Externship success!

I got the externship! That is, my school'll pay me to work with my astronomer friend to make an educational and outreach webpage. In return I have to write them a paper due August 12 that'll explain how it helps my students. Most likely my friend and I won't have a finished webpage by the end, but an outline of what we want in one, and a proposal for either NASA or the NSF to fund us further. I worry that if we don't have some finished product that my school won't want to pay me, but it's something I'd work on even if they didn't want to fund me, so it's no biggie. The extra money would be nice though.

When Nemo's mom died,

his dad should've changed sex to become the dominant female, and Nemo should've become his spouse. I'd like to see the Disney exec's response to that one.

I really like using popular works to illustrate real science. Too bad I'm not a biology teacher. :)

Summer Schedule!

I've got a busy but fun summer ahead of me. Some of it's actually science related, too.

1. I'm taking a 6-week graduate education course in geology. It's partially because I keep teaching courses related to it, and I've never actually had a course on it myself (though planetary astronomy's close, right?). And partially b/c another couple graduate credits gets me a pay raise. Moreover, it's an online course, which I'm really curious about, so I get to learn first-hand, and I know the profs so I expect I'll enjoy it. Win-win-win situation all around!



2. Once or twice a week I'm going to get together with jethereal to read Feynman's lectures. Between us we've got four Master's degrees and three undergraduate majors all related to physics, and yet we still fully expect them to kick our butts. It'll be awesome!



3. I'll be spending a couple weeks teaching observational astronomy to high school and junior high students at my Alma Mater's Astrocamp. We have each batch of 16 kids for 4 days, I think there's usually 4-ish of us instructors, I haven't done it in a couple years. Kids wake late, brunch, we have afternoon lectures and activities, they have dinner and socialize after dinner, and then the fun starts. From 8pm until midnight we have four students per domed telescope and the students themselves run the telescopes, learning to operate them from star-hopping to using RA and Dec and taking CCD images. I can't wait to see the CCD systems, when I was last there only one telescope had them.



4. And throughout the summer I'll be working with a friend of mine in research astronomy on an educational outreach webpage - he's got the research expertise, I know the education, and we'll cobble together some web experience between the two of us. Unless, that is, any of you loyal readers are graphic designers / web programmers and would be interested in becoming part of the team. We are ambitious about this, or at least I am. I want something like HubbleSite or the SDSS page at the end. I fully admit that we don't have the skills to do this. :( If you think you do, drop a line in the comments with a link to your portfolio. There is NO compensation involved; this is a pro bono project unless you can find someone to fund you - my friend's doing it as part of his own work, I'm trying to get a grant for me only thru my job and will do it even if not, and we have no grants to pay others. After this summer's work is done, we may apply for actual funding, but not until then.

And speaking of that last project, I've been pondering "coming out" with this blog, that is revealing who I am. Currently I'm not ready to do that (I'd have to scour my archives!), but one thought I had was once we complete a presentable webpage I could reveal myself through launching that page and linking it. It's a scary thought; I like the idea of legitimizing blogging, but its illegitimacy makes me worry that putting my name on it will look badly to peers/employers.

Sexy Science!

Just wanted to give y'all a head's up on a blog I was tipped off to: Sexy Science. I haven't read thru all of the archives yet, but it appears the blogger is a college student, I think a woman, who's trying to show that scientists are NOT all old dorky white men with bad hair, big glasses, and lab coats. The blog has profiles of scientists: their research, career, and photos! If I weren't trying for anonymity still, I'd possibly go and submit myself. ;)

Skeptical Psychics?

The Mystic Seaport (CT) has a ship that's supposedly haunted. Three separate groups of tourists, from different states, and with no contact with each other, recently reported sighting the same man in period clothing belowdecks. This came after a previous 40 reports of "unusual events." Thankfully, the museum didn't themselves decide to call in the RI paranormal "experts" to investigate, but they did allow the group to set up shop for an evening and determine what they could find out.

The Rhode Island Paranormal Research group are definitely "believers" in ghosts and such, but on the bright side, they admit right out that 90% of the "events" they investigate turn out to be natural causes or hoaxes. I wonder how confident they are of the other 10%, or more details of what they say causes the other 10% and how they measured it. They claim they're coming back to Mystic Seaport with "more equipment"...

I may not believe that remaining 10%, but I respect that they admit the 90%. It's better than most ghost groupies.

Worm bin question

To anyone else with a worm bin, I've a question. I went to harvest some soil from it (I was repotting plants), and I noticed the soil was very gray, and not the rich brown I was expecting and had seen in the past. What causes this, and is it still good to use? My best guess is that I've been low on the "green" content lately (as in fresh veggies), and high on the paper pulp. There were LOTS of worms, at least one in every spoonful, so it's not a shortage of digestion.

x-posted

Order of Magnitude: New Orleans trash

An interesting but sad order of magnitude calculation can be done for how much trash there was to clean up from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I actually gave my students a photocopy of the linked article in the Fall after we did our first order of magnitude calculation. Count up all the household goods - because electronics don't work and everything else is moldy - all the appliances, all the cars, everything, and you get 22 million tons of waste from New Orleans. They're still cleaning it up. And the environmental impact of all the gasoline going into the water? Who knows how long that'll take to clean up, if they do.