Resonant Constellation

Aw, crap.

Okay, so here’s the situation: today I was in E&M class, sitting in the back (I had biked in and was almost late, so I took the first seat available). My glasses were smudged a little, so I took them off to clean on the bottom of my shirt-this is a commonplace occurrence. While cleaning, I heard a popping sound, and the glass/plastic piece that actually corrects my vision clattered onto the floor. This was a little surprising, as it had never happened before, but I was theoretically prepared for it (I knew it could happen and was not overly alarmed).

I quickly retrieved the wayward lens, but noticed that the small bolt that holds the frame together and the lens in the frame had disappeared. As far as I can tell, this tiny screw evaporated into thin air-I never found it. The puzzling part of all of this is that the threads in the tiny little hole aren’t stripped at all and the whole assembly is otherwise intact (sans tiny screw). Now, I say I never found the screw, but it could have been right under my nose-I believe it to be too small to be perceived by human vision (yes, it is smaller than the wavelength of optical electromagnetic radiation). I’d need to requisition the department’s scanning electron microscope to find it.

Okay I thought, I’ll just wait until I get home to repair it and go today without glasses. My prescription isn’t that intense, I can still see. Sure, past me, you can see. Here’s what you can see: the people in the rows around you, the seats, and senseless blue smudges on the whiteboard that must have been equations. Squinting, focusing hard on the distant board, I gave myself a headache and eventually felt nauseous. Awesome.

Now, a whole day passes like this, including other symptoms, such as my right eye beginning to twitch again (this was a weird tick I developed before I had glasses when I needed them). This is so incredibly annoying, I do not have words to describe it. By the time I ride my bike home, I am really ready to break out the eyeglass repair kit. After about a minute of searching, I locate the tiny kit with its tiny screwdriver, and its even tinier screw (remember:scanning electron microscope) and get to work (this is difficult, as I can’t see that well without the glasses…which I am repairing).

Twenty truly excruciating minutes later, I conclude that the tiny screw included in the kit is somehow not tiny enough to fit through the indescribably tiny hole in the actual glasses. I gave up this line of attack.

Soon, though, a new idea struck me: solder! I have a kickass soldering iron, which I’ve been itching to use, so I broke it out and got to work. Another twenty excruciating minutes later, I again concluded that this is a failed effort. The solder, even with a resin core, just wouldn’t stick. I realized halfway through this process that it’s kind of irreversible, so maybe it’s not so bad that it didn’t work.

So that’s where I stand now: not quite blind, but headache-ridden, and a little blurry. Anybody out there have good ideas to help me out?

I have a weird tradition whenever I go on vacation. I’m not much for souvenirs or trinkets, but when I go on a trip I like to bring back a hat. I’m not entirely sure when this started, but the first hat I can remember bringing back from any trip is my irish cap from a trip I took back in middle school. Since then I have collected about four others-two varieties of Australian hats (one I got in Colorado of all places, the other bought in Sydney), a kind-of flat brimmed cowboy hat (imagine Clint Eastwood in For a Fistful of Dollars. I have no idea where I got it), and now a nice brown Indiana Jones-like fedora.

The only rules I have are that the hat must be appreciably different from hats I have collected before, they must be of relatively good quality, and they (obviously) have to fit my ridiculously oversized noggin. This sometimes makes acquisition of new hats difficult-I often come back from trips without new headwear. Still, hope springs eternal-I never get on a plane to go somewhere already wearing a hat. The excitement of a new find never gets old.

What I really need now is a hat tree.

This next week is spring break at the university, so I’ll be going home. I always look forward to this opportunity, as it allows me to catch up on some sleep and decompress a bit. Beside this, I also get to eat good food for a while-an opportunity I will NEVER turn down.

As I write this now, I’m sitting in the Tucson (theoretically) International Airport. Going through airline security always makes me slightly frustrated. It seems an ineffective inconvenience (for more ranting on this subject, see my Australia Travelogue, though you’ll have to dig to find it). I used to really enjoy flying, especially by myself. I once flew by myself from Albuquerque to Las Vegas to visit my grandparents (who live in Lake Havasu, Arizona, but spend quite a bit of time in Vegas). This was a very exciting experience that I truly enjoyed, but sadly this is no more. Ah well.

I say I’ll be relaxing in Albuquerque this week, but I seem to have accumulated a busy schedule. Aside from working on an image processing project for a class, I’ll be working for my research advisor, Matt Kenworthy, on our multiple brown dwarf system project. I also hope to get out to somewhere dark with my telescope (which I unfortunately have to leave in New Mexico) and perhaps take a few astropictures with my camera (you’ll see ‘em here first). Other possible activities include hiking and (as I always do) visiting the local music stores to gawk at the merchandise that I can’t afford.

Also, there’s a hint that a store in Albuquerque may have some of Deschute’s Brewery’s The Abyss. Excitement!

Afterwards:
The flight was uneventful today, but a funny thing happened right before I got on. I got to talking to the people right behind me in line, and the subject of my field of study came up (seems it always does). Now, I had a choice: If I feel like talking I could say that I’m an Astronomer, or if not I could say that I’m a Physicist. The reactions are always the same-if I say Physicist everybody says “Oh. Physics. That’s hard,” and the conversation is over. If I say Astronomer, the reaction is much more positive: “OOOh, Astronomy, I loooved looking at the stars when I was a kid. My brother…” and so on. Eventually they ask me if I think “Like, maybe there’s aliens out there somewhere?” I swear to you, this works every time, including today (I was feeling good, so I said Astronomer). People are funny like that.

I have two things to talk about today which are not connected other than the fact that that they can be found on the same website. The first was under the headline: “Mirrors Tested as Global Warming Block.” As soon as I heard this, I knew that Roger Angel had to be involved. I knew this because he has talked about this very subject several times before and nobody else is awesome enough to actually try it. This summer, I worked just down the hall from Dr. Angel’s office and I must say, it was a thrill to work so close to such a big name in my field. Of course, he had no idea who I was and we never spoke (our interaction consisted of passing in the hallway), but it was still cool.

The other story is simply a photoessay of a volcanic eruption in Chile in May of last year. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen this before now, it is clearly something you’d want to publish right away. There was also an electrical storm going on at the time, which makes the photos truly epic. Volcanoes and lightning; trust me, it’s awesome.

I love the internet, it brings me entertainment in all forms, lets me maintain contact with friends far away, allows me to get news from around the world in a matter of seconds, and sometimes, just sometimes, it brings me links like this.

That’s right, the United States government is giving away a stealth ship.

Now, I have long dreamt of flying to Boston, commandeering the USS Constitution, and sailing to Somalia to combat pirates in the most awesome way possible (I have a whole crew lined up for this, including a pilot, a weapons officer, and an engineer), but I always discussed that as a joke. Now I can get a stealth ship FOR FREE. This changes everything.

The Sea Shadow (which I will have to rename to something suitable like The Millennium Falcon or Battlestar Oceanica or somesuch) is about 170 feet long (about 50 meters) holds a crew of twelve, and is capable of a top speed of 28 knots. It has special coatings, sharp angles, and the whole basic “Stealth Fighter” treatment to make it invisible to radar and sonar.

Okay, so it may not have been designed for combat, so what? I’m a creative guy, and I have a lot of creative friends (at least 11…) we will find a way. The upside of this all: it is a perfect secret lair from which a mad scientist might…RULE THE WORLD!

There are some wrinkles, however. I’d probably have to buy fuel which I’d assume is incredibly expensive. This could wreak havoc with my future instrument purchase budget and ability to discover new and exciting beers. The ship also comes with some sort of a deep sea mining barge used to house it which is effectively useless. Also, I currently live in Arizona and unless the San Andreas has a major earthquake, Arizona is not nearly close enough to the ocean to make regular trips in the stealth boat feasible. Ah, well. I can dream, can’t I?

I got an email today that said I should take a survey. I’ve got plenty of better things to do, so I decided to take the survey. I discovered to my chagrin that it was a painfully obtuse survey about ‘leadership,’ which is one of those overused buzzwords like ‘diversity,’ which has lost all of its meaning and has become completely trite. For example, they asked two functionally identical questions about “what leadership means to you” right next to each other. I answered: “Leadership means management, administration, and organization. You just asked this question, I think you need better leadership.” I answered the questions honestly though, and I think my disdain for the idiocy displayed shone through, but just to be sure I left an additional comment on the end:

Please enter any additional comments you may have after taking this survey.
Based on my answers you may think me a bit of an egoist and rather ornery. I assure you, this is an entirely correct assessment. I do not feel this way without reason-empirical experience has made me what I am. I came to college as an optimist and the sheer stunning stupidity I find myself surrounded with daily has turned me into a bit of a pessimist. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a personal optimist. I can and will succeed in my chosen field of study, of that I have no doubt. However, I find it hard to believe that the people with whom I regularly interact outside of my peer group (my peers are scientists-astronomers and physicists) are capable of much more than breathing, reproducing, and the drinking of massive quantities of bad beer. Yes I do realize that these are a sample of the smarter half of the bell curve. This is precisely why I am so pessimistic.
You see, I don’t feel I belong to any group; city, state, country, religion, species, etcetera. When taken as a whole, groups of people are intensely stupid and rather disappointing, even people who may be individually wonderful. I marked myself as a political moderate because that is neither liberal nor conservative. The truth is that I have my own ideas about how the world works and I dislike the thought of being squeezed into somebody else’s paradigm. So I live my life in a bemused sort of detachment, watching (as a great man once put it) a once promising species circle the drain ever faster without even noticing where it is, much less where it’s going.
So I hope you understand my responses a little better now. I feel that this popular buzzword “leadership” is really just another symptom of an increasingly vapid society more concerned with talking about things and giving themselves a pat on the back for it than actually doing anything.

Cheers.

As you can tell, I had a hell of a lot of fun, this is why I always take the surveys. Try it, being honest is sometimes very entertaining.

I was doing my laundry this fine evening when I realized that I was short of quarters by exactly two dryer loads ($2.50). This is not good: all of my clothes are wet and the must become dry, preferably before tomorrow morning. I scoured my room and soon came up with half of the required amount. This is not to say that I don’t have more spare change. On the contrary, I have hoardes of nickels, dimes, half-dollars, a few dollar coins, about cents (this is the actual name of the coin: the cent. The penny is an english coin), and even a few dollars worth of various foreign currencies. Unfortunately, I can’t use any of these other coins in my apartment complex’s washing machines: they only take quarters. I have to ask, is it really that hard to engineer machines to accept different denominations? I make a solemn vow to design such a machine and perhaps implement it into my death ray when I take over the world! Then I shall track down the people who designed the coin-acceptance system and show them the wonder of my omni-coin operated death ray before I vaporize them! HA HA!

No, seriously, I had to borrow $1.25 from my roommate. Ah well.

I may not be a huge football fan (my favorite sport is Hurling-UP BANNER!) , but I always watch the superbowl even if I don’t have a team. However, as an Arizona resident I was obligated to root for the Cardinals. I must say, when I first found out that the Cardinals were going to the superbowl I was just a little…blown out of my mind. I’m used to my local sports teams loosing spectacularly and disappointing in the worst possible way. Success is just unheard of.

The best part of this is that the game turned out to be half awesome. The second and fourth quarters were actually great football, while the first and third were total crap. The Cardinals played as if schizophrenic, at points brilliant (the first interception, their last minute drive for a touchdown, the incredible safety which had everybody out of their chairs screaming themselves hoarse), but more often than not bogged down by seeming incompetence (the 100 yard interception return touchdown, the MANY personal fouls, the inability to capitalize on drives, the defense, oh god the defense).

Of course there were several very bad calls by referees, who seemed a bit trigger happy with the flags, but in the end the Steelers simply played a better (read: more consistent) game. My hat grudgingly goes off to them on their 6th superbowl win.
All I can say now is: maybe next year?