Personal Panoramic History, Part 3: 2010

In the previous post in this series we looked at 2009 and a couple of my first attempts at taking panoramas of certain volcanoes. In 2010 I refined my technique a bit by taking panoramas of the same volcanoes—several times—but also experimented with some new things as well.

May

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My first panorama of the year comes from May, when the University Astrophysics Club at UH Hilo was given a tour of the Subaru telescope. I had the chance to do a little hiking around Hale Pōhaku while we were waiting to acclimatize which I used to take the following panorama from the top of Puʻu Kelepeamoa (a popular sunset-viewing spot nearby):

Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea.

This was my first full 360° panorama. Actually, it went slightly more than a full turn around and when I first stitched a panorama together from the photos I refused to drop any of them, leading to a rather weird image with Mauna Kea in the center and the summit of Mauna Loa showing up twice, on either side. Hugin luckily can work out a full rotation and stop there, and also allows you to rotate your endpoints around, so I've made it a bit nicer looking by scooting Mauna Kea over to the side and no longer splitting Mauna Loa in twain. If you follow the link above you can see the original version by mousing over the panorama (which is now this new one) in the original post it came from.

June

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Mauna Kea summit area.

In June I had another opportunity to visit Mauna Kea's summit (probably helping with a summit tour) and used it to snap this panorama. This one is taken from a totally different perspective than the one in part 2 which was taken from in front of the Keck building, which is the two identical domes near the center of the image. From left to right, you can see UKIRT, CSO (just barely), JCMT, SMA, Subarua, Keck I and II, IRTF, CFHT, and Gemini North.

July

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In July I created this, my first and so far only astronomical panorama. This one's another hand-made image, as Hugin couldn't manage it. This is because the image is made up of twelve different images, each of which was a thirty second exposure in order to collect enough light. While thirty seconds is short enough that the star trails induced by the earth's rotation aren't too noticeable in each individual image, the entire sky would have moved pretty appreciably between the start and end of the series of exposures. I'm not entirely sure how I managed to wrangle this into a panorama myself—with a lot of effort, I suspect—and looking at it now I sometimes think I see some duplicate bits, but I'm still pretty happy with this view of the northern hemisphere summer Milky Way from the area near the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea. (You can see the glow from Hilo in the center of the image.)

August

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In August 2010 while I was back home for vacation during the summer my family went on a two-day road trip around some parts of northern California, including the coast and through the redwood forests. This let me experiment with a vertical panorama:

The Chandelier Tree in Leggett, California.

This is a hand-made panorama, as I just couldn't get Hugin to make a good looking result. It probably has to do with the unusual way the perspective changes from standing on the ground and rotating the camera up to get pictures. It's an interesting challenge though; maybe I should try more vertical panoramas in the future.

November

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In November 2010 I had my first chance to observe on Mauna Kea at Subaru while working as a student research assistant. Since we spent a day and a night at Hale Pōhaku acclimatizing before going up I had some time to hike a round and take a few panoramas:

Mauna Loa, Hualālai, and Mauna Kea.

You'd be forgiven for thinking I'd accidentally posted the same panorama from May again here. While writing this post I had to carefully double-check to make sure that I hadn't, as they both look pretty similar in the tiny preview thumbnails (this one has more cloud cover on the left, at least). While they do look very similar (and were taken from locations very close to each other on the top of Puʻu Kalepeamoa), the layout seen in both of them was created in this one and retroactively used for the May version when I was remaking both with Hugin. I like this layout a lot better, and I like to think it shows that I was getting a bit better at framing panoramas by this point.

Mauna Loa.

The previous panorama was taken from the summit of Puʻu Kalepeamoa, which is the hill in the foreground on the left of this image, which was taken from a cinder cone (or puʻu) slightly higher up Mauna Kea's flank. (Well, technically, “ka lepe a moa” means “the comb of the chicken”, and Puʻu Kelepeamoa is so named because it's a range of three or four rusty-red cinder cones that could be seen as a cock's comb, and I was technically still on [another part of] it while taking these pictures. The name is typically mostly used to refer to the hill lowest on the mountain and closest to the VIS, though.)

Mauna Loa and Hualālai.

This panorama was taken from a bit further up the flank of Mauna Kea again. In the foreground on the left you can see the summit of Puʻu Kalepeamoa again as well which helps give a sense of the movement between pictures. On the right side of this image you can see some more of the gigantic cinder cones (or puʻu) near the Visitor Information Station. These final two panoramas I'd never even created until writing this post so they're both completely new, which is a shame because I really like the last one—going through and creating these huge panoramas of gorgeous landscapes I just keep thinking “This would make a great picture to get printed and hang on my wall where I could actually enjoy it all at once, at full size.” Maybe in another decade or two when I can start to think about settling down and not moving every few years.

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And that's it for 2010! I spent some time refining my panorama technique with the same choice of targets that year (you're probably sick of Mauan Loa panoramas from the north by now), but for the next part covering 2011 I'll have a few unique panoramas which, for various reasons, I've never repeated. A hui hou!

The Genesis of Light

There's an old (at least, I assume it's fairly old) physics meme that goes:

“And God said…
\[\nabla\cdot\mathbf{E}=\frac{\rho}{\epsilon_\circ}\\
\nabla\cdot\mathbf{B}=0\\
\nabla\times\mathbf{E}=-\frac{\partial \mathbf{B}}{\partial t}\\
\nabla\times\mathbf{B}=\mu_\circ\mathbf{J}+\mu_\circ\epsilon_\circ\frac{\partial\mathbf{E}}{\partial t}\]

…and there was light.”

Here E is the electric field, \(\rho\) is the electric charge density, B is the magnetic field, J is the electric current density, and \(\mu_\circ\) and \(\epsilon_\circ\) are the permittivity and permeability of free space, respectively. Bold-face quantities are vector quantities. These four equations are Maxwell's equations which describe electricity and magnetism in terms of classical field theory, but more on that a little later.

Back in 2016 my parents took a trip to Israel and brought me back a shirt with this on it for Christmas, except in the original Hebrew. Pretty cool! Except, they weren't Maxwell's equations, and on a closer look they weren't actually equations at all, just collections of symbols that looked kinda like some equations from special relativity, and to top it off the shirt was just barely big enough for me so I never actually wore it.

But I loved the idea, and now (a little over a year later) I've created my own variation on the design and had a shirt printed with it:

This was a surprisingly difficult photo to take on my own.

Although known as Maxwell's equations (after the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, widely considered the third greatest physicist of all time after Newton and Einstein), these four equations are actually a reformulation of Maxwell's original twenty equations in twenty variables by Oliver Heaviside, who cast them into vector calculus form and condensed them down into four by use of the divergence (\(\nabla\cdot\) ) and curl (\(\nabla\times\) ) operators.

Being a classical description of electromagnetism Maxwell's equations have been superseded by quantum electrodynamics, but they are still very useful in a wide variety of situations that do not involve strong electromagnetic fields or individual photons, just as Newtonian gravitation is still a useful approximation to general relativity in areas of weak gravitational field.

These four equations, and what they represent, are a monumental achievement—second, at the time, only to Newton's work—and have a sublime beauty to the physicist. The seemingly-disparate forces of electricity and magnetism are revealed to be both aspects of a singular electromagnetic force. This is seen in the third and fourth equations, where curl (or rotation) of an electric field is seen to rely on a magnetic field, and vice versa. All four equations can be combined (in a vacuum, where J and \(\rho\) are both zero) to derive the electromagnetic wave equation which describes light as a series of correlated ripples in the electric and magnetic fields, or electromagnetic radiation. (In fact, it turns out that \(\frac{1}{\sqrt{\mu_\circ\epsilon_\circ}}=c\), the speed of light!)

The asymmetries between the electric and magnetic fields that at first glance might seem to mar the beauty of the whole only enhance it upon further inspection, as the minus sign in the third equation is crucial to forming the feedback loop in the electromagnetic wave equation that allows light to travel forever as self-contained photons. They helped motivate Einstein to develop special relativity (which Maxwell's equations are compatible with) to explain why the same phenomenon could be seen as an electric or a magnetic effect depending on the frame of reference chosen. And the second equation explains why you can't break a magnet in half and end up with two monopoles.

I used EqualX (which I wrote about last month) to typeset the equations in \(\LaTeX\), then exported them as SVG which I imported into Inkscape where I added the text (and did a lot of manual tweaking of the layout of the various elements to make it look nice). Switching my keyboard to Hebrew and figuring out the letters took quite a while, which is why there are no vowel pointings; Inkscape's support for right-to-left fonts is a bit fiddly (though I saw just the other day an update that supposedly improved it) and trying to figure out all the various pointings and getting them around the right letters was a nightmare, so I gave up after tortuously figuring out the first three. At least it's more authentic ancient Hebrew now…

While working on the design for this shirt (I uploaded five different versions to the printing site before I was satisfied) I thought sardonically to myself that I was making this shirt for my own enjoyment, and that of the perhaps five other people on the planet who understood both Biblical Hebrew and electromagnetism. Then lo and behold, the first day I wore it, while walking around Bunnings (basically Australian Home Depot) a gentleman stopped me, said he thought it was great, and asked where I'd gotten it. When I said I'd designed it and had it printed myself he then asked if I was selling it anywhere!

I ended up sending him the image file to use, but it got me thinking. I've gone ahead and uploaded the design to Spreadshirt.com, where I got the original shirt printed. You can find it (and a version in white for dark backgrounds) for sale on shirts here. It defaults to showing the men's styles, but there are women's styles as well and you can pick from a range of colors. (If any of you out there actually order one I'd love to hear about it!)

Personal Panoramic History, Part 2: 2009

Last time we looked at panoramas from Jordan, from 2008. In this post we'll skip forward to August 2009 (since apparently I didn't take any photos for a year and a half) when I moved to Hawaii at the tender age of twenty after completing two years of community college (and an Associate's Degree in Science) in order to finish my Bachelor's Degree at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. This year was a real life-changer! Moving out of my parents' home for the first time, coming to Hawaii where I would ultimately spend the next eight years, and being introduced to Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, my two favorite volcanoes—lots of stuff happened. So let's jump into…

August

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I don't have any pictures until August of 2009, but that's when I moved to Hawaii and I made up for by taking a pretty good number. And among them are three panoramas that I don't think I've ever shown before! When I flew out to Hawaii my mom came out with me for a week and we did some sightseeing, including my first trip to Volcanoes National Park, where these panoramas come from.

Puhimau Crater.

First up: a pit crater called Puhimau Crater found by the side of Chain of Craters Road in the park. It's not a particularly inspiring panorama, but I was obviously struck by the size of this giant gaping hole in the ground and tried to capture it in three photos. This panorama was only created while writing this post—it turns out that black lava rock plays havoc with your white balance and exposure, so I never bothered trying to stitch these together manually. Hugin, on the other hand, manages it amazingly well.

Kīlauea pali.

At the end of Chain of Craters Road, where it terminates in a lava flow after descending the steep pali (cliffs), I turned around and snapped this ambitious panorama (seven pictures!) of where we had just come from. If it looks hazy, that's because it was; Kīlauea was out-gassing significantly that day, so those aren't water clouds, that's sulfur dioxide and other fun gasses that volcanoes like to emit. I like this panorama (which like the one above was only made while writing this post) because it once again captures the immense flatness and and sheer breadth of Hawaiian volcanoes.

Kīlauea caldera.

Finally, another ambitious panorama of six photos, this one overlooking Kīlauea caldera itself, with Halemaʻumaʻu Crater just right of center spewing out noxious chemicals. This panorama I actually created manually all the way back in 2009, the day after taking the photos, though for some reason I omitted the left-most photo (with the fence and ʻōhiʻa tree); perhaps I found it too much work to integrate with the rest. Hugin had no problem with it, though, so that's the version you get today!

October

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September was apparently spent mostly settling in given its dearth of photos, but on October 9th I had my first opportunity to ascend Mauna Kea to the Visitor Information Station. I vividly remember the trip up that afternoon, because it had been cloudy and overcast in Hilo and all the way up until about maybe 7,000–8,000 feet, where we entered a thin layer of thick cloud for a bit only to suddenly explode out of it into a land of brilliantly beaming sunshine. The effect of that contrast was incredible, and the impression on me, indelible. In my many, many trips up Mauna Kea since then I've experienced the same thing two or three times, and it is awesome every time it happens.

I don't have panoramas from that first trip, but near the end of October, on the 26th, I had what I believe was my first chance to get to the summit of Mauna Kea.

Mauna Loa.

On the way up whoever was driving stopped the car on the side of Mauna Kea access road, allowing me to get out and snap this two-photo panorama Mauna Loa. Although I made these photos into a panorama manually a few days later, I don't think I was really thinking of it at the time or I'd definitely have taken at least a single additional photo on the left. Still, this one is right up there among my favorite panoramas I've ever taken. The serene calm of Mauna Loa beneath a few scattered clouds and cerulean sky, the green grass on the slopes of Mauna Kea, and right near the center of the image little Puʻu Huluhulu—he nani nō ia! (It's a wonderful thing!)

I'm often reminded, while looking at these panoramas later, of Isaac Watts' apropos hymn verse:

Lord, how Thy wonders are displayed, where'er I turn my eye,
If I survey the ground I tread, or gaze upon the sky.

Keck II and Maui from Mauna Kea.

The weather was cloudier at the summit where I took this small two-photo panorama, my first from the summit region of Mauna Kea. (I should clarify that when I say the “summit” of Mauna Kea I usually mean the large, relatively flat area near the actual summit—I've lost track of the number of times I've been to the summit area, while I believe I've only been to the true summit thrice, and only one of those times did I have a working camera with me.) This is actually a perspective I don't think I revisited, looking north from near the Keck observatories over the north plateau with Maui in the background on the horizon to left of center.

November

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November I continued my trips to Mauna Kea, and many of my pictures from that month reflect that. (The rest are a whole bunch of flowers—I guess because of the novelty of seeing flowers in bloom in November?—and a whole bunch exhaustively documenting my first attempt to cook a breadfruit into nachos.)

Hale Pōhaku, with Mauna Loa in the background.

Speaking of never-repeated perspectives, I think this is the only panorama I've taken from what I deduce must be the balcony outside the dining room at Hale Pōhaku. If you look closely you can see that the ridgeline of the building in the middle has a discontinuity—the two photos that make up this panorama were not enough, and quite divergent in exposure, so this is the best Hugin could do. I debated whether or not to put it up at all, but other than that glitch the image is pretty neat (well, it's overexposed on the right, but I like the view). The three buildings on the left are various dormitories for resident workers on the mountain to stay in, while the Visitor Information Station can be seen right of center.

The hill on the right is part of a series of three known as Puʻu Kalepeamoa, a Hawaiian name that means “cinder cone (puʻu) [that looks like] the comb of the chicken (ka-lepe-a-moa).” The summit of that hill is a popular spot for viewing the sunset, perhaps a quarter of a mile's hike from the VIS. It turns out, however, that that hill is merely the highest point in the rim of a large cinder cone, the second-highest point of which is visible here as the slightly lower hill in the middle of the image. The entire things is so large that I only first noticed its form while looking at the area on satellite imagery; in fact, the Access Road goes right through it just before reaching the VIS!

Mauna Kea summit observatories.

And here's my first panorama from the summit (region), of the summit (region, the true summit is behind the hill on the left). This is actually a hand-crated panorama which I literally cannot remake in Hugin, because some of the photos have gone missing since I made it. (I'm not sure if I deleted some of the less-interesting ones after making the panorama in a misguided effort to save storage space or what, but they're not there any more.) This panorama was taken from in front of the Keck observatory, and shows (at least a bit) of all the summit observatories there at the time. From left to right, we have the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, Gemini North, the United Kingdom InfraRed Telescope, Hōkū Keʻa, the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (currently being decommissioned, last I heard), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the control building for the SubMillimeter Array, Subaru, and the tiniest glimpse of the dome of Keck I.

December

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We round off 2009 with two more manually-created panoramas that I cannot reproduce due to missing images. I'm not sure why I decided to delete various source images after making a panorama, but I'm not happy with past me! Anyway, here are two panoramas from around dusk on December 13th:

Hale Pōhaku.

Another panorama of Hale Pōhaku from across the road at the end of the trail to the summit where it connects. Not much else to say other than that, no, those holes in the blue road sign are not bullet holes (as I was occasionally asked), they're there to protect the sign from the occasionally gale-force winds at this elevation. Also I love the background of the irenic sea of clouds. That above-the-clouds perspective is definitely one thing I miss in Australia.

Sunset from Mauna Kea.

My first attempt at a sunset panorama, and for being manually created I'm pretty happy with this one. To the left stands majestic Mauna Loa; in the foreground, mighty Mauna Kea; and, barely visible on the horizon, Hesperian Hualālai beside the setting sun. Very tranquil.

And with that we bid farewell to 2009! Join me for the next part covering 2010, where I don't make a whole lot of panoramas, but make a few decent ones with a bit of practice. A hui hou!

Personal Panoramic History, Part 1: 2008

With my discovery of Hugin back in January I've been combing through all the photos I've ever taken in an effort to find more that could be turned into panoramas. And I do mean combing; I've found several so far that my more cursory search in January failed to detect, including some made from as few as two photos.

I thought it would be interesting to go through my personal photographic history as seen through the lens (pun intended) of panoramas. I've been taking and making panoramas for quite some time now, and while I've put some up on this blog there are quite a number I've made that haven't appeared, either because they were made before this blog was or because I've only just made them recently from old photos.

I have a lot of panoramas, so this'll be a multi-part series. I'll try to link to posts where panoramas first appeared if they've already shown up. I've been going through and replacing the originals with the newly recreated ones, but leaving the original available by mousing over the image which makes for a really fun compare and contrast. We probably won't see those for a few parts, though.

January

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We'll start off in 2008, two years before the start of this blog and the year after I got my Nikon D40 DSLR which is still going strong over a decade later. (I got it moderately late in 2007; the first photos I still have from it are from October 16 of that year.) In 2008 I went to Jordan to dig at the site of Tall el-Hammam for the second time, an archaeological site in the Jordan flood plain north-east of the Dead Sea. It's pretty definitely the site of Sodom, as well as possibly several other cities of some importance throughout Biblical history. I was dissatisfied with the poor quality pictures I'd gotten the year before with a rather terrible point-and-shoot camera I had at the time, so I got myself a DSLR with an idea that I might also be able to use it for astrophotography as well.

I took a lot of pictures from that trip that I may see about sorting through and putting up here another time, but for now we're only interested in panoramas. And I only have two of those, both of them created semi-accidentally. Casting my mind back, in 2008 I think I would have become aware of GIMP only recently (or not yet, even), and not yet grasped its potential for making panoramas. The two sets of photos I found were created as sort of proto-panoramas, series of images taken to capture a wide horizontal expanse but meant to viewed sequentially like a short video instead of being stitched together. This being the future, however, we can go back and do the stitching now!

View from Mount Pisgah, overlooking the Jordan river valley.

The very first panorama I've been able to recreate, it's…suitably unimpressive for a first try. It looks like I took it from inside our bus whose shadow you can see on the ground. I'm pretty sure this is from a weekend trip we got to take to an old monastery that had been converted into a museum on Mount Pisgah, where Moses was shown the Holy Land and subsequently expired. From what I can tell it's looking west towards Israel over the Jordan river flood plain north of the Dead Sea (which you can just catch a hint of on the left). Too bad you basically can't see anything because of the dust and haze.

View from upper tell of Tall el-Hammam.

This second panorama, of Tall el-Hammam, comes from near the end of my stay. A quick language lesson: “tall,” in Arabic, means “hill” or “mound,” while “hammam” means “spring (of water)” or “bath”, so Tall el-Hammam is something like Hill of the Spring, named for a fresh water spring it has which is still active today (in the photo, it's hidden amongst that stand of bushy trees just left of center). In archaeology the word “tell” (basically just a slightly different transliteration of tall into English) or tall is used to refer to the hills or mounds that make up most archaeological sites.

So Tall el-Hammam is made up of two talls, or hills: the lower tall, which is roughly circular, and rises perhaps 10 meters above the surrounding plain, and the upper tall, which is narrow, elongated, much taller (pun not intended, maybe 50 meters or more?), and projects out of the north-eastern part of the lower tall like the tail of a stingray, or a tadpole. This photo is taken from the upper tall at its highest point before it slopes steeply down to the lower tall, looking out over it to the south west. Keep going in this direction and you'd hit the Dead Sea, though again you can't see it for the haze.

This panorama is a mere two pictures (unlike the first one which has four), but it still works and at least it's a lot easier to see things and make out detail compared to my first one!

The next post in this series covers 2009, when I moved to Hawaii, started making panoramas of what would turn out to be very common subjects for me, and made one of my favorite panoramas ever, never-before-seen on this blog! A hui hou!

Jumping up the Tech Ladder: A New Phone!

This week I got a new phone.

I've had a cell phone for over a decade now, so the novelty has worn off a bit and I like to think I've gotten over the urge to upgrade to the latest and greatest every two years. I've had the same model of phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, for four years now, and I'd have happily gone on using it if it weren't for a fairly serious issue with it that prompted me to finally get a new phone.

Although not as headline-making as its brother the Note 7's exploding battery problem, the Note 4 has a very aggravating issue where over time the battery degrades and cause the phone to randomly enter an eternal rebooting loop, from which the only way to recover is to plug it into a charger. At first it would happen on very low battery charge, but over time it would start to happen at higher and higher battery percentages.

How do I know it's the battery? Well, I've actually had two different Note 4s over the past four years. After two years the problem had gotten so bad with the first one that I got my phone replaced with another one (the month after I got laid off at the JCMT, actually). When the new one arrived, I switched batteries between the two phones on a whim and the new one immediately began displaying the same issue (it'd gotten so bad that it was triggering with over 90% battery charge) while the old phone with the new battery was fine.

Well, I went through with the phone swap and things were fine for maybe half a year or so, before I started noticing my new Note 4 beginning to exhibit the exact same behavior. By this time I was starting to begin the process of applying to Swinburne and working at the YTLA, so I was busy, distracted, generally never far enough from a charger for it to be a big issue, and not particularly flush with cash, so getting a new phone never really made it to the pile of things to worry about.

The problem hasn't gone away, however, and having moved to a new city having a reliable phone to help me navigate has become a lot more important. Once I'd worked out the route between the university and home it wasn't too much of a problem in my phone died on the train, but if I want to head out somewhere new I really don't want my phone conking out on me while I'm on an unfamiliar bus for the first time.

The long and short of it is, this week I pre-ordered the Samsung Galaxy S9+ and picked it up yesterday, a few days before it officially goes on sale in the stores. I note this merely because this is probably the one time in my life that I'll ever pre-order a phone and have such early access; I wasn't actually in that big of a hurry that I couldn't have waited to pick one up in-store this weekend, but Samsung had a promotion going on whereby pre-ordering netted you a free wireless charger, and I had just been musing about checking out wireless charging for the first time a few days earlier.

Having gone four years without a phone upgrade I've jumped several iterations and the S9+ feels quite new and alien. I've had a phone from the Note series for the past six years or so (two Note 4s, and a Note 2 before that) primarily for their large screen sizes, back when the Note line had the largest screens you could find in a cell phone. After looking at the current generation of phones however I realized that there was hardly a noticeable difference in screen sizes any more with the S+ phones, and it's not like I actually used the Notes' stylus (their other differentiating feature) enough to justify their higher cost.

With the S9+ I've also made the jump from physical capacitive buttons on the phone to purely software buttons on the screen. I'd been somewhat worried about this for a few years now and finally decided to take the plunge as it was clear that physical buttons on Android phones were fast becoming extinct. Yet after just a single day of using my phone I can say that it hasn't been nearly as disruptive as I'd feared—in fact, I barely notice the difference.

I think I'll call it…a “landline.”

This is also the first phone I've had with a USB Type-C connector, and it's quite nice for plugging in a cable. I also discovered partly by accident that by using a USB Type-C-to-Ethernet converter I can actually connect to the Internet over an Ethernet cable! (As shown above.) I don't know when that'll ever come in useful, but it's pretty amusing nonetheless.

There are some other features of the S9+ that I'm looking forward to trying out as well; for one thing, it's supposed to have one of the best cameras of any phone out there. Actually, it has two cameras: a wide-angle one and a second telephoto one that gets switched to when zooming in, which should allow for better zoomed-in photos than are normally seen on phone cameras. (And the wide-angle lens can swap between two different apertures which should allow it to take better photos in low light.) It can shoot video at 4K (a capability I haven't had before), and has a super-slow-motion mode where it can shoot at 960 frames per second for short bursts—probably not something I'll use often, but it might be interesting to play around with.

Anyway, it's getting late and I should finish this up, so a hui hou!

Unexpected Accolades

Something pretty incredible happened to me today, but to have any chance of properly explaining it I'm going to have to quickly jump back to…

…2012, when I was working at the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea. Among the videos we had to play for the public was one starring an astronomer named Phil Plait, author of the popular Bad Astronomy blog, dedicated to debunking all the crazy ideas people come up with regarding astronomy, or just explaining astronomy to the public in general. In the video he engages in charming Myth Busters-esque hijinks, like trying to stop a scale-model comet of dry ice and water ice by shining a laser on it, or investigating whether shooting an asteroid with a nuke would be a good idea (it's not). He's written a book (called “Bad Astronomy”), he's been on TV, he's got over 600,000 followers on Twitter, the point is that he's pretty good at communicating science effectively.

Jumping forward in time to this past January, I wrote my first article for Astrobites. I picked a paper from 2016 about some astronomers who accidentally observed the wrong star, then discovered it was a previously-unknown solar twin. It made for a great story about serendipity in science, and it fit with my Ph.D. project. I wrote and re-wrote it for a period of several weeks, and was pretty happy with the result.

Fast forward to this afternoon, when I discovered (via a colleague) that Phil Plait had come upon the same paper, thought about writing about it on his blog, discovered my Astrobite, and thought it good enough to simply retweet rather than write his own post:

I found an article about the accidental discovery of a solar twin, a star almost exactly like the Sun. I was going to write it up for the blog, but AstroBites already did a great job! This is pretty cool: https://t.co/0zxmfXm7R8

— Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) March 6, 2018

I don't really have much more to say about this other than: wow. This made my day. Soli Deo gloria! A hui hou!

Bouncy Burgers

While food-shopping on my way home from church this afternoon, I found this in the meat section:

The picture speaks for itself.

Naturally, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to sample an indigenous species. I picked them up and fried up two for lunch. Despite a tragic lack of dill pickle hamburger chips in this country and the necessity of slicing my own (it's the little things that make you homesick), I thought the resulting burgers came out pretty nicely:

I like how you pretty much can't see the burger patties in this shot. Great framing, me!

The verdict: …hmmm. I don't mind the flavor—in fact, thinking back I can barely remember a distinct flavor from the burgers. I was less thrilled with the texture. I'm not sure if it's a result of how I cooked them or what, but they seemed sort of…I guess “mushy” is the best word I can think of to describe it. Perhaps it's just that I was subconsciously expecting beef and that wasn't what I got that made it seem less than satisfactory; I'm still not sure. It was a rather confusing culinary experience. Luckily it was a four-pack of patties though so I've got four more to try to make up my mind. Maybe they just need cooking differently, or maybe I won't mind it as much if I'm expecting it. We'll just have to see! A hui hou!

Edit (3/16/18): I had the rest of the burgers a few days later, and definitely noticed the taste this time. I wouldn't say I really liked it, but it wasn't objectionable either. I've had some people tell me that burgers really isn't the best way to have kangaroo, so perhaps I'll have to try some other form of it.