentally, Jorge Cham, the writer of Phd Comics, will be giving a talk at OSU the beginning of May. He gave a talk at MIT about two years ago, right as I was finishing my undergrad thesis. I really was planning on going, and I was looking forward to it it and everything, but I wound up taking a nice four-hour nap instead. A good friend of mine, who was a graduate student in physics at MIT at the time, went and bought both of the PhD books for me, and got them autographed. The third book is coming out soon, but unfortunately won't be available until after Cham's visit.

The Stryngbohtyk Model of the Universe

2007-04-02T21:30:00.000-04:00

To the left is a figure depicting the shape of the universe according to the stryngbohtyk model of the universe, from Miralda-Escude (2007). The author recommends, "For better inspiration to think on the stryngbohtyk model, it is recommended to place an object as shown in the figure on top of one’s head." While this paper is not the only significant contribution to comedic cosmology on astro-ph today (see also Scott & Frolop 2007; Follop et al 2007, and be sure to read all of the footnotes contained therein), it is perhaps the one offering the best enlightenment on the relationship between dark energy and a certain famous equation:

As a note, the name dark energy for a component driving the acceleration is particularly bad among all the bad terminology that astronomers have made up, because Einstein discovered that
E = mc²,
(this equation is written here in case anybody had forgotten it), so everything in the universe is energy (and the name “dark stuff” would be no worse than dark energy). Moreover, dark means something that absorbs the light, whereas something that lets all the light go through without interaction should be called transparent, or invisible (which means detectable only through gravity, because Einstein found that nothing can be invisible to gravity).