Bad Idea

Our Governmet: Protecting Unborn Lives from Astronomers

My next-door neighbor Stan just bought a computer with his research grant, and while he was away one day the secretary came into his office and affixed a UCLA property sticker on his computer. This was a little odd, because UCLA has stopped keeping track of inexpensive computer equipment. It turns out that his grant was administered by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and they wanted UCLA to keep track of the computer. So, OK, it made sense.

But then a government auditor came by yesterday, to confirm the existence of the computer, and affix a couple more stickers, as shown in this image. Stan of course asked, "What's the bottom one?" The auditor told him that it was to prevent the computer from being used for non-registered human embryonic stem cell research (hESC). Stan thought it was a joke, but apparently the auditor had no sense of humor.

Stan does study the birth places of stars and planets, but he doesn't think the prohibition against working with stem cells will significantly impact his research. However, we're all now wondering whether he'll be able to look at the this link from his computer.

And we're all just really impressed at how our government defends its principles.

Lost in Conversion

For the tenth anniversary of the orbiting X-ray observatory the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, I made a new version of the All-Sky Monitor Movie an animation showing how the X-ray sky looked every 12 hours over the last decade. The original version was made by Don Smith (now at Guilford colloge) and I, under the supervision of Ed Morgan, Al Levine, and Hale Bradt at MIT. A description of the movie, along with the movie itself (which is 41 MB large) is on my (slightly more) professional site.

This being a weblog, it is my opportunity to gripe a bit. I spent several days on the new movie, which is not much time compared to the months it takes me to complete my usual research projects, but it was my vacation time. I had to get Ed Morgan to recover the original routines to make the individual frames off of a back-up, because the disk they were on recently died, and then modify the routine so that the images looked less "Dr. Who-ey" as someone put it. Then I needed to track down a program to compile them as an mpeg (the MJPEG tools worked well). I was happy with how it turned out.

I then turned it over to NASA, so they could put out a press release. It was in the "top 10 most e-mailed news articles" on Yahoo for like 20 minutes early on a Saturday morning! However, if you have the badwidth to spare, you'll see that when they converted it to MOV and SWF formats (what's SWF? is it for a personal ad?), it looks like crap.

Oh, well. I didn't expect to be up for "best animated short" later this month, anyway. . .

Astrophysical Data, Old School

A couple years back, a friend found a box of glass slides at MIT that had been created for a presentation in the 60's or very early 70's. That's way before PowerPoint was invented, and perhaps even before 35 mm slides. In fact, it was also clearly before computerized data collection systems.

Here is a scanned image of the slide that caught my attention. It was apparently created to display how data was collected on an experiement that was launched on a rocket flight. The data was recorded by taking time-lapse photos of instruments that one might find on a lab bench!

The top image contains a circular chamber with radial tracks in it, which is probably bubble chamber that recorded the arrival of protons and electrons, along with a gauge at the center of the bubble chamber to record the pressure. The bottom image contains a line that is probably from an oscilliscope, and an analog stopwatch to record the time at which the image was taken.

Based on what was going on at that time at MIT, my guess is that it was one of the early experiments to study cosmic rays from the sun or X-rays from astronomical sources.

Tired of Murder Mysteries?

I am. My wife watches a lot of mysteries, and I find it annoying how certain detectives, like Poirot or Angela Lansbury (OK, my wife wants me to say that she never watched Murder She Wrote), always end up being places where people get murdered. So, I came up with an idea for a parody that in which this incredibly bad luck can be explained.

Picture a parking cop who fancies himself to be an amateur detective, perhaps played by Jason Alexander (a.k.a. George on Seinfeld). He has a unique combination of curiosity, self-assuredness, and, most of all, clumsiness. Wherever he goes, he ends up inadvertently causing some horrible accident that kills someone, and yet he never realizes he's to blame. Instead, he suspects foul play.

He is determined to get to the bottom of each case. The police are called in, and although they find our detective's help annoying at first, he inevitably digs up dark secrets hidden by other suspects in the "murder." Eventually, he narrows in on a suspect, and establishes that person's guilt using oddly compelling logic involving the "guilty" party's real dark secrets as motive and a convoluted theory as to how the murder was carried out. The "guilty" party is finally dragged away loudly protesting his or her innocence. Unlike the typical murder mystery, there are no satisfying confessions of guilt.

Here is a sample script.

If that was on TV, I'd watch it. But only once, and just long enough to say, "Hey, they took my idea!"