Oops!

Okay, so there is a slight typo in the wedding invitations. Fortunately it’s not on the invitation itself or the map sheets (at least that we’ve found so far). It’s on the RSVP. It looks something like this:

M________________
_____ will _____ will attend
Number of persons _____

Yup. I forgot to put the “not” in after the second “will”. So, anyone confused by this, just tick the first one if you’re attending, the second one if you’re not. I’ll get a clue if you fill in the number of persons attending.

Maybe this will be the big fiasco for the wedding…you think? Yeah, I know — it’s too easy. I’m still expecting something spectacular to go wrong.

Witch Child

by Celia Rees

This book is the fictional diary of teenager Mary Newbury, chronicling her journey to the New World. Her journey, however, is precipitated by her grandmother’s conviction as a witch. A mysterious woman wisks Mary away from the public hanging, and sends her to Southampton where she will join up with a group of Puritans heading for America. Mary acts the part of a good Puritan girl, but has been brought up as a witch…a wiccan, not the wart-nosed, evil incarnation of a witch on Halloween night.

This was an easy read, since it was geared toward teenagers, however I quite enjoyed it. I liked how Rees set up the scenes, in particular the cramped, smelly ship crossing the ocean.

Pandamania, Trip 5

We went out for our fifth panda-hunting trip today. This time we used the Metro a bit more than on other trips, picking up smaller pockets of pandas in downtown DC.

One of our stops was at the Shops at 2000 Penn. There were originally two pandas inside the mall in 2 pandas outside the mall; however, this has become a sancutary for the pandas that have been vandalized in their original locations. As a result, there were actually about seven pandas inside the mall. The ones that have been moved included Red Pandagon, Cro-Magnon Panda, Jazz-E Panda, and The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, all of which we’d already seen in their original DC locations (though, the Cro-Magnon Bear had already been vandalized before we saw him). In addition to these bears, Rail Fence Panda, Coin Panda, Booted (which we’d tried to find on our last trip), and PandArt! are now in the mall. It was quite upsetting to see these vandalized bears in the mall, and I nearly cried when I saw what the vandals had done to PandArt!. People are so inconsiderate.

I’ve posted pictures on Flickr.

Pandragon II	Dreamtime Walkabout
Pandulum
Pandominium, The Bird Sanctuary

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.

More Games More Fun, Week 2

Our second games class was delayed by a couple weeks, but we finally met again tonight. We played three more fun games.

The first game was Ticket to Ride. This is a railroad building game, where each player attempts to connect various cities based on the tickets they hold. While on the surface, this game looks a bit like TransAmerica (which we played in the Beyond Monopoly class we took last fall), the game play is quite different, and I liked it much better. Of course, I killed the competition in this game, so that might have something to do with why I liked it so much.

The second game was Cluzzle, a sculpting game meant to be more of a social game than anything else. Each person takes a card with several different things listed. For each of three rounds they choose one of the things on the list and sculpt it using PlayDoh-like clay (but without the classic PlayDoh smell). Sculptors get points for each player that gets their word, but no points if everyone gets it. Players also get points for each sculpture they guess. Fun, silly game, but probably not one that we’d buy, since we don’t really do the “social” games much.

The final game we played was For Sale, and auction game. Each player starts with 15 chips, and bids on buildings during the first rounds. During the last round the buildings are then sold. I’m not so good at auction games, so, again, this is unlikely to be a game we buy. It was fun, though, and only took about 15 minutes to play.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

1/5 stars

What was I thinking? I know better than to rent “cult classics”. It’s always better to see them with the cult or not at all. I only knew what was generally going on because I read the Netflix sleeve before watching this. I didn’t really know what was specifically going on, and much of it felt like a fever dream. The only thing I can think of that would make this a “classic” of any sort is that there was full-frontal, both female and male (David Bowie, to be precise); though, what kind of “classic” I can’t really say…

Booklovers

A few notes for booklovers:

• I don’t think I’ve mentioned Bookcrossing except in passing on this Blog. Bookcrossing is a cool website where you can track the travels of books. First you register a book and put the unique Bookcrossing Identification number (BCID) inside the cover with a note pointing toward the Bookcrossing website. Then, you “release” the book. The release can take many forms: pass it on to a friend who would enjoy the book, leave the book on a park bench or in a doctor’s office waiting room, donate it to a library book sale, sell it to a used book store, or even trade with other Bookcrossing members on-line.

  Once out of your hands, it’s best to forget the book. Hopefully, at some time in the future, you’ll get an e-mail that your book has been journalled by someone else. This is a huge thrill, especially with “wild releases”, i.e. those that you don’t directly put into someone else’s hands.

  My first wild release that was journalled was Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel. I released it in the St. James Hotel lobby in Red Wing Minnesota, and it was picked up and journalled by a woman from Somerset Wisconsin. She has since re-released it in Hawaii.

  I have now tracked some of my books to Senagal (The Alienist by Caleb Carr) and Maylasia (As Nature Made Him by John Calapinto). Check out my bookshelf to see where my books have travelled, and join up yourself…tell them rhombitruncated sent you.

• For you science fiction, fantasy and horror book lovers, you have got to check out sf-books.com, a site I discovered through Bookcrossing. It’s a book trading site that costs you nothing to join. List books that you’re willing to trade with other members, then when you send one out and it’s recieved, you get a credit that you can use to request a book from another member. This involves a bit of trust, but I have yet to lose a book or credit, and the webmaster will make things right if someone stiffs you.

  There are traders from all over the world, so you can set which regions you’ll trade with. Within the US, it only costs about $1.50 to send a book if you use the “media rate”. Most members don’t mind if you use the slowest, cheapest method for shipping, since it’s silly to spend more on shipping than you would on a new or used book. Plus they all have to-read piles just as large as yours.

  You can see what books I have up for trade on my sf-books.com profile page. If you sign up, tell them rhombitruncated sent you!

• Powell’s Books is holding a contest for book lovers. It’s an essay contest on your most memorable reading experience in the last 10 years, and the prize is $1000 in books from Powells. They’re taking submissions until August 31….I still need to write mine! (Thanks Suzanne for bringing the contest to my attention!)

News from the Universe: 07/28/04

• This was cool:Tiny Hot Spot Found on City-Sized Star. XMM-Newton observations of the Geminga pulsar show a hot spot that’s about the size of a football field on the pulsar’s surface. Geminga has already been seen to show an X-ray tail as it speeds away from the site of it’s progenitor supernova. This tail is postulated to be from electrons created when gamma ray photons are accelerated in the pulsar’s strong magnetic field. In such a strong magnetic field, the gamma rays may become an electron/positron pair. If the X-ray tail is, indeed, electrons from this pair-production, then there should be a stream of positrons flying toward the pulsar’s surface. This hot spot may be evidence of those positrons.

  The story appears in the July 16 issue of Science, but can also be found in the astro-ph archive: Phase-resolved spectroscopy of Geminga shows rotating hot spot(s)

• It’s about time: Partners Agree to ISS Crews of “More than Three;” Details Sketchy. The International Space Station was designed with a vision of doing experiments in space; however, with crews of only three people, all of the astronauts’ time is spent maintaining the space station, with little (if any) time for science.
  

  NASA officials emerging from a space station partners meeting July 23 declined to commit to a U.S. purchase of Russian Soyuz crew-transport and rescue capsules but said such purchases would have to be made to meet the goal of having between four and six astronauts permanently working at the orbital outpost.

  In a conference call, NASA Associated Administrator Frederick D. Gregory and Bill Gersteinmeier, the agency’s space-station director, said NASA and its space station partners agreed that “more than three” astronauts should be working at the station on a permanent basis. A single Soyuz capsule can transport three astronauts.

  While there’s nothing definate, at least it looks like plans are being made to start using the ISS to it’s original potential.

• A question I’ve gotten from time to time is what good is the space program to life on Earth. Here’s a good example: Helping Hospitals: Space Technology Aids Life on Earth.
  

  In Europe, Russian air scrubbers built for the space station Mir — and later installed aboard the International Space Station (ISS) — have been integrated into hospitals to protect staff and patients alike from airborne spores, bacteria and viruses.

  […]

  Meanwhile, in California, NASA engineers are working alongside neurosurgeons to turn an infrared video camera normally used to study the Earth into a tumor-hunting brain scanner.

Invitations Away!

A few random wedding notes:

• The invitations finally made it into the mail yesterday.
• I’ve finished all of the favors (have I mentioned that already?) — they are all wrapped up in tulle. I’ve moved on to making and wrapping the ones for the Minnesota reception. I’d like to have those done before the wedding so that Mom and Dad can take them back home with them.
• The rings are both in our posession. There was some mess-up at Bailey Banks & Biddle where the ring arrived but no one called me; fortunately the ring was still there when I called earlier this week.
• The wedding web pages are pretty much finished (at least there are no more pages that say “under construction”)

That’s all for now.

King’s Blood Four

by Sheri S. Tepper

Life is a game of strategy. Literally, in the world that Tepper has created here. Gamesmen use pawns much as they might be used in chess — they are easily sacrificed in play in favor of a more powerful position. Children of Gamesmen study the game rules for 25 years, and during the last few of those years, their Talent starts to evolve to determine what position they will occupy (king, wizard, healer, etc.).

Fifteen-year-old Peter, still studying in school, finds himself suddenly “in play” during Festival, a time when anything goes. To protect him, the schoolmaster sends Peter and two of his friends to another school far, far away. However, Peter soon discovers that once he’s in play, it’s difficult to get out of the game.

All of Tepper’s skills at weaving a story and creating interesting, sympathetic characters are present in this novel; however, while reading it I felt that her writing just wasn’t as fully developed as in other books I’ve read by her. The book was a bit thin, and I felt that there could have been more development. However, after doing an Internet search, I found that this was, indeed, her first novel. Not bad.