And yet again, a post with absolutely nothing to do with math or science... :)
If you happen to live in the part of the U.S. where people know what a Publix is...
and you happen to tolerate spicy foods...
and you are actually reading my blog (oh wait, that's... no one)...
you must go to Publix at this very moment and buy the Publix brand HOT All Natural Salsa. Well, okay, be a wimp and buy medium or mild if you have to, but seriously - good stuff, even for a store brand. I just totally ruined my dinner by finishing off what was left of the Tostitos with this stuff. Yum!
I've been back home a while now and this post is long overdue, but getting caught back up from the missed school and work days was quite the rough patch. So... before leaving for DragonCon I listened to a couple of podcasts providing some advice for "surviving" the experience. Some of those ideas were swell and I thought I'd like to share them and add some thoughts of my own.
In no particular order:
1. Save some money - bring food. We drag a cooler and a tub with a tiny microwave hidden inside every year, plus another tub of assorted snacks, soup, bread, peanut butter, and so on. No one has ever called us on it or kicked us out, not even for the microwave (but your experience might vary). We bring plastic bowls and plates and ware and I am very careful to make sure these are washed and put away so as not to upset housekeeping or make the room smelly.
2. Wear good shoes. You will be doing some walking, and by some I mean lots. And Atlanta is uphill, all the way, and in both directions, or at least it seems like it sometimes. Plus, a point which will come next, it will probably rain, so you will want shoes in which you can climb wet stairs and in which you will not bust your arse on wet marble, tile, or shiny cement. Yes, that was me...
3. Yes, it WILL rain. Probably. The con is scheduled during hurricane season after all, so you can almost count on it raining at least one day, so pack an umbrella, even a small purse size one that you won't mind sticking in a backpack as you go. Also bring shoes that can handle getting a bit wet.
4. Bring a backpack or bag of some kind. You'll pick up swag, or bring a snack or bottle of water, or carry a camera, or a phone, or a notebook, or books you want signed, or the pocket program, or... whatever. Ya know, the umbrella. And you will get sick of carrying it all or trying to sit comfortably with too much crap in your pockets.
5. Consider a sweater. This one, of course, depends entirely on whether or not you are a "cold person" or a "hot person." In Atlanta in August the temperature is something close to that of the sun. Okay, I exaggerate, but it is generally in or near the 90's with much humidity. Outside, that is. Inside the hotels, restaurants, and shops, folks will tend to counteract this heat with arctic conditions. If you tend to get cold you will be miserable. If you tend to get hot you will enjoy this effect, except for when you're packed into a standing room only panel with smelly strangers and the AC suddenly doesn't seem to work so well any longer. Oops...
6. Plan. Obviously you don't want to schedule every minute of every day, but... plan some time to rest, some time to eat, and some time to shower. Please. Hungry, tired people get crabby and smelly people get... smellier.
7. Check out DragonCon TV. There was something new about DCTV this year. They started showing some of the mega panels an hour or two later, the ones that everyone wanted to go to but no one could actually get in to - like Battlestar Galactica stars, Star Gate stars, Whedonverse stars, and so on. Check the DCTV listing and see if you can just watch the panel from the comfort of your room. I mean, what's better than lounging naked while listening to Nathan Fillion talk?
So that's it for the moment. I'll have more about the stuff I did soon, and hopefully some pictures if I can get a link to the 300+ pictures our roomie took. I'll just wrap up with some links that are related to things I've talked about here:
DragonCon - They have tons of fan photo galleries posted.
DCTV - They have video of some of their commercials and bumpers and videos.
DragonPod - The podcast of DragonCon with information and advice about going to the con. Scroll down the page a bit to find "Bonus Episode #1" with Mur Lafferty's advice on surviving DCon, which inspired this post.
I will have much to say about our latest DragonCon experience shortly. But, we just got home last night (Tuesday) and had to get back into the swing of work this morning, and I have Astronomy Lab tonight. As soon as I have some time that doesn't involve catching up with homework, unpacking or doing laundry, I will give a full report.
I got my Astronomy textbook this week! I got mine used from an Amazon seller for cheap-cheap, so I didn't expect to get the software with it, but I did - and the EULA sticker is even still intact. The professor doesn't require it, but planetarium software is always cool to have...
Looking through the pages I found a disturbing little blurb in the sidebar, though. The book says that many people have trouble with the difference between the terms "galaxy" and "solar system." Really? Though, I guess that follows from the mindset where the U.S. is the only important part of the earth and the earth is the only important part of the galaxy. Forget heliocentric, we may never get past self-centric...
On a slightly-but-not-really related note, the family went to Kennedy Space Center again this past Monday. My beloved and I took my younger sister there for her first visit to Florida. We took the Up Close tour again, and got to see some very nifty stuff. As we approached the VAB the tour guide noticed that they were starting to move the shuttle's external fuel tank across the road from storage to the VAB. The doors of the building were open and we could see and snap pictures of the pale orange giant. It was lying horizontally and we could just see the end of it as they prepared to move it. Then, later, as we were returning from the launch pads to actually stop at the VAB we got there just in time to see them pulling the last half of the tank into the VAB itself. We got some great pictures of the nose cone and about half of it sticking out of the wide open VAB doors. Most cool! The driver parked as quickly as he could and we all dashed off of the bus and down the grass strip to get as close as the fencing would allow to watch the tank disappear into the darkness... Hopefully my beloved will transfer the vacation photos to me soon so that I may post some of those here.
At the end of the Up Close tour they drop everyone off at the Saturn V center, which I highly recommend seeing - I think that the free bus tour goes there as well. The Saturn V museum is probably one of the best things at KSC. Then, from there you can take a short bus ride to the facility where they assemble the pieces of the International Space Station for a ride up on the shuttles. (This was the first time we were able to go there... when we went at Christmas time, the place was empty and all the workers had gone for Christmas break.) Anyway, you can tour some mock-ups of the ISS modules and then go up to an overlook and watch the real peoples working on the real things. There were about 6 to 8 of the modules in view and a few people in clean suits running around some of them. It was just amazing to think that you were getting a look at something that would soon be orbiting our planet.
I finally got registered for my Intro to Astronomy and Lab classes today - woot! Classes begin at UCF and SCC on August 25th, so only three short weeks of sweet freedom left... but that's okay, because I'm very excited now to finally be able to start on my Astronomy minor for real.
I'm slightly worried about what the teacher will be like. He doesn't fare well on Rate My Professor, but I'm going to chalk that up to students who take astronomy for an "easy" science credit, but wind up with a passionate science geek for a teacher. Some of the comments made the guy sound like your basic nerd, and man do I love nerds... so hopefully it will all be fine.
Hmmm... maybe it's about time to break into the "Gravitation" chapter that we skipped in Physics I class.
I can't wait!
The Discovery Channel website has an article on a different idea for locating extrasolar planets that are more earth-like... water, atmosphere, maybe habitable. The idea is to take a look at earth the way we are trying to look at other planets - from a distance. Of course, we can't get as far away from earth as we have to be from anything else we're looking at, but hey, that's what math is for, right? At the moment it seems that scientists are making some use of Deep Impact's telescopes to peek back at earth as Deep Impact makes its lonely way out to comet Hartley 2.
The article says:
For example, at a planet-hunters conference in France last month, researchers reported that from the perspective of space, light from Earth twinkles as clouds pass in and out of view.
"A distant extraterrestrial observer would see Earth as a point source of light that varies in brightness in a repeating, predictable pattern, just like spots on a spinning ball," Science magazine reported in an article last month about the research, which was headed by Enric Palle of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands.
More about Deep Impact's new missions can also be found here.
I found this while wandering around Shakesville. Give it a minute. The first little bit doesn't seem to make sense, but then it gets... fascinating...
And now, of course, the answer to: "Who the hell is this nerd?"
I ran across an article full of niftiness today while surfing at work. You know, instead of working...
From Live Science and Space.com, apparently not only are people emitting waves of noise out into deep space that might some day attract the attention of some far-flung alien being, but the Earth itself is blasting out radio waves approximately 10,000 times greater than anything we measly inhabitants can manage. The radio waves are created by "charged particles from the solar wind collide with Earth's magnetic field." The sounds are not audible to Earthlings, even dogs, because they are blocked by Earth's ionosphere (the last layer of atmosphere around our planet).
Even more nift lies in the fact that any planet which produces an aurora also produces these sounds, so scientists can also add this to the arsenal of planet hunting techniques. Locally, it seems Jupiter and Saturn also produce these radio waves.
The Space.com link above has an audio clip of the sounds. Oddly, the link to listen says "Buy Now," but when you click the link it just plays, and no fee is required. The sound is eerie, but pretty cool.
I don't want to give the impression that UCF is a bad place to study Astronomy, by the way. They do not offer a major for it, only a minor, but by all indications the faculty is working hard to make a fine planetary astronomy program. The school does offer a Physics major, and those interested in Astronomy probably take the Physics major and fill that out with the Astronomy minor (and hence why the school generally doesn't bother with the AST lab mentioned in the previous post - most of their students are already taking Physics II and it's lab, so few students were signing up for the AST lab).
In fact, UCF researchers have applied for and gotten themselves rather a large share of time on the Spitzer Space Telescope as referenced here on the UCF News & Information Page. The school also has its own observatory, the Robinson Observatory, with "a 20" Ritchie Chretien Telescope" which was just installed within the last year to replace an older, smaller telescope.
They are currently running several very interesting research projects with the Space Research Initiative, JPL, the National Science Foundation, and of course NASA, as it is practically next door. I'm looking forward to getting into the more serious classes (and, admittedly, a little terrified). Hope they don't mind an English major mucking about and getting in the way. At this rate I'd be happy to sweep the floors and run for coffee if I could just be close to the research looking at or for extrasolar planets!
I'm pretty close to being able to get into the Astronomy class that I want in the Fall semester - at a different college. Maybe I've mentioned before the oddity that UCF offers Intro to Astronomy (AST 2002, at least at UCF) but they don't offer the lab... ever... or at least not anytime in the past or next couple of years. But the lab is kinda sorta required for my Astronomy minor - I could get around this requirement by taking the Physics II lab, of course, but that, you see, would mean that I was taking Physics II. (Do. Not. Want.) Yes, I understand that my whining permits were all revoked when I got that B in Physics I, but it was extremely painful and required a huge amount of help from my beloved, and is an experience that I do not wish to repeat, much less amplify.
So, I am attempting to take Intro and the lab at the other local community college (Seminole Community College) because they are the only place that offers the lab. They also have a cute little planetarium where they do shows on the weekend and for student field trips. Anyway, my transient student form has been approved by the hundred or so (by which I mean three) people through whom it had to pass by at UCF. Now I am waiting on a single approval from the registrar at SCC. Come on dude, or dudette... don't leave me hanging!
