In which I go to Las Vegas

Some time over the past year, I was made aware of the existence of The Amaz!ng Meeting. This is an annual* meeting, called TAM for short, of skeptics and freethinkers which takes place in Las Vegas. This year's meeting, TAM6, was held at the Flamingo Hotel & Casino on the main strip (right across from Caesar's Palace) from June 19th-June 22nd. With gracious spousal approval, I joined the fun this year.

Since I am still playing with my new camara and Lightroom, I will not bore anyone with a vast panorama of amateur, unprocessed photos. I'll just pop up a couple here and there for the highlights.

TAM6 started on Thursday, but I showed up a day early so I could get in some touristy stuff. I checked into the Flamingo and discovered an ugly little advertising gimmick of theirs. They state that their "Flamingo GO" rooms have a wireless internet connection (something not mentioned in other room descriptions), so I went with that slightly more expensive room option. Well, it is true that wireless (and wired) internet is available. However, it is not FREE internet (and the wireless is available throughout the building, so unclear why some rooms do not have that description). Alas, I am too cheap to pay $13/day for internet access so these are back-dated posts.

I found something very ironic about a conference on skepticism and, to a minor extent, atheism being held in a hotel which has no 13th floor (out of 27 floors) and a bible in every room.

After settling in to my room (and whining unsuccessfully at the management about the not-so-free Internet), I took a very, very long walking tour of "nearby" casinos (nothing is truly nearby in Las Vegas). Over the next 4 hours, I stopped by the Mirage, Caesar's Palace, Paris, Planet Hollywood, MGM Grand and New York New York casinos, as well as a couple less-famous names.

All the casinos are pretty much huge beasts of floor space. The MGM is massive, though. Over the next 4 days, I had the experience of becoming disorientated and needing a few minutes to figure out which way I was going (lack of windows and generally bad signage contributes). In the MGM Grand, however, I actually got lost. The size of that space is just amazing (and, generally, boring). It probably took me 25 minutes or more to find my way back out to the street. My general goal was to ride the roller coaster at NYNY, but by the time I got there, I was way too tired to enjoy it, especially knowing what a long walk I had to get back to my room. Instead, I ate a very good burger while sitting at the bar in NYNY's America restaurant, snapped some more pictures and hiked back to the Flamingo.

I never did get around to riding any roller coasters.

* It is actually somewhat more than annual - there was a TAM5.5 this past January and there may be a TAM-UK1 sometime in the upcoming year separate from the already-scheduled TAM7 in Vegas.

Video Game Halftime

I am a sucker for marching bands, drum corps, halftime shows and the like. If the D.C. area had a decent drum corps (hell, if it had ANY drum corps) within reasonable driving distance, I would possibly still be in one. My summer with the Reading Buccaneers was awesome, but that is way too far to drive every summer weekend. I am also, as anyone who knows me is well aware, an avid video gamer, much as I would like to stop.

So the below halftime show for Cal vs. Washington State in 2007 was pretty much ideal for me. I only regret that a video has not surfaced taken from center field from the "correct" side of the field. Picture your TV set upside down... and enjoy!



Bonus points if you can identify every video game shown.

Late to the game...

...but I have finally jumped onto the (now parked) bandwagon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans. More accurately, with the fans of the Buffy TV series (1997-2003).

I have always been a fan of the Buffy movie, which apparently puts me outs with most hardcore fans. It was super cheesy, intentionally so, and I loved it. Then along comes the TV series and I avoided it with the honest expectation that it would royally suck, as most conversions from the big screen to the couch potato screen do. Even though Mike & Kat kept telling us we were missing an awesome series, we still did not pick it up.

Finally, a couple months ago, I happened to stumble across a Buffy listing on hulu.com (after viewing Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy videos). I watched the opening shows for season one and was totally hooked. After devouring the two seasons available on hulu, I not-so-subtlely got M&K to loan me the next five seasons on DVD. I continued my nearly continual viewing of it through season 5, then slowed down because school ended and video gaming began. I finally finished watching the last two seasons yesterday.

Wow.

I heartily recommend the series to anyone who has not seen it (which may just have included me!). If you have not seen it and may in the future, stop reading now - some spoilers below as I randomly spout off some thoughts.









I didn't like the first or second principals - I'm not sure they were even meant to be liked. The final principal was pretty cool. I disliked that they kept killing off every teacher or other authority figure who was even remotely cool.

The end of Season 2 still stands as my favorite episode. If the whole series had stopped there, I would have been perfectly satisfied. This is not to say that the series went downhill after S02 - but that was a great ending and as good a place as ever to finish things.

"Hush" rocked.

The various incarnations of Willow ("Bored now!") were all cool. Lesbo Willow was a downer to start, but mostly because I thought Oz was awesome and did not want to see him go. Tara turned out a pretty decent character.

"Once More, With Feeling" in S06 was extraordinarily funny. I wish there was more musical talent present (Anthony Stewart Head - great! Tara okay. Everyone else should not sing in public.), but it was still very entertaining.

I hated the robot episodes - the Hellmouth concept permitted magic, demons, vampires, etc. The robots were only technology and undetectably-human-like robots broke the suspension of disbelief.

The sudden end of Anointed Boy Colin (by Spike) was a bit confusing. They worked so hard to build him up, then destroyed him before he actually really did anything. Maybe the writers couldn't figure out where they were going with him.

The "Halloween" episode was cool.

Faith was okay. Riley not bad. The College years should have gone on longer (but I guess maybe they wanted to move her back to the high school?).

Xander was great (better once he stopped being a total goofball). Giles was always entertaining and well-done. Dawn was cute (and less annoying over time). Anya was... Anya.

Buffy/Sarah Michelle Gellar was awesome, of course.

I could go on, but that's probably enough fanboy stuff for one night.

Another Semester Ends

The Spring 2008 semester is over, the grades are posted. I hear you breathlessly asking, "How did it go?"

Not too badly.

While I only registered for 6 credits this semester (3 lecture, 3 research), I actually sat through 9 credits of lecture. One extra class was by invitation from my research advisor. The other less invited, but he did not seem to mind (after all, I was a more consistent attendee than half the class). The full rundown then...

Senior Research Project - I talked a bunch about my research project here. I did not do any more flux work since my last post, but did continue working on vapor pressures of certain molecules (N2, CH4, CO and a variety of C2H* species) at very low (30-60K) temperatures. I originally was asked to turn in a sort of journal of my efforts for the grade. Before the semester was out, however, Dr. Summers let me know I had already earned an A (yay me!) for my work, but he still wanted me to turn in a paper which might be suitable for publishing on the low temperature vapor pressures. I finished writing that today and will submit it tomorrow for his review/editing.

Modern Physics - This was a very interesting class -- a "survey" course (touching relatively lightly on a number of topics) covering special relativity, introductory quantum physics, Schrodinger's wave functions, perturbation theory and similar fun. My one big regret is that we did not get to the last part of the book, which deals with subatomic particles (quarks and things). That was what I was looking most forward to! The instructor, Dr. Karen Sauer, is engaging and effective. I enjoyed her teaching and look forward to having her again for Senior Physics Lab next semester. The tests were not easy - GRE-based multiple choice plus course-based quantitative questions. No equations were given (just like in the GRE), so we had to memorize all the formulas as well as knowing how to use them. I studied harder for the final exam (5 full days) than I have for any other exam I have ever taken. Result (including her substantial curve to get the class average up to a B): A+ for the course.

Thermal Physics - I just sat in this class, not signing up for it (or talking to the instructor about it) because I was told it was critical for an astrophysics career (it probably is). However, it is not (currently) required to graduate - just one of a list of electives - and I chose to take a second semester of research for more fun. The instructor, Dr. Peter Becker, was not bad, if occasionally a goofball (humor is good, though). The book, however, was horrible. It was written in 1965 and completely unsuitable to today's education environment - just page after page of text spamming your eyeballs without a gap. I could not take it and did not even crack the book after the first week or so. I still took very thorough notes throughout the semester in case it ever becomes important to me.

Atmospheric Physics - Another survey course! (Don't we ever get to learn the real stuff?) This one was taught by Dr. Summers and I sat in it at his request. As expected, it was an enjoyable class full of great slides and interesting information about how the atmosphere works.

All in all, not a bad semester, although I started losing the urge to be in school somewhere in April (about par for me). One more semester of undergraduate courses - currently scheduled for Senior Physics Lab and Introduction to Astrophysics, although I may sit in one or more other classes as well again. We'll see what happens!

Charon Research

Another semester nearly done and I have hardly posted at all. I'll do a full summary once grades are in. For now, my classes are essentially done (one more on Monday night). Now I just have to finish writing up the journal/log for my research project, which I just realized I have not actually talked about before. Fairly briefly, then...

My last research project (with advisor Dr. Shobita Satyapal), done in Spring 2007, was based predominantly on Spitzer Space Telescope (and some older) infrared observations of a variety of galaxies. In that project I did a fairly rough, low sample comparison of various methods of determining star formation rate in galaxies (infrared, UV, visible light, etc.). Ultimately, I determined that infrared was the way to go for a variety of reasons. I am not sure how valid my results were (this was all new to me), but I got some interesting reactions from Shobita and one of her grad students, so that's a plus.

This time around, I am working with Dr. Michael Summers, as I mentioned in an earlier post. He is working up a paper discussing the possibility of Charon having an atmosphere and the composition, density and lifespan of that atmosphere, if present. While the great bulk of the work (and all the theory) is his (and a collaborator's), he has had me running some mathematical models using the IDL programming language. Technically-speaking, I am not really doing Charon research for much of it, because a lot of the models I am running (like determining equilibrium vapor pressures for a variety of gases at very low temperatures) has nothing to do with Charon specifically. Some of it, my earlier work (I actually started this work last May), used Charon parameters, however, so that qualifies. (Current direction of conclusions: yes, Charon most likely does have an atmosphere, which is picks up in part from Pluto's evaporation while it is near enough to the sun.)

Since it is not really a full research project (I have no theory, no position, not much of anything), I am not sure how he will be grading it - hopefully just grading the quality of the programming output I did plus whatever journal I write up talking about my adventures making the models. He has used at least one of my output plots in a talk he gave to other atmospheric sciences, so I can't be too far off in my models.

One thing I have learned about doing this research is that advisors are very hard to contact! Both of my advisors have been very out of the loop with my daily activities. In Shobita's case, she delegated pretty much all of my handling to one of her post-docs. She was out of it enough that my conclusions were a surprise to her - she had not inquired as to my progress for many weeks prior to the final paper. I still have not gotten my graded paper back from her after almost a year of asking. In Mike's case, he is a very busy man - two active NASA missions (New Horizons, AIM), one hopefully soon-to-be-approved mission (ARES) as well as papers he is working on and his class time. It is lucky for me I am sitting in on his atmospheric physics class this semester - it gives me 10 minutes each week to talk to him on our way to the parking lot after class! He apparently has a good number of grad students (like 6-8) working for him, although I only know two of them - neither of which gets much face time either, so at least I know it is not just me.

Expelled Exposed!

Been a big hubbub in the Skeptic blogosphere (and in the real world) lately about Expelled, a Ben Stein creationist movie. It all started a year ago, of course, with interviews requested under false pretenses, but the huge news started hitting with a post by PZ Myers.

Best defense against this kind of idiocy - get the word out. Go visit Expelled Exposed (hopefully they will get their server back up soon - traffic has been huge, apparently). Tell your friends and relatives to do the same.

Guitar Heroes

I don't normally push music on anyone because tastes vary so wildly. However, I caught this video by Rodrigo y Gabriela on a random walk through Yahoo's music site. This is excellent!