The Red Car, update

The Red Car! Here this morning, but now, gone! Yay!!

... the parking lot looks so empty now.

Renmin Square, Shanghai

This afternoon I used the department Windows box to upload some photos and try my hand at making panoramas using Autostitch. The program was remarkably easy to use, but unfortunately is only available for Windows. Here's the panorama from Shanghai:
This is outside of the entrance to the People's Museum, in Renmin Square (People's Square). I don't know what's up with the green part in the middle-left, but not bad for a first try, eh? It wasy very cloudy and horribly smoggy the entire time I was there; let's put it this way: there was apparently a full moon while I was there, but I have no memory of ever being able to see any moon at all. I took the pictures that comprise this panorama my first day in the city (after having spent a week on the Fudan campus). It was nice to see a real city ... the Fudan campus was rural enough (which is to say, not terribly, but still) that the cicadas were deafening. I like all of the crazy looking buildings... Shanghai is still in the middle of a huge construction boom, but apparently (and I have no way of knowing if this is true or not) many of these new buildings are fairly empty... but they look pretty and China can tout about how progressive they are.

The Red Car

There's this red car that has been parked—badly—outside of my apartment since the day I moved in nearly a year ago. I've watched dead leaves gather around its ever-flattening tires, snow and ice take longer to melt under its bumper than elsewhere, and more recently, spider-webs grow on its front grill and wheels. I used to be mildly annoyed that I have to walk around it every morning and every night, but now, I want it gone. It is no longer a mild amusement: now, it's in my way. You see, now I have a car, and I want that parking spot. But no, no no, it has a parking sticker saying that not only does it belong to one of my everso delightful neighbors, but also that it can legally keep its rotting ass right there.

Some people would try to draw an analogy here, something about how people with great talents and skills never seem to fully appreciate or use what they have while the "rest of us" have to work for what we get. Or something about having cake? Or is it ice cream? Mmm... ice cream...

Obligatory Planet Post

I have this vague memory of kindergarten, or elementary school, or sometime, when all the other kids were really into the planets. Me? I really couldn't care less. They seemed so... boring. I simply didn't care which order they came in, or when they were discovered, or what color they were, or whatever other nonsense people could come up with to talk about regarding these spheres with funny names.

It naturally follows that fifteen or so years later I decided to become an astronomer.

Now when I hear about "planets," I don't normally think first of our own Solar System. About 200 planets orbiting stars not our own have been discovered to date. As much has been speculated, but very little is actually known, about planet formation, it is very interesting indeed to think we might someday be able know what distributions of mass, distance from the parent star, brightness of planet star, etc. etc. planets take on. But our own Solar System? It's essentially one data point. Granted, it's the data point we know (and care) the most about, and since it's the one we can study the most about, we certainly should.

And so this week I have been getting a bit of a deja vu: "do you think Pluto should be a planet?" Well, the thing is... I don't really care. Neither, really, does any other astronomer. It's a definition. Nomenclature. Convention. Perhaps if we knew exactly how bodies orbiting stars formed then we could discover there is an obvious way of defining a "planet," but, well, we don't.

Personally, I think I like the current IAU proposal (I've posted the text of the actual proposed definition below). Like most people, my reaction went something like: "Ceres? ... Charon?!" But after reading the proposal, it mostly makes sense now. I think I can see what they were thinking, which is... good.

The reason I like the proposal is two-fold. First of all, I like that it acknowledges the eight "classical" planets. The terrestrials (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) and the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) just seem like the should be considered separately from the other minor bodies in the solar system. My real attraction to the phrase "classical planets," however, is that these are not the classical-in-the-real-historical-as-in-Greek sense: the word "planet" originally meant "wandering star" and referred, understandably, to the objects that moved across the sky in a detached manner from the background stars. The original seven planets were the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. Why else would there be seven days in the week?

My second reason for liking the proposed definition is that it appears to be physically motivated. Even if the proposal is not approved, people around the world are not merely aruging over "oh no! they're demoting Pluto!! poor pluto!" but actually being forced to think about the physical differences between different kinds of objects. Why is our Moon not a planet, but Charon is? (Hint: the center of mass for the Earth-Moon system is beneath the Earth's crust, while the center of mass for the Pluto-Charon system is not located inside either rock.) And, of course, it amuses me to no end to think of all the hapless souls in the non-scientific general public who, for whatever reason, have "always been interested in astronomy" and are now actually being forced to think a little bit about the conventions and panoramas they were taught in third grade.

Now, I didn't go through the "dinosaur stage" when I was six years old, either, but at least no one can count the current number of dinosaurs on their fingers. On the other hand, not everyone openly acknowledges that the dinosaurs actually existed ...

Current proposed definition of planet from the IAU:
Draft Resolution 5 for GA-XXVI: Definition of a Planet

Contemporary observations are changing our understanding of the Solar System, and it is important that our nomenclature for objects reflect our current understanding. This applies, in particular, to the designation "planets". The word "planet" originally described "wanderers" that were known only as moving lights in the sky. Recent discoveries force us to create a new definition, which we can make using currently available scientific information. (Here we are not concerned with the upper boundary between "planet" and "star".)

The IAU therefore resolves that planets and other Solar System bodies be defined in the following way:

(1) A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape[1], and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet.[2]

(2) We distinguish between the eight classical planets discovered before 1900, which move in nearly circular orbits close to the ecliptic plane, and other planetary objects in orbit around the Sun. All of these other objects are smaller than Mercury. We recognize that Ceres is a planet by the above scientific definition. For historical reasons, one may choose to distinguish Ceres from the classical planets by referring to it as a "dwarf planet."[3]

(3) We recognize Pluto to be a planet by the above scientific definition, as are one or more recently discovered large Trans-Neptunian
Objects. In contrast to the classical planets, these objects typically have highly inclined orbits with large eccentricities and orbital periods in excess of 200 years. We designate this category of planetary objects, of which Pluto is the prototype, as a new class that we call "plutons".

(4) All non-planet objects orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar System Bodies".[4]


Notes:

1 This generally applies to objects with mass above 5 x 1020 kg and diameter greater than 800 km. An IAU process will be established to evaluate planet candidates near this boundary.

2 For two or more objects comprising a multiple object system, the primary object is designated a planet if it independently satisfies the conditions above. A secondary object satisfying these conditions is also designated a planet if the system barycentre resides outside the primary. Secondary objects not satisfying these criteria are "satellites". Under this definition, Pluto's companion Charon is a planet, making Pluto-Charon a double planet.

3 If Pallas, Vesta, and/or Hygeia are found to be in hydrostatic equilibrium, they are also planets, and may be referred to as "dwarf planets".

4 This class currently includes most of the Solar System asteroids, near-Earth objects (NEOs), Mars-, Jupiter- and Neptune-Trojan asteroids, most Centaurs, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), and comets. In the new nomenclature the concept "minor planet" is not used.

Mind and Body

As my parents are coming into town on Tuesday, and spending the night at my place, I clearly need to clean up my apartment so I don't hear about how much of a slob I am for the next 47 years. And as I didn't particularly have any other plans today, the idea was nominally to do laundry while turning my apartment upside down and shaking it, perhaps with some bleach, so that it is as spotless as possible.

Needless to say, I stumbled upon the brilliant idea this afternoon (when faced with the choice of Doing Stuff or sitting on my couch watching Babylon 5 or The Twilight Zone) that my purposes would be much better served if I waited until tomorrow to go on a cleaning rampage. So I watched a DVD, wasn't in the mood to have my laptop on my lap for another two hours, and yet still had to come up with something to put off the impending doom.

So I exercised. I lifted weights, I went for a run (nearly ten whole minutes!), and I even stretched. Now, you have to realize, this never happens. Every few weeks, I resolve to "get in shape" or to "go running every other day" or to "at least lift weights to work on alleviating RSI." But it never happens. Even when I do get the occaisonal whim to try to do something physical, it's not strong enough to, you know, actually get off the couch and do something about it.

Today the random though got took control of me when I started off by trying to meditate for ten minutes. I really like the idea of meditation, of solidifying the connection between the mind and the body. This is a connection that is often ignored, even eschewed, in western culture. It's got a bad reputation. To concentrate on or care about such an intangible is what hippies do (and no one actually takes hippies seriously). Even simply caring about the capabilities and explorations of the mind is thought of as weird, or linked with drugs (and, as we all know, drugs are bad). The whole language surrounding how the mind and the body are linked reeks in fou-fou nonsense (e.g., "energy flow") that can't actually be backed up by, you know, science. Nevermind that that's because science just hasn't gotten there yet.

I first became interested in the idea of "meditation" (the term I'll loosely use for the idea of exploring the mind-body connection, though they are clearly distinct) when in Thailand for the first time, in January 2004. My father and I were motorcycle riding around the mountains in northern Thailand for about two weeks, and since this was a vacation after all, we had an hour-long massage each afternoon. Sometimes two. I got hooked on the Thai massage; it's an interactive experience, full-body (starting at the feet and moving up to the head and face), complete with various stretches. "Normal" (i.e., "Swedish") massage often focuses on relaxation, on having you be as calm and peaceful and out-of-it as possible by the end. Thai massage is entirely different; at the end of a good Thai massage, I feel indescribably alive, ready and able to do anything and everything, envigorated and enthused about life itself. This result, to me, is the desired outcome of a deep meditation. I want to learn how to funnel what energy I have into action, into thought.

The basic idea is simple: if I can become a happier, more productive, more energetic person by focussing on not merely what my mind is doing, but also my body, then, well, I should give it a try. I might even become healthier in the process.

Obviously, it's unreasonably, on a whole host of levels, for me to have a daily Thai massage while in Columbus, Ohio and trying to change the prefix adhered to my name. I know I am, in general, guilty of completely ignoring my body until it starts complaing that it wants something or doesn't like something else. Most of the time, it's just this thing I use to take my senses from one place to another, and, most of the time, said senses are merely used as information gatherers. Not exactly a two-way channel. Sure, there's comfort food, which isn't exactly healthy per se, but it's amazing how much better a bag of Doritos can make me feel (let alone a Coke or a nice cup of coffee, but caffiene is a whole other matter for consideration). And it's true, like most people, I get a mild euphoria after running for even five minutes (but it's very difficult to use that as a motivating factor before-hand). Similarly, I have also considered taking up dancing; the summer I spent at Caltech, I went swing dancing several times, though I can't definitively say that was a source of my high productivity and energy levels that summer.

So... what about meditation? How does it work? Everything I can find on the internet is about "relaxing" and "letting it all go" and "de-stressing." Uhm, no thanks. While sitting Indian-style with good posture does feel good for a little while, it doesn't exactly make me want to go figure out how the universe works. Is there a type of "meditation" that energizes instead of puts to sleep?

More along the lines of (mentally) concentrating on physical movement, there's qi gong, which I have mostly heard about from a friend for whom it has been most effective. I have had trouble with RSI (repetitive stress injury) for several years; while it's not as bad now as it used to be (at one point I was unable to open plastic bottles or doors with circular knobs) I still have to be careful not to hurt myself. I don't know much about qi gong, but I am interested in learing more. Apparently, all this would require is getting up early on Wednesdays, as the OSU medical center has recently started offering free weekly classes on qi gong.

But all of these ideas require actually doing something in order to, you know, do. And garnering the motivation to do stuff isn't exactly one of my fortes lately ...

Hubble "Constant"

I went through this stage once where I didn't read the news, at all, for about three years. The entire list of reasons is enough for a whole other post, but one contributing factor was certainly that every news article I have ever read about something (or someone) I actually know something about has made me want to scream due to mistakes ranging from raw factual errors or subtle misinterpretations.

The latest hubbub about oh-no-the-universe-is-15%-bigger-than-previously-thought proves to be no exception. Sigh. The article has it all right, far as I can tell, but it's the twist, the buzz, the headline-producing propoganda that has me annoyed.

In a nutshell, the Hubble constant, H₀, relates how fast, v, an object (say, a galaxy) is moving away from us to its distance, d, from us in a simple way: v = H₀d. The neat part is that, with very few other assumptions thrown in, the Hubble constant also tells us the age of the universe. So, we want to know this constant pretty badly. Velocities are fairly easy to measure, but distances... distances are hard. Relative distances aren't all that bad (e.g., "this galaxy is about twice as far away as that galaxy") but absolute distances are very difficult (e.g., "that galaxy is 50 kiloparsecs away").

For a long time, people have been anchoring their distance scales to the Large Magellenic Cloud, or the LMC. (For those of you who, like me until a year ago, never realized that the southern and northern hemispheres really do see different parts of the sky, the Large and Small Magellenic Clouds are two small dwarf galaxies orbitting our own Milky Way. They are so named because when Magellen's crew went sailing through the southern hemisphere, they were kind of confused as to why these two clouds always seemed to move with the sky, see...) The LMC kind of makes sense: it's close, and therefore easy to see, so it should be fairly easy to get a distance to. Right? Wrong.

So as I don't want to get into a whole discussion of how distances are measured, suffice it to say, for now, that people are always looking for new, independent measurements. The exciting thing about the M33 distance is that it's just that: a direct measurement of the distance to M33, independent of this fuzzy object in the southern sky. Working backwards, they are able to estimate the Hubble constant, which, sure, while 15% lower than what the HST Key Project got, is actually not unreasonable if you take into account the errorbars.

What all of this buzz has been forgetting, though, is that a "new" calculation of the Hubble constant ... isn't that exciting. I mean, it is, because it's the Hubble constant, which is exciting in and of itself, but the fact that people are getting all worked up over it (whereby "people," I clearly mean the media, which doesn't really count, but anyhow) just goes to show how remarkable it is that there has been a fairly agreed upon value for the last five-ish years.

And here you have it: published values of the Hubble constant over the last thirty-ish years. References can be found here. The big dot there on the right is the M33 value; its errorbars should be roughly the same as the HST ones (70% of which are due to systematics from not knowing the distance to the LMC, by the way). The supernovae paper listed several values, only one of which I've plotted, and they specifically state that their errors do not account for systematics. The WMAP results should be taken skeptically, as they fit for many cosmological parameters, and it's rather tricky to sort out all of their priors and other assumptions that go into H₀ in particular.

Bottom line: the "new" value of the Hubble constant isn't exactly new, per se; it's just another step that's being taken in figuring out exactly how to measure distances to far away objects.

Age of Universe

I'm in the middle of composing a blog post—mostly in my head at this point—on the infamous Hubble constant and how distances are measured in astronomy and the implications said distances have on cosmology, but as that takes work, and work takes time and effort and focus, I'll instead let you know about some other fun stuff...

For example, the age of the universe is apparently increasing exponentially. First, it was thousands of years old because we could trace back the geneologies in the Bible and add up the years. But that first week is rather tricky, and then we started being able to date fossils, and, later, rock formations, which were milions of years old, and the age of the universe has to be at least as old as the age of the Earth. And then came Hubble and galaxies moving away from us and all sorts of things like that, and now the universe is billions of years old.

For your viewing convenience, I've replotted their data on a log plot:

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?

Dots

I can't remember the last time I felt like everything in my life was simply going well. It's a strange and wonderful feeling. I highly recommend it.

Anyhow, seeing as how my paper was accepted by ApJ (the Astrophysical Journal) last night, I might as well start babbling about my next project with Kris Stanek.

The main goal of this project is to have something short, sweet, and fun, from which I can learn a lot and publish a paper. There are some near-infrared data lying around from 2000 through 2002 that some guys in our department took in order to look at one object, but they never got around to analyzing the rest of the data. So, we've got a bunch of images of the center of the Milky Way, and now we can look for variable sources, such as binary stars or pulsating stars or other crazy things. One of the exciting things about the cluster of stars at the center of the Galaxy is that there are both old and young stars (which is unusual---usually all of the stars in a cluster are the same age) and so there can be a lot of crazy stuff going on.

The way we are looking for variable stars is with a method called image subtraction. It's totally nuts that this works; we can often get fairly good light curves (graphs of how the brightness changes with time) of stars in regions so crowded that we can't even resolve the individual stars. To do this, we first make a reference image from some of the really good looking images in the set, and then subtract all of the other images from the reference (hence image subtraction). Stars that don't change in brightness ("vary") as time passes from image to image don't show up in the subtracted images, but ones whose brightnesses change do show up. We then, with the help of some black magic and code, can plot the light curves of the stars in the field.

Then comes the fun part. Lots of variable stars vary with some period; for instance, an eclipsing binary varies according to how long it takes for the two stars to go around one another. So, we just plop the data into a program and fiddle with it. This is what I spent this afternoon playing with. It's like connect-the-dots on steroids. The really fun part of it is playing with the phase-modulator, which folds the lightcurve up according to some phase, which I then get to futz around with.

The current plan is to have lightcurves for all of the sources in the field by tomorrow, or maybe Thursday. Not bad considering we started yesterday morning ...

And then I get to spend a month tweaking all sorts of parameters and redoing everything many many times and looking at lightcurves all squinty-eyed until I don't know left from right (I already don't know up from down) and we have everything all set. And much to Kris's chagrin, I don't think we'll actually have the paper finished by next Friday ...

These United States

California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, ... and home. Finally finally home, after over a month of travelling, the latest being driving from San Francisco to Columbus with Oliver (with a whole two days reverie in Columbus between Shanghai and San Francisco). As much as I would like to, I don't have anything all that coherent to say, so I'm going to have to try to the bullet-format blog post ...

• There is a lot more traffic on I-70 in St. Louis and Indianapolis than there is in Utah.
• Hotels west of Denver are expensive.
• The Mojave River looks pretty much like you'd expect.
• Hoover Dam: Expect Delays, 2003--2008
• What's in Kansas isn't all that bad; there just isn't much. Also, the slogan on the tourbook: "Kansas: As Big As You Think." And here we were hoping we were wrong ...
• There are lots of ADULT SUPERSTOREs in Kansas and Missouri. The ones I wanted to visit were usually coupled with "JESUS SAVES Pornography Destroys" signs. Isn't free speech grand?
• Limon, CO: Left In the Middle Of Nowhere
• If the TripTik suggests going around Kansas City instead of straight through on I-70, you should take the suggestion.
• Illinois and Indiana are really similar, except Indiana has worse construction delays.
• There is a lot of empty space in this country. I hear all of this stuff about how the population is rising exponentially, but we really do have places to put them all, and it can't be that big of a problem, as long as we can feed them all and someone fixes the energy problem. Oh, and global warming, that's another thing we should fix. Not that I think people should be having so many babies per se, but I'm just saying, the US of A is still fairly large. I have also become much more aware of how little I know that I would like to: exactly how much land is unused in this country that could be used? How much is used for farming, how much for animal raising? How much would it cost to make trucking a purely local venture and make long distance transportation of goods be left on the trains? Would that really help the environment? Just how much of a water problem is there? I want to know numbers, and I am just now figuring out which questions to ask.
  
• The new cool thing for cars to have is fans on their rear bumpers. They are shiny and spinny and very distracting.
• Lanya has a kitty who likes to meow. And who bit my nose.
• Delilah is incredibly easy to find on the radio, regardless of location.
  
• Las Vegas is shiny. In more ways than one.
  
• Bailey's Chocolate Bar in St. Louis is totally my kind of place, especially since it was Lanya's treat.
• The City Museum, also in St. Louis, would be an excellent place to have some sort of event, like a wedding reception or a ring premiere.
• The Glenwood Hot Springs in Colorado seems like it would be a fun place to go ... at night ... in the fall or spring when it's cheaper and there aren't kids around ....
• Check the hotel room before you leave. Really.
• Despite all of the talk about how different we all are, the United States is amazingly homogenous. We just need to communicate better is all. "I'm right; you're wrong," isn't exactly effective.
  
• It's very strange to be exclusively with one other person for a week and then to all of a sudden have them not be around.

But now I'm home, and there is work to do. I currently have no trips scheduled. It's quite a relaxing feeling.

For Security Reasons

July 8, 2006; Fudan University, Shanghai, China
Backdated for reasons which will become obvious ...

Other background: I was in China for RSI (just like the one typically held at MIT, but in Shanghai, with Shanghainese students, instead), teaching useful science communcation skills, also known as LaTeX and how to give a presentation ...

Well, I'm stuck in the computer lab tonight until 10p.m. (it is currently half past three, but I'm expected to start answering more questions around five), so I figured I'd try to actually write up a blog post. Of course, there are all sorts of problems with this idea. First of all blogger.com and blogspot.com are blocked in China. So... yeah. Other various problems I have mostly circumvented by giving in and bring my laptop, wisteria, into the lab today. Now let me explain this lab. Dell, being one of the corporate sponsors for RSI-Fudan, gave us 35 "state of the art" computers for the kids to do their projects on. Please ignore the fact that anything with a cathode ray tube quit being state-of-the-art around the turn of the century. On the other hand, the Dell guy who came to opening convocation brought with him a bag full of fifty 256Mb USB sticks, which has turned out to save our asses quite a bit as far as giving the kids a place to store their work. And, hey, I get one too! The other immensely interesting thing about this particular lab is that it is configured to only access websites that originate within China. In case you were wondering, there aren't many particularly useful English-language sites originating in China. So, after a lot of hoo-haa, we got a proxy server set up. But lots of sites are still blocked from this room. It's not a site, but ssh is also blocked, which is more than just mildly annoying. AIM is blocked, but jabber is not. Some sites are blocked only every now and then. Examples include such things as google.com and gmail.com. Not that anyone would want to use those anyhow. Besides, if it's not working now, just keep trying, and it might work again in a little bit.

There are about ten computers in the RSI office which don't have these issues. The only things blocked on them are the things that are blocked throughout China, e.g., wikipedia.com. (Interestingly enough, answers.com is not blocked, and contains much of the same information as wikipedia... and googling ofte brings up a wikipedia result, but I'm just now allowed to actually view it. Or the cached page.) On the other hand, ... they all have viruses, which have already claimed at least one staff member's pictures from five weeks in India. That, and I'm stuck here, not there.

UPDATE: ooooh yeeeeah

Birthday Candy

One of the nice little touches at this conference has been the availability of small snacks and candies during the coffee breaks between talks. As this is in fact a conference about galaxies, and one of the more popular galaxies is the Milky Way, it should come to no surprise that I have found myself craving a bit of chocolate. You see, astronomy, aside from the science of sugar, I suppose, is the field after which the most candy has been named. We've got the Milky Way, the Mars Bar, and, of course, the Starburst. But apparently Americans are confused about candy. I didn't even realize it, even after I had a clearly-labelled Milky Way bar this morning, with its soft nougat-y center. Apparently, what we Americans call a Three Musketeers is actually a Milky Way, and what we call a Milky Way is actually a Three Musketeers. Think about it. Milky center? That would be the stuff in a Three Musketeers. Three components? That would be the Milky Way's nice chocolate, caramel, and nougat. Somehow, this managed to blow my mind more than the influence of the bulge on the rotation curves of spiral galaxies.

Other adventures in eating include Tuesday night (birthday!); I went to dinner with roughly the same group of people I had gone out with Monday night (when I was terribly jetlagged and could have fallen asleep in my chair quite easily). This whole Japanese food thing is growing on me ... some of the raw fish is quite delicious, while some of it makes me think, "Why is this so chewy? Shouldn't it be cooked some?" Tuesday night I had raw beef for the first time, and it struck me how yummy it was. Not too chewy, and not to, well, raw-seeming. Afterwards, we went out for "dessert," or shaved ice with flavored syrup and possible beans. I passed, but it was still a fun place and I enjoyed the company and watching people investigate their dishes. We then went to the same bar we had gone to the night before .... their menu was primarily in Japanese, but some of the headings (e.g., Sake or Beer) were in English. One such heading was "Birthday Cocktails," and there were twelve pictures of colorful drinks in martini glasses. Obviously, this had to be investigated. As expected, my drink, a "Moonstone," was free, and I even had to show ID for it (in order to prove that it was indeed my birthday). It was one of the... weirder drinks I've ever had. It was milky white, and apparently yogurt-based. Aside from the fact that it was definitely alcoholic, that is all I know about its ingredients. It had this odd citrus-y flavor to it, like it was confused about what it wanted to be when it grew up. I won't mention that I think I was at least five years younger than everyone else at the table. While I may feel as if I have wasted the last twenty-two years of my life, it was definitely a young birthday.

Galaxies, background

I've finally arrived in Ishigaki. There is time set aside for a poster session today, and since I got bored on the plane yesterday and already wrote this up, I think I'll just give you some background on the research I've spent the last 9 months doing. Results to come later! The paper is at astro-ph/0606460.

First, a bit of background. To fully appreciate this project, you have to understand that galaxies are cool. Like, sexy cool. Like, really really pretty. Specifically, spiral galaxies are just to die for. Just look at any of the pictures I have here and you'll understand what I mean. One reason galaxies are so awesome is that they have a lot of stuff in them: stars, large groups of stars (called star clusters), gas (like H₂, CO, etc.), and dust (tiny grains of stuff, like dust on Earth, but without all of the dead skin cells). There is a lot more gas than dust, but usually where there is dust, there is gas, and as dust absorbs and scatters more light than the gas, it is easier to observe where the dust is and infer that there's a bunch of gas there as well. It's interesting to know where the gas is because if you get a bunch of gas into a small region, then stars begin to form. Oh, and it's pretty.

Now that that's out of the way, you should also know that most galaxies are barred. This means that instead of just a mess of spiral arms, there is some straight feature in the middle, such as is seen in NGC1300 or NGC1530. Bars are believed to funnel gas and dust from the outer regions of galaxies to the centers. It has been observed that, in general, barred galaxies have a higher concentration of gas at their centers than unbarred galaxies do, which is a bit of evidence that the bar is responsible for transporting the gas to the center. What we tried to investigate in this project is exactly what happens to the structure or morphology of the gas (or, more specifically, the dust) when it gets near the center.

We made these things called "structure maps" in order to look at where the dust is (all of the grayscale images in the paper and on the poster are structure maps). The dark regions are due to dust, while the bright regions are due to emission (which usually indicates star formation). These were made from archival HST (Hubble Space Telescope) data. HST is really good about making data publicly available after a short time; anyone can easily search their archive and download the data. There were a few papers published which had measured barstrengths for a bunch of nearby galaxies, and using this list I searched for which galaxies have available HST data including the galaxy center. I then downloaded these, ran some code on the files, and created the structure maps.

Once all of the structure maps were made, we finally got to look at all of the galaxies. We classified the central regions into six different categories. It's been known for a while that spiral galaxies often have nuclear spirals. Large-scale spirals are usually made of young, blue stars, and are essentially the size of the galaxy---on the scale of ten parsecs, say. (One parsec is the distance at which one AU (the distance from the Earth to the Sun) subtends one arcsecond on the sky. It's a little over 3 lightyears.) Nuclear spirals are completely distinct from these large-scale spirals; they are regions of slightly higher gas and dust density, are typically less than one kiloparsec in size. Our nuclear morphology classification scheme has four categories for nuclear spirals: grand design (GD), loosely wound (LW), tightly wound (TW), and chaotic spiral (CS). The grand design class is based on large-scale grand design spirals: there are two prominent symmetric arms which, for our definition, are seen to extend into the galaxy nucleus. This is an interesting class because it has been observed (and theorized) that GD structure should be found primarily in barred galaxies; dust lanes along the bar are seen to spiral towards the nucleus once they reach the central regions. LW and TW spirals are basically just coherent spirals, but the tightly wound ones are, well, more tightly wound. (The prototypes figure has a good visual example of the difference between these two classes.) How tight the spiral is can tell us a lot about the environment in which the spiral was formed and exists. Chaotic spirals are nuclear spirals that, while still having a unique sense of chirality, are relatively incoherent. The other two classes, chaotic (C) and no structure (N) are for nuclear regions with no clearly discernible spiral structure.

arrived in Osaka

Arrived in Osaka. Will miss first half day of conference, but will get there. Tired, but but free internet!

Apparently the really-awesome camera (ACS, the Advanced Camera for Surveys) on HST isn't working. This is Not Good.

The mirror in the bathroom here has this nifty feature that part of it majikle-y doesn't fog up. There's no noticeable border to the area, either.

More later ...

Disconnected

The illusion of world connectivity, shattered.

Have you ever had the feeling that what you're experiencing just can't be real? That you will soon wake up and it will actually be a few minutes or hours earlier? I like acronyms, so let's call this sensation the feeling of This Must-be A Dream, or TMAD for short. While I sometimes get TMAD when something really good is happening (e.g., oh my god, hejustkissedme), I more often feel TMAD when something really horrible is happening.

As a random example, let's take Friday afternoon, shortly after noon (Dallas time), as I was standing at the American Airlines Admiral's Club in Dallas being told that I would have to spend the night in Dallas. As all good travelling-on-planes-sucks stories are long and convoluted, and I'm currently sitting in a Hyatt Regency hotel room without internet access, I might as well start at the beginning. So, there's the conference in Japan entitled "Mapping the Galaxy and Nearby Galaxies." I'm supposed to present a poster there on Tuesday, and my advisor, Paul, is supposed to give a talk there, also on Tuesday. Of course, we would both like to be there for, you know, the entire conference. The conference is in Ishigaki, a tiny Japanese island off the coast of Taiwan. It's really hard to get to. Our itinerary had us flying from Columbus to Dallas (at 8:43am on Friday), and then from Dallas to Osaka (leaving at 11:45am). We were then to spend the night in Osaka. The next morning, then, we had a flight leaving at 12:20 p.m. to Naha, and then on to Ishigaki. This was going to be excellent---I could explore a random Japanese city for a night, and we'd be able to get over the jetlag before arriving at the conference. Alas.

We're sitting at the gate, and they come over the PA system to tell us to start boarding. We stand up. They come over the PA again: "We're sorry, but we just found out there is a ground stop in Dallas due to thunderstorms. We'll have a decision on a flight time by 10." Uhm. It's a two and a half hour flight to Dallas, and our next flight was supposed to leave at 11:45. This would be pushing it close. Paul, who has Platinum status and is therefore special, calls up American Airlines and asks them if our next flight is also delayed. This part is kind of boring and not very exciting, unless you include the bit about my laptop deciding that 60% battery means 0% battery and shutting down randomly. Anyhow, when we finally got on the plane shortly before ten, it looked like we might be able to make the connecting flight. If we missed it, we might be able to get on a flight to Narita-Tokyo at 12:05; the people on the phone assured us there were plenty of open seats on this flight, and that we had nothing to worry about. We decide we'd rather be stuck in Columbus for a night than Dallas, but that it's worth the risk. Oh, and, apparently, they do not delay international flights, even if all of the incoming domestic flights (you know, the ones with the people on them) are delayed. Paul had a seat towards the front of the plane, but I was stuck in the next-to-last row, with no hope at all of getting off the plane quickly.

The flight landed right at 11:45. From my delightful seat in the back (next to the girl with lots of mascara, badly dyed hair, and a red and black tattoo that covered her entire back), I could see Paul jumping up quickly. He was probably one of the first ones off the plane. When I finally get off the plane, he wasn't at the gate anymore, so I check the screen. Flight to Osaka delayed to 11:55, but in another terminal. I start running, assuming that if Paul got there in time he'd try to have them hold the plane. Oh boy. So, the Dallas airport has five terminals, connected by a tram thing. I was in C terminal, and had to go to D. Of course, this requires going through E. At the second E stop, the doors don't reclose. We wait and wait, and eventually someone comes over the PA and tells us to get off the train and to take the one going the other way, as it will service all of the stations. Never listen to the big brother voices. Get on the other train; the doors start closing on the first one. Run over to the first one. Wait. Wait some more. I was mildly anxious at this point, by the way. It was probably at this point that I realized Paul and I should have exchanged cell phone numbers. Then another one coming the wrong way comes along, and, once again, we're told to get on that one. So I do, and it goes, and when we're almost to the stop I started at, we see the first tram leaving the E station. I freak out a little bit, switch trains at the next station, turn on my cell phone, go all the way back to D, finally, and run to the ticket counter.

There's no one there. At all.

So this would be when I start freaking out, a lot. There is a huge departures screen right by the gate, so I look at it, and ... the Osaka flight is no longer listed. See, this is bad. I look, and ... the Narita flight is also no longer listed. This is also less than ideal. Some poor guide lady asks me if she can help. I figure she's not with American Airlines, so, no. I am probably hyperventilating at this point. If I had been thinking clearly at all, I would have totally been having TMAD---this was just not possible. I go to the next gate and ask the lady there if Paul was on the Osaka flight. No, but he was on the Narita flight. Which has already departed.

So, this wasn't good. I'd like to think I'm a fairly self-sufficient person, but at this point, I was falling apart in every which-a-way. It's also at times like these that I all skill I might have at maintaining composure is quickly converted into skill at cursing.

"So, wait, he's on the flight? And the flight left?" "Yes, ma'am."

Right then, my phone rings. It's a 617 number, but it's gotta be a good sign. It's Paul. That's weird. He's three gates away and had called the department to get my phone number. Relieved does not begin to express what was going through my mind at that moment. He had apparently been booked on stand-by on the Narita flight, which, though half-full two hours earlier, had been filled up due to some other flight dumping passengers. Anyhow, with his special-person status, we go to the nearby Admiral's Club and they start trying to get us to Japan.

Apparently, all flights to Japan from the lower 48 leave between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. All of them. So, if you miss one, you miss all of them. They found an itinerary that would have us flying from Dallas to Frankfurt. Yes, Frankfurt, you know, the one in Germany. And, yes, the other direction. From there we could have a flight to Osaka and arrive in Osaka in time for our next skip and hop to Ishigaki. Sure, we wouldn't exactly be rested, but at least we'd arrive on time and not miss our next flights. The problem with the flights from Osaka is that they are part of a (rather sketchy seeming) package deal, which includes our hotel rooms at the conference. We've only corresponded with these people via email, it's unclear that they work on the weekends, and it's also unclear that they actually speak English.

As exciting as it might have been, it turns out that the airline with the flight from Frankfurt to Osaka is "not booking" on that flight right now. Not that they don't have seats available---no, no, they just aren't booking them right now. Even with all of the special powers of the Admiral's Club, we couldn't get seats on that flight. And we'd already missed all of the flights out of the US to Japan for the day. Why is it so hard to get half-way around the world in 48 hours?? Aren't we living in a highly-connected world these days? As we are apparently not, we are currently booked on the same flight we had today, but for tomorrow. Now, the problem with this is that it puts us into Osaka at 3 p.m. on Sunday. But .... our flight leaves at 12:20 p.m. And it's mid-summer and Ishigaki is a resort island. All of this was running through my mind as I was standing there listening to the kind man with the nice suit, and I just didn't feel like it was real. It's past being funny; I want to get to this conference. I don't want to miss any of it. But right here, right now, that's just not going to happen. I don't see a happy ending for this story yet, but at least I'm not the one on the phone trying to take care of it.

Meanwhile, they gave us vouchers for lunch, dinner, and breakfast, as well as rooms at the Hyatt Regency for the night. The beds look like they are to die for. There are four channels of ESPN, but I'd have to pay for internet. I have vouchers for three drinks from the Admiral's Club, including alcohol, in my pocket, but that's on the other side of security. I may or may not try going tonight. It's almost 4 p.m., ... now what?

(Posted at 10 p.m. ... we have reservations for Sunday night in Osaka, but it's currently unclear how or if we'll be able to get to Ishigaki from there. As it is simply inconceivable that I would have to spend my birthday travelling back to the States after failing to get to a conference ... at worst, we'll arrive a day late. Right??)

Soccer and Such

Well, I've been meaning to write a post on this since opening day, but for whatever reason I'm just now getting around to it.  And, for equally unknown reasons, I'm writing this up now instead of either working or watching Germany v. Poland.  I've been assured, however, that Germany never loses to Poland, and so far the match is scoreless anyhow.

So... I've gotten sucked into the world of soccer in the last week.  Friday I was slightly burnt out and fairly intent on doing anything but working on my paper, and so I was gladly dragged along to watch the opening games of the World Cup.  Our department has a decent representation of non-Americans, as well as Americans who actually care about this international sport, and so the company during these matches has been quite knowledgeable.  I must say, though, that I am really sick of all the people---Americans and non-Americans alike---who keep talking about how, in general, Americans don't care about soccer.  (And, yes, I realize that by complaining about it, I too am talking about it.)  They talk about how 2.2 billion people were watching the World Cup finals last time (they're every four years, so that would have been in 2002, when Brazil won and I had a room on Mass. Ave. ...).  That's one third of the world population.  Here's one for you:  did you know that the World Cup was held in the United States in 1994?  Apparently, that is when and why Major League Soccer was formed in the US; to host the World Cup, you have to have a national soccer league.  Also, apparently, 50% of Americans were unaware that the World Cup was being held here.  I was certainly one of them.

The ones that really get under my skin are the Americans who talk as if America is inferior because we don't care about this sport.  Seriously, what the hell?  It's not like we don't care about sports or rivalries.  The difference is, the United States is a large country without any natural rivals a la England v. France, and Americans already believe they are better than any other country.  We create national pride by invading other countries, not by beating them on a game field.  (Sure, the morality etc. et.c of this can be debated, but hang with me here ...)  And, yes, we have our sports.  We care deeply about them (I was in Boston when the Red Sox won the World Series---ah, yeah, we care about sports).  The way I imagine soccer in the rest of the world is like this.  Take Boston and New York.  Let New York only have one baseball team. which we all know is really the Yankees.  Now, give both Boston and New York a lot of guns, don't let them trade players, but do let them invade each other if they feel they have sufficient reason.  Think I'm kidding?

I will concede one point, though:  people say Americans are wussy because the celebrated sports in the great U. S. of A. all have time-outs.  Baseball, you take turns.  Football, you go for a few minutes, max, and then stop and try again---and you only get a certain number of tries.  Basketball even has time-outs instead of letting the clock run continuously.  In soccer, on the other hand, the clock runs continuously for forty-five minutes, while one of the referees keeps track of how much time should have been taken for time-outs, and tacks it on to the end fo the half (which is known as "stoppage time.")  So, okay, sure, it's less atheletic.  But giving us fans only 15 minutes to go to the bathroom or get another snack??  Haven't you people ever heard of "commercial breaks"???

Oh, let's see.... other fun stuff....  well, when trying to learn all the rules, I asked about what happens if a player accidentally knocks the ball into their own goal.  Apparently it counts as a point for the other team anyhow, unlike the safety in football.  And, apparently, people can get really pissed off ... in 1994, a Colombian player scored against his own team in the World Cup, and could never show his face in public again.

We went down to the Drexel Theater yesterday to watch the Brazil v. Croatia game, which was being shown for free in one of the theaters.  While the game itself was rather entertaining, to be sure, I was fairly amused when a fan ran onto the field.  The commentators kept talking about how the cameramen were being very good for not showing him and therefore not condoning the behavior, but we finally go to see him being carried off of the field.  He was wearing a Croatian red-and-white checkered jersey, "but the blue-jeans gave him away."  The commentators then commented that "this doesn't bode well for security ... and neither does this," as they show multiple places in the stands where Croatian fans had red blazes going with nice thick red smoke.  Absolutely awesome.

The Universe Chandelier

An article on the sculpture "The End of Modernity" (an awful title) appeared this past Sunday in the New York Times art section. The sculpture, currently on display in New York City the Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea (no clue where that is), is basically a sculpture of the universe. The article tells the story better than I can, but basically, the artist, Josiah McElheny, was in residence at Ohio State, and decided he wanted to make a scientifically sound sculpture of the Big Bang. So he called up our resident cosmologist, David Weinberg, and once David realized that this guy was serious, they began to design the thing.

The astronomy department took a bit of a field trip over to the Wexner Center sometime during winter quarter when the sculpture was still on display there. David and Josiah were both there to explain and discuss it. I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the whole thing. I'm not usually one for art; I often find myself wanting to feel something, but simply not being as affected as I'd like to be. Then there are the times when I feel as if the artist is trying to hard to add meaning that just isn't there; they know I should be strongly affected by good art, but they just can't get me there. They're trying too hard. Anyhow, I was highly impressed with Josiah. At a first impression, he's a stereotypical artist in many ways; he's short, speaks with a bit of a high-pitched voice, and kind of "off" as compared to normal people. Whereby normal people, I mean, astronomers, which isn't a fair comparison at all. But he had actually learned a great deal of cosmology, actually poured himself into this project, and was quite clearly deeply passionate about art and beauty and, most importantly, trying to leave an impression on people through art. I respect that, and, somehow, having respect for the artist helped me love the sculpture even more.

The sculpture itself is more representative of the Universe than of the Big Bang. Structurally, it's based on chandeliers from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Made entirely of aluminum and blown glass, the central aluminum sphere hangs from the ceiling at about 5 feet above the floor (approximately my eye level). This sphere represents the "surface of last scattering," or the time at which atoms first formed in the universe and light wasn't banging into charged particles left and right anymore, and so could stream freely throughout the universe for the first time. When you hear people talking about the cosmic microwave background, it is the light that has been going along its merry way until hitting our detectors that they are talking about. Basically, it's as far back as we can see in the universe, because before then, the universe was opaque. So that's the sphere in the middle. Distance from the center of the sculpture represents time; the further out from the center, the later the time. The lightbulbs represent quasars (incredibly bright found at the centers of some galaxies), and the glass pieces represent galaxies. The glass pieces come in groups at the end of the sticks, accurately representing the clustering of galaxies at different points in time. There are two shapes of glass pieces: the disks represent spiral galaxies (like the Milky Way) and the spheres represent elliptical galaxies. One of the really cool parts of this sculpture is that the number and clustering of lightbulbs (quasars) and glass pieces (galaxies) at different redshifts (distances from the center) is based on science. It's not just some guy saying, hey, it'd look nice like this, but rather, David's code saying, hey, you should put the pieces on like this. It became a difficult, and interesting, problem when the fact that this thing has to hang from the ceiling without falling over. Very cool indeed. Orginally, it was going to be made out of chrome (Josiah knew of some guys who like to make big sculptures out of chrome and glass---go figure), but, uhm, chrome is kind of heavy. The other fun part is the fact that you've got all these clusters of galaxies (okay, bits of glass) coming off of all of these rods, and you need to position them in such a way that they don't touch each other.

Personally, as art, I was fairly affected by this sculpture. It's huge. It's hanging in a room with plain white walls---there it is---the entire universe. That's the thing I want to understand, to know. One of the unexpected side effects of having all of the metallic parts be shiny aluminum is that you can see your reflection in it. And the central sphere? It curves away from you, so your reflection looks terribly small and far away. And insignificant. I liked sitting on the floor ten feet away from the sculpture, staring at all the bits, and my little reflections, until I felt as if I needed to scream or else I'd fall off the earth. Now that's being affected by art.

Fun With Science

Today during AGN lunch, we got onto the frequently hackneyed topic of NASA and the NSF and how to actually be able to do real science when the administration (and thus the goals of this, that, and the other) changes frequently. For example, astronomers can be relied on to actually come up with viable science projects to do on the moon should that particular mission come to fruition. This kind of reliability makes NASA like astronomers. Biologists can't be relied on like this, it seems. When the space station became a big deal, astronomers realized, hey, we can try to capture a few cosmic rays, but other than that, there just isn't much science we can do, so we're not going to waste your time. So the poor astronauts are stuck with these awful biology "experiments." Like the one with the hamsters. Let's make space suits for hamsters and see how they respond to microgravity, or something. The thing is, no one managed to remember (or realize) that hamsters pee like once every four mintues. All of the hamsters drowned in their own urine in less than one orbit.

Fast forward to cosmology class. Today we learned about the first 10^-11 seconds of the universe, and, specifically, we touched on the expected phase transition at that time. Woohoo! Such a discussion naturally leads to that of particle accelerators. In particular, there's the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which was the first collider to reach energies at these kinds of scales. Apparently, before it was first turned on, there was a question as to if this collider would cause some phase transition in the present-day universe, thereby, uhm, destroying the known universe. "This would have a negative environmental impact." But, hey, if we accidentally destroy the universe, who's ever going to know, right?

Hello, world.