Miracles And Tragedies Of Cosmic Proportions

my first year of college, after the spring semester bookstore post-rush dinner (which for some reason was held in may instead of february!), i was being driven back to campus by pat, our accountant, when all of a sudden i remembered something i had to do before it was too late. i looked up at the still-light sky so intently that my carmates must seriously have thought i was crazy. but it was, after all, the perfect evening to be craning my neck -- clear, relatively warm, and homework-free.

so i veritably raced into mcafee, where i frantically dialed my roommate and another friend (there were no cell phones in our lives then!), changed my jacket and shoes, and trotted to the observatory to ogle at mercury, venus, mars, jupiter and saturn all lined up in a row, visible with the naked eye and through the 6" refractor telescope.

that evening was amazing. i rediscovered for the 720th time just what a small speck earth is in the larger scheme of things. and boy, is it a large scheme. thanks for that headsup, DEL! a fabulous, annotated picture of what we saw -- minus the random man with binoculars -- is at:
<http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020429.html>

if i weren't such a dedicated english major and geoff groupie, i would quite readily admit that astro 101 was my favourite class in college. that said, i still think about star stuff often, and not just on clear nights at sea face park and the dome. and when someone recently commented on the stars, galaxies and cosmology textbook on my bookshelf, the refrain "the farther out you look in space, the further back you look in time" started to run through my head. i've lost a lot of the other detailed knowledge from 2002, but i'm still interested in knowing more about our place in the universe. which, as i said, is huge.

so anyway, i was quite disappointed to read of this loss:

Eye on Cosmos Is Lost to Short Circuit on Hubble

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: January 30, 2007

The Hubble Space Telescope is flying partly blind across the heavens, a result of a short circuit on Saturday morning in its most popular instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

NASA engineers reported yesterday that most of the camera’s capabilities, including the ability to take the sort of deep cosmic postcards that have inspired the public and to track the mysterious dark energy splitting the universe to the ends of time, had probably been lost for good.

In a telephone news conference, Hubble engineers and scientists said the telescope itself was in fine shape and would continue operating with its remaining instruments, which include another camera, the wide-field planetary camera 2, or wfpc2, and an infrared camera and spectrograph named Nicmos.

“Obviously, we are very disappointed,” Preston Burch, program manager for the telescope, said at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., noting that the camera had basically met its five-year design lifetime. The Hubble telescope, Mr. Burch said, still has significant science capability.

Mr. Burch and his colleagues said it was unlikely that they would be able to repair the camera during the next Hubble servicing mission, which is scheduled for September 2008. On that mission, astronauts will replace the wide-field camera with a powerful new version, wfpc3, which will extend the telescope’s vision to ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths and restore the lost capabilities. They will also install a new ultraviolet spectrograph and make many other pressing repairs.

Noting that the five days of spacewalks for that mission were already full, and that changing things to fix the camera would cost time and money, Dr. Burch said, “At first blush, this doesn’t look attractive.”

The Advanced Camera for Surveys was installed on the telescope in March 2002, and it has been the space telescope’s workhorse. Among its feats, in 2003 the camera took the deepest photograph of the cosmos ever taken, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, showing young galaxy fragments only one billion to two billion years after the Big Bang. In the most recent round of proposals from astronomers to use the telescope, about two-thirds required the advanced camera.

The camera had been operating on its backup electrical system since last summer, however, when electrical problems in its main system caused it to shut down for a while. Now the backup system has failed, dooming its ability to take wide-field or high-resolution images.

The camera may yet be operated in what the engineers called “solar blind mode,” at ultraviolet wavelengths to observe phenomena like auroras on Jupiter.

The electrical problems apparently did not spread to the rest of the telescope. Rick Howard, of NASA headquarters, said: “The fuse did what it was supposed to do. It saw a high current, and it popped. It protected the rest of the telescope.”

Astronomers said that the Space Telescope Science Institute had developed a contingency plan of observations that could go on without the camera and that there was no shortage of astronomers who would want to use it. Some of the telescope’s most crucial and high-visibility programs, however, will be delayed.

Adam Riess of the space telescope institute, who has used the Hubble telescope to search for supernova explosions in the distant universe to gauge the effects of dark energy on cosmic history, said these explosions would now be out of reach until the new camera was installed.

Still, Dr. Riess said in an e-mail message, it was a great camera. “Although it only lasted 4.9 years, it was only rated for 5 years,” he said, “so we really got our money’s worth.”

the famous hubble deep field image (warning: image may take a while to load) is at:
<http://www.firstpr.com.au/astrophysics/hubble-deep-field/hubble-deep-field-northern-detail-rw.bmp>

that is huge.

Slackerface

i'm not going to apply for that last fellowship (yeah, the prestigious one that's sat on the to-do list and mocked me every time i looked at it for the last 3 months.) bite me.

for one thing, the deadline is feb 1 and i've been super late getting on the ball (although i have noone to blame but myself). secondly, the fact that i don't have to apply is a huge relief (almost all the programs i've applied to will offer me full financial support for 5+ years if i'm admitted and choose to attend). thirdly, the financial aid forms total 18 pages, and require extensive sets of USD figures i don't have. fourth, and corollary to the first and third points, dad -- whose expert skills i need to help me fill half the stuff out -- will shoot me if i tell him i need to start working on this now for submission by next week.

but as if all this wasn't enough to deter my erstwhile good intentions, the actual application totals 11 pages, and contains topic after essay topic (beyond the usual why do you want to pursue this graduate degree, what exactly do you want to study, and why have you picked x university in which to do so) that i don't particularly want to write about:
"what motivates you? how and why?"
"describe a time you were under pressure to make a critical decision. how did you respond? what was the impact of your decisions? faced with the same situation today, would you do anything differently?"
"discuss a piece, or pieces, of art, literature, music, or film which you created or in which you have participated. why is it meaningful to you? what have you learned?"
"comment on the following quote: "when admissions officers gather to create a freshman class, there is a large elephant in the room," wrote jennifer delahunty britz, in the new york times last week [march 23, 2006]: "the desire to minimize gender imbalance in their classes." britz, the admissions dean at kenyon college, wrote that her institution gets far more applications from women than from men and that, as a result, men are "more valued applicants." – chronicle of higher education; march 27, 2006"
and worst of all:
"what are your long-term career plans?"

(there's also a narrative autobiography, but we won't even go there.)

if you find yourself dying to work on questions like these, please go get your head checked. asapkthxbye.

yes, it's a lot of money, but frankly, at this stage, all i really want to do in life is watch salaam-e-ishq, go to goa next month, and take naps when i'm not randomly counting from 1-100 or conjugating simple verbs for french class. or eating blueberry cheesecake at moshe's.

mmmm, cheesecake. far more interesting than fellowship applications. non?

I Just Dream Ran!

(well, i for one dream walked, but i'll let that slide.)

<http://mumbaimarathon.indiatimes.com/>

6 km in a little over an hour ain't bad when you've spent the last few months being completely lazy and inert. and bombay is so awesome that when slowpokes like you finish, sweating and pink in the face, you are surrounded by thousands of other people all around you who are shouting and cheering and clapping and dancing and singing and waving pom-poms and sparking off little bursts of confetti and celebrating the spirit du jour rather than dissecting such trivial things as timings.

pick@flick[r]: <http://flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/365718310/>

good times, right from the newfound bounce in my skechers to the post-race tottering off to the bombay gym for pineapple juice.

Say What?

from an NYT article on the increasing ubiquity of advertising:
Last month, after some “Got Milk?” billboards started emitting the odor of chocolate chip cookies at San Francisco bus stops, many people complained, and the city told the California Milk Processing Board to turn off the smell.

from the first day of french class:
teacher: "when you think of french, or france, what comes to your mind?"
totally ghaat but very enthusiastic student: "the eiffel tower, and leonardo da vinci."

and from the talented hand of one ms. spacecoyote (<http://spacecoyote.com>): the simpsonzu! <http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/46036660/>
(mirror pick@flick[r], in case she gets so popular the link dies: <http://flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/358155313/>)

Five Things You Don't Know About Me

a meme by way of librarygrrrl (blog at <http://www.librarygrrrl.net>):

(if you’re not interested in me -- and no reason why you should be -- move on now!)

1. i first started reading at age 3. the first word i ever read was "there". by age 4ish i was on noddy and mr. men; i had special library privileges at school and my classmates called me the dictionary. seems i took pride in my nerd status even back in the day.

2. i fixate on my eyebrows. they are a constant source of annoyance, chagrin, and dismay to me. sometimes i think i don't care what they look like, other times i pluck them silly. they've gone from arched to curved to practically non-existent (always asymmetrical) -- no wonder i used to call them caterpillars. if i had one wish in the world, it would be for all varieties of facial hair to be non-issues in my life.

3. i can fake signatures and handwriting quite easily. (watch your checkbooks, people.)

4. i will only wear levi's jeans.

5. i'm obsessive-compulsive about planning and documentation: lists, ratings, memories, calendars, hours i've worked... my netflix account contained about 600 movie ratings (because i couldn't just let movies i'd watched sit unrated, could i now); my filofaxes always held extra post-it pads so that i could write out lists and then joyfully check things off them; my first widget on the personalized google homepage was a to-do list applet; i'd print out and highlight and categorize credit card and bank statements; i collected years' worth of movie stubs back in the US. when i first moved to boston in august 2001 -- and then again in august 2005 -- i'd make daily expense lists down to the cent. years before that i went through a phase where i wrote down what clothes i wore every day so that i wouldn't repeat too often. i have lists of books i've read, lists of people i've made out with, a list of imdb's top 250 with how many i've watched plus when i watched them and with whom... applications for college and grad school involved thirty-column colour-coded excel files. when i went off to college, i borrowed and edited a friend's detailed packing list so that i would have documentation of exactly how many pairs of socks/shoes/jeans/whatevers i was carrying (ditto for packing up my stuff after year 1 -- every item in my 4 boxes was put on a list, in case -- i don't know in case what). my diaries, until i started blogging, used to have to be daily so that i would remember everything. these phases don't last long, but when they're on, they're very involved. i figure out what i'm going to wear to events weeks, sometimes months, in advance. yeah, like i said: involved. and exhausting. i'm currently in a state of great privation because i don't have any to-do lists going. i make do by using google calendar to tabulate my hours such that all events and tasks are documented. it'll do until i go off to grad school.

ok, i realize that i sound like a psycho, but i'm not. really. and anyway, that's an intense enough blog post for jan 1 :P i tag no-one, again, although anyone who feels particularly inspired by this list can go right ahead and put one on his or her own blog.