Just my little corner of the Interweb
3.5 stars
Not bad, not great. A writer, played by Diane Lane, frustrated after a messy divorce, takes a vacation in Tuscany, and ends up buying a house. We follow her struggle to make the house livable while trying to rekindle both her love life and her writing in the process. A fun diversion.
by Philip Pullman
In this second book of the Sally Lockhart trilogy, where we pick up with Sally a few years after The Ruby in the Smoke. She has built herself a small financial consulting business, no small feat for a woman in 1878, and has helped her friends from the first book build a respectable photography business.
This novel starts with two seemingly unrelated minor mysteries — one involves the sinking of a ship, losing one of Sally’s customers all of her retirement savings that she had put into that ship on Sally’s advice; the other involves an enigmatic performer at the theater where Sally’s friend Jim (and also employee at the photography studio) works backstage. These mysteries come together when an elusive company, North Star, pops into both the mystery of the ship, and the mystery of the marked performer.
Pullman’s style is easy and fun to read; though I tend to get lost during fight scenes, so I just skim ahead and see who’s standing at the end. I like that he doesn’t treat any of his characters as sacred, though I was a bit startled and upset by a death near the end of the novel.
I look forward to finding and reading the last book in the series.
Tonight I took the “Stained Glass Garden Stepping Stone” class through Fairfax Community Education. The class was actually taught at the Stained Glass Works, a shop and studio in Centreville. It was fun and easy, and if the end product didn’t weigh so much, I might consider making them as gifts for friends and family.
Met with Chris today. Yup, just Chris — Kim had a family emergency earlier this week, so she was catching up in the office. I decided to keep our meeting, though, since we hadn’t met since December.
It was a good meeting. We clarified a few things that we had discussed last time, and decided that I really am ready to just chug through the data. I have a few tweaks that I’d like to make to the pipeline, but should be done with those this coming week, and then I’m going to just let’er rip.
Since Kim was unavailable, we decided to meet at Chris’ office at the University instead of GSFC. I hadn’t been to campus since last fall when I had to set up my funding again, and that time I was able to escape without talking with anyone besides the human resources person. This time I ran into a few people, and had a chance to catch up. Very few of the grad students I knew are still there — that’s what happens when you take a year and a half off — so I didn’t recognize many of the faces in the grad offices.
Ugh. I ended up staying up late last night (midnight, which is late for me, since I get up at 5:30 AM) to get a few things finished for today, and now I’m just a walking zombie.
The worst part? I forgot my purse. I work 35 miles, at least a 45 minute drive, from home, so I can’t really go home and get it. I feel so discombobulated without it….
One of the questions I got last week through the Ask a High Energy Astronomer website was asking if a candle, burning in a vacuum (we’ll let that part slide) would be visible from a great distance. The idea is that if there is nothing in the way to absorb the light, then we should be able to see the candle.
However, this does not take into account the decreasing flux from that candle. There are only a finite number of photons emitted by that candle, and those are emitted isotropically (equally in all directions). The number of photons, then, impinging on a surface, say, your eye, will decrease as the distance of the candle increases.
Out of curiosity I decided to do a quick calculation to see how far away the candle could be before it was just detectable by the human eye. I didn’t send this off with my answer, because I wasn’t sure of the calculation, and the person indicated their level as “novice”, so they probably wouldn’t have been enlightened by the calculation anyway. Just for posterity, here is my “scratch pad” calculation.
A few quantities to start with:
From (1), we can first get the total power output by that candle, assuming isotropic emission, and using the fact that there are 4*π steradian in a full sphere.
The flux of that candle at a distance, R, is then:
Now from (2), we can find the threshold flux that the eye can detect. Assume that the eye has a light-collecting area equivalent to a circle with diameter 1 cm, then:
Finally, by equating the two, we can find the distance at which the candle will be just detectable:
So:
That’s just 180 km, which is less than the distance between New York City and Washington DC.
Diminished by Discrimination We Scarcely See, an article from yesterday’s Washington Post, by Meg Urry, a professor at Yale University, and an all-around-powerful force for women in astronomy.
That’s the thing: Discrimination isn’t a thunderbolt, it isn’t an abrupt slap in the face. It’s the slow drumbeat of being underappreciated, feeling uncomfortable and encountering roadblocks along the path to success. These subtle distinctions help make women feel out of place.
I don’t have anything to add. Just read it.
We went to see Brad Sherwood and Colin Mochrie at the Warner Theatre tonight. Basically they did a live version of Whose Line is it Anyway?, with some familiar games and some unfamiliar games.
The show featured a lot of audience members — more so than the TV show, since there were only two actors instead of the show’s usual four. They played “moving people” and “Whose Line?” (with lines of dialog provided by audience members). They also did “Sound Effects”, which made me laugh so hard I nearly peed.
The final game they played was also the most disturbing game. It was “Alphabet”, but no ordinary game of Alphabet. No. They played it blindfolded. With bare feet. And 100 live mousetraps scattered about. Yeah. Live mousetraps and bare feet. At first I found this game nerve-wracking, but after a while, when they were both on their hands and knees looking for unsnapped mousetraps to thrust in the direction of the other’s voice, I started to get into it, though I hardly paid attention to the improv itself — just the mousetraps.
3.5/5 stars
Ten years ago, nearly one million people were killed during three months in Rowanda by the Hutu militants. We didn’t hear much about it in the US because our news media was enthralled by the O. J. Simpson trial.
Hotel Rwanda tells the story of a hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, who keeps his family safe at his hotel during this madness. He also takes in over a thousand other Tutsi refugies and uses his connections to keep them safe as well.
This is not a “happy” movie, but is very well done. They manage capture a small bit of what the horror must have been without sinking into the pit of gratuitous gore. Don Cheadle does gives an excellent performance, along with most of the rest of the cast. The exception was Nick Nolte, who turns in an uneven performance, giving the impression that he’s drunk much of the time.
Every once in a while, when I’m hotseatting for Ask a High Energy Astronomer, someone will ask a question to the effect of “What good is NASA-developed technology for the rest of us on Earth?”
The first time I was asked, I remember finding a great FAQ on the NASA home page. However, since the redesign of the “NASA portal”, I have been unable to find that page. Today I was able to find a great resource for this question on the NASA pages — Spinoff. Spinoff is an annual publication, since 1996, that chronicles some of the ways that NASA technology has been successfully implemented commercially. A few of the cool applications in the 2004 issue include:
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has given the world amazing images of the distant stars, planets, and galaxies. The cutting-edge imaging technology that enhances the Hubble images also extends its benefits to life here on Earth, from deciphering previously unreadable portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls to improving digital mammographies for advanced cancer detection. This imaging technology is now helping physicians to perform micro-invasive arthroscopic surgery, which is the visual examination of an interior joint such as the knee.
Information on the device is being distributed to crime laboratories around the world. Law enforcement photographers that take pictures of crime scenes can use the Laser Scaling Device to shoot scaled photos of blood-spatter patterns, graffiti, or other components of crime scenes that can be portrayed in a two-dimensional medium.
A critical imaging code used to enhance video footage taken from spaceborne imaging instruments is now available within a portable photography tool capable of producing an optimized, high-resolution image from multiple video frames.
The main Spinoff page also includes links to technologies used in everyday life on Earth from Apollo mission development and technology development for the Space Shuttles. These are fairly impressive and includes the development of kidney dialysis machines from a chemical process developed to remove toxic waste from used dialysis fluid (Apollo mission-related) and the development of hand-held extraction tools for rescue squads to remembe accident victims from wrecked vehicles using a miniature version of the explosive charges that separate devices on the Shuttle.
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