Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Night Vision

Every night before I go to bed I take a seat in the bathroom and look up into the sky from the gap between the blinds and the cafe curtains. This being Michigan, many nights I don't see a damn thing due to gray overcast skies. But in February I was pleased to see something recognizable -- Castor and Pollux of the constellation Gemini.

The Twins.

The Eyes of the Night. ***

When Spring Break came, the combination of staying up later and the rotation of the Earth took away my nightly viewing. But then break ends, the DST2007 law comes into play and suddenly the last few nights I have my bright points of light in my little sliver of sky.

Nice.

Dr. Phil

*** The name comes from the near human spacing of the Twins. It is as if the night sky is looking into your soul.

And if you gaze for long into an abyss,
the abyss gazes also into you.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146

Just A Small Planet In A Big, Big Universe

Thanks to jaylake, here's a link to a remarkable fisheye + wide angle sky image of the Parkes radio observatory in Australia, from APOD -- the Astronomy Photo of the Day. I should go to that site every day, and do when I'm teaching an Astronomy course, but I fear filling my hard drives with all the great and wonderful high res pictures they have. (grin) But this is the current wallpaper on my home computer:



Already A Star

Parkes Observatory, you may remember, was the location of the lovely 2000 Australian film The Dish, about Parkes' role in receiving the signals from the Apollo 11 moon landing. Among other things, it's a nice movie about how scientists work.

Dr. Phil

Road Traffic Up

Tuesday was the first day of public schools in Michigan -- they set up a law the other year to help out the tourist industry over Labor Day -- and also the first day of classes at WMU. Though I missed driving through any of the School Zones with their restricted speed limits, definitely the case that there was a lot of traffic on the roads today.

On the news last night was a story about a horrific fiery crash on I-196 over Chicago Drive in Grandville, right in the construction zone. Semi-truck filled with pies versus a Chevy Tahoe. People with fire extinguishers managed to save one of the two in the Tahoe. Most of the damage on I-196 was at the road's edge and they'd put up some concrete barriers to patch where the guardrails had been. Scary. Actual Michigan Labor Day weekend death toll down two from 2008.

Jerks

Sometimes you're driving along and you can see a spray engulfing a vehicle and you realize that it's running its windshield washers. So this morning, there's this silver Honda sedan which had passed me -- 70mph not being sufficient apparently -- and there was a huge spray on just the right side. About half a minute later it happened again. And again.

And I realized that there was a hand coming out of the right passenger window. And though they were ahead of me by quite a bit, I was getting a bit of spray on my windshield... and the unmistakeable smell of coffee. The bastards were dumping coffee -- a lot of coffee -- out the damned window in traffic at 70+mph.

What the hell is wrong with people? I don't even drink coffee!

Damn, The Students Are Back

Yeah, I know, that's a terrible attitude. But look at it from my perspective. It's tough coming back to the full regular semester after the summer. The Everett-Rood parking lot was FULL. Stuffed. No spaces left. There are not that many faculty with "R" stickers for those spaces. But the students know that they don't crack down and start towing for a week or two. So rather than park in the student places, they fill in the faculty spaces like mad. Eventually it will settle down, but it's stupid season right now.

Talked with a Parking Services Public Safety officer, who was busy writing tickets. He says that student infamously get indignant when told they can't park there and write letters to the President. "'Cause we paid our money!" Well, actually, you paid part of the cost of your classes. You didn't actually pay to park in those spaces, because they aren't for sale. "But can't you old fuddyduds (probably not the word in vogue today) just park elsewhere?" Sure, but we're old fuddyduds. And we're bringing stuff back and forth from home, because our workday doesn't end when we leave campus. And part of your money is paying me to teach your classes. So what good is all that if I can't get to my office and to our classroom? It's the difference between inconveniencing one person (you) from parking closer to the buildings and inconveniencing 128 people -- me and all my students.

Yay, The Students Are Back

Well, that's a better attitude. It was really quiet last week. And you never know how the first class is going to go, but I thought it went quite well. I have a few diversionary tactics to get everyone's attention in the first five minutes -- get the heart rates going and clear the cobwebs.

The problem with killing the lights in the lecture hall these days is that there's too much ambient light from laptops and cellphones being used. (grin) But my TITANIC model Acme Thunderer whistle wakes everyone up.

Did have some troubles making my syllabus. Twelve pages, a little short for me, but printed as 2-ups and copied double-sided, so I'm not really killing all the trees in North America. But the humidity was running so high that (a) my office LaserJet output got "eaten" by the document feeder on the copier, and I had to peel two pages off its rollers, make one copy of the six pages to get flatter masters. By then I'd lost most of my allotted copying time, so (b) I only had 65 of 130 sets made. Then (c) we ran out in the classroom after the secretary had brought the rest in because (d) the copier had actually jammed up and so the last 20-30 sets weren't actually in the pile. But it worked out in the end.

Ah, the joys of teaching. (double-trouble-grin)

Dr. Phil

A Beautiful Fall Day

Driving in to the office today was quite striking. Huge, towering mountains of clouds -- they rapidly alternated between blanketing the sky and allowing brilliant sunshine to light up the world, almost immediately followed by heavy rain squalls. You name it, you got it. And it was still 66°F at 11am! This is the Dog Days of Summer in August?

The Usual Gassy Complaints

Wednesday, when I didn't need gas, it was running at $2.42.9/gal for regular. Thursday and Friday? $2.59.9/gal. So with a sudden 17¢ jump, my 25¢/gal discount from the grocery store was mostly eaten up. Arrgh. And what were they just saying the other day? That crude had dropped below $69/bbl?

Revving Up For Semester 53

Fall 2009 semester starts late this year because Labor Day is so late -- and WMU is actually following the public schools which are required by Michigan state law to open after Labor Day, to help eke out the last tourism dollars -- so classes actually begin on Tuesday 8 September 2009. My PHYS-1060 Introduction to Stars and Galaxies astronomy course is a Tuesday/Thursday course, so the 8th it is! You are supposed to be able to link class webpages to the registration pages. This didn't work the other year, but I decided to give it another try. Unfortunately, as faculty I get a different view than the students, so I don't know if it worked right.

Been getting a steady stream of emails about whether one has to buy the 5th edition of the textbook. Well, actually, yes. Now sometimes I am honest and have pointed out in other classes in other semesters that if they are one or two editions behind, it probably won't hurt them. Most of the introductory physics courses are well-established and I don't teach "out of the book" and I don't assign specific homework problems, so that's all right. But astronomy has been very dynamic, what with the amazing array of new tools, upgrades, methods and theory which has blessed the field, especially since the Hubble Space Telescope first flew. So yeah, the 4th edition won't cut it.

"But I was told in the other class (PHYS-1040) that we'd use the same book!" True, but upon questioning I found you took the course three semester ago, so it wasn't adjacent semesters. Sorry. Buck up and spend the bucks.

Updated a number of class webpages, so things are well set up for Fall. Will work on my authorly webpages at dr-phil-physics.com over the weekend and bring them up to date. If I have the time.

Next Novel

I have an ending to a short story to revise for Abyss & Apex -- I haven't actually officially announced that yet -- so I am planning on starting the second sabbatical novel project on Monday. I think I'm going to spend some time expanding my short story "The Gravediggers" to a novel. This was my first story to appear in print, but as an Honorable Mention in the CrossTIME anthology contest it earned no money. It's 2009, which is 2004 + 5 years, so the short story should be released. But I'd have to rewrite it to bring it up to current 29th century universe specs (grin) and if I have to do that, why not look at the novel length? Note: I haven't actually done anything to the story, just taken the word count as the short story stands.

GRV Project

Due Date: none

Away!

And now I should probably back up my files and pack up for home. Maybe I won't get rained on heading out to the Blazer. (double-trouble-grin)

Dr. Phil

Or Why Facebook Is A Very Strange Place

A friend of ours was listed as having written on The Universe's wall on Facebook. Naturally intrigued, we had to check this out:

1 album
Universe Created about 8 months ago

The Universe wrote on its own wall.
August 14 at 12:40am

The Universe updated its profile. It changed Location.
July 6 at 10:14pm

Universe - 5 new photos
July 6 at 10:09pm

The Universe joined Facebook.
July 6 at 9:55pm

Apparently there is no time Before Facebook. (grin) The Universe is about 8 months old? Huh. And The Universe writing on its own wall? Would that be the Great Wall of Galaxies perchance?

But I particularly liked that in updating its profile, The Universe changed its location.

Facebook. It has a language all its own. Not saying it's right. Not saying it doesn't sound stupid. Just all its own.

Dr. Phil