This is the obligatory Happy New Year post, but also another place for me to put some of my 2014 goals (note - not 'resolutions'!) to keep myself honest about them. I'll also be posting on twitter and a few other places.
The first thought I had for a goal is specifically connected to this being 2014, which is the 450th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. I have been on a bit of a Shakespeare kick lately anyway, so I don't expect this one will be TOO hard to achieve: to read/watch/listen to all of Shakespeare's plays. I'm going to read a sonnet a day too as a bonus. I'll mostly likely be tweeting and blogging about this particular goal through my Tudor history accounts, etc.
The next one is a typical "lose weight" - in this case to continue losing weight since I had already lost about 10 pounds in the last few months of 2013 once I decided to kick myself in the arse about it. No, you're not going to get my goal number here, but I will say the goal date is at the end of July when we have our summer board meeting out at the observatory.
Another, probably fairly typical, is to continue decreasing my credit card debit. Again, no numbers, but I'd like to get half of my revolving balance on one of my big cards paid off. (Sadly, I'll still have one other large one, but I hope to continue chipping away at it too.)
The next two are related to the vast pile of craft projects in various states of completion. My goal is to frame (or finish into ornaments or whatever) six projects that I've already completed the stitching on and to finish the stitching on 10 projects (small ones count!). I'll most likely just post about those on Lara's Loose Threads.
The rest are book related. I've got a huge stack of books that authors and publishers have so generously sent me over the years and I've been really bad about writing reviews of them. So I'm going to set the goal of writing 10 book reviews for my Tudor history blog. I've already read several of the books, but I just need to sit down and review them! And for reading in general, I've set my 2014 Reading Challenge at Goodreads to 30 books, which should be doable since it includes all the audiobooks that I listen to driving to and from work.
So, let's see how I do! I'll go over the list at the end of the year and tally them up.
Another arbitrary milestone!
Yesterday marked the 8th anniversary of this blog, so it's another time for me to lament not blogging more here. I've figured out that part of the fall-off of posts is due to the fact that I started using Twitter and a lot of things that I would have posted here end up posted there. But I will still continue to try to post more!
Sherwood Forest Faire photo set finally up at Flickr!
Well, I posted the photos on Flickr a while back, I'm just now getting around to posting about it here too.
More thoughts on education
I have posted before on some of my thoughts on college education and a great post by Carl Zimmer over at his blog "The Loom": An Open Letter to Science Students and Science Teachers has prompted me to think on it some more. His post sounded *very* familiar to me, and after reading comments on Twitter, very familiar to a lot of other people working in popular science and outreach. And if you substitute "history" for "science" this is also what I see a lot of through my Tudor History site as well. The post is a good example of why Carl is such a great writer; he managed to describe and sum up something I've been struggling to put into a words for quite a while now. I don't really have much to add to what he said, but there are definitely conversations to be had between professionals and students and teachers.
JWST and NASA at SXSW
Northrop Grumman and NASA brought the full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope to the annual craziness in Austin that is South By Southwest. (For the record, I twitch uncontrollably when people abbreviate it to "South By" - if for no other reason in that it breaks the reference to North By Northwest, one of my favorite movies!) Working with one of our professors, they asked for volunteers to come down and help talk about the telscope and work at some of the tables in the NASA Experience tent, so I was down there for a while on Friday and all day Sunday. At the last minute I decided to throw my DSLR and my little travel tripod into my backpack since I knew that they were lighting the model up colorfully at night and that I had to get some photos. And I'm glad I did since I'm really happy with the way the photos turned out! Click on the photo at the top to go to the full Flickr set.
I had a great time talking about the telescope for the first part of the day even if I did manage to sunburn the top of my head. I was a little surprised that a few people asked if the model was the actual telescope, although I think everyone who asked that prefaced it with "I don't think it is, but I have to ask...". At one of the tables in the tent there were parts of the actual materials of the telescope, mostly the left over ends of things that were cut for the structure. I played with the parts a little on Friday and they are quite light, but that isn't too surprising given that it will have to be launched in to space.
I spent the afternoon working at the table with the infrared camera (the JWST will be an infrared telescope), which was a lot of fun. Kids in particular had a blast sticking their hands into the bucket of ice water and seeing how it looked on the camera. The most interesting visitor was a man with a medical condition that caused poor circulation in two of his fingers on one hand and the difference was quite easily visible.
And at the end of the day, the JWST folks made a successful attempt for an official Guinness World Record for Largest Astronomy Lesson. (The Guinness people are often at SXSW for a variety of interesting attempts at official records.) I stayed to watch that, but took off as soon as it was over since a day of sun, wind, talking, and allergies caught up to me!
Richard III news round-up
[I decided to cross post this from my Tudorhistory blog since the science is just as important as the history!]
As expected, the University of Leicester announced this morning that they have confirmed that the remains found last summer are indeed those of Richard III. (You can see my initial round-up from September here.)
Here is the re-launched site about the project from the university: The search for Richard III - completed.
You will find photos and information about all of the lines of inquiry that went into the identification there. The video of the press conference is supposed to be uploaded at some point as well. You can find the presentations by the speakers at the press conference here. They also mentioned on their twitter account that all of the research will be submitted to academic journals for peer review. (I'll stay out of the discussion of public and media interest vs. academic procedure, since I honestly don't know what the proper answer is. I've seen in the sciences that "press conference before peer review" can have unfortunate results, but I've also seen conclusions validated once papers are published.)
Here are some other informative links:
* Leicester car park skeleton 'is that of Richard III'
* Richard III discovery in pictures
* Richard III dig: DNA confirms bones are king's
* Richard III: The twisted bones that reveal a king
* Richard III's remains found in Leicester (nice diagram of the site on this one)
I've also seen some remarks about the DNA testing not being the "proof" that it is being presented as, and that is technically correct. There is a chance that it is coincidence that the Michael Ibsen and Richard III have the same mitochondrial DNA because of its nature (if it is rare or common will affect the significance of the match). They were also able to track down another maternal line relative who consented to testing (but wished to remain anonymous) and the mtDNA matched between Ibsen and the anonymous subject as well as matching to the skeleton. We'll know more once the academic paper comes out but in the text of the presentation the scientist is quoted as saying "The analysis showed that these two individuals shared the same relatively rare mitochondrial DNA sequence." I would also point out that the DNA tests did not exclude positive identification of Richard III (either because the skeleton wasn't Richard's or from mistakes in the genealogy) so that is helpful information as well. There is also on-going work with testing the Y-chromosome against known male-only lines, but this is more difficult and may be inconclusive for a variety of reasons.
To me, the osteological evidence, the historical and archaeological evidence, and the fact that the DNA and carbon dating results do not rule it out, the identification of the bones as those of Richard III does seem to be the correct conclusion. But keep in mind my degree is in astronomy, not archaeology! Still, all-in-all, it was an exciting day for me as a fan of both science and history.
As expected, the University of Leicester announced this morning that they have confirmed that the remains found last summer are indeed those of Richard III. (You can see my initial round-up from September here.)
Here is the re-launched site about the project from the university: The search for Richard III - completed.
You will find photos and information about all of the lines of inquiry that went into the identification there. The video of the press conference is supposed to be uploaded at some point as well. You can find the presentations by the speakers at the press conference here. They also mentioned on their twitter account that all of the research will be submitted to academic journals for peer review. (I'll stay out of the discussion of public and media interest vs. academic procedure, since I honestly don't know what the proper answer is. I've seen in the sciences that "press conference before peer review" can have unfortunate results, but I've also seen conclusions validated once papers are published.)
Here are some other informative links:
* Leicester car park skeleton 'is that of Richard III'
* Richard III discovery in pictures
* Richard III dig: DNA confirms bones are king's
* Richard III: The twisted bones that reveal a king
* Richard III's remains found in Leicester (nice diagram of the site on this one)
I've also seen some remarks about the DNA testing not being the "proof" that it is being presented as, and that is technically correct. There is a chance that it is coincidence that the Michael Ibsen and Richard III have the same mitochondrial DNA because of its nature (if it is rare or common will affect the significance of the match). They were also able to track down another maternal line relative who consented to testing (but wished to remain anonymous) and the mtDNA matched between Ibsen and the anonymous subject as well as matching to the skeleton. We'll know more once the academic paper comes out but in the text of the presentation the scientist is quoted as saying "The analysis showed that these two individuals shared the same relatively rare mitochondrial DNA sequence." I would also point out that the DNA tests did not exclude positive identification of Richard III (either because the skeleton wasn't Richard's or from mistakes in the genealogy) so that is helpful information as well. There is also on-going work with testing the Y-chromosome against known male-only lines, but this is more difficult and may be inconclusive for a variety of reasons.
To me, the osteological evidence, the historical and archaeological evidence, and the fact that the DNA and carbon dating results do not rule it out, the identification of the bones as those of Richard III does seem to be the correct conclusion. But keep in mind my degree is in astronomy, not archaeology! Still, all-in-all, it was an exciting day for me as a fan of both science and history.
Seeing a conspiracy around every corner
... or at least I have to think that is how some people go through life.
This is something I've wondered about for a long time, especially when I see people like Alex Jones going on and on about FEMA camps, black helicopters, etc. - how do people end up with a mindset that they see conspiracy in EVERYTHING? And to narrow it down some, why are so many people either afraid or seeing conspiracy in everything in the night sky? Was is started by all the noise around 2012? No, these things have been around for a long, long time - from ominous portents to selling "comet pills" to prevent being poisoned by the tail of Halley's Comet in 1910. But I can't help thinking that the 2012 stuff has created a revival of sorts.
The latest thing that prompted this thought was an email that came in to one of our general addresses and was forwarded on to me. It was a question about the object next to the moon on Monday January 21, which is a common type of inquiry we get when something bright is near something else bright in the night sky. (In this case it was Jupiter, which some lucky people got to see as an occultation - very cool!) Again, this is a very common question we get, but what caught my eye at the end of the email was "Can you tell me or is it a secret?". As I said on twitter.... "sigh". Considering that looking at it with even a decent pair of binoculars would reveal it to be Jupiter, it would be a very hard secret to keep if we tried!
Since I had the name and email address of the submitter, I decided to break out the Google and poke around. Sure enough, I found both the name and address on some forums dedicated to, shall we say... less than scientific modes of thinking. (Really, it was some serious woo-woo stuff going on there.) I could have asked him why he would have asked the "secret" question, but I'm honestly not sure that would have helped a whole lot. Plus, I'm just not that confrontational (which is probably a good thing in my line of work, it keeps me out of trouble!).
I know that in some cases (and possibly in this case, based on what I found) there is something genuinely wrong with the person's brain - and I mean that in a clinical sense, not to be flippant. And in other cases, I think it stems from a general human reaction to fear what they don't understand. After all, that was a pretty advantageous trait when we were evolving in the African savanna. So is the solution, in these latter cases, more education? I hope so, since I think that is a problem that CAN be fixed. Yes, I'm an optimist. :)
This is something I've wondered about for a long time, especially when I see people like Alex Jones going on and on about FEMA camps, black helicopters, etc. - how do people end up with a mindset that they see conspiracy in EVERYTHING? And to narrow it down some, why are so many people either afraid or seeing conspiracy in everything in the night sky? Was is started by all the noise around 2012? No, these things have been around for a long, long time - from ominous portents to selling "comet pills" to prevent being poisoned by the tail of Halley's Comet in 1910. But I can't help thinking that the 2012 stuff has created a revival of sorts.
The latest thing that prompted this thought was an email that came in to one of our general addresses and was forwarded on to me. It was a question about the object next to the moon on Monday January 21, which is a common type of inquiry we get when something bright is near something else bright in the night sky. (In this case it was Jupiter, which some lucky people got to see as an occultation - very cool!) Again, this is a very common question we get, but what caught my eye at the end of the email was "Can you tell me or is it a secret?". As I said on twitter.... "sigh". Considering that looking at it with even a decent pair of binoculars would reveal it to be Jupiter, it would be a very hard secret to keep if we tried!
Since I had the name and email address of the submitter, I decided to break out the Google and poke around. Sure enough, I found both the name and address on some forums dedicated to, shall we say... less than scientific modes of thinking. (Really, it was some serious woo-woo stuff going on there.) I could have asked him why he would have asked the "secret" question, but I'm honestly not sure that would have helped a whole lot. Plus, I'm just not that confrontational (which is probably a good thing in my line of work, it keeps me out of trouble!).
I know that in some cases (and possibly in this case, based on what I found) there is something genuinely wrong with the person's brain - and I mean that in a clinical sense, not to be flippant. And in other cases, I think it stems from a general human reaction to fear what they don't understand. After all, that was a pretty advantageous trait when we were evolving in the African savanna. So is the solution, in these latter cases, more education? I hope so, since I think that is a problem that CAN be fixed. Yes, I'm an optimist. :)
Happy New Year!
Here's hoping that 2013 turns out to have all of the awesome of 2012 and none of the crap.
Space Shuttle Endeavour visits Austin, Part Deux
On September 20, the Space Shuttle Endeavour did a fly-over of Austin and I caught a really cool photo of it with the UT Tower. You can see my original blog post about it here.
The weird thing was that for the next few months, after the initial rush of the first few days, I still saw a trickle of retweets, views, and comments.
Then, I got a tweet from someone at Twitter saying that they would like to use the tweet/photo as part of an official Twitter project. I was intrigued, but figured it would show up somewhere buried in a 2012 wrap-up. Well, I was partially correct, it was in a 2012 wrap-up, but buried it certainly wasn't! Imagine my surprise when it showed up here:
Only on Twitter
And here:
And here:
And in the video itself:
(Below the Curiosity rover and next to Barack and Michelle Obama. Seriously?!?!)
And here's the whole video:
And one of the more amusing places that the photo and tweet showed up was this blog entry from the TexasExes: UT Tower Lands on Twitter’s Most Popular Posts of 2012
Compared to Barack Obama's most re-tweeted tweet ever, my little photo and tweet of the Space Shuttle Endeavour was nothing. But to an average person like me it was a big deal!
The stats as of today, the last day of 2012, are: on Flickr - over 5500 views, 100+ favorites and 39 comments. The actual tweet directly from my account was retweeted about 800 times, but I also sent it to several local news outlets and *their* tweets also got a lot of traffic so the twitpic is edging towards 35,000 views! There were also several shares and about 800 likes on Facebook (I think, it's hard to track stuff like that on Facebook) and there were shares on Google+ and on blogs. I did a search on the link to the Twitpic (http://twitpic.com/awk6ky) and saw all sorts of links that I didn't even know about before! And I've gained about 150 followers in the past few weeks - I'm sure most of them are people hunting for follow-backs or are spambots, but still, it's kind of cool. :)
I did post a couple more pictures of the fly-over, although they weren't as special as the Tower shot, I did like this one of it coming in:
While I doubt 2013 will bring anything like this, I'm still excited to see what happens in the new year!
Shuttle #Endeavour flying next to the UT Tower #spottheshuttle #austin twitpic.com/awk6ky
— Lara Eakins (@LaraEakins) September 20, 2012
The weird thing was that for the next few months, after the initial rush of the first few days, I still saw a trickle of retweets, views, and comments.
Then, I got a tweet from someone at Twitter saying that they would like to use the tweet/photo as part of an official Twitter project. I was intrigued, but figured it would show up somewhere buried in a 2012 wrap-up. Well, I was partially correct, it was in a 2012 wrap-up, but buried it certainly wasn't! Imagine my surprise when it showed up here:
And here:
And here:
And in the video itself:
(Below the Curiosity rover and next to Barack and Michelle Obama. Seriously?!?!)
And here's the whole video:
And one of the more amusing places that the photo and tweet showed up was this blog entry from the TexasExes: UT Tower Lands on Twitter’s Most Popular Posts of 2012
Compared to Barack Obama's most re-tweeted tweet ever, my little photo and tweet of the Space Shuttle Endeavour was nothing. But to an average person like me it was a big deal!
The stats as of today, the last day of 2012, are: on Flickr - over 5500 views, 100+ favorites and 39 comments. The actual tweet directly from my account was retweeted about 800 times, but I also sent it to several local news outlets and *their* tweets also got a lot of traffic so the twitpic is edging towards 35,000 views! There were also several shares and about 800 likes on Facebook (I think, it's hard to track stuff like that on Facebook) and there were shares on Google+ and on blogs. I did a search on the link to the Twitpic (http://twitpic.com/awk6ky) and saw all sorts of links that I didn't even know about before! And I've gained about 150 followers in the past few weeks - I'm sure most of them are people hunting for follow-backs or are spambots, but still, it's kind of cool. :)
I did post a couple more pictures of the fly-over, although they weren't as special as the Tower shot, I did like this one of it coming in:
While I doubt 2013 will bring anything like this, I'm still excited to see what happens in the new year!
2012 was a pretty amazing year
I knew going in that 2012 was going to be a pretty busy year for me, and it was! Personally the highlights were the AAS meeting in January, successfully pulling off the very popular public viewing of the Venus transit in June, and seeing the Space Shuttle Endeavour in September (more about that later...). But in the broader world, there was some pretty incredible stuff this year. There were also some sad good-byes and heartbreaking tragedies, and I know it was a rough year for some of my friends and acquaintances, but I want to focus on the good things.
Humans literally went to the extremes - James Cameron solo dived to the deepest part of the Earth's oceans, while Felix Baumgartner jumped from a balloon in the stratosphere. And we got to see both occur live on our computers.
Physicists have probably discovered the Higgs boson, one of the key points of modern Standard Model of physics. (I'll refrain from grousing about how it could have been discovered 15 years sooner and here in Texas if the Congress hadn't been so short-sighted in canceling the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993.)
I saw a man run in the Olympics on two artificial legs. Wow.
Private spaceflight is becoming a reality and SpaceX is proved it can do the job of the low-earth orbit tasks and leave the big stuff, like going beyond Earth orbit, to NASA.
And the highlight, in my opinion, was the amazing landing of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover on Mars. I *still* can't believe that worked...
On a more personal and far less scientific note, this was a great year for one of my favorite places on Earth - London. The Queen's Diamond Jubilee was a great warm-up to their hosting the Olympics just a few weeks later and I loved every minute of watching both. I realized while watching the Olympics - in particular the cycling at Hampton Court Palace - that of all the cities that have hosted the Olympics, London is the one I've spent the most time in. (And I've only been in 2 other cities that have hosted - Rome, which hosted the games before I was born, and Atlanta. Well, technically I've been in St. Louis too, but only the airport!).
From my history side - the possible discovery of the remains of Richard III. The historical detective work that went into if was amazing enough, but the fact that they have found remains that, circumstantially at this point, might be what they were looking for is astounding. It still gives me chills!
On my geeky side - "The Avengers" was amazing and I'm still so impressed that Marvel has been able to put together such a good string of movies and was able to bring it all together into a movie that was even better than the sum of its parts. The finale to the Batman trilogy was perfect as well. And we got to go back to Middle Earth! But the tops for me was the acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney and the announcement that we would indeed get episodes VII, VIII, and IX. This is a kind of Holy Grail of my childhood, to see all 9 episodes of the Star Wars "Skywalker family" saga actually happen. And I'm looking forward to some of the other Star Wars projects that have been mentioned outside of the 9-part sage. Personally I'd love to see some stuff set in the Old Republic days.
I'm sure there are things I'm missing, but these are a few of the things that will make 2012 special in my memories!
Humans literally went to the extremes - James Cameron solo dived to the deepest part of the Earth's oceans, while Felix Baumgartner jumped from a balloon in the stratosphere. And we got to see both occur live on our computers.
Physicists have probably discovered the Higgs boson, one of the key points of modern Standard Model of physics. (I'll refrain from grousing about how it could have been discovered 15 years sooner and here in Texas if the Congress hadn't been so short-sighted in canceling the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993.)
I saw a man run in the Olympics on two artificial legs. Wow.
Private spaceflight is becoming a reality and SpaceX is proved it can do the job of the low-earth orbit tasks and leave the big stuff, like going beyond Earth orbit, to NASA.
And the highlight, in my opinion, was the amazing landing of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover on Mars. I *still* can't believe that worked...
On a more personal and far less scientific note, this was a great year for one of my favorite places on Earth - London. The Queen's Diamond Jubilee was a great warm-up to their hosting the Olympics just a few weeks later and I loved every minute of watching both. I realized while watching the Olympics - in particular the cycling at Hampton Court Palace - that of all the cities that have hosted the Olympics, London is the one I've spent the most time in. (And I've only been in 2 other cities that have hosted - Rome, which hosted the games before I was born, and Atlanta. Well, technically I've been in St. Louis too, but only the airport!).
From my history side - the possible discovery of the remains of Richard III. The historical detective work that went into if was amazing enough, but the fact that they have found remains that, circumstantially at this point, might be what they were looking for is astounding. It still gives me chills!
On my geeky side - "The Avengers" was amazing and I'm still so impressed that Marvel has been able to put together such a good string of movies and was able to bring it all together into a movie that was even better than the sum of its parts. The finale to the Batman trilogy was perfect as well. And we got to go back to Middle Earth! But the tops for me was the acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney and the announcement that we would indeed get episodes VII, VIII, and IX. This is a kind of Holy Grail of my childhood, to see all 9 episodes of the Star Wars "Skywalker family" saga actually happen. And I'm looking forward to some of the other Star Wars projects that have been mentioned outside of the 9-part sage. Personally I'd love to see some stuff set in the Old Republic days.
I'm sure there are things I'm missing, but these are a few of the things that will make 2012 special in my memories!
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