Perseid Meteor Shower

Before I forget, do yourself a favor and go out to a dark site tomorrow night (read: Sunday/Monday) and take a look at the Perseid meteor shower. It's going to be a great show this year thanks to the new moon, with rates around 60 meteors per hour. It's best just before dawn (though you should see some meteors starting around 11pm or so), and you need to look towards Perseus in the east. Check out the post on Bad Astronomy for more information.

By the way, if it's cloudy one of my favorite radio-geek things to do during meteor showers is to hear them! There's a live feed you can listen to here, based in Roswell, New Mexico. You can also rely on a propagation technique known as 'meteor scatter,' which occurs when a meteor burns up in the upper atmosphere and leaves a trail of particles which reflect signals from Earth for a few seconds. You can hear it just by tuning your FM radio to a static-y point on the dial, and you should hear a faraway station suddenly come in for a few seconds every few minutes. It really is kind of neat to check out if you never have before.

Physics Department Picnic

Who says physicists don't have a good time? Yesterday was the annual CWRU Physics Department picnic, where they coax everyone out of their laboratories and invite them, still blinking from the sunshine, to an afternoon of hanging out at the farm owned by the university. Hooray!

This year, however, there was a twist as to the method of transportation for the 12 miles to the farm. Despite the hot and humid conditions, all the cool kids decided to bicycle-

Hey man, Jaws was never our scene and we don't like Star Wars.

(For posterity, from left to right the members of the bicycle posse were Tim, Miriam, Pat Dave, Alison, me, Laura, and John. )

As I noticed from the odd looks several car drivers gave us, we were just like a really cheap motorcycle gang. Amusement about the unique nature of my bicycle was also prevalent in the group, particularly thanks to the recent installation of my awesome bicycle bell, which performed marvelously in both passing and in doing the Bicycle Race solo. Let the record also show that we were the first group to arrive, as Dan Akerib and his family used gasoline-propulsion and just barely beat us. But hey, this way we got first dibs on the drinks!

Anyway, everyone else affiliated with the department showed up pretty quickly, and there was much merriment in the form of conversation and consumption of foodstuffs. There was also the constant threat of attack via water gun (or, in my experience, getting rugby-tackled while running with a water gun), but we did not give in to terrorism so the picnic merrily continued until the faculty-student softball game towards the end of the afternoon.
Due to numbers it wasn't perfectly faculty vs students: it was actually faculty and grad students vs undergrads and children of faculty members, so I suppose "degree haves" vs. "have nots" is more appropriate. Either way, the stakes as I understood them were that if we won us undergrads would be permitted to graduate, so clearly there was a bit riding on this, but we won by two runs in the last inning. Victory!

Above is the fearless undergraduate team, or at least what was left of it because most people had begun to wander off as it was late. Pretty soon, the bicycle posse left too- we had an hour of cycling ahead of us- and it was fortunately easier on the way back as it's predominantly downhill (with the exception of a few inclines toward the farm end of things). All in all, it was a great way to go out and enjoy the summer sunshine.

(PS- I do have more pictures if anyone wants them. They'll probably make a Facebook appearance soon too, particularly if someone reminds me to upload them!)

Incubus!

Forgot to mention that Sunday, my last night in New Hampshire, I saw Incubus! Yay! They were doing a concert in Guilford, New Hampshire of all places, so my siblings and myself went to check them out.

(By the way, if you are culturally illiterate and have no idea who Incubus is, please go listen to Drive and Stellar and then come back when you are properly enlightened. You'll thank me for it, I promise...)

Now I will confess upfront that we were unfortunately not setting our hopes too high for this concert: the previous year we'd seen Counting Crows at the same venue where they played all slow, whiny songs not even on the CDs, and then refused to play Mr. Jones despite the crowd chanting it throughout the whole encore. (I understand that bands can't play all their famous songs at once, but if you ever reach #1 with a song you are required to play that song at all subsequent concerts because that's what people pay to see. Or at least any songs you are generally known for!!!) Thankfully last year's concert wasn't a complete waste as Goo Goo Dolls played before Counting Crows and were much better, but that didn't stop us from joking the whole way "man, I hope Incubus doesn't pull a Counting Crows on us..."


Thank goodness, Incubus delivered: they went through Drive, I Wish You Were Here, Megalomaniac, Oil and Water, and even Stand by Me as a cover. They even played a song from their next album during the encore, which was called Punch Drunk if I recall correctly.

The other noteworthy thing about this concert is how we ended up with really good seats: earlier last week my brother dropped a pair of shears on his foot and needed nine stitches, meaning he was going around with a golf club cane during the concert. His limping meant he (and my sister and I, as an extension) got VIP treatment from pretty much all the staff, and even got front-row seating on the lawn which was pretty sweet. To quote my brother who bravely hobbled without complaint, "I really don't like political correctness, but I really like it when it's in my favor."

So yes, good concert. It would have arguably been better if, in the aftermath, I didn't have to get up at 330am to catch my 6am flight back to Cleveland the next morning, but I guess you can't be too picky when such opportunities make themselves known. Plus it was so worth it.

New York City- Center of the Universe

"The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach." -Ayn Rand

New York City and I have this odd relationship in that I always feel like I'm ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room: it's huge, right there, yet I have only actually gone over to check it out three brief times in my life. One of these times happened recently, my brother had an internship there this summer so my family went to help him move out and hang out a bit, and I was rather sad that I've hardly ever been there to be honest. Perhaps New York City is better described as a really sweet elephant in the room who you'd really like to hang out with, but you've spent too much time crossing oceans to faraway jungles so you could see those elephants instead. I guess this gives me something to do once I'm older and no longer willing to go on safari, but I'll hold that thought for now.

This was the view from the hotel room we were staying in. (As an aside that has nothing to do with anything, I really love how you can see exactly how the sunlight was reflecting off the red building!) One thing that people don't understand who have never been to NYC is how, well, prevalent the skyscrapers are, more so than any other city in the world. The entire island of Manhattan is essentially a network of artificial canyons, where the bare minimum "ground height" of the canyon system is a good, constant fifteen stories above you. It's incredible, and puts the quotation at the beginning of this post into context when you see it.

Anyway, this time around I had about 24 hours of time in the City, so we headed over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a brief attempt to absorb something out of the 2 million pieces there. To say the Met is overwhelming when you first visit is a complete understatement, of course, but the curator giving a guided tour mentioned at some point that he'd been there 30 years and still found things he'd never seen before, so I felt better... Then after a brief dinner we went and saw Wicked, which was incredibly wonderful and you need to go see it whenever you're in town or if it comes to your town. No exceptions!
Then, because it was Saturday night, we were in the largest city in America, and because it was my brother's last night with his NYC friends, we went out to have some fun. Yay! We started out at Columbia University where the everyone was staying in the dorms while doing various summer internships (the above picture is from a statue at Columbia that moves when enough people push it), and took the subway down to West 79th or so because, for those of you who don't know, there is a large concentration of bars frequented by the young crowd in that area. It was fun, and surprisingly not that expensive compared to how much everything usually costs in New York City.

And a bit earlier than we'd wanted to the next morning, we packed up and headed out of the town to see this place-
The house is known as Kykuit, and was the estate of John D. Rockefeller. It was built in 1913 and was the home of three generations of Rockefellers, until it was finally donated to the National Historic Trust and opened to the public. It is an (understandably) pretty swanky place- I wasn't allowed to take pictures on the inside, but here's a side view so you get a grasp of the dimensions-
Some of my favorite features about this place, in a complete "if I was the richest person on Earth I would so have that in my house too" sort of way, was how there was a wide hallway in the basement specially made so the young Rockefeller boys had a place to ride their bikes up and down on rainy days, and a private art gallery. I was also rather fond of the mansion further down the hill which had a bowling alley, stables, and several swimming pools- known as "The Children's House," it was apparently built entirely for the Rockefeller teenagers. The family still keeps that one, which I find mildly amusing but understandable: if you had a choice between the nice house and the fun house, which one would you choose? Yep, that's what I thought too.

One thing I sort of didn't like about the tour (beyond the fact that we had dreary weather, and it started to thunderstorm partway through) was how while our tour guide was a kindly lady I kept discovering that she didn't know arguably important things like where the Rockefellers are buried. (Answer: less than a mile from where I type this, in Lake View Cemetery.) The clincher, though, was when she mentioned how one of the Rockefeller sons disappeared in Africa under mysterious circumstances a few decades ago, and she said that the official line given to tour guides was that he was lost in New Guinea.

"But New Guinea is several thousand miles away from Africa, near Indonesia," I said.

"Oh! Do you know a lot about the Rockefellers?" was her standard answer whenever us people on the tour displayed knowledge.

"No," I replied, "I just know where New Guinea is!" Arguably a slightly cheeky answer, but there's a mild difference between not knowing if Rockefeller Junior's wife went to college and not knowing major landmasses in the world. That or maybe I'm a geek who happened to not sleep too much the night before because she was too busy roaming through New York City with a gaggle of internship students.

So that was the end of my brief stint in New York City. I really, really liked it though, so perhaps I'll make a point of showing up there sooner instead of later. I ought to you know, as it's impolite to ignore someone when they're in the same room as you.

"If a guy doesn't pay for you, you're not being treated like you're special."

The above line is from an odd little article written by a woman who says she's a feminist and "a battler of gender inequality," yet thinks guys should pay for the first date. Hypocritical much? Moreover, what if the guy is going through a financially rough stretch, or you were the one who asked him out in the first place? More important, how do you expect to go into an equal relationship with someone when you're forever expecting him to buy?

I've often gotten into arguments about this with my friends, male and female alike, because most argue that guys don't mind being gracious. Fair enough, but if the gent insists on paying I will at least be courteous enough to thank him kindly and buy the next round of drinks (or pay the tip, or whatever), and I would certainly not go out expecting the guy to pay or judge him for doing so/ the lack thereof. It seems an odd thing to base judgment on, particularly when it's a first date with a guy you hardly know.

At least, that's the way I see things. What do you guys (and gals) think about such situations?

Explaining Sunscreen

One of my favorite online columns is slate.com's Explainer, which takes recent events from the news and does a run-through on the finer points, like if you can survive in space without a spacesuit, how they power an iPhone, or even how to determine if a bridge is structurally sound. It's the sort of clever column that appeals to your inner geek.

Today, for example, in light of a SPF 70 sunscreen being released this year, they addressed the important question of how scientists determine sunscreen's SPF (sun protection factor) rating in the first place. Here's how they figure it out-

A product's SPF refers to its ability to deflect ultraviolet rays. To calculate this figure, scientists gather 20 human volunteers who are especially susceptible to sunburn. According to FDA guidelines, volunteers must have a skin type of I, II, or III on the Fitzpatrick phototyping scale. (The categories correspond to the amount of pigment present in the skin: Very fair blonds or redheads are Type I, while those with dark brown or black skin are Type VI.) Using a device called a "solar simulator," experimenters irradiate a small patch of skin on each subject and then record the UV dose required to produce mild redness (in scientific parlance, the "minimal erythematic dose"). After applying a thick layer of sunscreen, the experimenters repeat the test. Then they divide the MED needed to redden the protected skin by the MED needed to redden bare skin. The result, rounded down to the nearest five, is the SPF.

Nifty, don't you think? Granted, the article goes on to say that the scientists apparently use a whole lot of sunscreen while doing their tests, ie a lot more than you probably use, so don't bet on being able to stay out in the sun 70 times longer without burning unless you douse yourself in the stuff. Just something to think about during the last days of summer.

Live Free Or Die

It's very New Zealandish in New Hampshire. No wonder I like both so much. Great weather too, check out the Weirscam to see what I mean...

Catch you guys next week, when I'm in Cleveland and no longer in the prettiness.