hello, poindexter!

November 5th, 2008

I don’t know about you, but the first thing that I did as soon as I opened my eyes today was hop out bed and run into the living room with the demented giddiness of a kid on Christmas morning, and turn on CNN to double check that my big shiny gift hadn’t somehow disappeared over the night. Like many, I’ve been conditioned over the past eight years to expect disappointment–even after CNN announced last night that Barack Obama was, in fact, our president elect, I didn’t really and truly believe it. I didn’t jump up, scream, and cry, like I imagined I would. Instead, I was suspicious and cynical. Even when the electoral votes started exceeding well over 270 votes, I still didn’t believe it. I took a walk around the East Village, and saw hoards of people banging on pots and pans, cheering, stopping traffic—some of them even jumping on moving taxi cabs.  They sang “The National Anthem,” hugged and kissed strangers, waved flags, shouted “God Bless America!” and all I could bring myself to do was stand dumbly by. I was saddened by my inability to participate because I just had this sickening feeling that it was too good to be true, that it would all be taken away.

Just a few days ago, a group of us drove down to West Philadelphia to canvas throughout some very poverty-stricken neighbourhoods. The streets on my maps were lined with veritable crack-houses and broken-down townhouses replete with boarded up doors and shot-out windows.  At first I couldn’t imagine that I’d even get anyone to answer the doors of these seemingly uninhabitable places; I was naïve, I know. These places were people’s homes—wonderful people—people who greeted me so warmly with big smiles and shining eyes, crying “Of course!” they were voting for Barack Obama. One very old woman who greeted me amidst her lovingly cared-for petunia plants told me that she never imagined she would live to see the day an African American would be voted into office.

Little kids that saw me with Obama door-tags came running over to me wanting anything with Obama’s face on it. I joked with them about being too young to vote, but they were each as serious as the most avid baseball card collector. After stockpiling their Obama loot, they went running back down the streets shouting his name, with their mothers trailing close behind.

Then I approached three young guys sitting on a stoop, rolling the fattest blunt I’ve ever seen. I asked them about voting for Obama, to which they began arguing back and forth with each other about their fears of Obama’s inevitable assassination. One of them said, ‘Why do they wanna kill him?’ and then the other said, “Cause he’s BLACK. And he’s about to be President!” Then they told me to make sure that Obama won. And warned me not to stay in the neighbourhood come sundown.

After I left Philly and had time to gather my impressions of the day, I was most struck by the fact that no matter how hardened the person I met, the mere mention of Obama’s name was enough to turn on that inner light inside—it made them shine. And lately, I recognize that same phenomenon in myself. I think its called hope. And though we all need hope—the residents of West Philadelphia are the ones that I’ve been thinking about today. I’ve never seen a hunger for hope like I saw there. And now that the polls are definitively in, and I’m finally sure that this is REALLY happening, I’m just so happy that this country didn’t let them down. I’d go out into the streets with a pot and pan and celebrate but I’m a little late. So instead, I sat down at my Rhodes, and wrote a new song. Which, of course, ended up having literally nothing to do with the elections or anything, but creativity is a funny thing I guess. 

Speaking of songs, here is one I wish I wrote: (thanks to Ali for originally sending this to me!)

 
And here’s something all we Poindexters can be hopeful about:

The Day After: Science in the Obama Administration: Scientific American Podcast

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XH

October 17th, 2008

This comparison came courtesy of my good friend and elections commiserator, Aurelio Valle.

xH

October 16th, 2008

We got into L.A yesterday for part two of our recording with Thom. We’re here until Halloween, but are leaving for five days right in the middle of recording to play shows in Tokyo and Hong Kong for the french designer, Agnes B. I’ve been alternating between feelings of giddy elation about going back to Japan (one of my favorite places) and excitement about visiting China, and fear about how I’m going to physically be able to perform live under the influence of massive jet lag, then return to LA for another few days of recording. Hopefully I’ll just be able to coast on adrenalin. Once I return to NYC, I’ve got about two weeks to recover before we start mixing and mastering the record.
I’m hardly complaining though, I’m in Thom’s studio right now, drinking coffee and he’s spinning OMD records for us. It’s a typically perfect L.A day and I have two and a half weeks of doing exactly what I love before me. I have little to complain about…life is good.
The world however, seems to be going to hell in a handbasket.
Watched the debates last night, and found these two gems…thought I would share:

eerily too close for comfort:

eerily close, comforting:

I found this photo here: www.dvorak.org

with the following text:

It looks like a lunar landscape but this remarkable photograph actually shows our Milky Way and the planet Jupiter in all their glory - viewed from a cave in America’s Utah desert.

The spiral galaxy, which cannot be seen with the naked eye, was captured by photographer Wally Pacholka using a 35mm camera and 50mm lens on a tripod with a 30-second exposure - long enough to collect the light but not to see the stars moving. He said: ‘I had to drive 800 miles each way five times to get the shot right. And I had to hike two miles to the cave and back again at night, getting lost each time I came out.’ His photo shows the Milky Way - estimated to be 100,000 light years in diameter and 1,000 light years deep - and Jupiter (to the top left), the biggest planet in the solar system with a diameter 11 times that of Earth’s.

Something about that photo makes me feel as though its all going to be ok. Am I crazy?

xH

October 8th, 2008

My interview today is with someone whom I definitely count among my favorite people in this world. He is my astronomy teacher, mentor, overall life coach-in-general: Dr. Charles Liu, without whom I probably would never have been given a break in the astrophysics field—considering that when he met me I was without a proper degree or really any credentials at all besides a lot of curiosity—which happened to be (thankfully) the only passport that Charles accepts.

When I enrolled in his class, “Intro to Space Science, Matter and Energy” at the American Museum of Natural History, my professional life left a lot to be desired. I was working at a gallery that was going bankrupt, and had literally no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I hated working at the gallery because the corrupt politics of the art world made me feel sick all the time. I was a failed documentary photographer because I didn’t have what it took to hack it in such a harsh and fickle industry. So what was a girl with a BFA in photography to do? I started frequenting the self-help aisles of the Union Square branch of Barnes and Noble (where, incidentally, I would later find myself on a stage with David Lynch of all people, which is a testament to how my life is as bizarre as it is fortunate) and picked up a book called “Conquering Your Quarter-life Crisis,” which advised me to stop panicking and instead, follow my interests, no matter how seemingly irrelevant they seemed at the time. So in my desperation to find a creative outlet that hadn’t yet been spoiled by academic study, I joined an eighties-music-covers, all-girl keyboard club, despite not knowing how to play the keyboard. I liked The Bangles, and I liked the keyboard. Seemed like enough of a reason at the time.

I also decided to take an introductory astronomy class out of some kind of misplaced nostalgia for the weekly two-hour-long car rides with my dad as he drove me home from my grandparent’s house in Staten Island. My parents were divorced when I was four, so the elder D’Angelo house became the drop off place for my brother and I since it was equidistant between my dad in Connecticut, and my mom in New Jersey. We had plenty to do there while we waited for the other parent to show up. My brother had a pretty bad case of ADD and would be bouncing off of the plastic-covered couch until my grandma satiated him with sugar-free candy. My grandpa would entertain me by carving apple peels off all in one long coiled ribbon. My Aunt Grace and Uncle Sabbe lived upstairs with my cousins Doreen and Ritchie, both of whom were in their teens during my extensive driving years, so it was there that I received a thorough education on the proper application of multi-colored eye shadow and Duran Duran (Doreen) and Nirvana and Contra (Ritchie). Meanwhile, we were all overfed pasta and gravy, which was my grandma’s way of curtailing (what she suspected was) anorexia in my brother and I. Naturally, those visits were the thing I would look forward to all week long.

But what I would look forward to most were the two hours I would have sitting in the front seat of my dad’s car, catching up on school and friends, and listening to him talk about whatever he thought would interest me. I’m not sure what initially prompted the subject of astronomy, perhaps it was because he was a lapsed Trekkie, but we eventually started having these wonderful talks about black holes and galaxies, and I remember that the first time he told me about it, I was just so in awe…like, ‘wait, you mean, I’ve been living on this planet for ten whole years and you’re just telling me this NOW?’ He bought me a telescope for my birthday one year and I become obsessed with looking at the moon—I was convinced that I wanted to be astronaut. I started watching Star Trek reruns everyday. But then high school happened and with that event came a succession of downtrodden monotone-speaking science and math teachers who eventually extinguished any sci-hope I had. Math didn’t come naturally to me, and I was too shy to ask for help. My grades faltered, I fell behind, and eventually my enthusiasm for becoming a scientist was restrained by my recognition that if you couldn’t do math well, than you probably shouldn’t do science. I had an algebra teacher who told me as much, and later, a chemistry teacher who confirmed it. Meanwhile, I was getting straight A’s in all my liberal arts classes, so it became clear to me what I should go to school for—that is, anything but science.

So when I found myself at 22 years old with no career to speak of, alone with my Quarter-life Crisis book and a few hundred bucks in savings, I decided to revisit that childhood dream of mine, and was lucky enough to get a second chance. I took the class with Charles at the museum, and nearly a year later, thanks to his incessant cheerleading, relentless esteem-building, high-school-academic record-denying and ‘you-can-do-it-sink-or-swim!’ attitude of inclusion and encouragement, I found myself standing on a podium in the Linder Theatre giving my first talk about astrophysics research I had actually done while interning with Charles and my other mentor, Neil deGrasse Tyson (who I’ll also try to interview at some point, he’s busy these days with the Nova series.)

That internship at the Rose Center for Earth and Space became my ticket into Columbia University, and that’s my story to date. I don’t usually get to talk about any of this stuff during A.R.S interviews, but I wanted to talk about it on this blog because I know that there are lots of people like me who, once upon a time, wanted to do science but were too convinced that ‘math sucks’ to persevere, and consequently chose an easier path. But I can attest to the fact that if you work your ass off and take on massive student loans, you can be a scientist too. I think it’s worth it. And I wouldn’t have realized any of that without a big push from Charles. So thanks, Charles. One day I’ll name a celestial object for you, or a song, whichever comes first.

The NY Times recently featured Charles in an article about the CUNY Macaulay Honors College— here is the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/nyregion/08honors.html?ex=1378699200&en=5f051c3432eb9a2c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

DESCRIBE YOURSELF, CHARLES….

“Charles Liu is an unremarkable Asian-American man with no substantially distinguishing characteristics. He had the good fortune to meet and marry a college classmate ten times smarter than he, from whom he learned (although she will deny it) just about everything he knows about being a good scholar and educator. He hopes that all of his students will develop a loving appreciation for both scientific and non-scientific knowledge, and an understanding of the difference between the two.” 

4 links I like:

http://www.quarkdance.org : this site combines two of my favorite things in life: physics and peppy music!

http://www. harvardgleeclub.org : my favorite choir!

http://www.whrb.org: the best place on the internet for orgies!

http://www.research.amnh.org/users/cliu/rabbliu : okay, I’m a little biased here, but this is the page where my wife Amy occasionally posts pictures of the food and meals she prepares.  All the pictures are unenhanced.  Verily, one way to a man’s heart is definitely through his stomach!

Heather: (in italics from here on): I wanted to ask you in about the state of science education. What do you think needs to be done to bring more students to science at a college level?

Charles: (in bold from here on): Great question. I’ve thought about this in a lot of different ways, and here’s the thing. I’ve always felt that science education is a little bit like art education. Because there are certain fundamentals about art. “This is a painting, this is a canvas, or this is a camera…” but then the results are liked by some, or appreciated by some, and not liked and not appreciated by others. So some art students get into photography, some into painting, or some into sculpture. And even within each discipline, its different. Some photographers really appreciate still life, others try to put together landscapes, and still others choose something more abstract…so in a way, science education has suffered from a commonality—a lack of a recognition—that there is as much diversity and interesting differences in the pursuit of science as there are in the pursuit of the arts.

That’s a great metaphor, and I totally agree…

Yeah, I think that’s really important for people to realize, and I think teachers have suffered because curricula have been designed around the idea that all science is based on things that are concrete and absolute and certain, and Heather, you’re a researcher, so you know that that’s not true! You know that some people say, “Well, what is this index? You didn’t calculate it right…you gotta do it this way, or that way.” Unless we give students that same realization, they’re never going to take it to the next level of what being a scientist really means. They’ll just know that science is a bunch of facts in a big fat book that they have to memorize and then regurgitate on an exam, and then they’ll just forget it like any other facts that don’t seem relevant to their lives, or don’t seem interesting, or don’t seem somehow beautiful. It is very hard to communicate that on a basic level. On a high school level, it’s hard sometimes to see how you can bring interesting, exciting information into a classroom, and to get people as fired up about science as you get them fired up about their favorite music. It’s not easy.

Well, I remember you, the first day of my introductory astronomy class at AMNH, literally singing and dancing about nuclear fusion at the front of the classroom…I believe it was something from the band, They Might Be Giants…

Ha, (singing) “The sun is a mass of incandescent gas…” Right?

Yeah, there needs to be more of that!

Yes, I think that would be cool. Obviously, I try to practice what I preach. The way that I teach science is the way that I would like science to be taught, the way that I would have liked to learn science. But I also think—and this is important too, because I think about my own experience, and even though I got the so-called ‘traditional education’—the kind that might have turned me off, I still maintained and preserved and had that passion and joy for it; I’m trying to understand why that was the case…

Well, you were kind of the oddball at Harvard, right?

Well, not just at Harvard but pretty much everywhere that I had gone…I brought a little too much joy into things sometimes, and I did very much spend a lot of time talking to people who weren’t scientists about my science. As a graduate student at Arizona, I took time to go talk to the public and I was somewhere between gently advised and strongly criticized for expending too much of my time having so much time with this, with people, when I should be doing things like studying, or standing in front of the computer, or sitting in front of a telescope, that kind of thing. So it was a personal joy and attitude that I brought to it, that I have kept all this time.  And so I just have so much joy talking about this stuff maybe because I had so much joy learning all this stuff…and maybe that can be institutionalized into our teaching? Maybe not. I don’t know how. I mean, one thing is for sure, nations like China, Taiwan, India—places we supposedly look up to as having great science education—they don’t even attempt the pretence of making things fun and interesting. They just do drill and kill all day long, for most of their secondary school education you memorize…’here’s a formula, here’s how you solve the formula,’ then you go on. And they produce great scientists too. So there isn’t just one insert…

Well, maybe needing to make science education more ‘fun’ in order to attract more students to the field, indicates that our nation is actually intellectually weak…like what Edmundson said in his essay, “On the uses of a liberal education.”  Perhaps needing all education to be akin to ‘lite entertainment’ means that we really are a nation of babies compared to the rest of the world?

Oh-ho! Them’s fighting words!  I’ll tell you what we’re a nation of—we’re a nation of plenty, of wealth, of choices. Even if we’re not the millionaires sitting on the top of the hill, our nation really is, for all intents and purposes, paradise. Nothing is closer to paradise for a typical American, compared with living just about anywhere else in the world. Yes, many of us don’t have jobs, and many of us live in difficult situations, and struggle day to day, but we really are blessed with the opportunity to choose to do just about anything we want. And there are people at every level willing to help us if we’re willing to try.  And so that level of comfort, of plenty and choice, often makes us want to find the things that we enjoy doing, and just do that and be done with it.  In a nation like India or China, whether or not you get a house for your family, for example, is dependent on whether or not you win a gold medal at the Olympics.  In this country, what is the only reason you go out and get a gold medal? It’s because you want to be the best in the world—because it’s the most fun thing for you to do. And you go and take gymnastics lessons because you have the chance to do it, and you have coaches who want to help you, and sure, there are endorsements along the way…but really, the fame goes away, everything goes away, and in the end what you have left is the fact that you have a gold medal. And that’s why you did it.  That’s why you compete.

Why do science? You do it because you like it, because its neat, and you want to make discoveries about the world, the body, about the universe.  These other societies see science as a path to something, and it’s a tough path, and yet they’re willing to put aside their personal comfort because they need to.

For the people who get great science education—in the end, it’s all about motivation. You could be motivated positively or negatively, but in the end, if you follow that motivation and work really hard, you will succeed.  In this country, it seems like we all need positive motivation to do science.  So given that culture, that national psyche, our educational process should probably adapt to it, and say, “alright, lets make science something that people want to do” as opposed to saying, “ok, if you do science, you can earn a good living, so do it hard.”  My worldview may not be the standard worldview of most scientists. I have so much fun doing what I do, and as I said, I’ve received everything from gentle advice to strong criticism that the way I’m doing it isn’t right, but you know what, its right for me, so I advocate the possibility that it might be right for others as well.

Well, your teaching method is certainly one of the things that helped to recruit me to the field. What are you working on right now?

My current work has to do with galaxy evolution.  Galaxies are to the universe the way that cells are to the human body…just as doctors study human cell function to understand how the human body ages, so too, by studying galaxies and how they change over time, I am hoping to understand how the universe has aged since the big bang.  A particular topic that has currently been submitted into the astrophysical journal to try to see if it works properly is to understand a certain class of galaxies which are forming stars at a furious rate—ten hundred times faster than say, the Milky Way. But they’re usually small galaxies, and they’re spread out throughout the universe, and quite rare. Some people call them “compact narrow emission line galaxies.”  They’re anywhere from 1 to 10 billion light years away, and they’re the fastest moving, changing, and aging galaxies in the universe, so trying to understand them is a challenge. Up to this point, only a few dozen galaxies of this kind have been studied at a time, but the COSMOS survey has produced a sample of more than a hundred of them which are useful to study as a whole.  I’m trying to understand how they’ve aged and how they’ve contributed to the creation of new galaxies, how much they inject into the universe in terms of new stars and new energetic processes, and hopefully we’ll get a sense of one important aging process in the universe.

I’m also studying one particular galaxy that collided with two small galaxies a billion years ago, and is still in the process of coalescing into one new giant galaxy, and recently my colleagues and I detected what we think is a supermassive black hole in the center, and are trying to understand how that got produced. Its one of my favorite single objects in the whole universe, its called G515, but my friends decided to nickname it ‘Flagellen’ because it looks like a microorganism with a little tail on it.

I will definitely Wikipedia G515 now— that sounds so cool! What is a typical day like for you?

Well, this is part of my typical workday, I talk to people, but my days are really different from day to day. One day I will teach several classes, another day I will sit in front of a computer analysing data for 12 hours, or write computer code, papers, or grant proposals.  About a couple weeks out of the year I’m actually at a telescope or working with a telescope from remote distances, manipulating and gathering data, looking up at the stars…one of my favorite times is going up to a telescope when the weather is nice and when I’m doing a long observation I have a few minutes to go stand outside on a catwalk and just look up at the sky, and see, and hear, and just experience that night sky that you could never see in New York, but just is such a cool part of being an astronomer…

For me, its kind of an equivalent feeling to one I imagine that a priest would have when entering a cathedral… I become emotionally overwhelmed by a sense of wonder and purpose. And whenever I become so frustrated by my homework, its nice to know that all I have to do to avoid giving up, is just looking up.

Yeah, I think so! For one moment, you really feel like you’re part of the universe and its part of you.

September 23, 2008

Its been awhile, I know. Unfortunately, my initial (overly eager) intentions of updating this blog daily degraded into an honest attempt to update it weekly, and now, well, I just check in when I can. But my absence has been largely due to the fact that my band is writing a new album, and we’re starting to record it tomorrow (!) under the wing of producer Thom Monahan, whom we hope will impart to our music a bit of his magic. Just a few hours ago, he arrived from LA with an arsenal of vintage keyboards at his side, and by noon tomorrow, we’ll have all our gear in place. The girls and I are VERY excited! We spent the weekend upstate at Erika’s family’s house, shooting the photos for the album cover and doing the final bits of tweaking to each song–rewriting lyrics, rearranging song structures, making ever more demos. So I hope the end result will justify my blog negligence!

I did, however, take a moment last night to attend the My Bloody Valentine show at Roseland Ballroom. I harbor a very nostalgic, stormcloud-colored soft spot for MBV since all of my memories of listening to “Loveless” involve a pathetic medley of teen angsty laden vignettes from when I was in a torturous, unrequited love affair with my best guy friend in high school. He was the coolest art boy in Jersey–I had braces and frighteningly knobby knees. But oh, how MBV could articulate all the latent passion buried beneath my flat chest! And though it was nice to be haunted by those subtle pangs of long-forgotten heartache last night, what wasn’t so nice was the very real, very un-subtle pangs of actual earache which accompanies a MBV show. Never before have I been forced to cover my ears with my hands while wearing snugly-fitting earplugs. That was a first. At one point, I pulled out the earplug just a little bit in order to hear what the show would sound like without them, and my poor eardrum was instantly raped by an incomprehensible screeching. I am now a bit more deaf in my right ear than I was before. And yet, once I put the earplug back in, I could hear the show for all its sonorous, bewitching perfection–I found myself dumbly swaying back and forth like a sailor at sea, so completely captivated by an ethereal siren song that the threat of drowning in a dusky dream-fog of guitars seemed certain. But take the earplugs out? Deafening, ear-splitting noise. I imagine that experience is probably the closest I’ll ever come to understanding the Babel Fish…

“HELLO HOLLY!”

“I live in New York and attend Columbia University. My twin sister, Heather Larson Teufel, lives in the Bay Area, and works in Passive Solar Architecture. Our sign is Gemini.”

My 2 links I’d like you to check out:

http://www.nickveasey.com

His work is a reminder both of our materiality and that visible light is not the only form of radiation available to us - in art or science.

The other link is of a group who ’sonify’ the solar wind.

http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/impact/sounds.html

I like how they translate the signal of particles into something we can register with our own senses. (this wind would be dangerous if we didn’t have a magnetosphere!)

Heather: (in italics from here on):   Hi Holly! What are you doing right now?

Holly: (in bold from here on):   I’m sitting in the computer room at Yale, casually working on research and eyeing the first edition of Percival Lowell’s book I found in the astronomy library here.  He wrote about canals on Mars and popularized the idea…I’m a sucker for old books like that.

So you’re doing research and perusing the stacks…and I assume, also squeezing in a visit with your Yalie husband, Pedro? I need to know something– are you two like the Yale astrophysics department’s very own Brangelina?

…the even funnier thing is that I work on little black holes and he works on supermassive blackholes—we could just get matching polo shirts.

Please do!

(Pedro’s) philosophy is that we are not astronomers, but that we just ‘do’ astronomy. I think it’s one of those things that can easily consume someone’s life.

Seems to be the general consensus. So what do you get out of this whole endeavor?

I think it is a lot of things. On a personal level, I enjoy the process; I like the idea of getting to a level of technical proficiency and then hoping to go beyond technique…

Am I wrong, or do I hear your ex-ballerina-ness in that desire? A perfectionism?

Yeah definitely…maybe, I’m a little addicted to discipline. Physics requires a lot of discipline. But I think I can recognize that and at the same time enjoy the payoff from hard work.

Is that the only relationship you see between physics and dancing? Has one helped the other?

Yeah, I think so. This is weird, but I equate things in my head from my previous experience, like pliés= particle interactions = basic building blocks of artform/system.

So far has your proudest moment been in dancing or in physics?

I am still proud of earning a contract with Pittsburg Ballet Theater, it came after a moment when I had to step in for an older dancer (when I was a student) and I got noticed by doing a good job. My victories in physics thus far are all personal, relative gains. My contributions aren’t that important at this stage.

What are you researching right now?

I am still working on X-ray Binaries. I was exposed to an object consisting of a black hole and a stellar mass star, GRO-J1690 when I was working at Yale, and I became interested in them, so my project at AMNH is now on a similar type of object.

The primary way by which black holes are detected is when a star is caught in orbit around them.  You can tell this is happening when the spectra of a star is repeatedly red shifted and blue shifted, meaning that the star is orbiting towards and away from the observer (and manifests as a double peaked spectrum). From these dynamics you can use Newton’s laws to infer the density of the object around which it rotates, and it turns out that that black holes in binaries are incredibly dense. Neutron stars are too. They are both referred to as compact objects because of how dense they are. When something falls into their potential well, it loses a lot of energy and lets out very high-energy radiation, so they are also detected by x-rays, thus the name x-ray binary.  For my current project we are accounting for the known x-ray binaries in the Milky Way.

Are there many x-ray binary systems?

There are over 100 already identified.

That’s a lot of black holes.  But are there any black hole suns? (Sorry, corny 90’s music joke…)

I’m looking at a number of x-ray binaries, and trying to account for those that are known and consider new ways of detecting them. We’re looking at infrared emission, which hasn’t been studied very closely yet for these kinds of objects, so there are good prospects for discovery. But I’ve spent a lot of time just trying to locate them, much less say much about them.

Is it kind of like trying to find a needle in a haystack?

Yes, that’s exactly how the project was described to me when I started…maybe someday I’ll be able to describe the needle to you! Our data was divided up into 1200 little cubes, each with millions of stars, it was a mess, but when I finally found the field that had the galactic center, I was so excited to have that image pulled up on my computer screen—it’s a rare view.

What does it look like?

Well, blinding…there’s so much radiation coming from that region that it was hard to get a good contrast on the images (in fact I thought there was something wrong with the contrast for a couple days before realizing what the heck was going on). It’s interesting that the filters are sensitive to light of other frequencies than optical, but when you compare the same space to images of different frequencies they often look different.

Is it only in the infrared that you can tell that you’ve found a black hole?

X-ray is the most commonly used bandwidth…

Like the same kind of X-ray photographs a doctor would take of bones?

Yes, exactly.

That’s kind of too weird to be true–an X-ray of the sky–showing black holes, you’re lucky you get to be privy to those pictures!

Yes, I know, it’s amazing.  I saw a photo essay in Seed Magazine today that reminded me how cool x-rays are. There’s a guy named Nick Veasey who takes x-ray images and makes art out of them.

People are obsessed with black holes. Why do you think that is?

Hmm, yes, it’s a buzzword—it gets responses at cocktail parties, there’s the fear that the LHC will produce them.  There’s something alluring about black holes in that they are by definition something that cannot be seen—we have inferred representations of them, we can tell when something is in orbit around one, we can tell when in-falling matter must be heating up, we can come close to describing them mathematically, but every description comes close to fiction.  I suppose the act of imagining that which is impossible to see is what intrigues people.  (As for the LHC, the speculation about that is just that- a fiction. Suggested and conceivable but not very likely)

Do you think that black holes are the link to other universes? Or is that sci-fi stuff?

Fiction too probably. I think a misconception about black holes is that they continuously suck up everything in their way.  They certainly have a strong gravitational effect on everything (including light) within a certain proximity, but there is a radius at which they no longer influence the movement of other bodies. 

With accreting black holes, it’s often approximated that the inner radius of the disk is at the Alfven radius, where it is supported by magnetic pressure of the black hole’s magnetosphere. But it’s already subject to gravity at this point. The Roche lobe is between two bodies, It’s the point at which material gravitationally bound to one object starts falling into the gravitational potential well of the other. So if you have a star with a large envelope of gas around it in orbit around a black hole nothing will get pulled into the BH until the Roche lobe overflows none of the gas, that is, but once it overflows, an accretion disk forms. But if you picture a black hole like a gravitational potential well, then you can imagine that within a certain radius, things won’t ‘fall in’ to the well.  Just as we are gravitationally bound to the Sun, there’s no fear of the Sun eating up the rest of the solar system.

That’s lucky for us. Despite the obvious coolness factor of your work, do you ever miss dancing?

I don’t miss pointe shoes and tights. Sometimes I miss being around beautiful music and being active all the time.

Do you listen to music when you do research?

Yes, I listen to a lot of Classical music. Sometimes I go to the school radio station and play records while I work.

Any favorites?

Sibelius. Milhaud. Bach…none of which are actually “Classical.” “Orchestral”…

I had no idea there was a difference. My knowledge of classical music is even worse than my knowledge of black holes.  My knowledge of chocolate however…I’ve nearly finished a box of Prestat mint thins during this conversation! So have you always been into Classical/Orchestral music, or does it just come with the ballet territory?

Well, ballet was always a part of my life, I was trained in the Balanchine style so I tend to have an affinity for the Neo-Classics. (Mmm. I like being able to do that and not worrying about how my leotard will fit the next day!)

Indeed. Who inspired you back then?

The cult of the Balanchine ballerina did, in my youth. And certainly all the big icons at New York City Ballet. But ballets set to George Gershwin’s music were always the most fun. The great thing about dancing to great music is that you get so wrapped up in it that you forget how hard it is.

Similar to forgetting how hard finding one of those needles is?

I guess it’s similar with great intellectual pursuits, exactly!

Who inspires you most now?

Fred Hoyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Einstein. (Why I like Fred Hoyle: he was a great scientist and I love his sci-fi; his book ‘The Dark Cloud’ is priceless).

What are you most excited about right now? What gets you up in the morning? Or is your peter-pan happy thought…

Besides cappuccino with extra vanilla soy creamer…I guess I’m surprised by how many turns my life has taken and I’m excited to see what the next one will be.

What is next for you?

Well, I’ll be spending more and more time up here at Yale.  (I like it here, it’s where I did my first research project so I’m a little nostalgic and I feel at home in the department.)

I may take on a TA job in the spring…one of the astronomy courses.  It should be fun and a good way for me to reinforce my own knowledge (it never hurts to revisit the stuff you zoomed by).  I think they offer an Archaeoastronomy course too. I like history of science stuff as much as physics…

Have you taken an Archaeoastronomy class before?

No, the closest I came is the research on Jantar Mantar that I presented for Columbia’s public outreach this summer. This is a good Jantar Mantar website: http://www.jantarmantar.org/

I will definitely check that out after I learn how to pronounce it. Before I leave you to your research, I want to ask you what is your advice to people like yourself who maybe were involved in non-science stuff for most of their lives, but want to get into it now? Is it worth it?

Yes. I think it’s healthy to always be a beginner at something. It is a good way to keep your ego in check. It’s a good way not to settle. It’s a good way to uncover hidden talents and interests. And eventually, you get better.

September 11, 2009

any dance party which requires a hardhat, lab coat, and ID badge to go to is one that i wanna be at:

lyrics:

https://www.msu.edu/~mcalpin9/lhc_rap/largehadron.html

put your computer to work!

http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/

September 4, 2008

This afternoon, at approximately 2:30pm, marks the anniversary of my 29th year of living as a perpetual child. In honor of my commitment to PPS (Peter Pan Syndrome), I’d like to talk about two games which I am eagerly anticipating the release of. They should have no problem fitting down the chimney.

SPORE:

Copyright: 2008 The New York Times Company

Spore is the latest piece of devilry crafted by designer Will Wright, who is known for his frighteningly-addictive computer gaming franchise, The Sims. I don’t know if any of you have spent any time with The Sims, but my little brother Jonathan owns nearly every edition of it, so I’m very familiar with it–and all I can say is that if you haven’t played it yet, and you know that you’re the type of person who is predisposed towards developing a God-complex, then just leave it alone. That is, if you enjoy having any kind of life at all. However, if you’re unemployed and not in a relationship where how you look or smell really matters, (as I was at the time) then I HIGHLY recommend it.

One time during a visit home, I spent literally 72 hours on lock-down in Jonathan’s bedroom, blissfully alone with my Sims. My eyes were bloodshot for days afterwards from staring at nothing but a computer screen as I furiously designed my Sim neighborhood.  I built homes from the ground up, planted trees, arranged gardens, and then created an entire population of residents for whom I meticulously decided every aspect of their personage, from hair color to astrological signs.  I moved them into their fancy uncomfortable houses, made them fall in love, have children, get in fights…built up generations of families and then tore them apart, and then set several of their houses on fire. It was a maniacal exercise, and all the while, I allowed the state of my physical and mental health to deteriorate to the point where I remember having to wrack my brain about whether or not I had brushed my teeth that day, or the day before–and for someone as vigilant about dental hygiene as I am, this was rather troubling. In fact, I eventually realized that the level of my general well-being was inversely proportional to the well-being of my Sims. They took showers and cleaned their kitchens, I festered in my pajamas and threw my trash on the floor.

Spore threatens to provide more than just a distraction from your life–it could potentially stop it all together because I predict that it’s addictiveness will reach near heroinesque-levels. This is the gist of it: You start out as a lowly microbe, a spore, if you will, but then you EVOLVE! Its genius! I mean, how many opportunities do people get in their real lives to actually evolve? Have you been watching the RNC?  (Sorry, thats my bad joke of the day) Anyway, Spore lets you evolve from a state of primordial ooze to a highly-intelligent, distant-planet-colonizing space creature! And it goes on sale tomorrow! All thats left to do is install a better graphics card on this laptop, and then I can let the personal neglect begin.

You can read the full article about Spore here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/science/02spor.html?ex=1378267200&en=74d8733a1a3ea56c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

CRAYON PHYSICS:

Sit back, relax, and go on the sublime journey that is Crayon Physics. It was designed by the Finnish designer, Petri Purho, and is beautifully Scandinavian in both spirit and design–the game has one very simple and clear objective…there’s a red ball, and a yellow star, and you move the ball to the star by manipulating the ball–you do this by drawing physical objects that actually follow the laws of physics. Draw a big rock, make it fall on the ball at the proper angle, and the ball goes rolling away, ideally towards the star. You’ve had fun and learned something about the conservation of energy. Where was this game last year when I was literally throwing balls across my apartment in order to directly observe elastic collisions?

http://www.kloonigames.com/crayon

and if that isn’t enough fun for you, then leave it to these girls to cheer you up:

“Linda Linda Linda!!”

I’m obsessed…
*H

August 29, 2008

Today’s post has nothing to do with science.  I just wanted to make good on the threat I made to Annie, Erika, and Christian about posting the pictures I took of us at the New York Renaissance Fair. We weren’t there for long, but still managed to find time to get our faces painted, hair braided, fortunes told, and of course, pick up some new sorcerer boyfriends…and make it back to Brooklyn in time to see Yo La Tengo at the McCarren Pool! It was a very full day.

Coming soon: the rest of the Cassini story, and two interviews which I did in the past week: one was with Holly Larson who is an ex-professional ballerina turned astrophysicist–we talked about black holes and the similarities between dancing and physics–and the other interview was with my good friend, Matthew Perpetua, of Fluxblog.org fame, who always has something interesting to say about literally everything. They should be good-so please don’t let these frightening photographs deter you from ever returning to this site again. 

*H

August 22, 2008

Yesterday was one of those days that remind me how surreal my life is sometimes.

One of the benefits of not having a ‘real’ job is that my mornings are pretty leisurely; they usually involve coffee, a walk around the East Village (my neighborhood), Gilmore Girls reruns (my dirty little secret), and a few hours of writing at my cute wooden desk by the window. It’s a nice, peaceful little routine that keeps me sane. Yesterday morning, however, was spent in the lounge of a bat-cave like windowless bar in the Lower East Side, which was the surprising location of our BlackBook Magazine photoshoot.  I tried to set up a little makeshift office there to do my blogging, but found that the near-deafening levels of Motown music being blasted through the PA was not exactly conducive to creating the kind of focused mental state which the act of writing requires, nor was the migraine-inducing strain of pins in one’s hair combined with the physical agony of wearing a piece of couture which is two sizes too small. There was no coffee, unfortunately, but there was, however, copious amounts of wine (despite the hour) being chugged coffee-like by the various people involved with the shoot.  I tried to take pictures to post on this blog, but the bouncer (yes, a bouncer.) prevented my camera wielding due to my seemingly untrustworthy countenance within the presence of such starlets as a Gossip Girl actress and a handful of NYC Holly Golightlys.  As if I have the number of every trashy tabloid on speed dial or something.

So the Cassini post had to wait. But now I have the whole morning, and a mug of coffee beside me, and can get down to business.

I wanted to write about the Cassini-Huygens mission because, well, I think its really cool and that everyone should be excited about, or at least, understand what’s going on. And I also wanted to write about it because I found that whenever I read a recent NASA or NY Times article about some new Cassini discovery, I would always have to do a ton of backstory reading—chasing old link after old link, just to get the whole story, and then even after reading all of it, I’d still be a bit confused. So I’m going to try to attempt to present the whole thing here, a ‘Cassini-for-dummies’ if you will, that hopefully won’t end up reading like a third grader’s book report.

First things first:

What is the Cassini-Huygens mission?

Cassini-Huygens is a two-part robotic spacecraft made up of the NASA Cassini oribiter (named after Giovanni Cassini) and the ESA Huygens probe (named in honor of Christiaan Huygens’ who was the first to figure out the shape of Saturn’s rings) and its current objective is to check out Saturn. The spacecraft will complete 74 orbits of the gas giant which should permit a pretty good look at Saturn’s seven rings, and additionally make numerous flybys past its sixty satellites, focusing on one particularly interesting moon, Titan.  Cassini-Huygens was launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in 2004—but before it got there it took a bunch of breathtaking pictures of Venus as well as our own moon, and also did a fly-by of Jupiter that yielded some new and exciting atmospheric data. It also tested Einstein’s theory of general relativity and found that he was right on (though I doubt that came as shocking to the scientists…)

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab designed the Cassini orbiter (with some help from the Italian Space Agency in the form of some super high-tech communication gear), and it’s the biggest and baddest spacecraft of all time. Cassini is powered by plutonium instead of solar energy because of the far distances it was meant to travel. In fact, the spacecraft is so far away from us right now that it takes about an hour and a half for one of its signals to even reach us. It has twelve really complex instruments that were designed to analyse and measure more things than I can even discuss in this post.

The Huygens probe was given to the mission by the European Space Agency, and was designed to separate from the Cassini orbiter once it arrived at Titan.  It detached from Cassini on December 25^, 2004, and touched down on the surface of Titan about three weeks later. The probe was equipped with six instruments which were meant to analyse a whole range of Titan’s properties, such as the temperature, pressure, chemical components and radioactivity levels of its atmosphere, the speed of the wind, the presence (or lack of) electromagnetic waves, the sounds heard on the surface, the electrical conductivity of its surface materials, and (best of all) it had a gadget on it called the ACP (Aerosol Collector and Pyrolyser) which, among other things, could analyse the composition of any organic matter that happened to be cycling through the atmosphere. (I like to imagine it behaving like Eva from Wall-E, though I doubt it was as cute.

What’s so interesting about Saturn that we have to spend $3.26 billion to study it?

Well, the mission may have cost $3.26 billion bucks—but the opportunity to learn a little more about this unique and wondrous solar system that we live in? Priceless.

Saturn is a pretty weird planet, and what we’ve already discovered about its even weirder moons makes it a fascinating place that is well worth exploring. We’ve visited Saturn three times before—the first time was with Pioneer 11 in 1979, and then again with Voyager 1 in ’80, and Voyager 2 in ’81.  Pioneer discovered the magnetosphere around Saturn, as well as two of its rings. The Voyager probes confirmed the seventh of Saturn’s rings, and the existence of nine moons.  Cassini-Huygens has already eclipsed the other missions in terms of data gathering, but then, that’s the point of the thing. If you’d like to see a full timeline of everything that Cassini has done to date, then I suggest reading this:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini–Huygens_timeline

Although there is a lot of interesting stuff to be said about Cassini’s observations of Saturn’s rings, it’s the observations of Titan, and more recently, Enceledus, that really interest me because of their unique potential for organic matter—so that’s what I’m going to focus on for the rest of this post, which, is already much too long, so I’ll continue with that later.

Later:  “Enceledus and Titan” (ie. where our distant microbial relatives may live!)  

 *H

I had three hours to kill before I had to get on my plane back to JFK. So I took the tube 1 hour and 20 minutes from my hotel near Heathrow to Piccadilly Circus, took this photo of a protest, walked for seven minutes to Leicester Square, then got back on the tube for the 1 hour and 20 minute journey back. Who says a layover can’t be fun?