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

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.

Mystery Hunt 2008 Post Mortem

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:

Astronomers Stuck in a Cloud

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.

Clouds, Clouds and More Clouds

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.

More Saturday Morning Ramble-Blogging

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)

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.

I Guess It's Official

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.

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

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.

Let's Play Good Idea, Bad Idea

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 ...

The Magnitude System

I'm planning on writing a post soon about my recent work on variable stars near the Galactic center, but I've come to the realization that such a post will invariably detour into a healthy rant about the magnitude system astronomers use to describe how bright objects are. So, in the interest of keeping this forthcoming post more on topic, I'll rant about explain magnitudes now. (Yes, two science-y posts in rapid succession; please contain your excitement.)

When astronomers talk about how bright something is, we use "magnitudes" (which are just plain old numbers from, say, -30 to 30) instead of fluxes or luminosities, which are ungainly things with units, like 1400 watts/m² or 10³⁹ erg/s or 10³² watts. The main reason magnitudes are nice is because they are logarithmic; small numbers are easier to work with and think about than big numbers. Logarithmic just means "3" instead of "1000" or "17" instead of "100000000000000000." The brightness of astronomical objects varies a whole lot, so, logarithmic is nice. Except that the first weirdness of the magnitude system is that instead of saying, magnitude = log(flux), like sensible people would do, astronomers instead say, magnitude = -2.5log(flux) + constant. The constant, whatever, but -2.5?? Seriously? This is the kind of crap that keeps physicists at bay. First of all, the "2.5" means that "an order of magnitude" change in flux (i.e., a factor of 10) is actually a change of 2.5 in magnitudes—or, rather, a change of brightness by one magnitude does not mean that the brightness changed by an order of magnitude. I can almost get past that nomenclature mishap (mostly because there are much much worse problems elsewhere in astronomy) by reasoning that we'd have to use more digits if the 2.5 wasn't there; it's similar to how a "degree" in the Celsius and Farenheit systems don't refer to the same difference in temperature.

But the negative sign. Let's discuss the fact that there is a negative sign in that there equation. This means that a magnitude 10 star is much fainter than a magnitude 5 star. Fainter. As in, less light, because it's got a higher magnitude. ?!@#~!?!?$%#??!! Who the hell ever thought that was a good idea? Actually, it was the Greeks, and if this were a real lesson rather than a thinly-veiled rant, I'd probably explain it to you rather than just handing out a pointer to the wikipedia article on apparent magnitudes. Of course it was the Greeks, what we in the business refer to as a "historical artifact." Historical artifact my ass. When you get into astronomy, they laud it as this amazingly wonderfully rich subject in part because it's the oldest blahblahblah, but what they fail to mention is that what this really means is that we aren't just carrying around the baggage of decades of people naming and classifying things before they knew what the hell they were, but some of the stuff in our closet, nay, our very foundation, is the result of a bunch of guys who died thousands of years ago (and probably wore bedsheets when they were alive in the first place).

The Worst Part About Being a Graduate Student at Ohio State

A few weeks ago, some prospective graduate students were visiting our department. After coffee one day, they were put in a room with graduate students so they could ask us questions about pretty much anything free from faculty members and any pretence of a social setting. These kinds of situations are usually kind of amusing because we graduate students usually come off sounding like happy drugged babbling people. (In visiting faculty candidates, this behavior often elicits a reaction of (in a confused tone), "Everyone seems really happy here ...")

So one obvious question we got from a prospective student was, "What's the worst part about being a graduate student here?" While most of the grad students were composing eloquent responses along the lines of, "duhr ....," one student, without missing a beat, replied, "Those two weeks in September when they've turned off the air conditioning but it's still really hot outside and so it gets to be like 85° in the offices." Everyone laughed, haha, but oh, man, there's some truth to that.

Except that's not actually the worst part. The two weeks in March when it's started to get warm outside but they won't turn on the air conditioning (or turn off the heat?) have got to be worse. In September, you see it coming, you're already used to wearing summery clothes, but in March you're still naively wearing a jacket everyday and then one day it's warm and it's like WHAM! and your palms get all sweaty just from the exertion of typing in your 80+° office. It's phenomenally horrid. And the whole bureaucratic reason behind it is so absurd: somewhere there is a Big Switch, and apparently they can only flip the Big Switch twice a year, and because of the ingenius cooling system in our building, they can't risk having the AC on (or the heat off?) when there is a risk of the outside temperature going below freezing. It's so ridiculous. I want to be glad it's warm outside, not wandering whether or not I'm coming down with a fever before remembering, oh yeah.

Good thing there are no proposal or funding or other kinds of deadlines this time of year and we can happily go a week or so without working ...

I Had No Idea

This morning shortly after I got to my office, Firefox crashed. Well, froze, and then crashed, but you know how it goes. So I blithely restarted it, and ... some default Firefox page came up instead of my homepage. And the bookmarks on the toolbar were all default instead of, you know, mine. This was clearly unacceptable. Turns out, Firefox had managed to forget all about who I am and what I like and where I've been; I learned in the ensuing hours that I apparently know very few of my passwords, and I get confused without little buttons to click on pre-coffee. I had no idea I needed these features so much. I was completely lost... I kept wanting to search for something or look something up or check something, and I suddenly had no idea how to use the internet. And, apparently, internet browsers have gotten more complicated since Netscape 4.78; I had to get our tech guy to tell Firefox where all of my stuff was. But, luckily, the files were just hiding and I was able to quit pulling my hair out and start crawling the web again.

2007 Already? Seriously?

How did it get to be 2007 already? Have I been asleep for the last two months/years/decades, or what? This crazy quarter system has it so that the last week of classes is next week; like with no warning whatsoever I've got to finish all of the work I haven't done for the last two months. How did that happen? I don't feel like I've been actively Not Working, and yet here it is March already and I don't know where January and February got put. And it's not just March; it's March 2007. New Horizons has already done its little dance with Jupiter, and wasn't it launched just yesterday? We can no longer pretend it's still the beginning of the century—the decade is practically up and gone, and we still haven't come up with a good name for it. Soon we're going to start calling the years with "twenty" in the name instead of the formerly new-sounding "two thousand." Twenty-ten is just around the corner—I'm supposed to be graduating then—which means I might want to have a thesis topic—which means I should figure out what I'm interested in—after I finish this current project, of course—erm...

Well, That Was Interesting

I had a layover in Philadelphia this weekend, and as such, found myself in need of coffee. I was standing in line at "Java Jazz" admiring the tanalizing display of nearly topologically interesting objects nearby when the fire alarm went off. Bright white flashing light and a siren like what I'm sure a fire truck barreling down the nearby corridor would sound like. A few people looked annoyed and conused, and then a voice came over the intercom letting us know the fire alarm was going off (thanks for letting us know!) and that we should move to the nearest exit. A few people spoke more loudly so that their orders could be heard over the ruckus, and the TSA folk looked a little bewildered as to what to do. The pilot in line behind me was making wisecracks like, "Welcome to Philadelphia." I don't think he likes his job very much. After a few minutes, the alarm went off, as I pulled out my credit card to pay for my coffee. I was told their credit card machine was broken, which was FANTASTIC since I don't carry cash. I told her she should put a sign up saying the machine is broken, but apparently it is against airport rules to post handwritten signs, and she has to abide by those rules.

Now, something in the story I just told you strikes me as deeply wrong and twisted, but I'm not sure what it is exactly.

Snow (Half-)Day

Ohio State shut down today at 1:30p.m. This is because Columbus doesn't have enough snow plows in order to deal with a bit of snow—and apparently sleet and frozen slush isn't looked too kindly upon, either. It has actually quit snowing and sleeting for now, but soon it will be getting very very cold. How lovely.

We have a faculty candidate visiting today, and he was supposed to give a colloquium this afternoon at 3:30. There were donuts and everything. So when the announcement was made that the staff were headed home for the day, somehow two boxes of very delicious looking donuts wound up in our office. Shortly afterwards, rumor spread that the colloquium was being moved to tomorrow, followed by a crowd of people flocking around our door, with mumbles about how donuts go stale after a day. Because nothing says "Snow Day!" like donuts and coffee without an accompanying colloquium.

I was all excited about the donuts and the "ooh, snow!" until I realized that "school is closed" also means "campus buses will quit running today," and I didn't actually want to walk home in the dark ice snow slush sleet badness. There is a layer of ice forming on everything, and I'm now mildly afraid that it'll discover the power lines, do a little tango, and there will be more badness. Weather is intertaining and all, but it's an inherently outside phenomenon, and I don't remember giving it permission to futz with what's going on inside. I was all stoked for working today—I have this fun variable infrared source that's also friends with a few masers and X-ray emission I'm trying to figure out—but noooooo ... I had to go home. And what if the university is still being a bunch of wusses tomorrow and the bus isn't running and I have to take a walk in the cold iciness just to get some work done? Life is so unfair.

And then I saw my car. Poor car. I so excited the first time my car got to learn about snow, I took a picture. But now? Now my car is learning about snow drifts and sheens of bumpy ice (see right, see left). At least it's not one of those sucker cars parked on the curbs of busy streets that now have frozen muddy slush all over them.

Global Warming is Bad

Now that I've ranted about how cold it is, I'm going to rant about how warm it is. Whereby "rant," I mean something much much more than that, but you'll see.

On Monday we discussed in Coffee the recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report to policy makers. You can see the full thing here (in pdf form); all of the figures I'm showing are snatched directly from there.

The report is entitled "Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis," and it essentially describes the unambiguous evidence that Earth's climate is going through rapid transitions, and this warming is unambiguously due to human action. The report also outlines several climate change models, and describes how even the most conservative and optimistic models predict drastic and nearly irreversible changes. What is even more terrifying is that, scientifically, their approach to the the entire thing is incredibly conservative and almost certainly underestimates the problems. For example, the report completely ignores "catastrophes," rapid events that could strongly alter sea levels and atmospheric content (like the Arctic ice cap melting, or all of the frozen peat in Siberia undergoing a phase transition [i.e., melting] and releasing a bunch of methane into the air all at once). They ignore possible catastrophes because, frankly, they can't be well modeled yet, and things that can't be well modeled have no business being in models.


The graph on the left shows the increase in carbon dioxide (CO₂ 10,000 years; the inset shows a blow-up of the last two hundred years. Clearly, something happened that made this trend go from slowly increasing to increasing really-really-fast. The report has similar graphs, showing disturbingly similar trends, for both methane and nitrous oxide. On the right-hand side of these graphs you can see the ") in the air in the lastradiative forcing" due to each of these gases. Basically, a certain amount of gas in the air can cause the atmosphere to either warm up or cool down. (The warming up is what is commonly referred to as the "greenhouse effect.") What I find painfully ironic about relative radiative forcing amounts is that apparently it wasn't until around the 1950s that people actually started noticing the increase in temperature of Earth's atmosphere due to gases like CO₂. This is because the Earth's temperature wasn't actually increasing all that much until the 1950s. Why not? There were certainly pollutants in the air from cars and factories pre-1950. The reason is because the ickier pollutants—think nasty particulate smoke from Industrial Revolution era factories—acted as a coolant, effectively counterbalancing the warming effect from the other gases. Once people realized that "smog is bad" and started cleaning up cities, the greenhouse gases were able to start really doing their thing. On the right is a series of plots showing this increase in temperature and its affect on the average sea level and the amount of snow in the northern hemisphere (between March and April) since 1850 or so. The smooth black curves represent averages for a given decade, while the grey dots are actual yearly values. Note, especially for the snow and temperature plots, that just because the amount of snow is up or the temperature is down in Columbus, OH for a given week, month, or year does not mean that the average global temperature is decreasing.

The report then goes on to describe, and show, that these observed changes are not due to purely natural causes. "Natural" here essentially means solar activity and volcanos, whereas examples of anthropogenic (human) causes include pretty much everything that separates first world and third world countries. One of the neat things about this report is that it culls information from a variety of scientific reports; instead of the authors running their favorite model, they cite results averaged over 58 models.

Then comes the nightmarish predictions, as summarized by the graph to the left. The plot shows global surface warming as observed over the last century (the top panel of the previous plot, remember) and as predicted for the next century. The bottommost model curve, the yellow-orange one, is if we hold the as-is atmospheric content completely constant: not another engine turning on, not another cow pooping, just—statis. And, behold, the yellow curve is increasing, and a thousand years from now the changes we have caused to the atmosphere would still be noticeable. And look: the other curves (red, green, and blue), show even higher increases in temperature. The models take things like population and economic growth into account differently, and the report says there isn't any reason to favor one over the others. It is interesting, though, that all of the models have the global population peaking around 2050. The report also gives predictions for distributions of temperature change across the globe; those of us living in the northern hemisphere should realize that the predicted average change in temperature for where we live is about twice the global average shown on the above plot.

One of the scariest parts of these predictions is the increase in sea level. If in 2100 the average global temperature were to level out at the amount of the green line in the above plot, then the sea level would rise by about half a meter by 2300, due solely to the fact that water expands as it warms. That is, this prediction of half a meter completely neglects the fact that glaciers and ice caps will simultaneously be melting and increasing the amount of liquid water in the oceans. Think of your favorite seaside city (Boston? New York? San Francisco? Hong Kong? Singapore?), and then wonder what it will be like in a few hundred years.

So now the question is: what does humankind need to do in order to save the world and ourselves? The obvious is that if we are going to do this without simultaneously butchering the economy, then someone needs to conjure up an alternative fuel, and fast. Meanwhile, converting to soley nuclear fuel for electricity (and everything else from heat to cars being electric) would give us some time to figure all of this out without continuing to be so worsening the problem trying to solve it. But individuals on their own aren't going to make the requisite lifestyle changes; I for one know I care, but when I am cold I am going to turn my heat up. It's the classic prisoner's dilemma: it is better off for the group if no one drives big cars, but it is better for me if I drive a big car. And this is why God invented Big Government to help force people to make the right decisions, like chosing the correct lightbulb.

If I remember correctly, the IPCC will be releasing another report in April with suggestions for just what global and local changes should be made.

Living in a Dorm v. Living in an Apartment

I've heard this week described as "the coldest night of the year." How that works, in a temporal sense, I don't really understand, but I believe it regardless of any such minor details. And for the first time since starting graduate school, I'm really missing living in a dorm. Specifically, I miss living in the dorm I lived in for four years: Random Hall. I don't miss having to share a kitchen with 13 other people (plus whatever friends and significant others might be using my oven and leaving a mess on my kitchen table)—it, in fact, feels really nice and grown up to not get angry emails about the dirty dishes that have made a nice comfortable home in my sink while the clean dishes become better friends with the inside of the dishwasher. No, no no, I miss the everso Random quality of it being below zero outside (remember, for example, that nice winter three years ago when the Patriots played in a stadium that had half its seats filled with snow?) and so hot in my room that I had to crack open the window. Random has this freaking huge boiler in the basement, which, well, puts out a lot of heat. Typically radiators are only kept on in the kitchens, lounges, and bathrooms—something's wrong with you if you're capable of sleeping an entire night with the radiator on in your room. I miss being able to walk around barefoot with short sleeves on, mindless of the mind-numbingly cold outside "real world." I miss not being afraid I'm going to wound up frozen to the toilet seat if I go to the bathroom as soon as I get home. I also miss not having to worry about such things as, how much will money will it cost me if I turn the thermostat up a few degrees?

On the other hand, I'm not exactly a big fan of doing dishes ... or being annoyed when other people don't do theirs ...

Winter Quarter Rundown

Many of you have told me that you like it when I give "my perspective." I'm not sure what that means, but here's a bit of my perspective for you: life sucks when it's cold outside.

Now, the cold and the suckage are probably not actually causally related, but I can at least assume they are. Winter: cold and busy and stressful. Summer: warm and busy and not stressful. Clearly, I can blame the temperature. Well, that, and in a Perfect World, I wouldn't waste two minutes putting on complicated clothing just because I want/need to *gasp* go outside. Not to mention the gas bills. Oh, yes, and "cold" is another word for "sick," and "sick" is another way of saying, "I'm not really going to get any work done today, but I'm not going to have any fun either."

This quarter I am taking two classes (because there are two classes to take). They are Radiative Gas Dynamics and Observational Cosmology. Observational Cosmology really means, AGN and maybe some observational cosmology if there's time left at the end of the quarter. I'm going to learn a hell of a lot of physics and astronomy this quarter, and it'll be great, but let's examine my schedule for Tuesdays and Thursdays for a moment, shall we. In short, they are Teh Suck. The idea is that we can dedicate the other days of the week to Doing Research, but seriously, days like Tuesdays and Thursdays this quarter make me want to crawl under my covers and get drunk. Specifically, I've got Coffee from 10:30 until Radiative Gas Dynamics starts at 11:10 or so, which goes until 12:30. Then Observational Cosmology launches at 1:30 and goes until 2:48 (:48? what the ... ?). Thursdays are even better because we have colloquium at 3:30 (with unskippable donuts at 3) until 4:30 or so, and speaker harassment at 5. Yick yick yick. I think I also have office hours on Tuesday, at like 4 or something.

Oh, yeah, and I have office hours this quarter. Because I'm apparently TAing and introductory astronomy course. It's not that TAing takes a lot of time—it takes five hours a week, max, and that includes the office hours that will be sparsely attended—it's that it's just something else to keep track of and do. I'm not TAing because my advisor was particularly unwilling to pay me (i.e., to give me an RAship) this quarter, but because I'm supposedly near the end of my current project and they really need TAs this quarter. This is one of the top ten things wrong with the quarter system. The astronomy department has several two-quarter sequence classes; they all either go fall-winter or winter-spring, and so winter just winds up being "let's teach lots and lots of astronomy classes!" time. At least I don't have to go to the class I'm TAing. It's at 9:30AM every single morning. I have the sneaking suspicion that the professor I'm TAing for would really kind of like for me to go to class every day, but is nice (and smart?) enough to not ask me to. Seriously, why do people take this class? I'm sure it's "intersesting," but 9:30AM interesting? If it were something like galaxies or cosmology, I could understand. But this is the solar system. And so far, it's not even "cool" solar system; it's like, zomg what causes a lunar eclipse?! See, this is why I wasn't an astronomy major.*

And, oh yes, I'm apparently close to the end of my current project. Which is to say, I'm finished with my current project, except that I need to actually write the paper. And, apparently, it has been decided that I should have said paper done by February 1. February 1 is terrifyingly soon, in case you hadn't noticed. And, of course, now that I've mentioned it on my blog, I have to have said paper finished by February 1. Well. We'll see how that goes ...


* Please ignore the fact that MIT neither has an astronomy department nor offers a B.S. in astronomy.

Adventures with arXiv.org

Apparently, I'm a rampaging robot.

I wanted to look something up in a paper I've written, and obviously, finding it on astro-ph is easier than going to a terminal opening it from *gasp* the hard drive, or even worse, standing up and trying to find a paper copy on my desk. At least, this was indisputably clear to me, until I clicked on the convenient PDF button, and instead of being given the PDF, I was told:

Access Denied

Sadly, you do not currently appear to have permission to access http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0606460

Mm. So this is amusing. It's also not the same error message you get if you're trying to access a paper that hasn't yet been made public. The page does include a link to their explanation of Access Denied, though:

Access Denied

Accesses from your site have triggered our automatic robot detection system. (Sometimes a block is caused by another user from behind the same proxy.) Blocks are usually removed automatically after about a week.

I sent them an email in response. I said,

I'm not a robot. I am a graduate student.

The meat of their automated reply was—and I paraphrase here—"blah blah blah orange elephants blah blah." They closed with—and this part is a direct quote—:

Message joins 79 other compelling messages current in queue.
Have a pure day.

Hopefully they'll be able to discern the stubtle different between the two worker classes, and I won't be forced to use a mirror site for a week.

The Undergrads Are Back

Well, Wednesday was the first day of classes (quarter system, hence, oddness, but that's another post). The most noticeable change between this week and last week is that the undergrads are back. The only upside of this I can see is that now the restaurants near campus will once again have reasonable operating hours; on the other hand, now there will be hordes of people at them as well ...

The astronomy department here is situated on the top floor of one of the chemistry buildings. One the first floor is a little coffee stand that also serves cold sandwiches and pastries. There are 40,000 goddamn undergrads at this school, and I swear, at certain times of day (like noon) they are all on the first floor, milling around the elevator. And then they look confused when the elevator doors open and people want to, you know, get out?

Most of them manage being lost and confused without actually moving, but some of them need a little nudge. These are the ones you find on the stairwell between the second and third floors looking for the basement (it's completely irrelevant that there are no classrooms above the 2nd floor, by the way). Or they wander into an office on the fourth floor (that no one can find if they are looking for it) trying to find a room in a different building.

Then there's the girl who visited our theoretical spectroscopy class this week. It's about one minute before the bell rings (yes, we have bells; yes, this is a "real college"; yes, it's demeaning; yes, I jump about ten feet every time it goes off and I'm standing near it; apparently a past president was a former high school principal and the university has never quite recovered). The professor is standing there at the front of the room, you know, in front of the chalkboard, talking about the densities and temperatures of tokamaks and the broad line regions of active galactic nuclei. And this girl, the type with the long hair that she probably spent an hour that morning trying to make look "natural," with the jeans that ride just a little too low and the shirt that's just a little too tight, walks in, completely oblivious to the fact that there's this man talking. "Hi guys," she says, smacking her gum. And she sits down on the far side of the room ... and right around then, the professor is done speaking (he had successfully completely ignored her entrance), and so we all get up and leave. She looks flabbergasted, like she can't figure out why we're all getting up and leaving ...

Then there are the ones who want me to join their clubs or sign their petitions or whatever the hell else it is they're trying to do. And I can't help but laugh when I'm just walking along, minding my own business, and someone comes up to me and asks if I want to enter to win $25,000 for grad school...