The Science of Superheroes

by Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg

This is a fun main-stream science book. The authors use comic book characters as a jumping-off point to discuss a variety of science topics. The subjects ranged from the possibility of life on other planets (inspired by Superman) to mutants and Darwin’s theory of evolution (from X-men) to the possibility of using a black hole as an endless energy supply (from the Green Lantern). There was a fun discussion about how strength scales with size, the thrust of which was that a 50 foot ant would not have the strength, proportionately, that a 1 inch human would. (The discussion was inspired by Ant Man, but reminded me of Bug Park, a fun book by James P. Hogan from a few years ago.)

It’s not necessary to be a comic book fanatic to enjoy this book. I don’t follow any comics, but the authors give enough description of each character they deal with that I felt very comfortable that I knew enough. The science itself is well-written and understandable (though I did skip much of the black hole discussion, since I’m more than familiar with that subject).

Biking the W&OD on my own

Andrew and I were going to go down to Georgetown to go panda hunting, but Andrew’s back started to spasm about half an hour before we were going to leave. He seems to be doing okay, but it continues to twinge at odd times, so it seemed best not to do all that walking today.

So, I packed up my bike and drove up to the W&OD trail to get some biking in. I first tried to park at the Hunter Mill Road lot, but the car in front of me got the last spot, so I drove down to Vienna and parked there. The one thing I had forgotten was that while biking out of Vienna, north towards Reston is all on a slight down-grade. That’s all well and good, but that means that the last 3 miles of the trip back to the car is on a slight up-grade. That’s a miserable ride, especially with temperatures of 85° F and 50% humidity. Oh, and I reached bicycle-seat intolerance around mile 8, making that last two miles a real joy. Oh well, at least I got out and met my 10 mile goal.

Total miles: 10.1

The Great Escape

3/5 stars

We’ve had this movie in the house for almost two months. It’s three hours long, and really more of a committment that either of us has had time for lately. We rented it because it’s one of those films that it seems everyone should see. It’s about an attempted escape of 250 prisoners from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany during WWII.

The tone of the movie really reminded me of Hogan’s Heroes, and I suspect that the movie was an inspiration for the show. The problem, though, was that the movie really took the subject matter too lightly. I wonder if they thought that it was the only way to ensure an audience, but I just found it disconcerting. Especially when the chipper music started just after we saw one of the men killed on the prison camp barbed-wire fence.

Formal Wear, Trip 3 and final!

We finally booked the formal wear tonight. Andrew called some of the local Masters Tuxedo stores to see if they carried the Oscar de la Renta grey cut-away tux that we’d seen at the Sears store, and to see if they had a better vest selection. The Falls Church store had them, so off we went this evening.

The guy we talked to was very helpful. He explained that it was a morning suit, and our 4PM wedding might be too late in the day for it. I giggled and said that I sincerely doubted that anyone at the wedding would really know the difference (who’s ever even heard of a morning suit in this decade?). He also had one in the store so we could look at it. The pants are striped, but not like the clown-pants with the tux we’d seen at Men’s Wearhouse. So, we told him we’d book it. He was a bit surprised that it took so little work on his part, but perhaps he could see that we were getting exasperated.

Andrew got measured there, but now we need Greg and Dad to call in their measurements and put down a deposit.

Yay!

Stepford Wives (2004)

3/5 stars

I’m not burdoned with having seen the original, so I had no expectations in mind. This remake took a more humorous path than the original (or so I’ve heard), and I thought it was fun. Great cinema? No. Fun? Yes.

Nicole Kidman did a credible job, but I kept thinking that Meg Ryan might have been better (that, and Kidman kept reminding me of Ryan). Bette Midler was fun as a angst-filled author, mother and wife. Matthew Broderick’s performance came and went — he’s good at the goofy, nerdy-type, but, as Andrew pointed out, at the climax, his delivery was somewhat wooden.

There were more holes in the plot than we could count, but it was still an enjoyable diversion for an evening.

Hubble Poetry

The Hubble Space Telescope site has a page of writing inspired by Hubble images. Weird.

Ooo…and some cool abstract images, too.

And interpretive dance (!).

June is over at long last…

At risk of jinxing July, I’m so glad June is over — it’s been the most stressful month I’ve lived through in a long time. Here’s a list in reverse-time order:

• Formal wear bitch — she was really the last straw to a horrible month. It wouldn’t have seemed so bad without everything else piled on top of it.
• ADP proposal due — this is a proposal to NASA to pay me for the next three years for my half-time thesis work.
• Buying my first new car — while exciting, this is also fairly stressful, and took away an important Saturday from wedding-planning.
• My first ambulance ride, my first time in an emergency room, and my first stay in a hospital as a patient — this turned out to be nothing (probably), but was a horrible, horrible weekend, and took away from our car-hunting and wedding-planning time.
• A tire blow-out on the Beltway — it’s still a toss-up whether this was more stressful or the hospital the following day was more stressful. Frankly, it was quite scary to be trying to change a tire on the Beltway, but then so was the chest pain and news that I might have had a blood clot.
• A week in Denver for the American Astronomical Society Meeting — I hate business travel, plus this took away my Memorial Day holiday, since that was the first day of the conference

Identity

1.5/5 stars

Already this one is fading from my mind. Ten strangers come together and are stranded at a motel one stormy night. And there’s a murderer among them. Less than halfway through the movie, I blurted out who the murderer was, and was correct. The twist was not terribly surprising, and the ending was expected.

News from the Universe: 06/30/04

A couple quick notes on news from the world of astronomy:

• The Cassini spacecraft is poised to take orbit around Saturn. They will be firing it’s engines starting at about 10:30 PM (Eastern Daylight Time) tonight to put the spacecraft in orbit. Anyone in the DC/Baltimore metro area is invited to the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Visitor Center this evening to watch the JPL mission operations center, hear GSFC people involved in Cassini speak, and participate in some sky-viewing with the GSFC astronomy club. The activities start at 7PM.
• Astronomers have reported finding a very old, very massive black hole: Massive Black Hole Stumps Researchers. The blazar hosting this black hole is at a distance of about 12.7 billion light years, which puts it’s formation at just about a billion years after the Universe formed. Astronomers aren’t sure, yet, how supermassive black holes form, but this one became very large, very quickly, so may put some limits on formation theories. (The original paper appears in The Astrophyisical Journal Letters, volume 610. Subscription is required to view article on-line.)

Wrestling the Crab Data

The Crab data is winning, too.

A few weeks ago, before the proposal was in our scopes, Kim had suggested that I use the Crab data as a way to check our results with MCG -6-30-15. This sounded like a reasonable idea that shouldn’t take too much work, since I’m familiar with reducing RXTE data (more than familiar, really, at least for extra-galactic sources). However, I had not factored in the complications of dealing with a galactic source. Why is this a problem? Since the source is so much closer, the telescope gets a much larger signal from it, and then complications of instrument dead-time arise^*.

My first results looked weird, and Kim later pointed out that this was likely because of a dead-time correction. So, I looked up how to correct for dead-time on the RXTE data anlaysis pages, and found an article on correcting spectra. However, there was nothing on how to correct light curves. I decided to see how the results would look using count rates derived from integrating under the spectrum, which I finally finished yesterday. Unfortunately it really doesn’t tell me much. My previous plots had data binned to 512 seconds, which produced a few thousand data points. With these spectrum-derived points, there are only about 20 points. Not a good comparison, really.

Now I’m pondering how to correct the lightcurves directly, so I can get my volume of data points back up. In the mean time, I’m going to start writing scripts to produce flux-selected spectra in the data pipeline. I need to consider how best to do this to balance the need for lots of photons per spectrum while trying not to have the spectrum cross into more than one flux state.

^* Detectors take a finite time to recover from detecting an incomming photon. If more photons come in during this recovery period, they are not fully registered, so the count rate measured is actually a bit less than the actual count rate. For extra-galactic X-ray sources this isn’t really a problem because the photons don’t come in fast enough, in general, to arrive during the dead-time from a previous photon. However, this can be a real problem for galactic sources.