Hired a florist and Formal Wear, Trip 2

While in Alexandria yesterday, I popped into a florist shop that was on the list of referrals from our wedding coordinator. They were very busy putting together arrangements for weddings, so I made an appointment to meet with one of the co-owners today.

Andrew ended up coming with me today, due to some long and uninteresting circumstances. We chatted with the florist for a while about what we want, what our colors are, the theme of the wedding. He suggested several things, and I basically just went along with everything he suggested. I’ve had trouble mustering much enthusiasm for the flowers — I love flowers, and I’m looking forward to having them at the wedding, but I have no idea what looks good with the colors and dress styles we’ve chosen, so I thought we could just defer to the expert. He quoted us a price and was going to let us go on our way to discuss things. Instead, we had already decided to hire them if they were within budget (they were), since they had worked with our wedding coordinator previously, and she quite liked them. So, we put down a hefty deposit, and we now have our top Clear Lake florist. Yay!

Afterwards we drove off to Landmark Mall, also in Alexandria, to seek out the Oscar de la Renta tux at a formal wear shop there. Unfortunately, that shop seems to have disappeared from the mall. The trip was not completely a bust, though, since we decided to pop into another formal wear shop to see if they had anything. We weren’t hopeful, since we’d been in another of their shops last week at Fair Oaks Mall. This shop had the gray tux we’d seen in the catalog on display, so I was able to determine that I really didn’t like it. However, we asked the guy working there if they had any other gray tuxes to rent, and he showed us one in their catalog. The people at Fair Oaks Mall were not as helpful. This one was a darker gray, which I liked better, but I still prefer the Oscar de la Renta tails. However, this means that we have a back-up plan if I can’t find my first choice.

Biking, Odd Sermon, and Errands in Vienna

We went out on the bikes again today, though this time just up to Vienna for a few errands (a stop at the bike shop to get Andrew a kick stand and me a small bag to carry an extra inner tube and a few tools).

On the way, we took a picture of a sermon title Andrew had spotted earlier in the week:

(I googled “+cat +bedpost +tie” and found the origin of this sermon title on several pages. Here is one called, The Center of Your Home. Do a search for “cat” on the page if you don’t want to read the entire sermon.

Andrew pointed out that this is similar to another urban legend where the bride cuts off the ends of the brisket because that’s the way her mother prepared it.)

Total miles: 8.0 miles

Uppity Women of the Renaissance

by Vicki Leon

Another in the series of Uppity Women series. Fun, quick, bite-sized bios of women from the Renaissance.

Pandamania, Trip 2

Our bike ride today took us directly past the Reagan National Airport, where there were four of the Pandamania pandas.

I’ve posted pictures on Flickr, but here’s my favorite panda not only at the airport, but so far in our hunting:

Biking to Alexandria (Second Time)

Last year, one of our final bike trips was from the Rossyln Metro station down to Alexandria along the Mount Vernon Trail. This year, we got off the Metro one stop earlier, at Courthouse, and went from there to Alexandria. While this added a couple miles to the trip, it didn’t actually add to the difficulty, because the extra bit was all down hill.

I took a couple pictures along the way:
Toward Downtown DC (it was a hazy day, so this isn’t the greatest pic)

A cool ship docked in Alexandria by the Torpedo Factory:

The George Washington Masonic Memorial:

Along the way, we stopped at Regan National Airport to see the Pandamania pandas there.

Total miles: 14.5

Formal Wear, Trip 1

Since we have less than three months, we thought it was about time to arrange for the tuxedos for Andrew, Greg, and my Dad. Here’s my problem: the colors I chose were yellow and navy. Navy. What an assinine choice. “Why?”, you ask? Because navy and black do not go together. Especially the navy on the bridesmaid dresses that we chose.

So, the solution to the problem is to have gray tuxedos with navy or yellow vests and ties (navy looks better with the gray). So, we started at Fair Oaks Mall, but the formal wear place only had one gray tux, and it had four buttons, which I don’t really like — it looks too much like a regular suit, and what’s the point of that? Our next stop was the formal wear place at the Sears (not Sears itself, but some kind of contracted out space inside the Sears). They had a nice looking Oscar de la Renta set with tails that was charcoal gray, but I didn’t like any of the vests that they had (plus the rental for just the tux was $130, that’s not including the shirt, vest, and shoes).

Our final stop was the Men’s Wearhouse across the street from the mall. When we walked it, a very tall blonde woman called to us, from a table where she was folding shirts, “Can I help you?”. I said yes, that we were looking for tuxedoes to rent for our wedding. She continued folding while I told her what I was looking for, explaining that our colors included navy, which I didn’t like with balck. I also told her that I had a print-out of something from their web site that might do the trick.

Finally, she stopped folding, deigning to give us a small bit of her attention. She walked back to the rental desk and pulled out a book, and found the page with the one set of tails in gray. Unfortunately, the pants that came with it were striped. Not pin stripes, but more what I would call clown-pants stripes. “No,” I said, “that won’t do it.”

She asked how dark the navy was, and I produced a swatch. “That’s not too dark,” she says, and unzips one of the suit bags containing a rental tux. “See, that’s not bad against the black.”

Had I not just said that I didn’t like navy and black? Did she think I was kidding? Hello?

“No,” I said, “I don’t like that. It won’t work.”

I believe she mumbled something about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to find what I wanted. I remember thinking that I had seen what I wanted but without a good vest at the formal wear place in Sears…she was sounding like the car salesmen I’ve dealt with. Needless to say, Andrew and I left, though a bit crankier for the experience.

GZK cutoff to crackpots in one Google search

Somehow I know just how to find them. I was Googling for “GZK cutoff”, since I had just read an article disputing the existence of the GZK cutoff^*, and I wanted a bit more information. (Plus, the authors of the paper did not indicate whether or not they had submitted the paper anywhere, and I was wondering if they were giving accurate information.)

The first link I went to was an article on UHECR [link disappeared from the Web] (ultra high-energy cosmic rays). I grew suspicious of the author when I read the following:

They say that energy losses suffered by ultra high energy cosmic rays by meson-producing interactions with photons of the big-bang relic background radiation would have a profound effect on what we can “see.”

Why was I suspicious? Most scientists would not say “big-bang relic background radiation”, but would simply say CMB or perhaps cosmic microwave background. I thought I should investigate the author a bit more.

I checked out his resume [link disappeared from the Web] and found that he has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and most of his experience is in computer programming. Now, I’m not saying that amateur astronomers can’t contribute to astronomy research, they absolutely can. He is not one of them.

What really gets me is that he was presented posters at American Astronomical Society Meetings. His abstract for his poster at the January 2004 Meeting was fairly vague; however, I’m not sure how his poster for the October 2002 Planetary Division Meeting was accepted.

And frankly, anyone referencing Velikovsky in the first paragraph of an article [link disappeared from the Web] should not be taken seriously.

I just can’t leave this guy’s site…it’s so bad. He talks about gamma-rays “tickling-to-death” heavy elements in the solar wind, and energies of gamma-rays in terms of Hertz (X-ray and gamma-ray astronomers always use keV or MeV to describe the spectrum). Few of the references in his article are to referred science journals, and those that are do not reference his theories at all.

I just need to turn it off…this is not good for me.

^* The spectrum of cosmic rays (relativistic particles, usually protons) that have been detected at Earth is theorized to have a “cut-off” at energies above 10²⁰ eV, because such particles will be absorbed by the cosmic microwave background. (For more, check out the GZK Limit article at Wikipedia.)

Control Room

I had first heard of Control Room through the Beyond the Multiplex series on Salon. I was surprised when Andrew metioned that a local theater was showing it, and he’d like to go.

Control Room is a documentary on the Arab TV channel, Al-Jazeera. It begins in March 2003, just before the US “military operations” in Iraq. We follow things at the control room in Qatar but also at the American “CentCom” (Central communications) where the American military attempts to control the media output of the war. We also see the Al-Jazeera reporter in Baghdad, which has not been adequately explained (a bit of a coincidence that an Al-Jazeera reporter and two other reporters were killed during the same campaign).

Is Al-Jazeera slanted? Duh. But no more so than, say, FOX or CNN are slanted in favor of the US. Equally interesting to the difference in reporting styles of the Arab and US is the stories of the employees at Al-Jazeera. For example, the senior producer confessed that he would take a job at FOX News in a second if they offered and he would “trade the Arab nightmare for the American dream.” He plans on sending his children to university in the US and have them stay.

Thought-provoking film. Of course, though, the right people won’t see it.

Random Notes

A couple random things I came across while searching for news items mentioning Constellation-X:

• The telescope will be 400 years old in 2008! Here’s a cool article at Space Today about the history and future of the telescope: The 400th Anniversary of the Telescope[link removed 9/2015 – no longer exists]
• This web site, UFO Area, quoted a press release on Chandra’s latest contribution to dark energy research. I had already come across the release, but when I saw the domain name, I thought I’d poke around. This is one of those fun, ridiculous sites collecting evidence of UFOs, ancient mysteries, and conspiracies.

Unprecedented

I’ve been working as a support scientist for three and a half years here at Goddard, and in those three years I have assisted with four different proposals, including the one that’s due Friday. In all of the other cases, the proposal has been furiously edited and re-edited until the last possible moment. I’ve found myself making the required 15 or 20 copies at 10 AM on the due date, frantically trying to find a working copier or searching offices for a working stapler. This only works because we are located in Greenbelt Maryland, a mere 15 miles (or so) from NASA Headquarters in DC where the proposals must be delivered before 4:30 PM on the due date. Someone from the lab would take the proposals for several people down to HQ, squeaking in the door at 4:20 PM.

Let me just say that I’m the kind of person who likes to have things done early. This last-minute-scramble drives me crazy. I would rather have the proposal in the bag with a day or two to spare, and send it FedEx overnight so that I don’t have to worry about navigating downtown DC.

This time around, I finally got my way! The only reason this happened is because Kim is out of town (left on Monday, so her contribution had to be finished by then) and Chris is busy working on his own proposals (though he, too, seems to be out of town, so I’m not sure how that’s working). So, I was able to finish the proposal yesterday with a couple careful read-throughs (and proofreading by Andrew), and a half-hour in front of the copier. The proposal is now away! And it’s not due until Friday!