Yum!

From my book-a-day calender entry on Anthony Bourdain’s book A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal:

To get a little excitement back in his life, he went on a globe-trotting expedition with a camera crew from the Food Network, recording his experiences as he consumed some of the world’s most peculiar meals: a cobra heart washed down by cobra bile in Vietnam, a deep-fried Mars bar in Scotland, sheep’s testicles in Morocco, roasted bone marrow in England, poisonous blowfish in Japan.

In what universe is a deep-fried Mars bar in the same category as a cobra heart and sheep’s testicles? I would be more than happy to try a deep-fried Mars bar, but even before I went vegetarian I would not have tried anything else on that list.

ASCA data

To track whether or not the effect I’ve been seeing with MCG -6-30-15 is real, my advisors suggested that I delve into ASCA data. The hope was that I could use data directly from the Tartarus Database of AGN observations from ASCA. However, I’m looking at the data in different energy bands — in theory, I could use the extracted spectra from Tartarus, but it would be using the data in a different way that I’ve been using it with the XTE data.

The upshot is that yesterday and today I’ve been delving into the ASCA data iteself. I needed to reinstall HEASoft software package to deal with a bug in XSelect — a tool I need in order to extract spectra and light curves from the ASCA data. In addition, I needed to find a version of SAOimage to run on Mac 0SX (fortunately HEASARC had one I could just download in pop into the appropriate directory).

I haven’t dealt with many data sources other than those from XTE. ASCA is an imaging telescope, unlike XTE, so it’s a bit different to work with. Rather than just using the raw data files and scripts, I need to go into the extracted images and tell the scripts where in the image I want the lightcurves and spectra extracted from. Honestly, it’s a lot easier than the XTE data, at least so far, presuming that I’m doing it right.

Stop calling me!

Ack! What recourse does a person have against calls from a fax machine? Every once in a while I’ll come home to find five messages one the machine that consist of “beep….beep…beep…” Now, the past couple weeks that I’ve worked from home, I’ve been getting calls from a fax machine.

Normally I would just not answer the phone, and then if it happened to be a “real person” I’d call them right back. Today, though, I’m waiting for a couple wedding-related calls from people who aren’t necessarily in their offices much, so I’m left answering the phone. One set started around noon, with a call every ten minutes for a total of about three calls. Now I just had another one.

I’ve *69ed the calls to get a phone number, but of course a reverse look-up comes up empty…oh, and the calls today are from a different number than the ones last week. Sigh. Off to answer the phone again.

Quit yer whining!

Whoever decided that this was newsworthy needs to quit their whining.

That’s so bad that NBC is betting that its May sweeps week disaster mini-series “10.5” starting Sunday for two nights will prove fatal to the competition despite a groundswell of grumbles from critics who say they haven’t seen and heard so many cliches assembled under one roof in years.

And scientists are also not happy: they call the whole thing blarney from beginning to end.

So? It’s not like 10.5 is the first movie with lots of bad science. And it won’t be the last.

Shall we list a few of the worst offenders from the past few years? Let’s see…
The Core, Volcano, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Asteroid, Twister, Meteorites!….need I go on?

Even movies that proudly announced that they consulted NASA scientists had blatant science mistakes. Take, for example the opening scene of Deep Impact. We open with a group of amateur astronomers observing the night sky. They are using flash lights to consult their charts. White flash lights. Astronomers never use white light during nighttime observations — it kills the night vision. If you’re going to tout your film as being as scientificly accurate as possible, I strongly suggest you don’t open the film with a very bad mistake.

I’m not saying I don’t watch these movies — I just know that I need to expect bad science, so I turn that part of my brain off.

Check out Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy for more bad science in the movies and media.

Hmmm…

Just heard a large boom somewhere relatively nearby. It’s been followed by sirens. Wonder what’s up. It doesn’t sound like it’s on campus, but the sound might have been decieving…

Update 9:05AM: When I went out to Building 6, there was a FOX5 helicopter perched in the general direction I thought I’d heard the boom from. But then, it might just have been looking at traffic on the BW parkway.

Update 10:08AM: The Washington Post traffic site is showing that Cipriano Street (just outside the Goddard campus) is blocked due to a fire at the VFW. That might be it.

Why I Marched

Melissa, her mom and her sister came out the weekend for the March for Women’s Lives.

I never used to worry about Roe V. Wade. I thought it was safe — written in stone. But with the current administration, I’m worried. An article on Salon, Marching for their Lives, was an eye-opener for me.

I’m certain that my family would be surprised, shocked, and disappointed that I would participate in such a march. However, I believe that the issue of abortion is strongly tied to our right to the freedom of religion. It is a religous question of when life begins, and for our government to legistate which religion is correct on that point is tantamount to chosing a state religion. I can’t support that.

There are also so many other women’s health and family planning issues at stake in this next election. One big one is access to birth control both here and abroad. Bush signed into law the so called gag-order which prohibits federal funds to go to any clinic overseas that even discusses the possibility of abortion, even if the US funds are never used for such a purpose. This has severely crippled such clinics overseas in their ability to teach family planning to third world people.

What most fundamentalists don’t understand is that abortion is never the first option. Organizations like Planned Parenthood are committed to the overall reproductive health of women. They would prefer to teach men and women to use birth control and how to have a planned family than to use abortion as the first or only option.

Planned Parenthood was there for me when I was a student in need of regular check-ups and birth control. My health insurance didn’t provide birth control, so I was left on my own. Planned Parenthood offered reduced-price services for me. Sadly, during one of my visits I found out that they could no longer offer free services for those most in-need. They still maintained a sliding scale, but the lowest end was no longer free. These are the people most in need of birth control.

What the fundamentalists also don’t seem to understand is that the number of abortions did not change after Roe v. Wade. (Sadly I can’t remember my reference for that — I did a report long, long ago and found that statistic in my research.) What it did was change the number of women dying from back-street abortions, clothes hangers and broken glass douches.

Bush’s solution is to teach abstinence. Hello? Abstinence isn’t enough. According to one of the speakers on Sunday, nine out of ten people have had sex before marriage. Nine out of ten. I wonder how many of those have had real sex education in school. I wonder how many of them know how pregnancy happens and how to prevent it. Not enough. Salon had an eye-opening article about the abstinence programs: Bush’s Sex Fantasy.

Salon also had a good short story, Miscarriage of Justice, that might be of interest.

Thoughts on the March

Andrew and I met my friend Melissa and her mom and sister to go out for the March for Women’s Lives today. I’ll admit that I’ve never gone out for a protest or march before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect; although, the reports were that the March was going to attract some million people, so I was expecting crowds 🙂

When we arrived, we promptly signed up on the official sign-in sheets, and then tried to make our way through the bottleneck in front of the Smithsonian Metro exit onto the Mall. There were tents set up near the Metro stop, and all along the Mall there were piles of signs to take and carry during the march. We weren’t sure where to go or what to do, so we headed to the opposite side of the Mall where things looked quieter (and where there was a row of port-a-potties).

Later, Melissa and I ventured back out on the Mall, because she had seen a sign that she wanted to carry — the “Vote like your live depended on it” sign from the Feminist Majority. I also wanted to find a pink pom-pom that I’d seen people carrying around. We threaded our way across the Mall to the tents, but saw none of the signs Mushi wanted. Finally, on our way back, we found one — just one! Someone had given us the hint to grab some extra stickers, and use those to tack the signs we wanted to carry onto the signs that came with sticks to hold them, so we each grabbed a sign with sticks, and got extra stickers, and got our signs ready. Thanks to the woman with the tip — that was a lot easier than carrying signs without sticks.

The March started a bit late, of course, since they wanted to get through all the speakers on their list before step-off. Then we took off, but soon hit several bottlenecks. That was great, though, because it spoke to the sheer numbers of people on the march.

Soon we hit our first batch of anti-protestors. They were creepy-looking men holding huge pictures of aborted fetuses. Don’t the anti-protestors know that men do not make a good picture for anti-choice protests? It’s like this picture of Bush signing the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban. Note all the smiling old men in the picture. It’s gross.

Mushi got caught up, without telling us, standing with her sign helping to block the anti-protestor’s signs. It was cool that she got caught up, but we got about half a block up before we noticed she was missing. I tried calling to see if we lost her in the crowd, but fortunately, Andrew and seen her run off. He went back to retrieve her, but got caught up himself for a while.

Where we were waiting for Mushi, there was another anti-choice protestor. It was interesting because there was a person with the March who was assigned to him, keeping the Marchers from engaging him. I didn’t envy her job.

The bottlenecks weren’t bad after that. We marched through the Ellipse in front of the White House, but of course Bush was off at Camp David, so our cries of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, George Bush has got to go” didn’t reach his ears.

After the White House, we started down Pennsylvania. That’s where the “real” anti-protestors were. I was, frankly, disappointed. The March has taken a year to plan, so you would think the anti-protestors would have had time to mobilize. There weren’t many of them, and since they wanted to stretch themselves as far as they could, their numbers looked really thin. And, again, most of them were creepy old men. Supposedly there were some women dressed in black as part of the anti-choice protests. These women had had abortions and now regretted it. These are the people who might actually make a good statement, but I didn’t see them at all — maybe I was just turned off to the anti-protests by then.

We made it back to the Mall, and crashed on the lawn for about 20 minutes. The whole time, there were still Marchers coming into the Mall.

I was struck by the range of ages represented at the march. I think we all tend to think of this as “our” fight, but it started long ago. Roe vs. Wade is now 31 years old. I saw women in their sixties at the march. I saw young women in their teens. There were mothers with babies. There were mothers and grandmothers — some marching together with their daughters and granddaughters. Pro-choice is not anti-family.

I certainly hope another march like this is not necessary, but I’ll be there for then next one, if there has to be one.

Check out my pictures from the march.

Thesis Meeting

I met with Kim and Chris again this afternoon. We are still trying to figure out if the weirdness I saw in the data is real or just an effect of instrument gain changes. The problem is that the XTE PCA is quite susceptible to gain changes, and the background may not be modelled properly for all of my data. The question, then, is whether or not the effect that we’re seeing could arise from gain changes.

I’m going to attack the problem from two tracks in the coming weeks. First I’m going to persue the veracity of the weirdness by looking up data on this source from other X-ray missions, specifically ASCA and XMM. Second, I’m going to assume that the weirdness is real and make some plots to show if and where changes in the spectrum reflect the weirdness.

No child left behind

I just read this article on So You Want to be a Science Teacher’s site about the government’s No Child Left Behind education push.

Now, I’ll admit that the No Child Left Behind program sounds great; however, as most government projects, the execution leaves much to be desired. SYWST points out that the NCLB push has taken money from the National Science Foundation’s long-term math-science partnership to develop better math and science education for the short term goals of increasing student’s aptitude test scores.

Another downfall of NCLB is that it is chasing eager and qualified teachers out of the classroom for lack of proper certifications. I took a community education writing class last fall, and the teacher worked her “day job” as a teacher at a facility for pregnant teens and new teen mothers. She had a master of fine arts, and had been teaching at the facility for two years. However, since she didn’t have her teaching certifications, she would be ineligible to teach again next school year.

I can understand wanting to ensure that teachers are “highly qualified” (NCLB words), but a mere certification does not make a teacher more qualified and should not be the deciding factor. Perhaps for inexperienced teachers coming straight out of school these certifications offer some measure of their level of qualification, but the success of an experienced teacher speakes more than some lousy certifications.

The good news is that my writing teacher found a job teaching in the MfA program at Cornell. The bad news is that she quite enjoyed teaching the teenagers and had built a rapport with them. The facility will have to find a new teacher, probably less qualified, and likely less enthusiastic to work with pregnant teens.

I used to believe

The radio show this morning pointed out a site on the web called i used to believe. It’s a collection of things adults used to believe as kids.

When I was a kid, I used to believe that if you had the same dream three times that it would come true. This was scary to me because I had a recurring nightmare. While the dream didn’t start out the same everytime, the middle and ending parts were always the same. Here’s one version I remember:

The dream starts with me and a few kids in the back seat of a car. Our hands are tied, and we are stopped at a railroad track. Our kidnappers have just checked on a kid they had left on the railroad tracks [I think I may have watched too much Dudley Do-Right as a kid]. Then they got back in the car, and drove us back to their house.

The house just happened to be my parents house, but somehow I knew that my parents had moved or been kicked out, and while they missed me, they didn’t suspect that I was being held at their house. The kidnappers let us out in the fenced-in front yard to play along with the other kids they had kidnapped — there must have been a dozen kids total.

While we were playing in the yard, I decided to make an escape. I crawled over the fence near a stand of trees, so the kidnappers wouldn’t see me. Then I started running down the block, stopping at every house asking for help. When I reached the house of my brother’s best friend, I noticed that the kidnappers were coming down the street. They, too, were knocking on every door to see if anyone had seen me.

Dave, my brother’s best friend, answered the door, but wouldn’t let me in. His mother came to the door, too, but she wasn’t going to let me in either. Finally, when the kidnappers were getting close, they did let me into the house. But they had already seen me. When they arrived at the door, though, the Incredible Hulk came crashing through the front wall and saved me.

Now, I’m not sure I actually believed that the last part of the dream would happen….but I was worried about being kidnapped.