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3/5 stars
I’d never seen this “classic”, and thought it was about time so I’d know what people were talking about when they mentioned it. Not sure what to say about it — it’s good Woody Allen.
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.
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.
Usually I don’t have breakfast until I get to work — I’ve discovered that if I have breakfast at home at 6 AM, I’m just as hungry when I get to work as if I’d had no breakfast. This morning, though, I felt on the verge of a migraine, so when I stopped at the gas station on my way to work, I picked up a diet vanilla Coke and strawberry Pop Tarts. This remined me of an incident a couple years ago with Pop Tarts…
Some mornings when I arrived early to work, I would let myself get Pop Tarts from the vending machine as a treat for breakfast. One such morning, I bought my tarts, brought them back to my office and popped them into the microwave. The instructions recommend microwaving them for 3 seconds. 3 seconds.
This particular morning, I was quite tired. I put the Pop Tarts into the microwave, and then turned to my computer to see what e-mail I needed to attend to. I became engrossed in the e-mail, and after reviewing a couple messages, realized that I still heard the microwave going. It had to be more than the 3 seconds I’d set it for.
I went back to the microwave, and it said it still had a minute and a half. A minute and a half?? Crap. I must have set it for three minutes. So it had been in there for a minute and a half. I stopped the microwave, and opened it up to see what damage there was.
The Pop Tart had contracted to about half it’s normal size, but had also bloated up where the filling was. It was charred black and smoking. I quickly threw it out, burning my finger tips in the process. I noticed that there was a smoggy feeling to the hall going out of my office. I walked down the hall to see how far it went, and found that I could smell it about three doors down from mine.
When a co-worker came in, he popped his head in my office and commented that it smelled a bit smoky in the trailer. Did I smell it? Hee hee hee. I started giggling uncontrollably at that point, and confessed my story.
The trailer smelled of burnt Pop Tart for the next two weeks.
Pretty good lesson tonight. Knocked off two duets — one an 18th century piece, the other a Rossari piece (#s 31 and 57 in the Voxma book). The Rossari piece is actually fairly easy, but sounds cool and is a good warm-up piece, so we may play it again. The other one has been the bane of my existence for quite some time. We muddled through it again today, and Fred decided it was good enough.
We went through the book and picked a couple new pieces to try, so now I have one old piece, a Haydn Menuetto, two pieces from last time, Gigue by King and Tamburin by Chedeville, and two new ones, Minuetto by Hoffmeister and a piece by Devienne.
Next week Fred wants me to bring in a piece of music that Andrew’s been working on. Fred has ordered a book of duets for alto and tenor sax, and thinks that we might be able to transcribe it to work for alto sax and cello. That could be fun. (I’m not sure if sarcasm was intended there or not.)
The Gravity Probe B satellite has launched!
According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, any spinning massive body (like the Earth, the Sun, a black hole) will not only distort space, but will drag space along with it as it spins. This frame-dragging is a fairly small effect for a body like the Earth, but with the instruments aboard the Gravity Probe B, it should be measureable.
You might wonder why we need another test of Einstein’s theory. He’s a household name, afterall, and his theories have stood up against many other tests.
It’s true that Einstein’s theory has worked extremely well to explain, for example, the bending of starlight measured during solar eclipses and Mercury’s peculiar orbit and rotation. However, no matter how well a theory stands up, it is still open to further testing. That’s what science is all about.
Up to this point, frame dragging has not been directly measured, even though the effect has been known for over 50 years. The problem is that the best place to test frame dragging would be around a black hole, but we don’t have one handy. So we had to wait until we could develop sensitive enough instruments to test it on the Earth.
The results should prove interesting, but we’ll have to wait about a year for those.
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.
Friday afternoon I had a huge scare while playing with iBlog. I won’t go into all the details, but suffice it to say that I thought I lost half of my entries (they were still there), and then, once I found them, I found that all the dates were wrong. I probably could have fixed the problem, but decided to look into other blogging software instead. Saturday Andrew installed Moveable Type for me and converted all my iBlog files to a format MT could import. I then tweaked all of the entries, uploaded all my images (and made thumbnails — cool!), and changed all the blog-to-blog links.
Don’t get me wrong, iBlog is a good package. However, I like that with MT I can edit pages on the web from any computer. (Though, with my Mac’s Airport occasionally fazing out for no reason, I may regret that…) I’ll probably play around with the style sheet and templates in the coming weeks, but for now I like the nice, clean look of the new pages.
We had a meeting with a cake person today. We had met her at the bridal show, and her samples were quite good (which couldn’t be said for the bakery that we were originally thinking of hiring). When I mentioned that our wedding would be a celestial-theme, she spouted out several different ideas about what do to. I loved that she was so enthusiastic, and she had a lot of creative ideas.
She works out of her home, and is just getting into wedding cakes. However, she has done cakes for birthdays, showers, christenings, etc. for years. I like that she is a one-woman operation — that tells me that she is in it because she loves it, and that she’s more likely to want to please us than herself (or her employer). I also like that she’s just getting into the wedding cake business. Rather than making me nervous, I feel like she is going to want to go an extra step to make sure that we’re happy, and that we’ll be happy giving a good recommendation for her work.
So, we met with her today at her house. I brought a swatch of the bridesmaid’s dress and one each of the soaps that I’m making for the favors. From these, she came up with some great ideas for the cake, and we sat down and designed something with her. The cake is a done deal!
2.5/5 stars
Stu Shepard answers the phone in a phone booth. That’s not his first mistake, but the caller on the other end thinks it might be his last. The caller, a sniper with a view of the phone booth, keeps Stu on the phone, threatening to kill if he hangs up.
I think the idea was more interesting than the movie itself. It wasn’t bad, but I wonder if it would have been better as a short story, or somehow better developed with more flashbacks to get to know the characters better, or something.
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