It's All Just a Bunch of Rhubarb

Smile!

2008-04-10T13:10:00.003-05:00

Two weeks or so, after a rough day at work (although I can't remember what had pissed me off, which just goes to show you how important it actually was), I walked out to my car to go home and while I was getting settled, something caused me to look up and I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the car on the floor above me in the parking garage was smiling at me. It made me laugh and smile and lighten up from whatever had annoyed me earlier that day. I didn't have my camera on me that day, but a week or so later my boyfriend and I saw the car again and he snapped the photo above.

So, to whomever owns the smiling car, thank you for brightening my day!

Lucy!

2008-03-15T12:36:00.002-05:00

No, not that Lucy... THIS Lucy! The date of March 11 has become a "seeing things with my own eyes that I never thought I would see with my own eyes" day. Six years ago on March 11, I was standing in Pompeii. This year, I saw Lucy.

Yes, we finally did our road trip to the Houston Museum of Natural Science on Tuesday to visit Texas' most famous 3.2 million-year-old visitor. The exhibit opened last August and closes at the end of April, so we didn't have a whole lot of time left. I think that waiting a while was a good move, since it wasn't very crowded there on a Tuesday afternoon during Spring Break. For a while we practically had the Lucy room to ourselves (save the docent and security guard and a couple with a little girl).

Obviously Lucy was the main draw, but she wasn't the only thing on exhibit from Ethiopia. From pre-historic times, they had some 1.6 million year old hand axes and some nice replica fossils and skulls of other species of hominids from the area. They also had lots of cultural artifacts, especially Christian processional crosses (some of which had some very intricate metal and woodwork on them) and an interesting collection of coins. They also had photos and a model of one of the amazing rock-cut churches in Ethiopia.

We skipped the exhibit movies, although I kind of wish now that we had watched the "introduction to Ethiopia" one at the beginning. I have to admit that I didn't know a whole lot about the country beyond the fact that it was mostly left alone by European colonial powers (probably due to its long history of Christianity) and that they export a lot of coffee. And of course that it is a rich source of ancient hominid fossils. There was an introduction to Lucy video that we also skipped, mostly since I've read both "Lucy" and "Lucy's Child" and know a fair amount about her discovery. They also had her namesake song - The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" - playing in the outer room. I was mystified that someone actually complained about that in the comment book at the exit. Maybe they missed the connection and just thought the museum was being cute...

The "Lucy room" as I've decided to call it, was surrounded by a magnificent mural of human evolution from our probable common ancestor with chimpanzees (approx. 6 million years ago) to early Homo sapiens, with explanatory text below it. Lucy herself was in a horizontal case in the middle of the room, with a full-size life-like reconstruction of her in a case nearby. On the wall next to the original fossils was a vertically-mounted replica with the bones placed three-dimensionally in their correct anatomical position. This was very helpful, since you lose the depth information with the way the original fossil is displayed.

I would have liked to have seen some comparative anatomy in the exhibit. The docent on hand did a good job of describing how some parts of Lucy are more human-like and some parts are more chimp-like, but it would have been nice to have a visual reference. I also think they were trying their best to dispel the "if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" creationist canard. Of course, if you know anything about human evolution, that's a totally silly argument. But I'm guessing that a lot of the people visiting Lucy don't know that "common ape-like ancestor" is what a scientist would say, not that "man evolved from apes". So, they seemed to be careful about how they were phrasing Lucy's place with relation to modern man and apes (chimps in particular). (Although I would point out that the eLucy site does just that... it allows you to pick a bone of Lucy's and see it side-by-side with a modern man and modern chimp).

I would like to compliment the museum for allowing people to get a really good, close view of Lucy in her case. They could have displayed her in a way that kept the people at a distance or behind ropes, but thankfully that wasn't what they did. The case was horizontal, about 3 feet off the ground, and you could get right up along side it, lean over it and look through the sides. And I did. Again, and again. I'm not sure how long I loitered, but I decided to drink in as much of the view as I could. The odds of me ever seeing her again are slim so I tried to make the most of the time we had there.

I know there has been criticism and controversy over transporting such priceless fossils, but I'm so glad that Lucy is visiting the States. First, it was probably the only way I was ever going to get a chance to see her, and second, in a nation where a large fraction of people don't believe in human evolution, or evolution at all, it is important for one of our best pieces of evidence of evolution to be available for people to see with their own eyes. Unfortunately it wasn't convincing to everybody, judging by the "It's all lies" statement I saw in the comment book, but the majority of notes were far more complimentary. I don't know how many people might have their minds changed by seeing Lucy, but even if it is just a few, it's worth it. And for people like me, it was an amazing opportunity to see in person an important piece of the story of human evolution.

Last weekend's bread experiment

2008-02-28T16:41:00.002-06:00

I think I actually first saw this recipe in the newspaper, but after seeing the results (and that it was so easy a 4-year-old could do it) on Jaden's Steamy Kitchen, I decided to give it a try. You can find one of her entries on it here, but I also suggest looking at some of the others. Not to mention all the other delicious looking things at the site!

For a first attempt, I'm pretty pleased. I think my yeast might have been a little anemic and I had the pot a little too close to the top elements in the oven (hence the very dark brown parts on the top), but overall I'm happy with it. The flavor was quite good!

Carl Sagan on a stamp!

2008-02-19T13:52:00.002-06:00

Well, hopefully!

From the Cornell Chronicle:

A movement to immortalize famed Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan with a U.S. postage stamp was launched Feb. 11 for local media at the Ithaca Sciencenter.

Patrick Fish, founder of the Utica-based grassroots Sagan Appreciation Society, and Charles Trautmann, executive director of the Sciencenter, unveiled four renderings by three artists or artist teams of proposed Sagan memorial stamps that the society plans to submit to the U.S. Postal Service for commissioning.

You can read the full article and see the potential designs here.

Still being a bad, bad blogger

2008-01-28T21:42:00.000-06:00

For this blog at least. I've had lots of updates on my Tudor blogs, and even a few on the stitching blog, but not much here. After an adventure at Christmas and getting sick then, and again after getting back to Texas, and then having to catch up on the stuff that didn't get done while I was in a fog from the second round of whatever was making me sick (I'm still not sure if it was a really bad allergy attack or a really short cold)... well, you get the picture.

I think part of the reason I haven't been posting that much here is that I'm not totally sure what I want to blog about. I've done some science blogging, some personal blogging and some totally-apropos-to-nothing bogging.I guess for now I'll just continue that!

One additional thing... a little bit of science blogging! I was thrilled to see the new photos of Mercury from the Messenger spacecraft. We only saw about 45% of the planet with the Mariner 10 flybys in the mid-1970s, and eventually Messenger will see those parts *and* all the parts the Mariner missed, and with better instruments and cameras. It's kind of amazing to me that there was still over half of a planet so relatively close that we haven't seen until now. At least with Pluto there is the excuse that it is so far away (and will finally be visited by a spacecraft in about 2015), but Mercury isn't all that far away. However, it *is* really close to the sun, which brings up its own interesting set of problems.

Enough science for now.. time for bed since I never fully got back to sleep after 5 a.m. this morning!

I've been a bad, bad blogger

2007-12-22T07:43:00.000-06:00

I can't believe it's been a month and a half since I've updated this blog (although, in my defense, all of my other blogs have been updated more recently), but that's just the way it is sometimes. Not much to add... had a nice Thanksgiving break... about to drive to Alabama for Christmas and then we'll be back in Texas for New Year's.

Totally off that topic...
I need to update my blogroll on the right to include some of the grammar blogs I've been reading lately. I particularly love Apostrophe Abuse and The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. I've been an apostrophe abuse warrior for a while now, so I was pleased to be able to contribute a couple of photos to the site. Here's the first one I sent in, from a gas station pump near work. I still haven't gotten a picture of unnecessary quotation marks, but I'm on the look-out!

Texas Renaissance Festival 2007

2007-11-06T16:36:00.000-06:00

We went to TRF this past weekend and had a great time as always. The pictures above go to this year's photos set on Flickr.

Comet Holmes!

2007-11-01T16:04:00.001-05:00

I have been meaning to post something about this very interesting comet for a week now... better late than never, I guess.

The comet, which usually hangs out in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter, had already made its closest pass by the sun (which wasn't all that close) and was heading back out, orbiting happily along at 17th magnitude. For those of you unfamiliar with the astronomical magnitude scale - that's VERY faint (about 24,000 times fainter than what you can see with the unaided eye). Then, on the night of October 23rd, it suddenly got bright. VERY bright. Over all, it ended up increasing about a million times in brightness in a day or two, probably from an outgassing event.

I was running the regular open house on one of the campus telescopes last Wednesday and decided to give the comet a look at the end of the night. I really had no idea what to expect, especially from the middle of Austin, with a nearly full moon, a large football stadium with all of its lights on and more sports fields about 20 blocks away (which always color the northern sky a bright yellow-orange when viewed from our building). I punched in the coordinates and moved the telescope over and climbed up to look in the eyepiece. I saw a bright, fuzzy blob in there and figured I needed to refocus the telescope with the new eyepiece I had slipped in. But, when I looked around the field a little, I realized there was a nicely-focussed star in the corner of the field, meaning the bright fuzzy blob was the comet! I was totally, amazed since I had never seen anything quite like it before. I wasn't very familiar with the constellation of Perseus, so I didn't realize until someone pointed it out that there was an extra "star" in it, clearly visible to the naked eye even in the middle of Austin.

I have been looking at it almost every night since, mostly just with binoculars and my unaided eyes, and it has been changing quite a bit over the week since the outburst. It is now distinctly fuzzy to the naked eye and disc-like in binoculars. The outer shell of gas has been expanding, so it has appeared to grow dimmer but it is now much larger.

I decided to try to photograph the comet last night with the telescope and the digital camera from the office and got a couple of decent photos (including the one up top). You can see both of the photos here. And you can see lots of other photos on SpaceWeather.com. Be sure to look at the finder charts and to go out and have a look yourself!

Remembering Deborah Kerr

2007-10-21T12:38:00.000-05:00

(Cross-posted at the TudorHistory.org blog)

While this is only tangentially Tudor-related, Foose reminded me in comments to the Elizabeth open thread that I wanted to comment on the passing of Deborah Kerr. (And yes, I'll do some more "open threads" in the future on some other topics, since it was kind of fun to read other people's thoughts on "The Golden Age").

I first really got into the Tudors when I was about 14 years old, which was also about the time that I really got hooked on watching old movies. I think it was around this time that American Movie Classics and channels like that starting popping up and I fell in love with some of the old movies (not to mention forming crushes on some of the actors, in particular Cary Grant and Yul Brynner). So, of course, I started seeking out old historical movies, and I'm pretty sure the first Tudor one I watched was "Young Bess" (1953). Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger (who were married to one another at the time) star as the young Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour, Charles Laughton reprises his role from "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933) as the big king himself and Deborah Kerr played Katherine Parr. Interestingly, the boy who played Edward VI in "Young Bess" would go on to play the son of Kerr's character in "The King and I" (one of my all-time favorite movies).

When the news came out the Deborah Kerr had died, the coverage mostly mentioned the famous kiss on the beach in "From Here to Eternity" and her roles in "The King and I" and "An Affair to Remember", but I also thought of her in the role I first saw her - Queen Katherine Parr in "Young Bess".

Image from Wikipedia

Confessions of a Nobel Prize junkie

2007-10-12T13:00:00.000-05:00

Yep, it's true, I'm a Nobel Prize junkie. I eagerly await the announcements every year, especially Physics and Peace. This year the Nobel folks set up RSS feeds so you can find out almost instantly when the prizes are announced (provided you are sitting at your computer in the early morning hours US time) and have links to videos of the announcements, summaries of the work the prizes are awarded for, etc. They have more info on the prizes and my favorite sections - "Memories of the magic call".

So, given this, you can imagine how thrilled I was to be able to sit and chat briefly with last year's Physics co-winner, John Mather, who was here to give a couple of lectures and receive the Antoinette de Vaucouleurs memorial medal. Like an idiot though, I forgot to ask him about "getting the call"! D'oh! I also have never asked Steven Weinberg about his call for some reason. Well, if he asks me to help him with graphics for a Power Point presentation again, I'll have to turn into a fangirl and ask him. :)

And yes, I was very pleased with this morning's announcement of the Peace Prize, given jointly to Al Gore and the IPCC. To show what a total Nobel geek I am, we typically flip the TV on as soon as the alarm goes off and turn it over to the news. Knowing that the announcement was made about two hours before we got up, I instantly started reading the "crawl" across the bottom of the screen (something that usually annoys the heck out of me but was quite useful this time!). About the third or fourth story that came across started "Vice President Al Gore..." and I knew that he had won. I wonder if this the first time someone has won an Oscar and a Nobel in the same year?

And to finish my thoughts about the Physics prize in particular, it still amazes me that some of the experiments we did in the first year quantum physics lab won people Nobel prizes a century earlier. It just goes to show you how quickly science advanced in the 20th century!

Happy Birthday Sputnik!

2007-10-04T12:52:00.000-05:00

I was going to say a few things about the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, but it looks like Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy already wrote a lot of stuff along the lines I was thinking!

Here's a NASA page (where I took the picture from) about the spacecraft and a Science@NASA page where you can hear the beep and learn more about communicating with spaceprobes, like the one on its way to Pluto.

Problems posting over at Tudorhistory.org blogs

2007-09-24T09:22:00.000-05:00

Just in case any of the folks who regularly read the TudorHistory blogs or listen to the podcast happen to wander by here, I wanted to get something out there about the publishing problems I'm having. For some reason I can't get anything to publish to that site with Blogger, even though this site is working fine (and is hosted by the same company). I'm going to keep working on it periodically from work and see if I can figure something out...

Dragonflies!

2007-09-21T16:25:00.000-05:00

Central Texas got off easy this summer. The temperatures were relatively mild and we got enough rain for everything to stay green instead of turning to a dusty brown. Okay, so maybe at times we got too much rain... One of the side effects of this is an interesting change in the behavior of birds (the hummingbirds have hung around a lot longer this year) and in the insects, in particular the dragonflies. I've seen at least 5 different types this year and in higher numbers than in the past. I haven't had a lot of luck getting photos of them, but this magenta-colored one was nice enough to keep landing on my car antenna and holding still long enough for me to get some photos. Click above to go to the Flickr photoset (which I hope I'll be able to add to in the future!).

Storm photos from last week

2007-09-06T15:01:00.000-05:00

We have had some spotty popcorn showers over the past couple of weeks, a lot of them coming from moisture sweeping up from the Gulf. By the time they get to central Texas, it's usually close to sunset, so we can get some really amazing skies in the evenings. I've added the most recent photos (including the one above) to my "Sunsets and Weather from Elgin" Flickr set linked through the photo. (The new photos are at the bottom of the set.)

Introducing...

2007-08-26T19:20:00.000-05:00

Lara's Loose Threads

I was trying to figure out how to incorporate my needlework and quilting stuff into the re-worked version of my homepage and I realized that the answer was staring me in the face. A blog! There isn't a whole lot up over there yet, but I'll be posting more photos in the future.

Today's Best Spam Subject Line

2007-08-16T11:16:00.000-05:00

Today's winner is:

sandwich 376 fetishists - This one has a lot of comedic potential. I'm picturing 376 peanut butter and jelly fetishists being squeezed together.

Start of a semi-regular series "Best Spam Subject Line of the Day"

2007-08-09T16:33:00.000-05:00

Between the four email accounts I use regularly, I get a lot of spam. While it annoys me greatly to have to spend so much time sorting through it to make sure that some real mail hasn't been caught in the filters, I've found that the subject lines can sometimes be quite amusing and sometimes even profound in an existentialist sort of way. Most of my amusement comes from the emails where they take two or three words and randomly pair them in the subject heading, but I do have to admit that I'm also getting a chuckle out of the fact that even the spammers are riding Harry Potter's robe-tails and now "enhancement" products are using "magic wand" as a euphemism for a certain part of male anatomy.

So here are some from today's haul of spam that made me grin:

Worldly tripod - this one actually kind of works for me. Makes me think of travel photography.

A pretty-pretty fly - What happens when an insect ends up in a supermodel's teleportation device.

Dirt-encrusted squid - What happens when you drop your calamari

A few photos from West Texas

2007-08-07T15:12:00.000-05:00

I didn't get a chance to take a lot of photos when I was out in West Texas last month, but I did post the few that I did take over on my Flickr page. If you click the photo above, it will take you to the West Texas photo set, which also includes photos from when I was out in December 2003 (and has a lot more photos of actual telescopes!).

As you can see from the photos, it was the rainy season in West Texas. While that isn't great for using telescopes or having outdoor functions at a meeting, it does make for pretty green scenery and nice sunsets. The last night I was out there though was crystal clear and beautiful. I ended up not even looking through a telescope ... just sitting on a porch and looking at the Milky Way!

On travel for a few days

2007-07-12T09:58:00.001-05:00

I just wanted to let folks know that I'm going to be traveling for work through Sunday, so I won't be answering emails or making blog posts in that time period. I'll have internet access, but I don't think I'll have a lot of time to deal with non-work stuff!

Apparently I'm not as organized as I thought

2007-07-10T12:34:00.000-05:00

If any of you have wandered over here to figure out why my Tudor History website isn't showing up, here's your answer. The domain expired yesterday, but I just renewed it after talking with my domain registrar, so hopefully it will be back up soon. I am usually really good about keeping track of these types of things and I thought I had another year on this one, but obviously not!

My one complaint is that my registrar didn't send a notice that it was about to expire. I know some companies do that, but this one doesn't. I understand that ultimately it is my responsibility to make sure it gets renewed on time, but really, how hard is it to send an email a week or so before to remind someone about an expiring domain?

Oh well... stay tuned. If the website doesn't show back up in a day or so, then I'll update with any additional news.

2007-06-23T14:21:00.000-05:00

This is just sickening:

A church's Elizabethan Tudor Rose window has been smashed to bits by thieves just a fortnight after clergymen proudly showed it off to the Prince of Wales.

They climbed in through the remains of the stained glass window at St Gredifael Church in Penymynydd, Anglesey, seized an ancient cannonball and hurled it through another Elizabethan window.

Full article (2 pages)

This is the window that was smashed, which some of you might recognize as the image that used to be on the front page of the website:

Click on the image to go to a page with a little bit more about the window and a link to the full sized picture. I've also got a few other pictures of the church itself, which I visited in 2000. (I'm in the process of re-doing all my photos from the negatives, so at some point I'll have some nicer and bigger versions of the church photos up.)

(Cross-posted at the Tudor History blog)

Cutty Sark

2007-05-21T09:37:00.000-05:00

I was heartbroken to see the fire on the Cutty Sark this morning. The good news is that about 50% of the ship was away for restoration. The bad news is that right now the fire is being treated as "suspicious".

I've visited the ship twice, although I've never actually gone aboard for some silly reason. The picture above goes to the Greenwich set from my 2003 trip, which includes a few photos the ship.

Here's a link to an article at BBC News

And here is a link to the Cutty Sark Trust.

{cross-posted with the Tudor History blog}

More bragging on colleagues

2007-05-12T19:40:00.000-05:00

We go from gigantic stars blowing up to finding the one of the oldest stars in the Galaxy! This time it is Anna Frebel, the William J. McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow and her metal poor star HE 1523-0901. Yeah, it isn't the sexiest name for a star, but that's not what's important about it. Since Phil Plait over at BadAstronomy has already boiled down the science, I'll just link to his post.

Big-Badda-Boom!

2007-05-08T19:56:00.000-05:00

I've got to brag on a couple of colleagues who were mentioned in the New York Times today.

From the article:

In a cascade of superlatives that belies the traditional cerebral reserve of their profession, astronomers reported today that they had seen the brightest and most powerful stellar explosion ever recorded.
...
Astronomers have been following the star since last September, when it was discovered in a galaxy 240 million light years away in the constellation Perseus by Robert Quimby, a University of Texas graduate student, who was using a small robotic telescope at McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Tex., to troll for supernovas.
[note: one addition... Robert is a Post-Doctoral Fellow now, and still at UT]
...
“The core is still composed of explosive oxygen,” explained Craig Wheeler of the University of Texas and another of the paper’s authors. “The oxygen ignites and blows the star to smithereens with no remnant, no black hole left.”
[another note: Craig is also the current president of the American Astronomical Society]

The star up at the top of the page is Eta Carinae, which is mentioned in the article. It similar to the star that exploded, but much closer to home. If you click on the image it will take you to the press release from Hubble.

Rainbow cows

2007-04-27T14:36:00.000-05:00

This photo is from a storm that blew through one evening about two weeks ago. It rained pretty hard, but it also cleared really fast. With the sun fairly low in the west and it still raining off to the east I was pretty sure we'd have some nice rainbows and I wasn't disappointed. I only wish I had the SLR with the really wide angle lens at home so I could have captured the whole arc! A secondary rainbow was also visible for a lot of the time, although it didn't make a whole arc.

One cool thing is that the rain hadn't moved too far when the rainbow started to show up, so it appeared to be coming down in our neighbor's field. Guess I should have gone looking for that pot of gold, but I think the cows beat me to it. In the picture above (which is linked to my rainbow Flickr photoset -- the last six are from this storm) you can see the rainbow coming down in front of the cows and the trees on hill in the background.