Back From Bloomington

I’m back from my lovely and relaxing trip to Bloomington. I managed to see almost everyone I wanted to, which was nice. There were a few people that I didn’t manage to catch up with and others I would have liked to spent more time with, but I also know that there are more Bloomington visits in my future. I did manage to do everything that was on my list of planned activities: Farmer’s Market, dress shopping, watching the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy, seeing the house some friends just bought, half-priced martinis, Hapkido club practice, climbing in the Red, and, of course, my cousin’s bridal shower.

You Can Classify Galaxies Too!

You may remember my excitement about the Galaxy Zoo project. I had noticed that the second Galaxy Zoo paper was available on the arXiv a few weeks ago, but it was the end of the semester and I was too busy to read it. One of the first things I did after finishing classes was to print it off.

The paper focused on comparing classifications found through Galaxy Zoo to those produced by professional astronomers. They found good agreement, with the classifications by the general public agreeing with the professional assessments to an accuracy of over 90%. In addition, most of the discrepancy was well understood, meaning that it can be accounted for fairly easily. For example, the authors suggest eliminating distant, faint galaxies where structure can be hard to distinguish. It was good to read that the classifications provided by Galaxy Zoo are accurate – especially since the dataset available from the project is at least ten times larger than any previous dataset.

The third paper was available on the arXiv yesterday, and it’s all set to get on the plane with me when I leave for Indiana in a couple of hours. It looks like another interesting paper that will expound on a point mentioned in the second paper on why morphological classifications are desired. It’s possible to apply computer algorithms to attempt to classify galaxies based on attributes such as color (ellipticals are redder, spirals bluer) or a concentration parameter (the light in spirals is more spread out). However, you then lose the ability to talk about relations between morphology and the attributes you use to derive morphology. For example, there are “red” spirals that would be missed in classifications based on color.

Observing “Fun”

I’ve been remote observing the last few nights.  They’re short nights – 10:30-2am or so, which is actually rather annoying.  It’s just enough to mess up my sleep schedule and make life difficult, without the payoff of lots of data.  The disruption to my sleep schedule would be why I am now up at 3 am, rather than sleeping.

I had my first few nights of observing on my own. And, as if that wasn’t scary enough, I somehow ended up helping to teach another first year how to observe the last few nights.  I barely feel like I know what I’m doing – I definitely don’t feel that I’m competent enough to help someone else.  We had a night full of my worst fears tonight – including password hassles and failures when trying to start the night’s observing.  That’s okay – when there were errors at the start of the night that I didn’t know how to handle I turned to the wisdom of my elders.  I whipped out my cell phone and called a wiser, more experienced graduate student for advice.  Have to love how easy it is to contact people in the modern age.  Although the desperate phone calls at all times of the night while observing might convince people that it’s a better idea to not share their cell phone number with me.

I’m Done!

Handed in the last assignment and paper in astrophysical processes, which means I’m done with classes and have survived my first year. My first celebratory act was a nap – I think the short observing nights I have right now mess with my sleep schedule more than full nights. That and not being able to sleep because I would dream about that final problem set….and wake up panicked about it.

While I’m officially done with classes for the summer, I’m ready to be done forever – I’m not looking forward to class next year. This final problem set in astrophysical processes typified much of what I’m fed up with and ready to be done with when it comes to classes. Parts of the problem set were cool – calculating the Einstein A coefficient (decay rate) for the 21 cm line for neutral hydrogen was interesting, if annoying thanks to my ability to mix SI (magnetic dipole) and CGS (everything else) units. A couple of the other problems were also interesting but mainly the problem set was tedious. Once I understand how to set up the problems, I lose motivation. I know what I need to do to get the answer, and I don’t see the point in doing tedious work. There are only so many matrix elements from quantum mechanics that I want to calculate in my life, and I hit that limit a long time ago. When I’m spending more time checking my algebra and doing integrals than thinking about the motivation for the problem, I fail to see the point.

Forbid This!

I just thought that would be a fun post title. Honestly, I hate coming up with post titles more than anything else usually, so when I get a good idea, I can’t stand to let it go to waste.

My inspiration? I went to see The Forbidden Kingdom last night and enjoyed it very much. The plot wasn’t so hot, but that wasn’t why I went to the movie. In fact, I tended to become annoyed any time the movie focused on plot/character development rather than action. As one of the people I went to the movie with pointed out – it would have been better without the stupid white kid. And he was definitely stupid: “Hmmm, I bet the evil warlord will just give me the immortality potion if I stupidly give him what he wants. After all, it’s not like it wouldn’t be ridicuously easy to take it from my weak ass self.”

There were redeeming qualities of course. I always love Jackie Chan, and the Monkey King was pretty awesome. Personally, I’m a fan of kick-ass female characters, but I would love to point out to Hollywood that they can kick ass in their own right and don’t have to just be in the story as romantic interest for idiot kids.

Well, I proscrastinated working on the astrophysical processes assignment by seeing the movie last night, I shouldn’t procrastinate too much tonight by writing about it. Plus, I’m also observing, and I can barely handle two of those at once, let alone three. And, sadly, writing here is not quite as important as the other two.

What Would Ninja Do?

My mom sent this to me and I immediately put in on the office door so that everyone could benefit from the guidance of ninja. The paperclips were added to increase friction and change the mass distribution of the ninja so that spins are more representative of all the options. Unfortunately, there’s not a choice on there saying, “Find motivation and finish the damn semester.” Maybe I should add that (and procrastinate some more)…..

Class Tournament

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Originally uploaded by leftlegofvoltron

So my posts are about a week out of date – that’s just the way the world works.

Last week was the last week of classes – that meant a mini-tournament for the beginning Judo class. Having skipped that day of class last semester due to an EM final the next day, I thought I should go this semester. I ended up playing a little bit and had fun. Generally, that sort of competitive, interactive aspect to martial arts is something I strongly dislike, mainly because I’m not comfortable with it. It was good to put myself in the situation for a few minutes where I had to try my best to make my throws work and not get thrown while the other person was the same. It was definitely a learning experience – learning how poorly my throws work. The picture summarizes – good position, bad hands/arms – notice the break in the shoulder. Note – I’m not a blue belt, that’s just a quick and dirty way of representing white vs. blue for the sides.

Missing Satellites?!?

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now, and what better time than when I’m procrastinating from working on my astrophysical processes final project.

Astronomy courses tend to have a much stronger emphasis on final projects than final exams, for which I’m grateful. While the projects are a lot of work, I do much prefer them to final exams – I get to pick a topic that interests me and study it. For cosmology I looked at the “missing satellite problem” and am working on something related for astrophysical processes. I think this is one of the most interesting topics in cosmology (mainly because there is a lot of observational astronomy and astrophysics), so I thought I would share a brief overview with everyone.

The single sentence overview: The missing satellite problem is the discrepancy between the number of dark matter halos predicted around a Milky Way-sized galaxy (~100) and the of satellite galaxies actually observed (~20). So why do we care? Well anytime there is a mismatch between theory and observation there is a chance to learn something new – whether it’s modifications to the theory or the importance of some physical process.