Paper Writing

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.

Citations and arXiv.org

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).

Google Sky and Astronomy for the Masses

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).

The Internet Before Blogs

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?

Spring Break

This week is spring break. Normally, I guess this would mean an oasis of a week of working free from distractions, but for various reasons I'm not going to be doing much in the way of research this week. My paper is finally in its final throes before being submitted to a journal, and ideas about what I'm going to work on next have even begun to congeal... so taking a breather right now is even kind of good timing. I also have the distinct feeling that I won't be blogging much this next week either, but hey, it happens. I'll be back sometime.

And I should totally get points for how specific, enlightening, and interesting this post is.

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...

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.

A Case of "It's Funny 'Cuz It's True"

I'm currently "taking time off." This means that I wasn't paying attention while booking flights this year and am spending an extra week "away" than I had really planned on. But that's okay, because I can work on my paper from anywhere, because I have a laptop and many many papers strewn about this table and room. So far, I'm somewhere around panels 3–5, but without the little kids running around:

Panel #2 was also nice, especially seeing as how I didn't sleep at all on Saturday night.

You can also refer to this particular post if you're wondering why the blogging is ... less often and of lower quality over the next few weeks than usually.

End of the Quarter

It is officially the end of the quarter. Huzzah.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Lists

There's this thing I've been (nominally) working on for the past two days which I very muchly so do not want to be working on. In fact, there are many things I would rather be doing. Here is a random list of such alternatives that have come to mind:

1. Calculate π to a 1% uncertainty by throwing frozen hot dogs down the hall. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate how many thows this will require.
   
2. Visit The Federated States of Micronesia. I think the fastest way to get there from here is via Houston and then either Guam or Honolulu on Continental; it should take about two days. Then I could go to Yap! Don't worry; Micronesia still has about an order of magnitude more people than Vatican City, and almost twice as many as Greenland.
   
3. Go candlepin bowling, preferably at the bowling alley near the Alewife T-stop.
4. Fingerpaint in red wine.
5. Make a t-shirt where the front is the image to the right and the back says, "I believe!"
6. Have a free dinner of Indian food with today's speaker, even though I didn't go to this talk because I was supposedly working on this thingie. Note that I do not like Indian food.
   
7. Make a 3-D snowflake.
8. Play with my pet dragon. Or penguin.
9. Fill my office up with a house of cards. And then knock it all down.
   

Of course, what I'm working on isn't all that bad ... if it were, the above list would look more like the following:

1. Be gently flogged to death with scented bootlaces.
2. Marry an axe murderer.
3. Gnaw my fingers off one by one.
4. Watch Gigli again. It's a painfully bad movie—and not in a good way.
5. Read all 3964 3671 messages in my spam folder.
6. Take a swim off of Revere Beach near Boston, MA, right now at night in the cold and rain and mist.
7. Sit at my desk with a stopwatch, staring down the hall, and measure—repeatedly—just how long it takes for the motion sensors to allow the lights to go off.
   

It's interesting to note that #6 on that first list was the only one of these I've actually done, and the item on the first list most likely to make the second as well. I had garlic naan and a mango lassi and some lamb. I don't know what that means, though.

Motivation

I think one reason I might be used to coming in on the weekends is because I don't always seem to get things done during the week. All of today, as well as most of yesterday afternoon, I've been trying to convince myself to write a script/code/thing that goes through our data and removes lines from the files corresponding to data which just isn't there (e.g., if we're missing for a year for a given object). This is really not a difficult task. And yet, as I've only sort of written a few lines of it, I'll probably come in tomorrow to do it. And then to start reducing the other set of data (the same stuff, but taken in a different wavelength).

It's funny, cuz I feel rather motivated right now, just not to, you know, do anything. Then I made the mistake of eating lunch, and all of that murky substance called "motivation" I had found in multiple cups of morning coffee and good conversation was instantly and irrevocably lost. How annoying. On the other hand, I remembered to bring both my camera and my USB stick to campus today, and my Chinese officemate who chews with his tongue instead of with his teeth and is therefore one of the reasons I tend to get homicidal if I am in my office around mealtimes remembered to bring his MacBook. See, my old decripid version of iPhoto doesn't realize that movies are a perfectly acceptable thing to download off of a camera, and therefore I have quite a number of movies that have just been biding their time on the camera instead of on the internet, which is where they really want to live. So here's one for you, complete with motivational communist music (such as was being piped into the train from Hue to Ha Noi, Viet Nam), so be sure to turn your volume up!

Today's other highly motivating event was the thesis defense of Rik, in that I got to think, "Ooh, I wanna change my name!!" and to consider the fact that sometime in the next four years I should figure out exactly how one transitions from being a student to an independent scientist. On the other hand, lots of sugar and a touch of champagne aren't exactly the most motivating factors of a lazy Friday afternoon.

In any case, it's now time for AstroMovie, so ... I 'll finish writing that code ... later?