Wrapping Up

It's my last week working at the SETI Institute, meaning I am spending time banging my head over code with greater urgency. Presentation on Friday, gotta catch the redeye back to the East Coast that night...

Until then, here is a hilariously staged photo taken at the Allen Telescope Array a few weeks back sort of explaining what I'm trying to finish up. In short, there's a lot of radio frequency interference (RFI for short) that is detected at the ATA, and I have the job of cataloging it- or, primarily right now, the clock frequencies from all the processors in the control room. I'm holding a spectrum analyzer here- which we didn't end up using much, but has a great dual use as a ray gun-looking device- detecting the evil RFI (shown here as Billy, one of the telescope operators at the array).

If you look really closely, you'll notice by the way that there is a gremlin used to depict RFI here, which is out of a really bad movie that used to scare me when I was little. This is because, as Billy put it, RFI is like the gremlin in radio astronomy because it causes all sorts of problems. That or we were just really bored and looking for an excuse to take silly pictures, conclude what you will.

Ok, until I sort out my code, I will leave you with this other shot of Science In Action (or, depending on your take, Science Inaction). Be very, very afraid of the girl with the spectrum analyzer...

Testing Physics

Um, yeah. There's really no way to display this picture without giving away that I went skydiving this past weekend, is there?

Basically, this is something that I've wanted to do even back in New Zealand, but we just never got around to it. A few other students here in the program were keen on going, though, so we joined up and finally did it halfway towards Sacramento from the Bay Area. Mind it was $100 for a tandem jump from 13,000 feet, which is a relative steal as far as these things go...
Our motley crew, waiting for the plane to take us up. Mind I didn't notice at the time that I was the only one of us with a purple harness; this was only pointed out to me later...

It should also be noted that it turns out that the sort of people who decide to be professional skydivers are really the sort to get excited upon the word that they're ferrying a bunch of students working at the SETI Institute. As in they get very much into the joke of which one of them we've come to take away, and appreciate responses like "sorry, we're only looking for intelligent life..." and "I could tell you the truth [about aliens], but then I'd have to kill you."

Which raised the obvious question in my mind of why exactly people who professionally do SETI and people who professionally skydive are probably considered mildly crazy (probably in slightly different ways, but not much), and why at the same time you would trust someone society at large considers a bit crazy to jump out of an airplane with you and make sure you land safely. But I digress...
On the ride up- the guy sitting in front of me was the guy who took all the pictures you see here (I ordered them, seems kind of silly to go skydiving and not have pictures!) and the guy behind is the guy who operated the parachute and all that... This plane btw was a little one, just big enough to hold 15-20 people, and we were sitting crammed in on two benches by the window like they do in WWII movies.

And because it's inevitable to be asked, no, I really wasn't scared at all- there might have been a bit of a "huh, I'm actually going to do this" thought when the plane was taking off but I never gave it another thought since.

To be honest, I am almost worried sometimes about my inability to get scared about things a lot of people get really freaked out about. This started when I was in New Zealand last year, where I never thought I could do bungy jumping but ended up realizing that rationally there's nothing to be scared of. You know the physics and how it works, you know the statistics of something happening, so why be afraid?

Skydiving is, to me, the same idea- you are about twenty times more likely to die in a car accident than jumping out of a plane and you know the physics works, so what is there to be afraid of? Just a simple kinematic equation is all.

(Yes, I realize I'm essentially saying something along the lines of learning physics helped me master my fears. I don't think that was the intended consequence, but it's definitely a nice one.)
So for anyone who is curious, in my experience it is a lot easier to skydive versus bungy jump. This is because first of all you don't have much time to think in skydiving- they open the door and everyone hops out in pretty quick succession- and because unlike bungy jumping the ground is really, really far away so that instinct of "maybe this isn't the best idea" doesn't cut in as much. Even better, in skydiving once you hit ~50 mph (terminal velocity is 120 mph when you're on your tummy) the wind resistance makes you feel like you have some weight, meaning after about a second you don't even feel like you're falling. You're just... floating, I guess, which was so great that I spent the entire time alternating between laughing and grinning like an idiot.

One cool thing I really liked about all this by the way is how we did some sort of backflip on the way out, meaning I spent the first few seconds watching the plane go away. Per my frame of reference, however, it felt like I wasn't moving, so I watched the plane go up and away at an odd angle all the while thinking "huh, that's mighty interesting!" And then I got even more excited, as it was by far the best demonstration of relative reference frames I have ever experienced and physics has destroyed any chance I have of thinking normal things even when falling out of an airplane at a hundred twenty miles an hour.
Falling. It was the most absolutely lovely sensation. In fact, he photographer spent some time towards the end trying to get me to do a thumbs up or some other gesture for photographic purposes, but honestly I was only vaguely wondering who the hell this guy was and what he wanted because I wasn't even bothering to pay attention to anything more than the moment. There's just too much to process... Now I'm told if you go skydiving again it's a lot easier to figure out what's going on the second time, but we're going to ignore that line of thought because my mom still has yet to progress beyond saying "I'm glad you survived."
Parachute deployed! This is a rather abrupt stop- taking you from 120 mph to a less splattering descent is guaranteed to be- and I was frankly amazed that it was over that quickly. I was told that free fall lasts about a minute, but it definitely seemed much shorter.

And here's something that I only remembered later, on the ground, while rethinking everything. Somewhere along the way, probably right before the instructor deployed the parachute, he shouted in my ear, "do aliens exist, yes or no? I'm not pulling until you answer!!!" Such wonderful senses of humor, those skydivers... And fyi no, I didn't answer, as a. I wasn't processing what he was saying, b. it's not like he would've heard an answer due to the wind, and c. I was too busy smiling and laughing at the awesomeness known as skydiving.
Gliding through the sky, ho-hum. Still very awesome though, it lasts maybe three or four minutes and I got to steer the parachute. Pretty simple, you have two ropes, and you pull the one on the right to go right and the one on the left to go left. If you pull one of them really, really hard you go into this nice looping spiral, which is similar to the scale of a looping decent on a tall roller coaster. The only problem I had with the parachute part is your weight is essentially held entirely in check by the straps on your legs, which isn't the most comfortable thing in the world but is obviously necessary and doesn't last long so we'll let it slide.
Coming in for landing on the landing field. Landing is so gentle that we ended up standing (slight winds and you might end up sitting instead) and you're unsteady for a second or two on your feet until you remember how to deal with real ground again.

So that is skydiving, or at least the best description I can possibly give of it. I must say explicitly though, in case it wasn't clear, that skydiving is wonderful and you all should most definitely go do it when you have the chance. Trust me on this. After all, you'd trust the astrophysics student who searches for aliens and goes skydiving on the weekends, wouldn't you?

Bernie Falls

One last set of pictures from the night before I turn in, this set from Bernie Falls. It was well over 90F last Friday, a hot enough temperature that gets most people thinking about swimming prospects, so as there was little else to do on late Friday afternoon a small handful of us headed over to the local state park for some swimming. We'd heard there was a waterfall, of course, but nothing prepared us for this beauty-
All in all, a 150ft waterfall cascading down a cliff with rivulets of water all around it. The secondary waterfalls came straight out of the ground, as they were essentially snowmelt (meaning the water temperature was about 45F). Here's the view from the bottom-

Getting to the bottom was also refreshing because it was about 20 degrees colder than it was at the top of the waterfall. Hooray for natural air conditioning!

Because our group was so enamored by this waterfall (which is one of the prettiest I've seen, and that means something from a girl who toured New Zealand), we ended up spending a lot of time here, primarily occupied by staring at the falls and trying to see how wet we dare get in the freezing water from the tiny side waterfalls. Here's a good example of them-
Basically, if you stood on the edge you could still get into the freezing stream and get your hair wet or whatever, but the water was just too cold for swimming. So we ended up going to the state park's lake for a more respectable venue, which was also cold but actually swimmable.

Friday was alas our last day up at Hat Creek, meaning we headed back here to Mountain View on Saturday. The most eventful thing on Saturday by far happened just a few hours back to here in a story I want to share now lest I forget it...

The setup: there were 19 people on this REU trip, so in order to get around we rented two 12 passenger vans for the week, one driven by Jill Tarter and the other driven by an older student. Jill was going a bit over the speed limit on the way back, which isn't a big deal in California until a cop notices you, which this one did... and he was not happy. When he came up to our van to talk things over, no one doubted for a second that she was going to get a ticket.

Then the cop went back to talk to the passengers in the second van and we waited. And waited. Upon looking back, we noticed that everyone in the second van was laughing, including the cop, and after a five minute discussion he came back all smiles and let us off with a warning. We were on a cell phone within moments of him leaving with the second van in an attempt to find out what had happened.

Apparently what happened was this- the cop had asked who our group was and where we were from, and the student driver told him we were from the SETI Institute. Upon hearing this the cop got really excited, even mentioning something about an acquaintance of his in Texas who had seen a UFO- something that made Jill visibly cringe in the telling. She needn't have, however, because the student driver had been quick to retort "oh, well we look for real aliens!" which was enough to send everyone bursting into laughter for what seemed an eternity.

So all in all, the cop let us go because we were SETI. I didn't realize this summer job had an element of celebrity when I started, but it's definitely given us a story to joke about for the rest of the summer!

Hat Creek Week

I'll come right out with it- I liked my week at Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO). This might have had something to do with the miniature fleet of observatory bicycles, the awesome milkshakes at the local place down the road... Or we could all just admit it was because of the pretty radio telescopes and wonderful company and get on with the pictures already.
This is the sunset from the first night at HCRO. All the sunsets were absolutely stunning while we were there but the reason wasn't so pretty- California is currently battling a bout of wildfires, and while there's nothing unusual in that what is unusual is the fact that the fires started so early in the summer. We spent most of the week following updates on the local fires, some of which were 10 miles away and would shut down the local roads, but luckily we lost nothing short of a few views.

So what you see in the above picture, by the way, is part of the 42 telescope array, which will be phased up to 360 telescopes once the kinks are worked out and the money flows in. It's pretty impressive stuff, but what's also impressive is what it takes to run this stuff in the control room to process the signals-
I offered various telescope operators five bucks to pull out random wires and replug them in the wrong places, but for some reason none of them would go for it.
A bunch of us students and Garrett, the telescope operator. Perhaps it's an indication of just how much there is to do in the area, but at night we'd have 'observing parties' in the control room and play with the Allen Telescope Array (you might have not been able to see stars some nights due to smoke, but for radio waves this luckily isn't a problem). Definitely cool stuff, though we could have done without the blizzard of various bugs that would inevitably find their way into the control room.

Anyway, I should move on from this because a lot happened this past week that I need to get to and I am spending the rest of my summer working on the Array. Continuing on...

At The Array (ATA!)

All the REU students are at the Allen Telescope Array this week, but I can't pretend the view right now is like the one above. Why? Because there are currently about 800 wildfires in California, about 100 of them close enough to count as "local," and as we're in the valley there's a bit of haze and you can just barely make ou the mountains. They're perhaps a bit too close for comfort- the closest wildfire is about ten miles away and the road we took to come here yesterday is now closed. Everyone's crossing their fingers that we won't be forced to leave before the end of the week, but this isn't something you mess with obviously and everyone's been advised to keep their belongings close just in case we need to leave suddenly.

But there is one good effect- the wildfires made for a lovely sunset last night (pics later), and a bunch of us slept out last night under the stars in the Array field (to the left of the picture above). Lovely skies, even with some smoke, but a bit on the chilly side as it cools down quickly around here. Still, saying you slept in a radio telescope field has bragging rights that go with it, so I'm glad to have taken advantage of the opportunity.

Ok, more at some point later when I have things sorted out a little better. Cheers!

All in a Day's Work

So here is, in short, what I am doing this summer. I am going into the logbook for the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) and making a database for component failures- as in, when stuff goes wrong- and then hopefully seeing correlations in what goes wrong and how it can be prevented. This will be good because I get to learn a lot about database structure and the ATA benefits by getting a good framework for their still-developing structure.

This is what the ATA looks like, by the way. There are currently 42 telescopes but there will be ~400 when it's all said and done, which is a fancy way of saying whenever a check comes in to build the rest of it. (On that note, anyone want to build a radio telescope? Only costs $120k, which is a relative bargain in this field.) Anyway, picture:

Close-up on one of the dishes-
In actuality, though, my job gets pretty interesting. First of all my mentor is Jill Tarter, the director of the SETI Institute, inspiration for the Ellie Arroway character in Contact and all around fascinating woman, and jobs are always more fun when your boss has pictures of her posing with Jodie Foster in her office and stuff like that. Second, the first week I was too busy to write because I got to go visit places like Berkeley (the ATA is being built in conjunction with the Berkeley Astronomy Department) and the engineering company where the Array is being built.

The best day by far to this point, though, was the day I got to go to Hat Creek Radio Observatory in northern California where the ATA is located. It's a 5.5 hour drive away from here, but it turns out Jill's husband (who is also a radio astronomer, at Berkeley) has a plane, and Berkeley allows you to use grant money towards fuel costs. Turns out that way it only takes about 2 hours to get to the Array from the Palo Alto airport, as a fellow student and I (and two astronomers, but they already knew this) found out...
Picture of the little Cessna, which technically sits six people but it seems cramped enough with four if you ask me. A few people were asking me apprehensively about the bumpiness of small planes (and I confess I didn't eat much breakfast that morning, just in case), but the weather in California is remarkably stable at this time of year so this wasn't much of an issue. It was only bumpy once when going over a ridge, but I confess the slight turbulence right then was enough to make me realize why small planes seem to crash so often- in non-perfect weather, it must really suck.
Typical "this is what California looks like from the air" picture. (It's all yellow, of course, because it hasn't rained in months so these are the famous golden hills of California.) There are huge patches of farmland too, of course, but I know everyone's seen enough of those from airplanes and it's not too exciting, so let's move on.
San Francisco and the Golden Gate bridge from 10,000 feet (zoom in for a better look). The haze you see isn't haze at all of course, but rather the fog coming in for the night...

The fog is really impressive by the way, even if you wouldn't nessecarily think so. It doesn't get foggy down here, but when I went into the city last weekend on the train the fog was rolling over the mountains in such a dense, stealthy way that I would've guessed it was straight out of a horror movie if I didn't know any better.
When it flat-out doesn't rain for months, you inevitably get wildfires. This one was interesting because we hadn't seen it at all when flying up in the morning, but by the time we were flying back it was going full-steam and sending smoke thousands of feet into the air. Had to divert our course around it, actually...
An areal view of Lassen Volcanic National Park, easily viewable from the ground at the ATA. Most people don't realize this, but Mount Lassen was the second most recent volcano in the Cascades to erupt, in 1915 (the most recent, of course, being Mount St. Helens), in which it was described as having devastated the surrounding area. When I inquired at the Array site if this was indicative of a great place to build a multi-million dollar telescope array, this concerned was shrugged off. "It's either that or earthquakes" it was explained in a way only Californians can get away with.

I'd go on about Mount Lassen and the ATA, but excitingly I will be there next week again! The REU program does a weeklong field trip to Hat Creek/ Lassen for all the students every summer, which we're all very much looking forward to. Trust me, it's a gorgeous country up there, even if you never hear about it much for whatever reason.

Defined By Stuff

I was going to write something about what exactly I'm doing in California, but in the interest of keeping things at least slightly exciting I will instead focus on all the things I currently keep in my pockets. This is because explaining what most of the stuff is doing there requires me to explain a few things anyway-

~ key ring and card holder- This is the one I carry around at uni, actually, but important because it has my bike lock key and SETI entry card inside it. NASA Ames research center, where I live, is a mile or so away from the SETI Institute, meaning we all got bikes for the summer because it doesn't rain here in the summer. (Really- it just doesn't, and hasn't since springtime.) My current bike is a cruiser- I couldn't help myself- except unlike my Cleveland one this is probably from the original generation of when all bikes were like cruisers. So it goes.

As for the entry card, beyond getting into the building this is important because the SETI Institute shares the building with Symantec on the second floor, aka the people who gave you Norton antivirus software. This means you need a special SETI card obviously, but the building has an odd layout so you're forever going from the "common" areas to the shared and back (even on simple things like going to the kitchen or to my boss' office). Alas, this is also problematic for a few of my fellow students who are busily trying to figure out how to pull a prank on Symantec, as apparently they're not total fans of their software...

~ key ring for room key- NASA Ames used to be in part Moffet Federal Airfield, an active military base until 1994, so the student housing (for several programs) is in the old army barracks. Think a cross between a hotel and a dorm really.

I rather like the base, by the way. First of all it has Hangar One, possibly one of the most iconic things in the greater area, there's a branch of Carnegie-Mellon University here for robotics to make me feel like I'm back in Pittsburgh, and word on the street says Mythbusters has filmed a decent number of shows here. Oh, and when I had to do my laundry last week it involved going through an abandoned barracks area to a bunker that had an asbestos warning on the door, a journey which at night reminds one of the set of a scary movie. ("They were there to discover alien life... but then the aliens found them!!!) Defintely a place with character.

~ NASA ID badge- I got one of these the first day to get on and off the base, and it has proven annoying for several reasons. First, it is slightly larger than a wallet size, meaning you can't fit it into anything. Second, you need to show it every time you need to get in. Third and most annoying, it doesn't count as a valid form of ID in itself, so you need to show a government-issued ID (aka driver's license) every time you enter as well, thus rendering this badge completely worthless. As I've already established when I forgot the special ID, you're allowed onto the base with just your driver's license, thus proving this is just a layer of bureaucracy someone likes to keep around (probably the guy who takes the crappy pictures).

~ Wallet- Important for the money that one goes through quickly in California, BART card (aka light rail/subway in the San Francisco area), and for the driver's license which is the actual important piece of identification.

~ Cell phone- I often "forget" my cell phone in my room back at Case because I am not a total fan of them (to the point of not really having one at all in New Zealand on study abroad), but that's not exactly an option here. This is because there has been quite a bit of travel already on the job, and calling people, and stuff like that, so cell phones are sorta important...

Of course, I realize I haven't described what exactly I'm doing yet, but that deserves its own post so I'll explain later.

So all in all, too many things to keep track of. See, I realized soon enough that my problem here is this is one or two objects to many for the "in pockets" category for me because I'm forever forgetting one or two things and spending a few minutes before work every day looking for the missing item. This is usually the NASA ID in which case I don't shed too many tears, but this morning it was the bike key/ SETI card, and that was a hassle to poke around for... Am working on increasing the efficiency of combining items still, so my goal is to know where everything is without a search within a few weeks.

And that, ladies and gents, is my brief description of the day-to-day in California. As promised earlier, I will give a description of work itself a little later.