Swans on Tea

The nightmare of any and every PhD student writing his or her thesis: My laptop was stolen with all my thesis work on it.

I was so paranoid about the lab catching fire and destroying my thesis that I had it on two computers and had about five backup copies. On floppy disks, which was the style of the times, at least one of which was always at home. If the whole science building imploded, I would have a copy that was at most one day’s worth of writing or set of revisions out of date.

Also, having grown up and done high school and college papers in an era before word processors (ask me about my fun with carbon paper!), I am quite aware how much time I saved being able to write my thesis on a computer.

I was cleaning up my inbox the other day and accidentally opened up the box below Admin, which is Answerguy, and one I had forgotten about. Several years ago I was “The Answer Guy” (or at least I had his email address) for our web page, back in the days when I took care of my research group’s web page. The legacy site is still present but in some sense is no longer “official” and has not been maintained in some time (the cesium fountain page has been dormant even longer). The current official page for work is much more sterile and doesn’t even discuss the clock details at all.

I got a number of inquires over the three or four years that the email address was active. A few crackpotty ones, several good questions, and a few from people who couldn’t find contact info on the pages other departments were maintaining, so there were several moon phase and time-of-sunset inquiries I punted. But I like this one, in particular:

To whom it may concern, My name is Christopher I am a sophomore in highschool and conducting a science fair project on time travel. I am not sure if this is the appropriate email address for this, but i am trying to obtain an atomic clock that measures to the nanosecond. If you have any information please please email me as soon as possible.

Sincerely, Christopher

Not much time for blogging recently — getting together with family, travel (made longer because it involved a snowstorm), a stiff back from the car ride and the lugging of that which is lugged, and now, apparently, the fruit of the traditional holiday first sharing of germs. To be followed by the inevitable second sharing, when everyone returns to work/school.

Apologies. I’ve been suffering from a sore neck and shoulder for a bit, and decided to minimize typing on a keyboard for a bit to see if that can help speed my recovery.

So I got back from my vacation last week to find this: my office had been labeled to within an inch of its life with blue sticky notes.

And not without some geeky physics humor

All this means is a little “me” time in my hollowed-out volcano lair, as I plot my revenge…

NASA Earth Observatory: The Derecho

These before and after images from NASA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite show the power outages in the clear skies over Washington, DC and Baltimore that occurred as a result of a rare, fast-moving thunderstorm system on Friday, June 29th

I’m in one of the very dark areas, that’s very bright in the “before” picture, west of DC.

Power restored (after only 90 hours!), but still no internet at home. My fridge hasn’t been this empty since I moved in. I noticed one set of traffic lights still out on my commute this morning, so there is still work left to do in the area.

Big storm. Tree down where I originally parked last evening, but I moved my car into better shade. Power out. Fire alarm (luckily false, because the fire department too a long time to show). Hot. Eventually, too hot.

Fled the state in search of an internet connection and juice, yes, the precious juice. Hoping things have been restored by this evening. Enjoy your leap second tonight.

Cloudy, with almost no chance of Venus, ended up being the weather yesterday. I did manage a glimpse through a telescope, during one of the brief interludes when the clouds thinned. I also snapped this, with my transit/eclipse glasses covering my iPad camera lens

A somewhat pixelated Venus might be that dark blotch in the upper left, just inside the rim. Maybe. It was taken about the right time for it to be there, I think. But it might just be part of the cloud.

We had an OK turnout and it was fun talking to people, play with some of the other kids and I even got a chance to tour our 26″ telescope, which I had not previously visited.

SMBC: Grace Hopper

For the record, RADM (which was Commodore, at the time) Grace Hopper gave the commencement speech when I graduated. I was in the navy, though not yet commissioned, and I took Hopper’s famous “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission” as a direct order.

I’m back from my jaunt down to Augusta, GA. I had a good time talking with the faculty and students and my talk was well-received — I got some really good questions from the students and even the biology folks said they understood most of it (I may have lost them temporarily when I talked about the guts of atomic clocks, such as the mention of Zeeman splitting of atomic sublevels). The room was reasonably full, too — maybe 60-70 people. The only real glitch was the previously mentioned swapping of NRL for USNO. If I had had time to add a slide to the talk I would have put up a map showing the geographical difference in our locations, and then say how wonderful it is to be in South Carolina (which, like NRL, is right across the river), but I instead opted to mildly embarrass my navy buddy by calling him Ensign and telling about calling up the USNO Master Clock voice announcer. But I kid because I love, and I think he’s done a great job in helping to build up the physics program there and I had a wonderful time visiting with some old friends. Back to regular blogging soon!

Once again, I belatedly realize that my blogoversary has come and gone. Friday marked four years of blogging. Yay me.