House Heating Haranguing

This past week I moved house from the place I'd been staying since I first arrived in Melbourne (which is why it's been a bit quiet around here). The place I moved to has no central heating, so I've been huddled in my room for the past few days (I'm also in the midst of a two-week vacation) with a single brave space heater which is doing its valiant best to warm it up to a livable temperature in here. (“Livable,” for me, a child of the tropics, being at bare minimum 20 °C [68 °F].) This has led to much rumination on my part about how houses in Melbourne seem to be undesigned to handle the normal temperature extremes in the region. It's like houses in Melbourne are built on the perpetually optimistic outlook that every day will be a balmy 20–24 °C (68–75.2 °F). Yet I've already endured weeks of temperatures being in the 5–15 °C (41–59 °F) range, with no end to winter in sight.

For starters, most houses are built out of brick, a novel building material for me as I don't recall ever living in a house so constructed (it's possible that I may have as a kid too young to remember). Having spent several months with it, my observation is that brick seems to retain heat about as well as a sieve does water. (I have a 1500 watt space heater, which can, over the course of hours, infinitesimally raise the temperature in my average-sized bedroom, which simple thermodynamics suggests means that the outgoing heat flux is of the same order of magnitude.) Insulation seems to be a foreign concept, and as mentioned whoever built the house I'm in saw no need for including any sort of central heating system, which just kind of blows my mind.

From talking with a few fellow Americans at CAS from Michigan and Wisconsin and a fellow student from the Netherlands, I gather that they too have noticed this, and that this issue of houses not seemingly being built for the weather is not really a problem at those locations. This has led me to formulate the following graph, based on my own experiences and hear-say from others:

I've personally had experience in the 0–15 °C range.

Basically, for places where it either gets really cold (like, freezing temperatures or below), or doesn't get very cold (like in Hilo, at the 15 °C end), houses are generally constructed in such a way that they can handle those temperatures pretty well. But if it gets cold, but not quite down to freezing, eh, people can just tough it out, amirite? It's not actually freezing yet, what are you complaining for? (Can you tell I get rather bitter and sarcastic when I'm cold?)

I've also (re)discovered that my motivation to get out of bed in the morning is directly and strongly correlated with the temperature outside the covers. I've only been able to directly test this over a moderately small temperature range so far (~11–22 °C), but extrapolating it out to “the house is on fire”-level temperatures I find that I would indeed be extremely motivated to get up, so it checks out.

Anyway, thank God for personal space heaters and all the quilts and blankets people have gifted me with over time (seriously, a blanket is probably one of the best gifts you could give me; I treasure them all). And winter should “only” last another two to three months. I really am quite happy with my new place otherwise—but oh, how I miss Hilo's climate during the winter! A hui hou!

Another (Unexpected) July Astrobite! Structured Satellite Galaxies

So just a few days after my previous Astrobite summarizing the ASA meeting I got a surprise when I woke up to an email from the Astrobites scheduler saying that he'd posted my Astrobite I wrote for the queue back in February. This one deals with an interesting problem I'd never heard of before called the “Satellite Planes of Galaxies problem.” Observations of he Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and Centaurus A show that a significant fraction of the satellite galaxies around them tend to orbit in correlated planes. Yet similar-looking structures are vanishingly rare in simulations, to the point where it would be exceedingly unlikely to find them around three galaxies so close to each other. It's pretty interesting as while we've had hints of theses planar structures around the Milky Way for a few decades and Andromeda for a little less it's only recently that we've really been able to confirm them and discover the one around Centaurus A.

Something amusing I found in this paper was the name for the structure around the Andromeda Galaxy, which is called the “Great Plane of Andromeda.” This sounds like a reference to a very old name for the Andromeda galaxy, several hundred years ago when it was known as the Great Nebula in Andromeda. I just like the idea that anything associated with the galaxy becomes known as the “Great ____ in/of Andromeda.” A hui hou!

July Astrobite: Summarizing the ASA Meeting

My Astrobite for July came out yesterday, a short summary of the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) meeting last week. Well, I say “short,” but as it's not a normal paper summary I allowed myself another hundred words or so beyond the usual thousand-word-limit. I think there were a hundred and forty talks total, so to summarize I just picked one from each day from a range of topics and by people from different universities. Even then I didn't have room to cover some of the things that came up such as a good number of talks about radio astronomy which covered things like using measurements of pulsar timing across the Milky Way to make a very sensitive gravitational wave detector on a galactic scale.

One thing I did notice over the course of last week, though, was that there weren't any other talks or posters related to my area of research in varying constants. There were quite a few areas where there were multiple talks/posters on similar subjects (like gravitational waves, or pulsar timing, or the challenges of big data), but nobody else presenting anything like what I'm doing. (That I saw at least; there were parallel session each afternoon of which I could only watch one, but from reading the talk titles I don't think I missed anything obviously related.) Certainly there are other people working in this area, but it was interesting to have presented what felt like a pretty unique talk. Anyway, that's enough for now or I'll end up writing another thousand-word summary. A hui hou!

Belated Tau Day! And the 2018 ASA Meeting

Happy (belated) Tau Day (6/28/2018) everyone! Yes, it's that time of year again when we celebrate the correct circle constant, \(\tau\ (=2\pi=6.283185…)\). I'll do my usual linking to the official Tau Day website, and note to myself that I should consider getting one of the \(\tau\)-shirts. A triumph for tau is that it's now officially part of the Python math module as of version 3.6! Just do from math import tau to start using it.

In other news, it's been a very busy week and a half for me. Last Thursday I headed out to the gold-rush town of Ballarat an hour and a half by train from Melbourne for the Harley Wood School for Astronomy (HWSA). This is an annual workshop for graduate students, where this year some fifty students from all across Australia spent a very frigid weekend at the historical Ballarat Municipal Observatory. We had some interesting talks and workshops and I got to meet quite a few fellow students from other universities.

Anyway, Sunday before coming back to Melbourne I and a few other students visited Sovereign Hill, a tourist attraction in the form of a historic mining town from Victoria's gold rush in the 1850s. Being just a few years after the California gold rush there are a lot of similarities, but I think I'll save a fuller explanation (and some pictures) for a later post.

On Monday the week-long Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) annual conference began. This is my first time attending such an event as a participant, as when I went to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) meeting in Honolulu in 2015 I didn't actually attend any of the talks. This time not only have I been sitting in on talks all week, but I gave one of my own on Monday!

It's essentially the same talk as I did for my Confirmation of Candidature cut down to half the time with more focus on the theory and less what I actually did, but from the comments I received it came off pretty well. I had the very last talk of the day on Monday and several people said I'd managed to keep their interest during it, so I consider that an accomplishment.

Having got my talk out of the way Monday I was free to enjoy the rest of the week. I listened to a lot of talks on some very interesting astronomy going on in Australia, and having been to HWSA before hand I knew a number of the speakers and poster authors, which was cool.

Today's also the last day of the Deeper, Darker, Brighter exhibition as well. Tomorrow we'll be removing our artworks from the gallery, and hopefully moving towards starting up our weekly art workshops again!

June's been a very busy and somewhat stressful month overall for me, and I'm looking forward to things settling down a bit. It's perhaps not surprising that I came down with a cold immediately after the ASA meeting finished, so I'll keep this post short tonight. A hui hou!