Frances’ Ripples

Frances may be a mere tropical depression now, causing rain and tornado warnings in the local area, but, surprisingly, hurricane Frances had wider impacts on my life.

• My grandmother is auctioning off the rest of her farm land and the farm house in October. Grandpa died last year, and she just can’t take care of the farm by herself, even without the animals and crops. After a difficult search, she found what seemed to be the perfect condo in Red Wing, MN, not far from her sister’s place. To manage the purchase, she needed to get a “bridge loan” from her bank to close on the condo a month or two before the house is sold. So, for the past several weeks, she’s been fighting the surveyor and inspector to get to the house so she could arrange the loan.

  Long story shorter, she was supposed to close on Tuesday this week, but got a call from the seller’s lawyer saying that they aren’t closing. The house they are supposed to move to is in Florida between West Palm Beach and Daytona Beach — right where Frances did a lot of damage. The seller’s went into a panic. They couldn’t find out the status of their house, and the husband needs to stay in a place with filtered air because of his health. Nevermind that Gram had already told them that they could stay until at least the end of September, and probably the end of October if they needed it.

  Now, I’m not heartless. I understand that this is stressful for the sellers. But, dammit, they’re screwing with my Grandmother. She needs a place to live, and finally found something in Red Wing that was not only affordable, but well-built and a good fit for her lifestyle. Now they’re trying to back out. Oh, and the best part is that my parents, who have been helping Grandma with this all, are leaving tomorrow for the wedding. Ugh. Things will work out, and hopefully the sellers will come out of their panic with clearer heads…

• Kennedy Space Center was hit pretty hard by Frances. The damage is certainly not as bad as it could have been, especially if Frances had remained Class 4 or 3, but this pushes the Swift launch by at least two weeks. Now with Ivan on it’s way to Florida, the launch may get pushed back even further. Just our luck, it will coincede with the Minnesota reception November 6…

Thesis Meeting

I had a great meeing with Kim and Chris today about my thesis. First, I convinced them that the oddness that we’d been seeing in MCG -6-30-15 is, in fact, instrumental. And, this convinces us further of the importance of using spectral analysis, especially for long-term studies of XTE sources.

Then I showed them my results from flux-selected fits of the MCG -6-30-15 data from the same data set as a published set. My results did not exactly match theirs, but Chris argued that he had never thought that theirs made a lot of sense, from a physical standpoint. The reasons my results are better stem from the improvements of the background and response modeling that the XTE team has done in the intervening years. I can have more data points than they did, but still retain similar error bars. In addition, I can use a bit more of the band-pass than they used, which helps pin down some of the model parameters.

Finally, I showed them the results of time-selected spectra from MCG -6-30-15 and NGC 5548 from my current pipeline. I had fixed a couple major problems in the pipeline, so these results look much, much better. In fact, they look good enough that Chris suggested that I just start plowing through the mountains of data that I have now. Yikes! This is what I’ve been working toward for the last year, so it’s quite exciting…

While the data is running, I need to start thinking about an outline for my thesis, as I see it now. I also need to start reasearching the sources I’m analyzing, and I still need to do a few things to help understand that oddness in MCG -6-30-15 that we’d seen so that I can write it up for a chapter in my thesis.

Idiot!

I’m such an idiot sometimes that it’s a wonder that I can acutally dress myself in the morning.

Two idiotic things have happened in the last week with my thesis. One, I discovered that the response files that I’ve been making for the spectra are wrong for more than half the spectra, and two, I’ve been losing some of the latest data because I haven’t updated my SAA (South Atlantic Anomaly) history file.

The response matrix problem arose because I have a script that automatically makes the response files. The FTOOL needed to make the response requires the numbers of the PCUs used to extract the spectrum. I adjust these over time, since PCU #1 is only on intermittantly after a certain date, and PCU #0 lost it’s xenon later at a different date. It’s best to use as many PCUs as available for the data, so I use #1 and #0 before their respective malfunctions, but not after. In my response-generating script I had been defining which PCUs were used, but not actually feeding this to the FTOOL making the response. Idiot!

The SAA problem came about because I have a file in the “aux” directory for each observation that the reduction script (the rex FTOOL) looks at. The default requirement for data to be considered “good” is that the data be at least 30 minutes from the last SAA passage. The file that I’ve been using ended long before the latest data sets that I’ve downloaded, so all of the data has been rejected from these data sets. Idiot!

Anyway, I’ve since changed the response-generating script to feed the pcarsp FTOOL the acutal PCUs used, and I’ve updated the SAA history file in the aux directories.

Let’s try to avoid any further idiocy, boys and girls. Shall we?

Neighbors

I’ve never had any real problems with any neighbors I’ve had, and I really don’t like to start a conflict, since there’s no real way to know how long you’ll be neighbors. But our new neighbors, who are renting the house next to us, are really starting to get on my nerves.

The owner, who lived there for about a year before moving out and putting up rooms for rent, also got on our nerves, but not so much that we needed to say anything. We haven’t actually met the new tenents.

Yesterday the parking lot in our housing development was striped and painted. We were asked to park 2-3 feet from the curb while this was going on. Since Andrew and I were at work, we didn’t need to worry about that. But our next-door neighbor was home, so pulled their SUV out a few feet. In the process, though, they angled the SUV toward our parking spaces. This meant that we could only use one of our parking spots, unless our second car was a Mini (which it isn’t). I knocked on their door to see if I could get them to move before Andrew came home, but no one answered. He parked in a visitor’s spot.

Okay, we thought, we’ll go out to pick music tonight, and the SUV will be straightened out by the time we get back. Lo and behold, when we got home at about 9PM, the SUV was still there with it’s ass blocking our second parking spot.

Alright, we thought, we’ll park in the space of a vacant house across the street, and surely they will move the car by tomorrow. (I think you see where this is going.) It is now 2 PM on the day after the parking lot was striped and painted. The SUV is still there, with it’s ass blocking our parking spot.

I’m going to put up a polite note on their door before I head off for my hair consultation. Anyone want to bet whether or not it will still be blocking our parking spot when I get home? I know where my money sits.

2000+

I’ve had my new car for two months now, and have put over 2000 miles on her. She finally told me her name about three weeks after I came home with her — her full name is Delphinus, but she goes by Delphi for short.

I’ve noticed that I drive differently with Delphi than I did wil Arthur. I’m certainly more comfortable on the Beltway than I was — I had started getting paranoid that cars were crushing in on my during my commute. Now I’m much more comfortable, probably because Delphi sits higher on the road than Arthur did.

I drive faster than I did in Arthur. Arthur had a 70 mph shimmy that alerted me when I was going 70 mph. Delphi, however, does not shimmy. In fact, she doesn’t even shimmy at 80 mph. So, it’s way too easy for me to go fast without knowing it.

I also drive a bit more agressively. That’s not entirely good. In Arthur, I would just sit in the second-right lane for the first half of my trip to work. This is the lane I need to be in when the Beltway splits off for I-270 (I stay on the Beltway). Now, though, I’m zooming in the left lanes, unsatisfied with the “slow” cars in the right lanes, until about a mile or two before the I-270 split.

All in all I’m enjoying my new car. I still get a small twinge of guilt when I see one of Arthur’s many cousins, but I know that he’s hopefully serving as an organ donor to these many cousins in the area.

Grad Life: A Legless Bull Humping the Window Cow

Frequently, the pressures of grad school would manifest themselves as totally insane conversations between me and other grads. Perhpas the pinnacle of this behavior was a discussion I had with Jocko about the “window cow”.

My university has one of those cows with a hole in it’s stomach that can be accessed through a “window” on it’s side. The cow is usually grazing in a pasture that is right on the path between the parking lot and the astronomy building. (Yup, there’s even a barn right across from the astronomy building, but while it’s cute to see the tiny goats in the spring, it does not produce a “country fresh” odor that you’d want in your house.) This “window” is mounted on the side of the cow with a support that protrudes out from the cow’s side by an inch or so.

One day, as Jocko and I were walking out to the parking lot, a thought struck me, and, of course, I articulated this thought. “So, how would they breed the window cow? I mean, couldn’t a bull just rip that window right out?”

Read more…

Suspicious Activity

They’re back up. The electronic signs over the beltway that are usually used to report unhappy traffic conditions ahead are again giving the message:

Report suspicious activity
800 492 TIPS

They’ve put up that message every time the terror alert level is raised. Here are the problems I have with this:

• They have emphasized several times that the terror alert level is primarily supposed to be for law enforcement agencies, so why advertise like this every time the level is raised?
• We should always be on alert, since in this day it’s just good policy. So, why not keep that notice up all the time?
• Who is going to remember a phone number that they’ve buzzed past going 70 mph? This just doesn’t seem to be the right place for this notice.
• The latest elevation in the threat level is based on 3-year old information…come on. The danger today, then, is really not any higher than last Friday.

I’m curious if other metropolitan areas do this as well, or is it just Washington DC?

Hey! Way to go Minneapolis

USA Today reports on a study that ranks Minneapolis as the most literate city in the US (of the 79 cities with populations over 200,000). I grew up in the Twin Cities metro area (Bloomington, to be specific), so it’s no wonder I love to read as much as I do. Oh, and Washington is #6 on the list, so I haven’t moved too far from “bookish” America.

More on the report can be found here.

Thesis Meeting

Met with Kim and Chris at long last this afternoon. The last time we all met was in April, and while I’ve gone to Kim a couple times with questions in the interim, it was good to meet with both of them and talk about my thesis again.

We talked a bit about my troubles with the deadtime correction with the Crab data. We’re not convinced that the Crab is the right source to be using, and Chris is going to e-mail another scientist to see if he has suggestions for better galatic sources to use. Unfortunately, those sources are still likely to require deadtime corrections. We also grabbed another scientist in the lab, Craig, who has done a lot of work with XTE data, and he was able to answer a few questions about the deadtime correction.

One interesting thing that came out of our talk with Craig was that XTE Epoch 5 does not correspond with a gain change, but with PCU 0 blowing it’s propane layer. This means that during Epoch 5, even though PCU 0 is still generating data, it may not have the spectral response that we are expecting, and may not be well-modelled. This means that I will have to go back and re-extract the Epoch 5 data for both the Crab and MCG -6-30-15 with PCU 0 excluded.

We also talked a bit about my work with the pipeline results. Unfortunately, it looks like the blind-fitting results are not coming back as reasonable. This is a problem because if I start to “massage” the spectral fits, our own biases can be easily introduced. We’d really like to say that blind fitting returns reasonable results, but they don’t, and this is largely because the bandpass of XTE and the degeneracies of the reflection models are working against each other.

At least I have a few directions to go in right now, and I’m looking forward, once again, to my thesis work over the next few weeks.

Moving on, though I’ll have to look back

I set aside my work with the Crab data, since I was just getting frustrated instead of making any progress. I’ll need to go back and figure out how to deal with the deadtime correction in the light curves, but that will wait until next week.

In the mean time, my work with MCG-6-30-15 has shown that there is a definite difference in results when extracting flux-resolved spectra versus time-resolved spectra. So far, my data pipeline has only done time-resolved spectra, but we’re not sure anymore that this is the right approach.

My project the last week has been to add flux-selected spectra extraction to the pipeline. I thought it would be difficult, and I do have some more tweaking to do that might turn out to be harder than I’d like, but my initial implementation did not take as long as I thought it might.

Currently, the pipeline treats each “observation” (as defined by the RXTE data) separately. It cuts the lightcurve into 0.25 cts/second slices, and then bins those up until there are at least 100,000 net photons in a bin. This ensures that there is enough signal to get a decent fit of the spectra to various models, but hopefully minimizes spectra that cut across flux states.

I’d like to improve this by making all of the flux bins equal across the entire data set (i.e. so that the flux bins from observation to observation are taken from the same count rate ranges). I can’t currently think of any way to do this easily, but I’ll ponder it for the next week or so, and maybe something will come to mind.