it's...

update: Mia pointed out an album I was aware of but wasn't aware of how great it was. Definitely makes my list. Thanks for pointing it out Mia!

Peter, Bjorn and John - Writer's Block

So Tim was asking me the other day if there was any good music from 2006. He'd apparently been enraptured with 1930's pop music. Well, I've got some time at home, so I went through my iPod and here's what I came up with. I'm not claiming that these are the best ablums of 2006, they're just the ones I've enjoyed the most. Let me know what you liked and what I might have missed (cause I DO miss a lot).

My Favorites
	TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain It's hard to call one album my favorite this year, but I keep coming back to this as the best album of 2006. It's a realization of everything promised on the Young Liars EP and then some. Just gets better every time I listen to it.
	Beirut - Gulag Orkestar It would be equally hard to pick one single from this year... unless of course you've heard "Postcards from Italy". I still don't understand why Pitchfork wasn't all about this album. Well, Zach Condon (who is pretty much the band) is only 20. More great things are coming.
	Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood So many haunting, beautiful, amazing songs. Who besides Neko could make Tim and I love a song about John the Baptist? And man did I get endless compliments about how cool my concert shirt was.
	Love is All - 9 Times That Same Song Such a fun album. Songs that make you want to jump up and down. Songs to rock out to. Songs that are just great. Short and sweet... and high concept!
	Phoenix - It's Never Been Like That An album too good to be merely a guilty pleasure. This is the way pop music should be, imho. It's the easiest album to get into to come from France since Daft Punk's "Discovery". High praise.
	Destroyer - Rubies I'm including this despite the fact that Dan Bejar insists on doing all his New Pornographers gigs piss drunk and barely able to walk. I let this album be for a bit and came back to it and it really came together. Songs like "Painter in Your Pocket" and "European Oils" are just too good. "Broken Flowers" is pretty great too. And "Rubies"... There are many good tracks. Let's leave it at that.
	Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche Had this been actually combined with Illinois into a double album it would have been epic (not that Illinois wasn't). But on it's own, the Avalanche is some great pieces of Illinois that slipped into 2006. Just chalk it up to a most welcome and unexpected surprise.
	Vetiver - To Fine Me Gone The kind of album you put on at sunrise after having just camped out under the stars when you're driving across the western united states on your way to Los Angeles. I can almost feel the stubble on my face, the sleet in my eyes, the sand between my toes and the dry still heat. It probably doesn't deserve to be on a "best of 2006" list, but I have plans for this album. It's a favorite.
Guilty Pleasures
I do not vouch for any musical value in these albums. Just pure enjoyment.
	Nouvelle Vague - Bande A Part All praise to Will. A Brazilian Bossa-nova band who draws their name both from the French film movement and the music they cover is quite a find. The parade of sultry voices and re-imagined classic 80's songs was just enough to edge Cansei de Ser Sexy as my top Brazilian guilt pleasure.
	Whitest Boy Alive - Dreams You may be cool, but you're not Erlend Øye cool. No one else is that cool. He's like a European Beck. But cooler. Bands called "Kings of Convenience" and "Whitest Boy Alive". An album called "Quiet is the New Loud". Covered Harry Nillson. He's just too cool.
Under-appreciated Masterpieces
Not "unappreciated" but I certainly didn't give them enough listening time. They belong amongst the best of 2006, but I've no clue as to where.
	Joanna Newsom - Ys I keep oscillating wildly back and forth on this album. Sure, it's a masterpiece. But sometimes all the songs sound the same. My mom thought this sounded a lot like Joni Mitchell, and honestly, I'm not a huge fan of her. Maybe that's it. But I'll give it time. It is a masterpiece. I just don't know how much I like it.
	The Knife - Silent Shout Hey, wasn't "Heartbeats" a great song? Yes. The Knife has obviously moved on while everyone else was just catching up. Still it's how they've moved on. People who just got to know them this year probably aren't ready for this album (I wasn't). Sometimes it sounds so synthetic it can be an uncomfortable listen. It's a fine line to walk, but they walk it well and keep things interesting. (And why weren't these guys in the ESC?)

A "top 20 tracks of 2006" will be available upon request.

My six month visit to Pasadena is delayed (by three months)... again. Summer 2007. There are good things about this, like the fact that I can be 99% sure I will have data when I go as opposed to 50% sure. And that I will have time to wrap up my many VLA and GBT projects. And that I will actually miss a bit of the Chicago winter when I do finally go. But it's still frustrating to keep having these delays happen. I must sound like a broken record the way I keep telling people I'm going to go to Pasadena... Comforting to know that when I do finally get out there I will have a great project waiting for me. Hopefully all the people I know there won't have left by then.

Now to figure out how to extend my lease by a few months.

In my tireless effort to meld film with the physical sciences, I've searched for physics and astronomy papers which referene movies... blatantly... in their titles. What can I say, I'm too lazy to write a piece of code to do this properly.

This was inspired by one of my favorite papers, "The mouse that soared: high-resolution X-ray imaging of the pulsar-powered bow shock G359.23-0.82" by Brian Gaensler. You see there just so happens to be a neutron star (pulsar) being shot through the interstellar medium creating a bowshock which in radio wavelengths at least, certainly resembles a mouse. It of course references the great Peter Sellars vehicle The Mouse That Roared, which if you're reading this you probably have already seen.

Without further ado, here's the best I could cull from ADS...

• The Magnificent Seven: Magnetic fields and surface temperature distributions
  Author: F. Haberl
  http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609066
  
  
• Raiders of the lost AdS
  Author: Kumar, J.
  http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0003163
  
  
• Apocalypse Soon
  Author: Jackson, J.C.
  http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0109380
  
  
• Bianchi type IX asymptotical behaviours with a massive scalar field: chaos strikes back
  Authors: Stephane Fay, Thierry Lehner
  http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0509071
  
  
• Star Wars - the Astronomers Strike Back
  Authors: Mundell, I.
  NATURE V.357, NO.6378/JUN11, P. 430, 1992
  a little too on the nose
  
  
• And there are some interesting riffs on Dr. Strangelove...
  
  • Peer-led instruction for a qualifying exam preparatory course or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the PhD Qualifying Exam (Christensen & Engelhardt 2006)
    
  • An Eclectic Journey Through Experimental Nuclear Physics, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Data (Norman 2005)
    
  • Copenhagen Computation: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bohr (Mermin 2003)
    
  • Accretion Disk Turbulence, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rotation (Socrates 2002)
    
  • How i Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Gauge Theory of the T-J Model (Tikofsky 1994)

But all in all, there aren't that many papers I could find that obviously riff on a film, which is a shame. Obviously this will have to be at the forefront of my contributions to astronomy. Let me know if you come across any more. I'm keeping a tally.

To spell out my general dissappointments:

No puns involving "The Usual Suspects", "Gone with the Wind" or "se7en"

No physics paper invoking the phrase: "silence of the lambda"

"Back to the Future" is waaay over-referenced.

No paper seems to reference a Monty Python film (but there was a paper that has it in the title... "Design Flaws in the Implementation of the Ziggurat and Monty Python methods" which only sounds like it was written by John Cleese).

Seems like I am congratulating a new doctorate of physics from the astronomy side of northwestern every three months now... not that there's anything wrong with that (well, unless every university is putting them out at that rate. a crowded job market is not something I want to think about).

Today the man of the hour is Dr. Casey Law. This one is a little special for me too. Casey is Farhad's first grad student to make it through. He's boldly saying to me, see, it can be done. Casey has set a great precedent. Hopefully I too can graduate in four years(total) and get a job in the Amsterdam at the ground floor of a great new science endeavor. Alright, I'd settle for five years and a postdoc with at least 50% research time. There's going to be a bit of a gap now that Casey has wrapped things up. I'll be Farhad's only grad student, won't have him to help me out with data reductions, and he and his wife Jessica are just great people to have around. They seem to have a knack for living in places which are great to visit though, so I bet I will cross paths with them sometime in the future.

And reassuringly, Farhad proved himself very competent with post-doctoral celebrations, which will presumably dovetail quite nicely with the Physics Holiday party later today.

Something else I'd been wanting to mention, so I'll throw it in here. About a month ago former office mate and excellent radio astronomy resource Doug Roberts let me play with the latest greatest toy from AT Vislab... Pixzilla. Twelve 15" LCD screens each displaying a small fraction of 24 million pixels, which in this case were devoted to Spitzer IRAC and MIPS surveys of the inner 1500 light years of our Galaxy (re: the galactic center). Supposedly it's not on display for student use at the library. There are also some great historical maps to peruse. Someday I'd like to give a public talk on all these Galactic Center surveys, including some data cribbed from Casey's thesis. I'll add it to my list...