In which I am still alive

30Jan07

Term starts next week. Consequently, I’ve been madly working on finishing a few projects left over from last term and forbidding myself the luxury of blogitude. Sorry bout that, world. Anyway, I couldn’t take it any longer, so here I am.

I neglected to reshift my sleep-schedule after my last observing night, so I’ve been completely nocturnal for the past week. Whenever I’m on night-schedule for more than a few days, I reacclimate such that darkness shocks me wide awake and bright sunlight makes me hell of sleepy. This is fine for observing purposes, and sleeping in sunlight means I won’t suffer a horrible vitamin D deficiency and die of rickets. But it makes it that much harder to switch back. Oh, the trials of astronomers!

Today, in a stunning display of willpower, I dragged myself downstairs at the ungodly hour of 2 PM. I had breakfast, and checked my email, and read the news, and escaped – just – a perilous nap-in-the-armchair beast. Then I went outside, where the light beamed garishly, indecently, from house and sidewalk. It was almost pornographic. I felt like telling the world to put some darkness on, you can’t go out looking like that, what will people think?

And now, at last, the sun has set. I’m off to watch the IAP Integration Bee. Yeah, that’s right. That’s why I go to MIT.

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Technology, Teaching, & TEAL, Part 1: MIT’s Hotshot Innovation

22Jan07

Update: Something befell one of the paragraphs. Anyway, it’s back now, so hopefully the post will actually make sense.

Call me a cynic, call me a curmudgeon, but the recent and burgeoning crop of “educational technology” programs scares the bodily substances out of me. It’s not that I have anything against technology – Youth of Today, remember? – but the very word seems to make Important People froth at the mouth, and that’s usually a bad sign. It seems to me that the technology these people implement too often ends up being a) gratuitous, b) distracting, or c) irrelevant – but I also suspect that the programs get an undeservedly bad rap. So I thought I’d take a look at a few of the fancypants “innovative learning” schemes I’ve encountered. Today’s installment: MIT’s beloved pet, TEAL.

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Chocolate + Science = HOT

20Jan07

January at MIT goes by the name of IAP, for Independent Activities Period. That means we can do WHATEVER WE WANT. There are a few classes offered for credit, but most of the Activities are purely for fun & excitement & maybe some nerd cred. So yesterday I went to a chocolate lecture. It was not, alas, a talk in a chocolate hall by a chocolate professor, but a lecture on the science behind fine chocolate, sponsored by the MIT Lab for Chocolate Science. I can see you salivating. Here are the cool parts- from memory, so no hotshot details; I didn’t take notes.

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…but only darkness visible

19Jan07

That’s the sky on Mt. Hopkins right now. Woe is me, and woe is a whole list of young supernovae.

It’s hard to figure out a good sleep schedule for winter observing. I work from, say, 8 PM to 9 AM, but there’s no point staying completely nocturnal all the time, since I have things to do during the day. Also, I like sunlight. Today I woke up at 7 PM and I’ll probably go to bed around noon, but of course my friends won’t wake up until 1 PM. Alas! Looks like a lonely cloudy night for me.

Good thing I have a blog, hm?

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What does this even mean?

18Jan07

Via {metadatta}: Nature Publishing Group has a press release touting something called Nature Education, which is…what, exactly?

Nature Education will take a non-traditional approach to the rapidly-evolving college education market, focusing primarily on creating leading edge, digitally-based, learning solutions in biology, chemistry, and physics.

…

Instructors and students are thirsty for learning environments that move beyond traditional textbooks and even course management systems to provide a highly interactive and personalized experience that simultaneously builds understanding, inspires career and research aspirations, and connects the student to a worldwide community of likeminded thinkers.

Let me commend NPG on their finely crafted press release, which combines maximal buzzwords with minimal actual information. I only hope they do not really mean

Nature Education will implement half-baked ideas to keep up with kids these days, using some gleaming gizmos, and maybe even the internets, to confuse and annoy everybody.

There is more to be said about this. But it is past 9 in the morning and I am all kinds of sleepy.

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The Learned Astronomer

17Jan07

I’m observing tonight.

Gnarly old physicists like to caution children that astronomy is not all fun & stargazing – that, in fact, nobody looks at stars these days, or at swirly galaxies, or really at anything celestial or most things on earth. There is no LOOKING. There are only COMPUTERS.

Which is not true. There’s actually a quite masterful combination of looking and computers, and it’s called optical astronomy. INGENIOUS!

I work for a Harvard grad student who’s studying type Ia supernovae. For five or six nights out of every month, he has sole use of a lovely 1.2m telescope on a mountain in Arizona. The wonders of modern technology (cf. COMPUTERS) allow us to control the telescope and camera from Cambridge and monitor the images (cf. LOOKING) as they’re taken. We still need someone on the mountain to open the dome, power up the telescope, and troubleshoot, but we do the rest. It’s much more convenient than constantly zooming across the country.

Observing is good work: it’s quiet, with just me and my computer, and there’s a sunrise at the end. But I miss having the telescope right there, rattling its mirror covers and swinging its dome. I always kind of assumed I’d be a theorist, but what if I can’t keep my hands off the instruments?

Mmm. Hey baby, can I … operate your telescope?

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Hokay.

17Jan07

So here I am.

I? I’m a hapless MIT undergrad – let’s say I’m a junior. I think physics is just about totally awesome. Because, well, I don’t know. It just makes me happy. Sometimes I’ll leave a lecture or enter lab with a weird visceral joy – it’s like knowing a really good secret, like having a whole day alone, like sneezing, and it only comes from physics.

Luckily for us all, I’m a physics major. Thank you, MIT, you are so kind.

Now, because it is January and I don’t have classes, I have a serious buildup of unsaid words in the head. Also, I am a Youth of Today, and furthermore, I go to a school with “Technology” in its name, AND MOREOVER I am the Person of the Year on account of my techno-savvy-youth skillz. So I would be remiss, I think, if I did not make some effort to exercise those skillz while ridding myself of words. Which is to say, I think I’ll start a blog.

So, world, here’s a blog. Its ostensible purpose is to help me figure out how to be a damn good scientist without losing sight of the rest of the world. The theory goes, what I force into coherence I’ll consider more carefully, and remember better.

Got that?

Okay, good. Ready GO.

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