I'd actually intended to write this post for the queue and write about a different paper for my scheduled Thanksgiving post, but I ended up being extremely busy this week (details below) and since I'd already started working on this post I ended up using it instead. Oh well. Maybe I'll write the other one up for the queue. The paper I ended up writing about is fascinating in its own right, about the discovery of a new, extremely faint dwarf galaxy just beyond the boundary of the Local Group.
The reason I was so busy this week is that I was attending SciCoder 2018, an intensive week-long workshop in scientific programming. This was, however, an almost-literally last-minute decision, as the course had filled up so quickly upon being announced a few months ago that I only made it on the waiting list (and knew there was at least one other person who was on it ahead of me). Sunday night at about 7:30 PM I got an email from the conference organizer letting me know there was an opening and asking if I wanted to attend, and after half an hour or so of working out just how much that would impact my week I accepted.
And when I say intensive, it was just that; 9 to 5 each day (or 8:30 on the first day), at the University of Melbourne (necessitating an hour of train and tram travel for me each way), and throughout a veritable avalanche of information. I was fortunate to already have some familiarity with some of the concepts presented, and even I left each evening feeling like I'd just spent the day doing the mental equivalent of drinking out of a fire hose. It was good, don't get me wrong, but also quite exhausting.
Somehow during the week I also managed to squeeze out enough time (not that it took much) to work on a little personal project: Astrobites has had an offer, through its parent association the American Astronomical Society, for a logo revamp by a professional design firm. In place of the current logo which uses a photograph of Mars (with a bite taken out of it), one of the concepts they've provided was a stylized representation of Mars (with a bite taken out of it).
I'm a huge sucker for stylized representations of things, and liked the general idea, but there were a few details of the proposal that I wasn't 100% satisfied with so I quickly made a slightly different version of my own based on their template to illustrate the shortcomings I saw…and then had a fanciful idea to make a whole solar system of stylized-planets-with-bites-out for logos. I've got enough experience with Inkscape now that it only took me an hour or two, and I really like how it came out (as did a few fellow students when I showed them).
At this point I've changed Mars enough that the only thing I'm really copying from the proposal is the “bite and crumbs” motif each planet has. I doubt these will show up in an official capacity, so I thought I'd show them off here as a personal project. That's it for today though, I need to go catch up on my sleep now. A hui hou!
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