Becca Stareyes

( Still alive. Survived conference. )

So, this weekend, the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science is having its annual conference in town. ( In addition to giving a poster presentation* as part of my work, and listening to talks and 'networking'**, the conference organizers organized some events.  )

So, today is Labor Day. Classes are in session at Cornell, but the staff (except professors, and people needed to handle classes) have today off. Yeah, I don't get it either, especially since classes start on Thursday, and there still isn't the same number of days in Fall and Spring semesters (73 days in Fall versus 75 in Spring -- if they started classes on Monday instead of Thursday, and then gave us Labor Day off, it would balance out).

Funny story -- Labor Day three years ago was my first TA experience. Guess who assumed Cornell didn't have class on Labor Day? Good thing I checked on Sunday.

Now, as it happens, I am pretty stuck on research, so I might give it the old Grad School try, then head home early. In other words: it is currently 1 PM. Unless my advisor is looking for me, or I have an angle on something to do, I am catching the 4 PM bus home. Or I have tea. I don't leave tea sitting if at all humanly possible.

Things are a little crazy, since school starts this Thursday. I might be taking a class -- there's a seminar on comets that may help me, as I also study small icy things in the outer solar system. Also, there's a grading position open, and I acquired a reputation for being a fast grader, but I'm not hurting for money, so I might hold off.

Anime club looks good this year. I helped do the chalking today. A common way of advertising anything at Cornell is to get sidewalk chalk and a busy spot and get to work. Meghan, one of the members, draws well, so she brings a picture from something we're watching, and gets to work. The rest of us help with lettering, flats and that kind of stuff -- things people who can't draw well can be trusted with. So, if you go in front of the school store, there's a nice shot of Youko from Twelve Kingdoms. There's a Yuuko from XXXholic somewhere on North Campus. If the club site puts up pictures, I'll link them.

Also managed to nearly lose my ATM card at the store. Thankfully, in the time it took me to search my pockets, return my purchase to the shelf, head down to the bank, and ask the teller what to do, a customer found it on the floor, gave it to a store clerk, who took it to the bank in the store and asked them if they could find me. Seriously -- the teller was asking a coworker if she could get through to VISA when the coworker asked if this was the card she was trying to cancel. (Awesome people for being so prompt.)

Unfortunately, I spent most of today hunting down why my website wasn't working. Turns out I let the domain name registration lapse*, so I have a site, but no way to get to it besides through IP address. I ended up getting a similar name (.com instead of .net), and now just need the nice folks at my webhosts to tell me how to hook A into B, when I don't know how to get into my site to tell it 'okay, we need to point here'.

* Because the email it is linked to no longer exists, and I remember nothing about how to get into my billing account. I am brilliant, I know.

I got markers. Once the tea** kicks in, I'm gonna color this evening. ^_^ The internet also appears to be working again -- it was being spotty. Not enough to not work, but enough that I couldn't stream music or stay in a chat room.

** Jasmine green, third brew. There's enough to give me a bit of a pick-me-up after work, without keeping me up past bedtime.

Work was fine yesterday. I'm a bit stuck, so I need to go bother my boss again. Mostly I'm trying to model some data I got, and I'm getting answers that indicate I shouldn't be seeing anything, and that it won't be as simple as I thought. On the other hand, I'm getting the hang of the problem, which is good. I had a nice grilled cheese sandwich and fries for lunch at one of the campus dining halls, because I had forgotten to bring lunch (again) -- they finally decided to get rid of the darn 'coated fries', which mostly tasted like grease and salt. (I like my fries and chips to have some resemblance to potatoes).

( Read more... )

My friend Shoshe leant me a summary she did of some Voyager-era papers I'm reading that she did for a term paper last spring. Not only does she mention me in the Acknowledgments for explaining something to her, one of the citations is (B. Stareyes*, private communication), because I told her a picture had never been taken of a ring particle, unless you count the moons Pan and Daphnis.

* Okay, so it was my real first initial and last name, but I try not to give out my real name on this blog.

Also, thanks to Elizabeth Bear's blog (matociquala), I got this link -- English without all the non-Germanic words. It really shows how much modern vocabulary is dependent on Greek and Latin derived words. Reminds me of an essay I was reading a couple of days ago, by Richard Feynman about his trip to Brazil. He noted that speaking science in Portuguese is easy, since both English and Portuguese use a lot of Latin, and the modifications mostly follow the same patterns, so he could quickly convert a term in English to a term in Portuguese. Speaking conversational Portuguese was harder, since English was more Germanic in that sense, and languages in general tend to borrow less at that level.

It also makes me want to develop Darynese's (my constructed language) science vocabulary. Knowing the history of science helps here, since it explain why we named things what we did -- for example, electron comes from the Greek word for amber, since the first electrical systems were created through static electricity on glass and amber. (It's why the electronics in Lyra's world His Dark Materials are known as amberics -- same etymology, but a different language to give it that alternate-history flair).

My practice for my A exam on Friday went well -- I got a lot of questions, but thankfully most of the comments were along the lines of 'organize your talk better'. I also spoke to my advisor and got some plots on Saturday. He reminded me that I am allowed to shunt questions off if I'll answer them later, and to say 'I don't know -- I haven't done that yet' and 'well, I haven't done that yet, but if I can speculate...' (in other words, to make it clear when I am talking out of my ass and when I think I should know it). Which is funny, since that's the exact opposite of my problem with my qualifying exam -- I would just say 'I don't know' if I couldn't answer it perfectly.

My advisor also asked me to make an Important Mission Decision for Cassini. Well, not an especially important one. Seems one of the observations we're planning doesn't have enough data volume, and we can't go begging for more, since the Enceladus folks are also on that day's run and they are short as well. My advisor's cut out all the obvious things, and asked me what the best thing to do to get rid of 1/3 of the data we take without losing much science, since I'm the one who works with this kind of observation. Hee! Power!

In under 48 hours, I'll either be getting a Master's Degree (and cleared for a Ph. D) or being told to pack my bags. I am a bit scared. Better then I was, since my peers and my advisor seem to think I can do it.

Dave-from-down-the-hall: *sticks his head into my office* Hey, Rebecca, fighter okay with you?

Me: Fighter is fine.

Dave: Great! *leaves*

Akshay-my-officemate: What was that for?

Aren't out of context conversations great?

In other news, I will be trying 4th edition D&D this Friday. It's the GM's first time GMing, and a lot of the players are novices to the whole console RPG thing.

Guess what class I'm being. XD

So, in light scattering problems (and orbital dynamics), there is a letter -- ϖ. It looks like an omega with a tilde over it, but is really an archaic way to write pi. If you are feeling formal, you read it as 'curly pi', but all of us always call it pomega*.

* Name-smushes -- not just for fandom and tabloids any more. Pi/omega OTP!

In the paper I'm reading now, the author spent a paragraph saying how he thought pomega was a stupid tradition and he was going to just use a w, and Chandrasekhar be damned! (Okay, it wasn't phrased like that.)

Which I suppose is better than just deciding to use his own conventions and just letting the reader figure it out.

I also now know how to make a ϖ in HTML and in LaTeX**.

** A scientific type-setting program -- it lets me make shiny, shiny PDFs.

So, it's hot outside today -- the high is supposed to be 34° C (93° F, 307 K -- I could probably also give a temperature in eV, but I don't think you all would appreciate it*). There also was a power outage in Elmira. As a result, the power company asked Cornell to shut down all the unessential power. Currently, all the offices with windows have their lights off, and the hallway is only half-lit. (I still have my lights, as I work in a windowless box). AC is thankfully not an issue, since the campus is cooled by heat exchange with the bottom of the lake.

* 0.0264 eV per gas particle in the atmosphere. If I did the math right.

I think I will do my part, and turn off my computer and go outside to read papers. In the shade, with a nice, cool drink. I'm still working -- they are scientific papers, and not the novel in my backpack.

I wonder if the ice cream place is open, or if they closed easy to save on power...

Just spoke to two people from Cornell Housing (I think...). Apparently they were looking for a grad student who had been sleeping in the stairwell that leads to the roof, and wanted to speak to him and make sure he had somewhere to live and was generally okay. Since one of my officemates keeps weird hours (read: there was a time I had stayed around here until 2 AM playing Axis and Allies, and he was still in the office working when I left), they wanted to make sure it wasn't him.

( How was my weekend? )

Well, back to work. These papers won't read themselves.

Today's Outreach Meeting
Re: T-shirt designs

"I like Ryan's design, but I think we can do a better galaxy."

"I think it looks fine. Do we need to change it?"

Me: "You know, it kind of looks like a swastika."

*long pause as everyone stares at the screen*

Ryan: "Oh, crap, it does. I totally didn't see it before."

Co-ordinator: "So, Ryan's design, with a new galaxy, then?"

--

Jokes about Space Nazis filled the rest of the meeting. Well, we completed business, but there was also jokes about Space Nazis.

Spilled some tea on my desk. So I had to not only mop it up, and hope nothing important got wet, but also make sure my computer was still okay. Given my laptop looks like it's been through the war, Sharvari, my officemate, was not terribly surprised that the worst protest it had was a bit of a hum that died off. (I swear, this laptop has done more to cement my brand loyalty to Apple than anything else -- I've had it 3 years now, and have dropped it, spilled things on it, and generally mistreated it. Aside from a CD drive that likes to make funny noises occasionally, and a case held together by duct tape, it still runs fine. (Granted, I am on power cord #4 and battery #3, but I'm told all laptops have problems like that -- and I lost battery #1 to a recall.)

So, I'm on a mild dose of SSRIs for anxiety. (Thankfully, what side effects from the drugs have on me went away with use -- for the first month I was dead on my feet in the evenings, thanks to the drowsiness. Now I'm not even noticing it. Well, I still have the vivid dreaming, but I kinda like that.) I think I've forgotten my dose for the last couple of days. And, this morning, when I was answering RPG posts*, I was watching myself posts and noticing that I was a lot more anxious about how things were worded, and not being mis-interpreted. Which is pretty much classic anxiety for me.

* The main RPG I'm in is in a big climactic battle. Four of my five characters are involved -- the fifth deciding that wherever the fighting is, is where he doesn't want to be. Having one selfish character is fun, but he's a pain to get involved in plots.

In conclusion: I need to remember to take my bloody meds.

I am pleased that it's not showing up in my work, despite the fact my model is refusing to work. (I think I can fix it, once I give it a bit more thought.)

Okay, tomorrow I need to plan on doing something while waiting for my program to run.

Or maybe test it with an easier problem so I find out if it is giving me the right answer before it spends an hour thinking before giving me an error message.

Sorry I haven't posted much.

News here: I got a new computer. It is very shiny. The monitor is also bigger than my TV screen (this is not really an achievement) and it can run Photoshop without making weird fan sounds. (Unlike my laptop) I also got Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced, which is going back to the store, since it doesn't work quite right. I need to actually play the games I own, though -- recently it's mostly been mindless Harvest Moon playing. (Damn it, I have Phoenix Wright games I should be playing.)

I also might be going to my first conference as a grad student -- the deadline to submit abstracts is Friday, and my advisor has me working on one. I have the second draft open now. I also need to renew my membership to the American Astronomical Society, and get travel arrangements to the conference. It's in Boulder, Colorado, BTW.

I'm starting to think I need to be like limyaael and make a Things I Did Today post to remind myself that I work harder than I think I do.

Yesterday, I got to go over to the computer center, where they were trying to attract scientists into using 3D projection more. Which is pretty cool -- they had a 'basic' setup, which just used polarization and two projectors to make 3-D projections. (He even took two pictures of the group and projected them in 3-D in the screen), and a really cool one that used three screens to make a projection you could walk through, with the aid of a pointer (kind of like a Wiimote) and a tracking thing on your 3-D glasses (which was broken). Among the uses were visualization of things like proteins, 3-D concept maps, and models of metal crystallization. They also used the Quake gaming engine to turn architectural models into something one could walk through. It was kind of like having a holodeck in one's office.

The weird thing is that I have very poor binocular vision, thanks to crossed eyes as an infant. However, I could really tell things were 3D -- perhaps because I don't normally get binocular vision except in an area directly in front of me, so I really notice the difference. I also discovered that when shown two different images in my eyes, my brain knows exactly what to do -- the computer operator was showing us how far apart he could set the images before our brains refused to make them match. I went seamlessly from seeing both images as a 3D image to seeing only one and ignoring one eye's input. Everyone else got headaches. Go screwy vision, go!

(I was very impressed by the whole thing, as you can tell.)

Today I am voting in the New York primary. Go, democracy in action! (I am not telling who I am voting for, mostly because I care less about Clinton versus Obama than I care about Winner versus Republican Winner.)

So, working from home today...

Pros: Do not have to brave the icy mess that is outside.

Cons: Miss an interesting lunch talk on star clusters.
Probably will get less done.

I'll probably go in, but late.

So, my advisor is away. I feel proud of myself that not only did I get the most recent draft of my working report to him, but that I also have kept working on stuff after he was on the other side of the world. (Working without someone checking up on me! Hooray!) That and there's something really effing promising about one of my projects that I can't wait to show him. Mostly so he can suggest about five different mundane explanations that I didn't think about.

Now, if only a collaborator would get the data that I've been asking him for since the beginning of last semester. -_- Need to bug him about it in person during Planetary Lunch, since my emails seem to be going unread.

( A Dialog Concerning Becca's Spending Habits: In Three Acts )

That was mostly just a long excuse to say that I now have Zelda games. Go me!

I need to draw something. My writing's going fine, but I don't feel motivated to draw. Which means I need to dig out my sketchpad and do it anyway.

I just finished my 3rd draft of a report for my advisor that I've been plugging away at for 6 months. (No, not all that 6 months has been spent writing. Some of it was also spent doing the research I'm writing about and fighting with the computer. And making graphs.) It is currently 46 pages long. Half of this is graphs. At least.

Suddenly, I see how people can write dissertations as long as novels.

(Because I was curious, I pasted it in a word counter. It's currently running at only 7,600 words. Darn -- that's about 30 1/2 pages of text. So that means I have 15 1/2 pages of figures.)

I still have three more data sets similar to the one my report is about. ::trudges on::