it's...

since i went and posted all political, i thought, i should try and define where i lie on that big political/ideological spectrum... or rather, how far "left" (i am afterall lefthanded).

here's an analogy: imagine if you will that hippies had political clout. hippies scare me. at least the ones i've met, and from hearing lyrics in "hippie" songs. i have friends who like hippies, who like free love and all that. but i'm not really friends with any hippies. now if Edward Kennedy were President pandering to hippies, i'd be wondering what the conservative equivalent of the ultra-leftist hippie was. Instead we have this ultra-conservative "religous" right giving religion a bad name.

ignore this if you don't want to hear me talk about politics.

So where have i found the most well-laid out and enlightening bit about the potential supreme court justice replacement for sandra day o'connor? why BBC News of course.

They briefly profile the candidates. Looking them over there appear to be a few moderates who I think would be ok... oh, wait, no, no there aren't. looks like a roll call of the federalist society spliced with a bunch of ideologically conservative judges. hmm. that's not good. want an example of what i consider not good?

Reading about these justices I also came across the SCOTUS case Lawrence v. Texas which invalidated the criminal prohibition of homosexual sodomy. It involved the two guys pictured below (a 60 year old medical technologist and a 36 year old barbecue vender)A neighbor didn't like what they were doing and falsely reported to the police that a robbery was in progress; police came in, probably were a little bit surprised, and Lawrence and Garner were arrested. This went to the Texas supreme court which decided 2-1 that the law was unconstitutional. John Cornyn, listed by BBC as a potential SCOTUS nominee, was on that court at the time... Care to guess whether he was the one or among the two?

The most appealing candidate to me was Maura Corrigan... because wikipedia says absolutely nothing about her. This, however, is probably not a good thing... but we probably don't have to concern ourselves much about it:

When her name was mentioned as a possible successor to Sandra Day O' Connor, [Corrigan] said she was "flattered and honoured", but added: "I'm not holding my breath."

So now if i were to have to pick a candidate entirely based on ideology and the principle of "your enemy's enemy is your ally". Alberto Gonzalez. Qua? So perhaps he doesn't have any respect for human rights, and he got Bush out of jury duty so that he wouldn't have to reveal his secret DUI, and he might not be a huge fan of due process. that kinda paints him as an ally of my enemy, no? As Jon Stewart said, "Either Bush is going to pick Gonzalez, or Bush is totally being a dick to Gonzalez!"

well, so far I haven't been able to find anything about him wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade or not upholding equal social rights (maybe not so much the equal rights for all bit). and "some conservatives" find him objectionable... which i read as "the radical right".

Even before Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her plans to retire, some conservatives had begun warning Bush about selecting Gonzales, the former White House counsel, objecting to his record on abortion and affirmative action.

And he's already got a cool nickname to boot... Gitmo Gonzo! But you know what, this isn't at all based on judicial ability, and totally on ideology, which means i'm talking out of my ass. Then again, do you expect Bush to pick the candidate with the best judicial credentials? (And I would love for someone to tell me who the best candidate is based solely on judicial credentials.)

it was 45 degrees this morning as I road my bike to work and learned that 45 degrees is too cold to ride a bike places without a ski-mask. i was muttering to myself a lot and don't remember much of it, but I think at one point I mumbled the question to myself, "why didn't i wear the taj mahal." either sleep is making me crazy, or i'm cold.

and yes, from hence forth, this shall be a blog exclusively about how fucking cold i get and the inner monologue that runs through my head because of it. (why is it that we talk to ourselves when we're cold/tired? it's not just me, right?)

yep, this morning i walked outside and was greated by the sight of my very own breath. and it's a high pressure front we've got here. the cold front isn't going to hit until tomorrow. durr.

I waited, and somehow the price to fly out on saturday, the day I wanted to leave, finally dropped so I booked it. I'm visiting my sister Sarah in Barcelona! Leaving Saturday, November 19, hanging out with her until my grandma and little sister jessica arrive and we get our pension, and then heading back to Chicago on Monday, November 28th. I'm excited.

as a TA anyways.

it wasn't bad. mostly harmless. boring lecture, but i've little doubt Dave Meyer will be getting much more interesting as we start to get into things (at least for the students... but as the venerable Prof. John Ketterson says "it's amazing how much people love being told what they already know"). best of all it's at 2pm so i'll probably only sleep through class once or twice. oddest thing happened though: when i was introduced and stood up, some people cheered for me. nothing uproarious but, you know... isn't it odd that I got cheers? maybe it was because i did the whole raising hand to wave at the 200+ people who can now seek me out for help in astronomy. (i guess the scarrier part is that fact that this includes jen sharber! at least this is what tim leads me to beleive.)

also, i am (as was rumored in the comments) going to barcelona for thanksgiving, with my grandma and little sister, to visit my eldest sister who's studying abroad there this fall. i'll put up more exact dates when i book my flight, since, you know, why not. it might as well be google searchable.

and it looks like we may yet field a physics graduate student dodgeball team. so far there's six willing guys and two willing girls. need another girl to qualify for co-rec, which might be harder than it should be. regardless i want unis with this on them: ΔxΔp ≥ ih. so if you've got any good ideas for team names, i'd love to hear them.

if anyone reading this blog wants to play IM dodgeball (you qualify if you're a student, or somehow on northwestern's payroll), then you should let me know! i'm trying to field a team. why?

why not?

i passed.

so, mere minutes after finishing my last qualifying exam I receive an e-mail from Victor Nelson, nelson55@digitalpath.net, with the subject line "We Promis You Will Get a Diploma or a Degree"...

Get a Bachelors, Masters, MBA, or Doctorate (PhD)
We are able to send your certificate to all countries (WORLDWIDE)
Consider a more prosperous future with more money earning power!
No testing, studying, or interviews required.
Discreet and affordable. Everyone is eligible.

well, at least now i have a fallback plan.

see CNN article here

hey, i've got a solution here that'll make everyone happy: change the pledge of allegiance back to the way it was in 1924 before McCarthyism, when the phrase "under god" was inserted into it in 1954 (hell, SCOTUS doesn't even need to be involved; Congress could do this!... but i'm not holding my breath). Then, just leave that pause in there, heck, it could read "One nation _____ ___, indivisible...", and anyone who wants to say "under god" can, or whatever else they want to say. Even better, just leave out all the things you don't beleive in. like people who want to expand the patriot act could leave out liberty and/or justice, southerners who still drive around in cars that sport the navy jack could leave out "indivisible", and if you don't like everybody, leave out the "for all".

then we can all just move on to arguing about "In God We Trust" being printed on our monies.

Hey californian, atheist parent who keeps bringing these cases to court (i have no trouble with two of those three): Stop embarassing your kid! It could be worse for the poor little guy; he could be homeschooled!

"From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty." President Eisenhower (1954) after signing into law a bill to have "under God" added to the original pledge.

Fun fact: the pledge was written by Francis Bellamy (looking backward is worth reading) who was a socialist and wrote utopian socialist novels. he was also a baptist, and perhaps move self-evidently an american. in looking backward (1988) he is totally obsessed with the concept of music being pumped into rooms from far away using tubes, and then in 1895, Marconi (and Tesla) succeeded in making wireless transmissions, birthing the invention necessary for the development of radio broadcasts.

yesterday I found an invitation in my mailbox to the wesley ave. block party. w00t! looks like on Sept 24 there's gonna be a block party on my street. my immediate thought was, ooo, i have a really big wrench that would be perfect to uncrank that fire hydrant at the end of the street... but i dunno if the white-collar wesleys would be down with that.

I don't really like to link to articles, whereby i'm saying in effect, you're wasting your time reading my blog, go off and read this other blog (but in this case it's not a blog, it's an "editorial"). But this case is special. I'm not sure why I was so amused, but this piece i read in the Gaurdian I absolutely loved. I don't know what the writer has against "humanities graduate journalists" but they seem to have this "parody" of science and it seems to be at the root of bad science reporting:

Science is about groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality: they do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory and, most ridiculously, "hard to understand".

Sometimes I feel that way about my professors, but truly it is as off the mark as thinking all scientists are atheists (surprise!) or that science is hard to understand. Heck, for most of astronomy you don't need quantum mechanics if you are willing to beleive the theorists... of course, if you're an astronomer, you know the theorists can fit just about anything you see with 8-fold degeneracy, pick their favorite and won't know bugger about the real universe unless you spell it out for them, so you must be very distrustful. And if you're a theorist, you know that astronomers don't know bugger about quantum mechanics, so how could they possibly know about the real universe unless you spell it out for them, so you must be very distrustful. anyways, read this article. especially if you are a humanities graduate.

so on further reflection, i've realized my last little addendum to the TA post need not apply.

And although I can't think of anyone who this would effect, if you know me and are taking highlights, well, I will pretend not to know you during class... don't take offense

I won't actually be grading anything where I'll need to be impartial since everything i'm grading will be multiple choice or fill in the blank (hooray for mindless work!). I'll still be doing observing sessions on wednesday nights though, so it won't all be mindless work. And Office Hours. (I just know someone is going to walk into my office hours and ask me a question i should know but don't.) Anyways, now you can feign aggravation should you be taking Astronomy 120 and I pretend I don't know you, if and only if I do in fact know who you are, and remember at the time, and everyone reading this could care less right? well, too bad for you, i'm the one who's having to study all this quantum mechanics, and I want to keep typing words down here in this post so I can for just a few more precious minutes not have to think about quanutm mechanics... stupid quantum mechanics. stupid qualifying exams, stupid jack for going to graduate school, stupid world for exitsing. stupid keyboards for being created and allowing typos like "exitsing". Stupid word typo; how the hell do you spell that anyways. stupid great weather falling so perfectly in front of my exam and not after it. stupid magnetic fields cd for skipping when i hit the table. if i were listening to stupid squarepusher it wouldn't be a problem. *sigh* back to the studying.
(not to worry, i'm saner than i seem... or at least no less so than usual)

so how much did will and steve hate living together for five years, working on all the same fucking films, and having to pretend to like each other, you might ask? in a rare candid portrait we find the answer: this much.

from the first trip I made to the "other side of the lake", the infamous st. joe's trip with elisa, brendan (his dad's a judge) and mark. memorable moments included the greatest story i've ever told: "oh i have a story like that. so this one time, i saw, in... um, this thing... aw, fuck it." mark and I saw our first big boy, and brendan's ski/bike rack ominously unhinged as we entered the state of michigan. this is probably the best picture from the trip. it perfectly captures the spirit of it all: we saw a hotel with elisa's fiance's name, it looked pretty sleazy with lots of neon, we pulled up next to the sign, ran out in the cold, posed, and took the picture, then back to more cruising around at 2 a.m.

amazingly, we found a sign with a ross-ism on it in greek town. and we all had to stand by it and make it a big deal. which it was.

(yes, i know it's called B.A.R.T., Cameron, but i thought calling it the san francisco underground sounded better.)

I don't even know who this is a picture of, but I think it got partially exposed when I was messing about with my camera. turned out pretty cool, no?

two sunrises, and this lovely sunset in 24 hours, all seen over the lake. possibly a record for most memorable moments in one 24 hour period.

even more photos in what rather quickly became an ill-named "photo blogging period". This is of the old 140 foot radio telescope in Green Bank, WV. It's a rather unique telescope, with a polar mount which allows easy tracking of celestial motions. It also features the largest spherical bearing that i'm aware exists; diameter: 17-1/2 feet. It floats on an oil film 5 thousandths of an inch thick and supports the dish and polar mount. It was shut down for a few years because it's rather expensive to operate, and it's not at the cutting edge of radio astronomy anymore, but it's still a great telescope and quite useful. I'm not sure who is now funding it, but it's been running for the past two trips I taken to green bank.

What I love most about this picture is that you can see the arm and subreflector of the 110m GBT sticking up just above the fog.

So this morning was fun... At about 10am I got an e-mail asking me what times I was unnable to TA for Fall Quarter. Um, I was not aware that I would be TAing in the Fall... (all the time was not an appropriate response). So I send an e-mail off to Farhad saying basically "um, can we talk..." and I get one back saying pretty much "of course you are TAing, when you go to caltech or somewhere else, then maybe you won't have to". You know, I certainly don't mind the whole TA duties. It's a grad school right of passage... but you know, no one bothered to tell me! I just assumed that with all the research and proposals I've got coming up and no talk of any TAing from Farhad, that well, I was RAing. Farhad, apparently assumed I would assume I was TAing. So this lack of communication miffed me a bit, because he's been telling me there's no funding trouble. Now I'll be more suspicious and a bit more keen to go after my own grants, and see where my grant money goes (good I learn these lessons now I suppose).

As of one this afternoon though, I got my TA assignment. I'm going to be the new David Lin (well, hopefully not for quite so long). Highlights of Astronomy for Prof. Meyers. This is of course (relatively) awesome; if I have to TA (which apparently I do for the entire !@#$ing year) then I'd want to TA this class. Also, it will presumably allow me to go out to LA to work with Jeonghee Rho in October. I'm a bit more worried about being able to go visit Sarah in Barcelona (maybe in December now), but the news I got this morning seems a bit better.

Oh, but what's that you say? CAESAR says there are 91 students enrolled in this class already... ok, maybe it's not quite such a blessing as it seemed. Good thing I'm already squatting on ta.jack at gmail.com

And although I can't think of anyone who this would effect, if you know me and are taking highlights, well, I will pretend not to know you during class... don't take offense

so i've got my qualifying exams coming up again, and with all the research, moving, etc. I haven't had time to write, let alone construct my thoughts, so this is going to become a photo blog until I get through mid-september madness... I'll try to do one a day to make it worthwhile. while i'm busy, i just throw some of my favorite pictures at you.

here's the first: (well, maybe i'll make it two) these two pictures were taken while visiting cameron, spring break 2002. At the exploratorium they've got this little traingular mirror setup. Made for great pictures. I love the wonder you can see in cameron's eyes even though her camera covers most of her face.



can you find which will is real?