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!
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