It seems like I go through these cycles where for a while I will hardly get any research done, and then will suddenly start working really hard. It’s like I’m a 2-state system:
State 1:
- Go in late, come home early. Take days off.
- Twiddle around at work, reading news sites or blogs.
- Uninterested in astronomy.
- Hang out with people on weekends.
- Really slow progress on research.
State 2:
- Go in somewhat earlier, stay late. Go in on Saturdays.
- Fairly productive at work.
- Interested in my research.
- Withdraw from social activities.
- Lots of productivity.
I don’t like either of these extremes. I don’t want to spend all of my time working, to the detriment of socialization. On the other hand, it is not cool to be a State 1 slacker either. I have been in State 1 for several weeks now, and I think my collaborators are going to start wondering soon why I’m not contributing very much. I need to strike a balance.
Um, this doesn’t mean y’all should stop trying to distract me from work. I would take that personally. :)
This is kind of old news by now, but yeah, I went to Switzerland. It was my first time to “the Continent.” Actually, the entire MIT Concert Choir went to Lausanne, which is on the north shore of Lake Geneva, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, in order to sing Brahms’ Ein Deutsche Requiem together with the University Choir of Lausanne.
We had two performances, both in the Cathedral of Lausanne. It was my first time singing in a cathedral — in fact, one of the few times I’ve gotten to sing in a venue with really nice acoustics (ok, Dabney Lounge at Caltech was pretty good).
When we weren’t performing or rehearsing, we played tourist. I toured Lausanne, Montreux (which has a nice 12th-century château), Evian, and Geneva. Yussanne came out from London to visit! Here are pictures.
It was cool to actually have time to hang out and socialize with kids in the choir. Some of them are pretty cool. Even though we spend 5 hours a week together, we spend most of it singing and there isn’t much time to get to know people, especially outside your section. Plus, I’m usually hungry and grumpy from a long work day. :)
Oh, and I gave an astronomy talk too. When my advisor heard that I was going to Switzerland, he set me up with some of his buddies at the Observatory of Geneva, and I presented a little talk about our current research. It went pretty well, I thought.
Hi kids. Just thought I would let you know (if you’re curious and don’t know yet) what happened with my big oral qualifying exam. Yeah, I failed. But the blow is eased a little by knowing that I was (apparently) pretty close to passing, and my advisor thought I did a good job. So at least the person whose opinion counts approved.
I’ll be trying again in about six months. Hopefully I will not be so stressed out the next time around.
Ok, show of hands. Who here can say that the first thing that enters their mind upon hearing the sentence “Oh be a fine girl; kiss me” is the classification of stars based on spectral lines?
What? Only me?
You may know this already, but I am an astronomer. Well, more accurately, I am a graduate student studying astronomy. Anyway, I am now officially published. I’m proud to say that that paper appeared in the April 1st edition of the Astrophysical Journal. My first paper, on April Fool’s day — an auspicious beginning.
Here’s how bad I am at posting on my blog: we have submitted another paper to the Journal since then.
Both these papers concern quadruple quasars. They’re not actual groupings of quasars in the sky; each is a single quasar whose light is bent by the gravitational field of a foreground galaxy in its line of sight. This lensing effect causes the four images. These two papers report that the ratios of the brightnesses of the four images are different at optical wavelengths than in X-rays, which signifies that there’s something complicated going on. We draw some conclusions about dark matter and the structure of quasars. It’s fun stuff. You should check out the papers; if nothing else, they have some pretty cool pictures.