Farewell to 2020

With less than four hours to go to 2021 as I type this, I wanted to cap off a turbulent year with one final post.

Where to begin? I have so much to be thankful for over the past 366 days. Just under a year ago, in early January, I flew through Shanghai airport on my way back from visiting family in California, just a few days after hearing about a new disease called “COVID-19” which was showing up in China. Thankfully I avoided catching it, either then or since. And while multiple members of my family caught it back in the U.S., they all survived more-or-less unscathed, a fortune not shared by millions of grieving people around the globe this year.

My PhD research has also thankfully been mostly unscathed by the tumult of transitioning to working from home from early March. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more upset-resistant project than mine: my data is all archival (so I don't have to worry about observing runs being disrupted), I already had it all downloaded on a hard drive I can bring with me, and all my research happens on my university-provided laptop (so no worrying about the Swinburne supercomputer being down or having a faulty internet connection like many of my fellow students). I've continued to make slow but steady progress over the past ~9 months, and haven't had unavoidable delays like students in other fields who were doing lab work have. While the transition to working from home initially produced psychological stresses not unlike a house move (which was interesting to observe), once those wore off after a few weeks I've been quite happy not to be taking lengthy public transportation every day, and am probably going to continue working from home for the remainder of my PhD. (Which should hopefully be finished before the end of March.)

Sure, what I'm calling The Great Melbourne Lockdown was a bit rough. But I made it through with a guaranteed student stipend, the newly-discovered ability to order groceries online from my local grocery store, and the natural propensity of an introvert (or maybe just a hermit) to be at home when given the option. The winter was miserably cold, since keeping my room warm all the time in Melbourne's "What's insulation?" housing would've been prohibitively expensive with a space heater, but when, outside of the tropics, aren't winters miserable? (I'm channeling it towards motivation to find a job in the tropics again.) And on the plus side I didn't have to tramp a kilometer to and from the train station every day no matter the weather—on near-freezing rainy days I could time my daily walk with a break in the clouds, or even skip it altogether.

So on the whole, I really do have many things to be grateful for this past year. But what's on the horizon for 2021? 

Well, as mentioned, I hope to be finishing up my PhD and submitting my thesis by the end of March. Along the way I plan to submit two papers, containing the results of my three and a half years' of work. (I'm also contemplating a series of posts covering my research aimed at a layman audience now that the results are nearly done.) This is the time of year for astronomy jobs to be posted, so I'll be kicking the job hunt into high gear next week. It's no secret that I miss Hawaii and will be checking for jobs there, but who knows where things will go from here? I'll be looking for astronomy jobs first, but the skills I've learned from my PhD are quite broadly applicable; this year's put a lot of things into perspective for me, and I wouldn't mind potentially putting my skills to work in a medical field for a few years.

In the meantime, the prospect of summer is looming in the near future…probably. While we had some extremely hot days in late November presaging the approaching estival season, the weather here in Melbourne took a dip back to cooler temperatures for most of December. I've been wearing warm clothes and occasionally running the heater the past two weeks (including on Christmas) due to the antarctic cold fronts blowing up from the south lately. Now, as much as I dislike being cold, I can at least mitigate it with clothing and heating; cooling down from Melbourne's intensely hot summers (with nights that sometimes barely cool down) is a bit trickier, as the AC unit we got installed last year is out in the living room and doesn't really reach back to my bedroom. Supposedly we're in for a cooler and wetter summer due to a La Niña year in the Pacific, and I will happily take that over the more typical Melbournian summers I've endured the past few years. (I've also got a new gadget that might help out a bit with that, but I'll save a full discussion and review for a post early next year…)

As we approach anno Domini 2021, I'm feeling fairly upbeat. Yes, there are the multiple promising vaccines that will hopefully bring an end to the worst pandemic in a century; but I'm also really looking forward to finishing this PhD into which I've poured a tenth of my life and moving on to something different. Exactly what, I don't know yet, but that's the exciting part. I've been reading two books lately: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein, and Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement, by Rich Karlgaard. Range is a study about how many of the greatest breakthroughs and innovations throughout history have come from people who, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of specializing ever more deeply in a single subject, were broadly acquainted with many, allowing them to see and make connections their more specialized peers weren't equipped to. And Late Bloomers complements that by documenting many people who, despite society's push for us to be high-achievers by our 20's, bloomed and discovered new talents much later in life.

Range argues that instead of knowing exactly what we want to do for the rest of our lives before college, we are actually very ill-equipped to make that decision and should instead spend time during and after college trying various different jobs and experiences out for short periods of time, both to become more well-rounded and experienced and to have a better chance of discovering what exactly we want to do. Late Bloomers similarly advocates for patience in figuring out our path, due to full brain development demonstrably happening later in people these days (with a median age around 25, but even into late 20s or early 30s), and being open to the possibility of change and discovering new talents and interests throughout life.

Taken together, they've been very comforting to me. I've been secretly bothered for a long time by the way my brain doesn't really fit with the prevailing societal pressure to “pick something early and specialize in it forever.” My interests shift with the years, and I've held several jobs over the past decade rather than a single one. Range taught me to look upon my breadth of experience as an asset rather than a disadvantage, and Late Bloomers taught me not to fear the changes of time, or to worry about not already having changed the world or become a multi-millionaire. I've learned a lot over the course of my PhD; research methods, for sure, but I've also had time to become much more knowledgeable in Python (which will serve me well for any number of possible jobs) and I've discovered latent talents like painting and music scoring I never knew I had. I've learned that maybe research (or at least academia) isn't for me like I thought when I was younger, and I'm eager to try something new when I'm done with my PhD. Between it all, while I don't know what the future holds, I'm feeling more optimistic about it than I have for the past few years. And with that, here's to a Happy New Year 2021! Hau'oli Makahiki Hou!

Christmas Planets, 2020

Merry Christmas everyone! I've got a Christmas video for you this year. I'd been hoping to see the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn this year, with their closest approach for over 800 years on December 21st, but Melbourne's weather took a turn for the cloudy for more than a week around that date. However, I noticed Christmas evening that the clouds were finally starting to clear out, so on a whim I set up my GoPro to get a timelapse, and caught not just Jupiter and Saturn but Mars and the Moon too. The two gas giants are a bit hard to see in the video, but were clearly visible to the naked eye when I came out to look when it got dark. They're already pulling apart again, but at least I got to see them so soon after closest approach. Hope your Christmases everywhere were as merry as can be this year! A hui hou!

A Typical Melbournian Hailstorm

So if you've followed this blog for a while you may know that I enjoy making videos, and have been doing so for a few years now. And while cell phones are a great portable video-taking device (seeing as all my previous videos were taken using them), some of the kinds of things I really want to do (such as long timelapse videos) aren't really suited for being taken by them (not that that's stopped me before). I've thus been interested in getting a dedicated action camera such as a GoPro for several years now; in fact, I first looked into it back in 2017 right before coming to Australia, but couldn't afford one at the time.

Fast forward to 2020, and with all the money I'm saving on not taking public transport and eating out during the week I could finally convince myself I could afford one. The latest GoPro model, the HERO9 Black, came out in September with some nice improvements (such as for timelapses), and after doing a lot of research into various action cameras out there I picked one up over a sale on Thanksgiving weekend! (GoPro has actual competition now, but its specific features were still the best fit for what I wanted.)

Tada! This was me attempting timelapses of the night sky. They're impressively easy to get, but not quite ready to show off.

I'm still experimenting with it, but today I've got my first video to show off. Last Thursday we were projected to have an afternoon thunderstorm, so I decided I'd put my camera out facing up and try to get a timelapse of the clouds passing overhead. Fortunately, I somehow started recording real-time video instead (still learning!), and it turned out that the thunderstorm dropped some hail as well (as they often do, in Melbourne, we had another hail storm less than a fortnight before that).

I was worried for my new camera, but more worried about myself dashing out into the hail to retrieve it, which worked out for the best as the camera's fine and I got a cool video of being in a hail storm. The storm itself passed in less than 30 minutes, so I sped the whole thing up 10× and made the following video out of it:

Anyway, that's all for now, but look forward to more—and hopefully more innovative and unique—videos from me in the future, as I figure out what kinds of videos I can get with something I wouldn't want to use my phone for. A hui hou!

Happy 250th, Beethoven!

Today (December 17) marks the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's birth in Bonn. I'm pretty sure he needs no introduction from me, and I doubt I can say anything that hasn't already been said about this famous master of classical music, so I'll just note that Beethoven has long been one of my favorite composers, ranked up there next to Handel for music I love. As a teenager some of the first CDs I owned (yes, I'm old enough to have had them) were his nine symphonies, and while I've become acquainted with much more of his work in the past few years, those will always remain etched into my memory.

Beethoven wrote quite a few sets of variations on tunes, both original and from others (he wrote a set on the tune for "God Save the King/My Country ‘Tis of Thee", for instance), and while most of them aren't well known, they showcase to a particular intensity his propensity to experiment with tunes or motifs throughout his music, poking, prodding, stretching, inverting, mirroring, and just generally wringing every last drop of music out of a simple set of notes that he could. It's one of the things that I quite enjoy about his music, and which makes it unique.

There's a concept called frisson (from the French “to shiver”), which is the feeling of euphoria (often accompanied by feelings of chills and goosebumps) some people feel when listening to music. I only came across the term recently, but I've been familiar with the concept for a long time. I primarily enjoy classical music because of the various musical genres I've been exposed to it consistently has the largest fraction of works which induce frisson, and my ongoing quest to expand my horizons in classical music is ultimately all in pursuit of more works that cause it. In that quest, Beethoven is possibly the composer with the largest number of pieces which can provide that feeling of chills (though as mentioned Handel is right up there too), especially his works for strings; partly his many string quartets and piano trios (which have some sublimely frisson-inducing movements), but most especially in his sonatas for violin and piano, all ten of which have at least one movement capable of bringing goosebumps to my skin.

It's a bit difficult to discuss frisson, as it's an intensely personal feeling (and is apparently different for every person); merely discussing it feels like baring a part of my soul to public scrutiny. I read recently (in a study on the topic which pointed to the pleasure coming at least in part from being able to correctly predict remembered patterns) that only about 50% of the population feels it at all, so this post may not make much sense to half my readers; though perhaps even for my readers who can enjoy it, the individual nature of it may make trying to describe the exact notes and cadences that induce it like trying to describe a rainbow to the color-blind. Anyway, if you, like me, were familiar with the sensation but didn't know the name of it, I hope this post has been helpful, and I'd love to hear of any pieces that induce frisson for other people if you feel like sharing. A hui hou!

Measuring the Fine-Structure Constant to the Best Precision Yet

As you might know if you've been following this blog, my PhD research focuses on the fine-structure constant, traditionally denoted by \(\alpha\). Specifically, I'm working on extending an astronomical method for searching for variation in the fine-structure constant's value to main-sequence (specifically Sun-like) stars for the first time. I'm more interested in searching for a change in \(\alpha\) than in that value per se, but I was still interested to see an article in Nature a few days ago reporting the most precise determination of \(\alpha\) yet.

The authors measured the value of \(\alpha\) to be 1/137.035999206(11) (the last two digits are uncertain), with an incredible precision of 81 parts per trillion. Interestingly, this value varies by more than \(5\sigma\) from the previous best measurement. This measurement used rubidium atoms, while the other measurement used caesium atoms, so it's possible it could be some systematic difference between the two different setups. But we don't know at this point, so we'll have to see as the respective teams go about improving their measurements even further. (Incidentally, this measurement helps rule out that the electron could be a compound particle, as such a state would conflict with the measured electron's anomalous magnetic moment at this level of precision.)

You'll notice there are no units on that value. That's because \(\alpha\) is a member of a small group of pure numbers which define the universe known as ‘dimensionless constants,’ whose values are independent of the units used to measure them. For comparison, if you measure the speed of light c in different systems, the numerical value will differ; for instance, approximately 186,000 miles per second or approximately 300,000,000 meters per second. The value of \(\alpha\), on the other hand, is always approximately 1/137, no matter what you measure it in. This lack of dimensionality is really quite remarkable when you think about it, and has fascinated physicists practically since \(\alpha\) was introduced by Arnold Sommerfeld in 1916.

Interestingly, it's looking like my PhD work will be able to put constraints on variation in \(\alpha\) at about the level of 10 parts per billion. That's two orders of magnitude better than the current best constraints from astronomical tests (~1 part per million), and only about another two orders of magnitude larger than the precision with which we can measure \(\alpha\), which is rather amazing to think about. Hopefully before too much longer I'll have my own published articles to share here on the subject. A hui hou!

R.I.P. Arecibo Observatory

I woke up today to the news that the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, originally constructed in 1963, had collapsed. This wasn't entirely a surprise (though it was a shock), as it had been having some trouble lately. Back in August, one of the cables holding the instrument platform above the dish snapped, followed by a second one in November. After the second cable broke, the NSF decided about a week ago to decommission the telescope after determining it would be too dangerous to repair it. That decision turns out to have been the right call, as today another cable snapped (along with the tops of the towers they were anchored to), sending the many-ton instrument platform plunging to the ground and through the dish in between.

Now, I've never used Arecibo myself, but pretty much every astronomer knows about it; for being the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world until 2015, and for participating in various important scientific work over the years. Plenty of non-astronomers know about it too due to its appearance in movies such as Goldeneye. Its loss will leave a gap in astronomy for quite a while, unfortunately; for instance, it's been used to bounce radar off of near-earth asteroids to give us a better idea of their shapes and orbits, which can help determine their threat levels. All in all, it's a bit of an end of an era for radio astronomy. (This doesn't affect me or my PhD at all, if you were wondering, but it's still a shame it happened.)

Edit (12/6/20): The NSF released a video of the collapse, which was, remarkably, caught by two sources: a security camera trained on the telescope, and a drone which happened to be inspecting one of the cables at the exact moment it snapped. It's pretty heartrending to watch, but also pretty incredible to have it caught on camera like that.

Australian Thanksgiving, 2020 Edition

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I had my own little Thanksgiving meal this year after noticing this mini turkey loaf at the grocery store the day before:

What a year it's been, eh? I'm certainly thankful that all my relatives that caught COVID-19 (including my parents and maternal grandparents) are still alive, and that I haven't gotten it myself that I know of. I'm thankful that Melbourne today recorded a full 28 days since the last COVID-19 diagnosis (I think the last active case was declared cleared a day or two ago). Certainly, even with the fact that Victoria was hardest-hit by far among Australia's states and territories, we're truly blessed here considering basically all of the rest of the world.

While adjusting to working from home (or “living at work,” as one of my grad student friends put it) was an upheaval (similar in scope and stress to moving house, I found to my surprise—I guess it's the sudden breaking of most routines), I've adjusted to it pretty happily now. I do not miss the roughly hour-long commute to and from Swinburne amidst crowds of people on public transport. I can tailor my daily exercise to the state of the weather, instead of having to tramp back and forth to the train station at a specific time, often in pouring rain or burning Sun in the heat of the afternoon. The latest news from Swinburne is not to expect to be back on campus until February, and while I would still have potentially three more months to finish up my PhD at that point I think it'd be easier (and I'd prefer) to just continue working from home for the remaining time rather than re-adjusting to a different schedule.

Speaking of, the PhD remains a constant struggle, but at least we had some encouraging news last week: my advisor finally performed the last few steps on my results to get constraints on variation in the fine-structure constant, \(\alpha\), and even with just a subset of about 15% of the most Sun-like stars in our sample the error came out to be just 10 parts-per-billion (ppb). (The full preliminary result was \(\Delta\alpha/\alpha=11\pm10\) ppb.) We'd previously estimated a final error of 10–100 ppb, so having it come out directly at the low end of our estimation was a pleasant surprise. That also means that the constraints we'll be getting from my PhD work will be a full 100 times better than the current best constraints from astronomical tests, which are at the 1000 ppb (1 part-per-million) level. Even a factor of 10 improvement would be quite impressive—PhDs are awarded for less—but a full hundred-fold improvement is really quite remarkable, and really speaks to the amount of information available from high-resolution stellar spectroscopy (though extracting that information to that level of precision has taken the preceding three years—almost 10%!—of my life).

There's still a number of sources of systematic error to investigate, and we may refine exactly how we calculate that number, so it may change in the final result, but likely not by much—certainly not by a factor of 10, probably more like a factor of 2. With that level of precision we'll be going for a short paper in Science, though probably not until next year when it can coincide with my already-in-progress papers on the process of making such measurements.

With that in mind, I've finally signed up for my own ORCID ID number. If you haven't heard of ORCID, it's a not-for-profit organization which curates ID numbers for researcher, allowing them to have one unique identifier that can be used to unambiguously identify people's contributions to research. Admittedly, in my case there are exactly zero other Daniel Berkes publishing in astronomy—I checked—but it's useful for people who might share names with other researchers, and it just makes it simpler for people to look you up without having to search by name by offering a simple URI which can hyperlinked, encoded in a QR code, etc.. It also offers one convenient place to tie in all the information about your career such as education, employment, papers, and so forth, and you can check mine out right here:

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7181-3020

Anyway, that's all for tonight! A hui hou!

A Visit to Mount Donna Buang

This weekend my housemate Dan and I went on a scenic drive out of Melbourne (now that we can). We were going to visit a reservoir, but discovered that the road there was closed for construction since Dan last visited it a few years ago. So instead we headed up to the summit of Mount Donna Buang, a mountain about 50 miles (80 km) from the center of Melbourne (and perhaps half that from where we live). It's the southernmost range of the Victorian Alps, and one of the closest mountains to Melbourne that gets snow in the winter.

First time my ears have popped since flying back to Australia in January.

I'd dressed for warmer weather (and lower altitude), so it was a bit of a shock to find that the wind was both strong and cold at the summit (due to a small cold front passing through). It wasn't enough to stop me climbing the metal observation post present, allowing me to get a nice panoramic view of the surrounding area.

View to the south-east from the top of the tower.

There are also a number of hiking trails that radiate out from the summit, and we went for a short hike on one of them among the giant eucalyptus trees (and my calves are feeling it today!). Along the way, I found this really neat-looking lichen clinging to a rock:

I've never seen lichen that grows out from the surface like this before.

All in all it was nice to get out of Melbourne and into the surrounding countryside for a bit for the first time in over half a year. It's a pretty nice spot for a good view if you're ever visiting, and though there were a few people there it wasn't overly tourist-y. Now that we can get out again we might do some more trips in the next few months, so I may see some more of Victoria before too long. A hui hou!

A Weird Week (2020 Edition)

I've now made more social visits in the past three days (two) than in the prior seven months (one), now that Melbourne has emerged from its second lockdown. I've gone from shivering two days ago to being mildly too hot today. I also voted by absentee ballot from overseas for the first time! It's been a weird week.

Saturday I went into Swinburne for the first time since mid-March to pick up various things from my desk, including a small fraction of the painting supplies I left there. I'm fairly excited about this, as I have some new (old) projects to work on, and options to work on them with now! (I also saw a friend who lives nearby, hence the social visit.)

If I'd been thinking, I could've printed out my absentee ballot to sign it while I was there (assuming the printer was still powered up and connected), but I didn't, so thankfully some good friends of mine in Mitcham helped me out there. I just emailed the scanned, signed ballot off an hour ago, so that's all taken care of. (Thankfully Hawaii makes it convenient to vote, although at least I was on top of things enough this time around to have requested it back at the end of September so I could've mailed it in on time if need be. Hopefully. You never know with the global postal service this year.)

The weather is finally starting to show signs of warming up, too, with today being comfortable in the morning and even hot in the afternoon—though there's a storm predicted for tomorrow afternoon which will plunge the temperatures back down into “decidedly chilly” for another few days. Still, in my (limited) experience it seems like the weather in Melbourne generally warms up in November, and it seems to be on its way. The days are quite noticeably longer now so when it's clear the Sun really heats things up. That's about all for now, though! A hui hou!

Lockdown Letup!

As of today, the 111-day lockdown in Melbourne has finally ended, with two days of zero new COVID-19 cases on Monday and Tuesday. Travel is still restricted to a 25 km radius within the Melbourne metropolitan area, but we can now leave our houses for any reason at all again, instead of just the four approved reasons¹ that've been the law of the land for nearly too long to remember at this point.

Sometimes referred to as Lockdown 2.0, I'm lumping it in with the first lockdown from ~March to mid-May as The Great Melbourne Lockdown of 2020, since I (more fool I) held off on actually emerging from the first one for a few weeks out of an abundance of caution. Had I been in any other state (or even city in Victoria) I'd have been fine, but due to a combination of bad luck and bad decisions that led to COVID-19 getting out of the quarantine hotels via private security guards I was just about to resume external activities in late June when the second lockdown happened. Maybe it wasn't so bad for the people who enjoyed the few weeks of freedom in late May and June, but for me I've been effectively locked down from mid-March to late October.

I find myself a bit conflicted at this point. Even now, I'm not entirely unhappy to be staying home; it's nice being able to pick the time I want to go outside, instead of being forced to tramp through whatever weather we happen to be having around the time the trains are running, and I'm saving something like 1.5 hours a day in commute times (plus the costs). But I'm also quite happy to have the option of leaving; I'm going to see about heading into Swinburne this weekend² and pick up as much of my painting supplies and equipment that have been sitting there for seven months as I can. Even if I personally don't particularly want to be leaving my house all that much, there's something that eats away at your mind like acid when you're not allowed to. I think I may see about getting involved with prison ministries in future; if nothing else, this has given me a lot more empathy for the incarcerated and a greater appreciation for personal freedom.

For now, at least, Melbourne seems to be in a pretty good place; there will undoubtedly continue to be scattered cases over the coming days, as we definitely haven't eliminated the virus, but hopefully the government's beefed up its contact tracing enough that it can jump on any outbreaks. For all of the hardship it's been, at least we're looking to be in a much better place than much of the rest of the world which is rapidly spiraling out of control in terms of case numbers. The big question going forward is, will there be a third wave? I'm struck by how well the first two waves here in Melbourne mirrored those of the 1918 H1N1 influenza outbreak, which, tellingly, went through three waves with the second being much worse than the first. Of course, the rest of Australia as this point has only been through effectively a single wave, proving that it's possible to break out of this morbid historical re-enactment, so here's hoping we can break out of it here as well in the future. A hui hou!

¹ Grocery shopping, (essential) work, (essential) education, and personal exercise.

² If I can get security to let me into the astronomy building; after enough people were flouting the more lax “work from home if you can” restrictions between the two lockdowns Swinburne deactivated everyone's security cards to stop people from coming on to campus to work.

Three Years in Melbourne

I'm a few days late to the exact date, but this week marks three years since I came to Melbourne. The weather is finally starting to show signs of spring, though being Melbourne it continues to oscillate wildly—I had to laugh a few days ago when I saw this prediction on my weather app:

Note the Monday high lower than the Sunday low.

Saturday and Sunday were indeed beautiful; I took a walk in shorts, T-shirt, and even sandals (for the first time in something like half a year) on Sunday and felt perfectly comfortable the entire time. Today, on the other hand, due to a cold front dumping lots of cold rain overnight, it's felt like right back into the depths of winter. I'm not too surprised, at least, as in my experience it takes till at least mid-November and some years even into December to really warm up in a sustained fashion.

Other than that, not much is going on here; we're all hoping for COVID-19 cases to drop enough to be able to ease some of the lockdown restrictions by the 19th, and I'm just recuperating from the last month or so of hard work for my final review. With the Daylight Savings Time change this weekend I've also got an hour's worth of jet-lag, so I should probably finish this up and get a good night's sleep. A hui hou!

Finishing My Draft Thesis Review: Some Thoughts

This past Wednesday (the 23rd) I had my Draft Thesis Review, the final of the three annual reviews for PhD students at Swinburne. This review is for students to show off the culmination of their efforts to date, and also where students who still need some time to finish up can request an extension of six months, which is what I've done. (It's also what the vast majority of students do, at least in astrophysics; while Australian PhDs are nominally three years, in practice most people end up going over that time.) My project is progressing well, I just need a few more months to finish up the analysis of my results and publish; at this point the plan is to publish two papers together covering pretty much everything I've done for the past three years.

It's been pretty hectic the past month, writing the report for my panel along with work on the aforementioned papers, which will constitute most of the science chapters for my thesis as well. This is the first weekend I haven't worked in at least that long, and it was sorely needed. At least now I have a chance to catch my breath slightly before the final push over the next few months.

Now that the review is past, it's also time to start looking to the future. I'm still sorting out what I want to do after this at this point; my first preference would be to get a job back in Hawaii (probably with an observatory, given my prior experiences there), but after this past year I'm finding myself more amenable to the possibility of putting my skills to work in the medical industry somehow, perhaps for a few years, to do some good in the world. Maybe. Who knows! I've learned an absolute ton about programming over the past few years, so I've got some very broadly applicable skills, it just remains to see what's out there. But for now, I've got a timeline to write for my Finalization Plan to submit to the university, and then some analysis to get into! A hui hou!

Drinking through Grass: Plant-Based Disposable Straws

Plastic is an incredible material which the vast majority of our ancestors would've gone to great lengths to obtain; imagine being able to store your grain for the winter in water, air, and vermin-proof containers which neither rust nor rot! Unfortunately, that extreme durability becomes a liability when used for products which are intended to be disposable, specifically drinking straws (as the increasing amounts of them ending up in the ocean show). Multiple different types of reusable straws are coming out on the market (and that's an admirable initiative), but they often have issues of their own, such as straws being difficult to wash out and possibly prone to mold.

Looking for another solution, a new company called Equo has created a range of disposable, plant-based straws which biodegrade over a few months or so. They had a Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, I backed it, and yesterday I finally got a chance to try some of their straw out!

The packaging got a little dented in transport, but the straws were all fine.

They offer four different kinds of straws, but I only got two, as I don't really use straws at home much. Or at all, really, I just thought they'd be fun to try out. They offer straws made from rice, coconut, sugarcane, and grass, as seen here. They're each made in slightly different ways, but it basically involves soaking or steaming the plant material into an elastic mush, then forming into straws as it dries. Except for the grass straws, which are simply stems from the grass Lepironia articulata, or grey sedge. They naturally form these hollow tubes, so they just need to be cut to size, sterilized, and packaged! Because they're natural grass stems, they don't go soggy in liquid—I used one yesterday, left it to dry overnight, and used it again today. They're all even edible (with maybe the exception of the grass ones), with Equo noting that you can cook the rice straws down into porridge after use, if you want, and simply eat the others.

I'm a huge sucker for more innovative use of our God-given natural resources, and from personal use I can give these the seal of approval, so I really hope these catch on. They're not yet available for sale generally, but now that they've started production hopefully we'll be seeing them ‘in the wild’ soon. A hui hou!

There's no way to look dignified while sipping through a straw, so I offer this photo of me trying out a sugarcane straw purely from a sense of scientific integrity.

Some useful Unix utility replacements written in Rust

As I continue hurtling towards my Draft Thesis Review on the 23rd, frantically working on papers and my thesis to have ready for review, I thought I'd take a little time to show off some nifty command line utilities I came across recently. I learned about them from this useful blog post, and I'm only going to cover a few of the things listed there so be sure to check it out for yourself. I mentioned nearly a year ago that I was trying out the Xonsh shell ("konsh", like the snail), and it turns out I'm still using it (it's got some really helpful features like suggesting commands based on what you're typing and have used in the past), but these work just as well in Bash, and presumably other shells as well.

All of these utilities are written in Rust, a programming language which has been out for a decade at this point but which I only heard about for the first time in the early part of this year. It's a compiled, statically-typed language which bills itself as being like the venerable C language, but with a bunch of features which involve memory-safety built directly into it. It's not exactly widespread in use at this point, but the people who use it apparently love it, and I've been somewhat interested in learning it for a while (maybe when I have time again). Anyway, let's get to the cool new utilities, which tend to be advertised as smarter, updated replacement for traditional Unix utilities you might be familiar with already. Today I'll briefly review two of them: fd, an updated find, and sd, an updated sed.

fd is first because it's the one I've found most useful personally so far. If I were to sum it up in one sentence, it'd be: "A utility that works like I always expect find to." find is an incredibly powerful utility, there's no doubt about that, but that comes at a cost of complexity. Let's say I'm in a directory, and I know that somewhere in the directories contained within this one is a file named “add_actions.lua”. I don't remember where, though, so I try to use find to locate it:

$ find add_actions.lua
find: ‘add_actions.lua’: No such file or directory

Well, that's not very helpful. The correct way to do what I want it to do it to add a -name flag before the name of the file I want; this finds the file correctly:

$ find -name add_actions.lua
./files/scripts/add_actions.lua

I never remember this, however; just figuring this out for this example took me a few minutes of trying and reading the manual for find. I thought maybe you need to specify that you want to start searching in the directory you're currently in, by adding a period after find; this, it turns out, is unnecessary as that's the default action (so now I've wasted time remembering something superfluous). I also thought maybe I needed to specify that I was searching for things of type ‘file’ (and not, say, ‘directory’), which ultimately also turned out to be unnecessary but took me extra time to verify that that was the case. Now, the fact that the correct version doesn't require those additions does make the comparison slightly less impressive, but let's see how you would do this using fd:

$ fd add_actions.lua
files/scripts/add_actions.lua

Boom. No needing to add additional flags, it just intelligently assumes I'm giving the file name (or technically a regular expression to search against) if there are no flags or other arguments, and finds what I'm looking for by searching recursively starting from the current working directory. No looking up manuals or reading help files needed. Now, you might argue that this is a very simple example, and that's the point. I just want my computer to do what I want to do quickly so I can get back to doing whatever it was that caused me to need to find this file in the first place: fast, simple, easy, done. Much like find, fd comes with a host of options and flags which you can use to modify and specify your finding operation. I haven't looked into them deeply, and it's possible there are some use cases which find can handle which fd can't. And that's perfectly fine, computer have enough storage these days to hold both of them at once.

You might also say—in fact, I'll say it—if I used find more frequently I'd memorize its idiosyncrasies and not have this problem. And that's true, if I used it a few times per day I'd probably memorize in in a few days at most. But the fact is, I don't—I use find sporadically, perhaps every few weeks or even months, at just long enough intervals that I forget how to use it in between. (Especially if I were actually trying to perform a more complicated operation, such as only searching for files between two and four levels down created more than three weeks ago larger than 5 MB in size, for example. find can do all of that. I definitely don't remember how.)

Now that I've written it, I'm not quite sure whom this slightly long-winded apologia is directed against; die-hard find users who oppose making computer usage “too easy” for other people? (I mean, I know such people exist, but I doubt many of them read this blog.) Anyway, the basic point is that fd uses intelligent defaults to simplify your ability to find files using the command line and keep you from having to memorize specific details which serve to slow you down if you haven't. Let's look at a slightly more complicated example, using sd. Suppose I have a text file, ‘test.txt’, with the phrase “The rine in Spine falls minely on the pline,” and I'd like to correct it to a more Received English pronunciation. With sed, you could do:

sed -i s/ine/ain/g test.txt

This will change the text in the file to “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” (Which seems hydrologically unlikely if there are mountains nearby due to the rain-shadow effect, but I digress.) There are a few things of note in this command: the -i flag causes the substitutions to happen in the file, rather than merely printing the changed output to the terminal. The ‘s’ at the beginning tells sed this is a substitution. The ‘g’ at the end makes the substitution happen everywhere the pattern ‘ine’ is found, instead of just at the first location per line in the file. And the slashes work because there aren't any slashes in the text, but if there were I'd have to get creative with the symbols used to separate the before and after patterns. Contrast this with the equivalent command using sd:

sd ine ain test.txt

No flag to remember to add to make it have an actual effect on disk. No need to tell it yes, you want to change this in all locations rather than just the first one per line. And no arcane symbols separating patterns, making the whole thing much more readable, especially when you start using more complicated regular expressions with symbols in them. Now, sd is even less of a replacement for sed than fd was for find, because sed can actually do a lot more than just simple substitution; but sd acknowledges this on its GitHub page and says that it's just intended to focus on doing one thing, and doing it well (which is the Unix way, at heart!).

Anyway, that's enough to give you a taste of what these utilities can do and how they do it. I definitely suggest you check out the post I found these from and see which ones you might want to use for yourself, as there are quite a few covering a lot of different use cases. I've only actually used a few of them so far, but I've really enjoyed the ones I have, so hopefully you find something here to spice up your command line usage. (If nothing else, fd makes me actually eager to search for files using the command line, instead of reluctant like find does.) Happy computing! A hui hou!

Painting Solar Twins (Quintuplets?)

Back in late February or early March, approximately 217 years ago before the lockdown started, I picked up a pack of five small artist's canvas boards. I didn't have a plan in mind for them at the time, but one of my fellow-students Christian, who's working on another aspect of the same problem for his PhD as I am, was having his first annual review soon, so we decided it would be fun if I painted all the panels to look like solar twin stars so he could put photos of them in his talk (as his research is focused on discovering new solar twins further away than the ones we know of now).

Solar twins, if you don't know, are simply stars that are very similar to our Sun, in temperature, mass, luminosity, etc.. They're the basis of my PhD project, which revolves around using solar twins to be able to get the first constraints on variation in the fine-structure constant from main-sequence stars. (I actually just made some plots representing the culmination of almost three years' of PhD work this past week, so perhaps I'll write some more about that when I have time; my final annual review, the Draft Thesis Review, is coming up on September 23 so I'm going to be insanely busy preparing for that the next few weeks.)

I quickly got the panels painted in time for them to be added to Christian's talk (see the picture below for what they looked like then), but I wasn't completely satisfied with them, and kept going back to play with them some more.

“Solar Quintuplets,” acrylic pentaptych on canvas, 10×10 cm.

I actually quite like the effect of these with the peaks of transparent yellow oxide, a color I really learned a lot about the nuances of while making these. I mixed it quite thinly with some transparent medium, giving it an almost honey-like color and consistency here. However, I felt the stars didn't quite have enough limb-darkening around the edges, so I decided to darken those ever so slightly. This, unfortunately, set me down a long trail of darkening the limbs too much, attempting to lighten the center by thin transparent glazes, overdoing it and lightening everything too much, etc., etc., until I've finally got them to something resembling what I imagined (though honestly, at this point I'm inclined to just accept that not every project works out and be done with them).

Anyway, here they are, taken outside in the full light of day, which almost doesn't work as well as taking them indoors with the flash on. Even the jet-blackness of Black 2.0 is overwhelmed by the Sun's light, making them look a bit washed out. They really do look better in person (and indoors), trust me! I do at least kind of like how the surface texture came out, though again it doesn't really display well here. Pretty much all my cool and fun gel mediums are sitting at my desk at Swinburne, so I had to get creative with the two jars of matte and gloss finish thick viscosity medium I had on hand to get that texture. 

As I said, I'm inclined to accept these as just not really working out and move on. They can't all be winners, and frankly I've had—what is to my mind—an almost surreal level of success in translating ideas from my head to canvas so far, so I'm fine with an occasional dud. I've discovered I don't particularly enjoy painting on these canvas panels, for whatever reason—I vastly prefer a stretched canvas or wooden surface, so I probably won't get these again. A good learning experience, I suppose. With that I'm down to the last piece of stretched canvas I have on had (which does have a picture in progress), so I'm really looking forward to the end of the lockdown (whenever that happens) and the opportunity to pick up some more of my paints and mediums and some more surfaces to paint on. There's a round wooden artist's board that's been sitting around at Swinburne since early this year that I can't wait to get back to working on; I've got a fun mixed-media idea that's been percolating in my head for most of a year now. Soon, hopefully! A hui hou!

Order-of-magnitude Calculation, Or: How Many Numbers Am I Keeping Track Of?

I haven't talked about it much on here, but I'm coming to the end of my original three-year PhD period at the end of September, a week prior to which I've got my final annual review. I'll be applying for a six-month extension to finish writing the two papers which will contain the majority of my original contributions to the sum total of human knowledge, and which will make up the bulk of my thesis. I'm currently in the process of trying to get some results from all the measurements I've spent the past almost-three-years collecting, correcting, collating, and calibrating.

I got to thinking on Friday about just how many numbers I actually have to keep track of. I'm just going to do a quick order-of magnitude estimate here, as it'll get us close enough that it won't really matter. For starters, I have around 11,000 different observations (divvied up between 144 stars, but that's not really relevant here). In each observation, I've attempted to make ~150 measurements of the wavelength of specific absorption features corresponding to particular atomic transitions. Now, these ~150 measurements get several corrections applied to them, and I keep all those corrections and corrected measurements around too so I can go back and check them. This adds up to a total of 9 different arrays.

From those ~150 transition measurements I also construct ~200 pairs of transitions and collect measurements for them (which are the real results of my research), and that comprises (currently) another 3 arrays. There are a few more numbers I keep track of per-observation, but few enough that I'll leave them out for now. Doing the math here:

\[11000\,\text{observations}\times9\times150\times3\times200=8.91\,\textbf{billion}\]

Yes, that's “billion” with a b. I'm actually surprised by this, because when I first tried doing this on Friday I got an answer an order-of-magnitude lower (22.5 million). I've done the math here several times, however, and it all checks out. Huh. That's…a lot of numbers. Well, technically, a lot of those are not numbers; specifically, they're Not-A-Numbers, or NaNs—essentially a computer-understandable way of saying N/A for cases were a measurement does not exist for some reason or another. Perhaps it would be better to call them “data points,” as I still need to keep track of which data points are numbers and which aren't, so it's still important for me to have ways to organize and keep tabs on all of them.

That's all for tonight, I just wanted to get that out of my head and down somewhere. Perhaps in a few months when I'm quite certain I won't be adding more arrays of numbers—I added several just this past week, actually—I'll do a more careful calculation and get an exact number, but for now, a hui hou!

Edit (September 8, 202): Argh, I knew there must be a mistake somewhere! I multiplied when I should've added and didn't parenthesize well; the correct calculation should've been:

\[11000\,\text{observations}\times(9\times150+3\times200)=21.45\,\textbf{million}\]

I'm still planning to revisit this and do a post with a more accurate number a bit later on, so keep an eye out for that one.

Baking Cinnamon Rolls

This weekend I made some cinnamon rolls using a recipe from a friend, and they turned out pretty good. I think this is the first time I've done some proper baking with proper dough and yeast for…three years, perhaps? I took some pictures during the process and thought I'd show 'em off.

Here's the dough after letting it rise for an hour.

It's been so long since I last mixed up a proper dough. It's funny how the smells come back to you, like the way the yeast smells. I also have a ton of yeast left over now since the smallest package of it I could find was a half-kilogram, so I guess I need to do some more baking soon. I had a hankering for runzas just the other day…

Cutting up the rolled-up log of dough with the cinnamon mix inside.

This part reminded me of watching videos during tours of the Jelly Belly factory about how they make those little taffies with the pictures inside, by rolling up logs of ingredients and cutting across them.

Putting the rolls in the pan…

…and a half-hour later, when they'd risen some more and filled up the space.

Finally, baked, frosted, and sampled!

The frosting didn't work out quite so well unfortunately, as the butter wasn't softened all the way through. Which left little lumps of butter which later melted once spread over the piping hot rolls, visible here as the yellowish regions. Thankfully it doesn't seem to have affected the taste, these do indeed taste delectable. I left them in the oven a few minutes too long so they came out a bit more “done” than they should be, but I'd say they're still a solid 6 or 7 out of 10. Not too bad for a first try! I'll have to do these again sometime. A hui hou!

A Doily and a Scarf

Approximately three centuries of subjective time ago, back in October 2018, I mentioned that I had taken up knitting and begun work on a scarf. And a few months ago (I think in May), I finally finished it! Then, because I had some yarn left over, haven't crocheted anything in a while, and was bored, I used the leftover yarn to crochet a doily off the top of my head in a few hours.

And here they both are!

When I picked that scarf pattern I decided I wanted something more advanced that a real beginner's-level pattern, and boy did I get it. Doing that cabling turned out to be really annoying, though it does look cool when I didn't mess up and make either one too many or too few rows between crossing the cable over. A friend of mine at the JCMT used to tell me that knitting was simpler than crochet and I finally get what she meant now, though in a way knitting is actually harder for me. It's true that crochet has a large variety of different stitch types while knitting only has two, but knitting is about keeping track of numbers of stitches much more than crochet generally is (at least, the things I tend to crochet) and it turns out I am pretty rubbish at keeping track of numbers of stitches, so I have a long way to go in knitting. But I do enjoy it. As of this writing, I've just ordered a few skeins of yarn online to give me something else to do as Melbourne goes into Stage 4 lockdown for six weeks. (I've never lived under a curfew before, it's mildly exciting. [For, I'm sure, the next day or two.]) I'm planning on both knitting and crocheting something, though I have yet to pick out patterns for either. We'll see what I end up doing! And maybe it'll take me less than a year to do this time. A hui hou!

Painting the JCMT

While at home these past few months, I've been a bit constrained in my painting by a lack of painting materials (namely, I don't have a very wide array of colors with me—most of my paint is still at my desk in Swinburne, and will be there for at least the next month-and-a-half—and I also didn't have much canvas with me when the first lockdown started). However, I did have a canvas in progress which I started near the end of last year, of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope where I used to work from 2013–2016. Thankfully, it didn't require a wide variety of colors, and I'd already blocked in about half of it back in November (based on the only in-progress picture of it I could find), though I took a few months' break from it after that. I've been working on it slowly off and on over the course of the lockdown(s), and I finally finished it last week.

“James Clerk Maxwell Telescope,” acrylic on canvas, 14×18”.

I based this off a photo taken by a college friend of mine who was a telescope operator at the JCMT for a few years, contemporaneously with me. If you're not familiar with the JCMT, it's a telescope which detects light in the sub-millimeter wavelength range, between infrared and radio waves. The dish itself sits behind the large Gore-Tex membrane in the world, which is the area in the middle of the painting with the contour lines. (The Gore-Tex is essentially invisible at sub-millimeter wavelengths, so it doesn't block the observations.)

(Incidentally, getting the contour lines to look not-wrong may have been the hardest part of the painting, as I painted them on only to realize they looked wrong at least twice. The membrane has a somewhat complicated shape, so I ended up drawing them on with pencil so I could more easily change them, and after several weeks of adjusting them they're at least approximately correct.)

Another neat fact about the JCMT is that the SCUBA-2 sub-millmeter camera (which I worked with primarily, though on the quality assurance side) is the coldest place in the known universe: the detector is kept at a working temperature of just 70 millikelvins above absolute zero. This is because the detector has to be colder than what it's observing to prevent swamping the observation with thermal noise, and sub-millimeter light comes from extremely cold gas and dust, on the order of a few to tens of kelvins.

Anyway, that's one of the things I've been working on lately. I'd like to do another painting of the other telescope I've worked at (the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array) on the last canvas I have with me, but as I only just started that this week it probably won't be done anytime soon (though it's also a much smaller canvas, so we'll see). Maybe I can start a series of “Observatories I Have Worked At.” And maybe in the future, it'll contain more than two paintings! Who knows? A hui hou!

The Lockdown Life

This past Wednesday, Melbourne (and one shire to the north) went back into Stage 3 lockdown for six weeks due to rising case number of COVID-19. This is after we'd gotten all the way down a few days in early June with zero new reported cases, then a few weeks of just single-digit new cases. Then, near the end of June, we started getting double-digit numbers, which stretched into two weeks, then eventually breached triple digits just within the last week or so. In contrast, most of the rest of Australia has been completely or almost completely free of reported new cases, other than New South Wales which is still getting a low number irregularly. Practically overnight Victoria has became a pariah state, with all the other states and territories closing their borders and politely but firmly making it known that Victorians aren't welcome 'round these parts, y’hear?

It's a bit of a disappointment, considering we seemed to have beaten the virus more-or-less and were starting to open back up again. Out of an abundance of caution I didn't go anywhere since the lockdown started to lift in late May except for a single visit to friends, but as June progressed I was starting to think about heading into my desk at Swinburne to pick some things up (especially some more paint and something to paint on, as I have a very limited selection of the former and have nearly run out of the latter).

It's odd that this second lockdown hit me harder than the first one, considering I hadn't even really come out of the first one to begin with; I know friends who were starting to get out and about in the interim where it seemed like we were on top of things. It just feels more unjust somehow—those of us who've been being good for months now are forced back into lockdown through no fault of our own due to the actions of a relatively tiny amount of people who took "lockdown being lifted" for "business as usual" and ignored social distancing guidelines put in place to prevent exactly this happening. Before the lockdown, someone could be excused for not knowing what was happening amidst the confusion and unwittingly spreading the virus before becoming symptomatic; it's a lot harder to justify such behavior afterwards when they should know better.

Then as I was preparing to lead our small group Bible study Thursday night, a verse in 1 Peter I'd been looking at all week jumped out at me:

For is it better, if the will of God, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.
   —1 Peter 3:17

While it's still pretty annoying to have to forego any hope of taking a trip anywhere further than walking distance for another month and a half, I can at least agree with this in principle: I'm glad the lockdown isn't of my doing, and I don't have any lives on my conscience from spreading the virus to potential victims. It's just frustrating when the reward for doing good is the absence of a negative rather than a more tangible positive, but I suppose that's just the world we live in. And that I'd probably feel rather differently if I were in the other position.

In the meantime, it's not like I'm ever going to run out of things to do from my home: I've still got a Ph.D. to finish, papers and a thesis to write, plenty of games that won't play themselves, some art projects I should really get around to finishing and sharing, and I've started copying Brahm's absolutely fantastic “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel,” which is of pleasantly maddening complexity. (I find myself needing to dive into the LilyPond documentation quite frequently to figure out how to represent the various intricacies and special cases of music notation that pop up.) And hey, at least it beats being in the hospital! A hui hou!

Tau Day 2020

Happy Tau Day! What's this? Me remembering two interesting dates in a row? I'm as confused as you are! I guess it helps that both fell on weekends this year so I was less busy.

I've mentioned tau a few times before, but as a reminder, \(\tau=2\pi\). It's the ratio of a circle's circumference to its radius, and makes much more sense as the true circle constant rather than \(\pi\). I was reminded recently how much more sense when my mother asked for some help with some trigonometry problems (she's been teaching herself trig lately) and it was so confusing trying to think about the various unintuitive ½\(\pi\)'s and ¾\(\pi\)'s scattered about. With \(\tau\), a fractional value of \(\tau\) corresponds directly to a fraction of the way around a circle, which is so much simpler to remember. I think \(\tau\) makes more sense than \(\pi\) from a purely mathematical perspective, but the practical benefits to teaching and using trigonometry (and higher math that uses it) would be compelling all on their own—after all, we switched from Roman numerals to Arabic numerals primarily because the latter were easier to use and reason about; why shouldn't we do the same with other values? A hui hou!

Happy [Winter/Summer] Solstice!

Happy [winter/summer] solstice, [southern/northern] hemisphere readers! As an astronomer I always feel like I should comment on these astronomically significant dates, and then I always end up forgetting or being too busy to write anything. This year, at least, it falls on a weekend and since I've been working from home I've been even more aware than usual of the lengthening nights the past few months. It's actually rather relieving to finally reach the solstice, to know that this is as dark as it gets, and the days will begin to lengthen again after today (even if it won't really be noticeable for a few weeks, and the actual coldest part of winter is yet to come).

On an astronomically-related note, I wanted to share a website I found recently, called thetruesize.com. The idea behind it is to allow you to compare countries' sizes on a map that takes into account the distortions present in the projection, specifically the very common Mercator projection. You can input a country (or U.S. state) name to create a transparent copy of it on the map, and drag it around. As it gets closer to or farther from the equator, it'll shrink or grow according to the distortion present at that latitude (none at the equator, and increasing towards the poles). I found it absolutely fascinating, since I'm aware that there is distortion, but don't have a mental idea of its magnitude.

Probably my favorite country to visualize the distortion is Greenland, which looks to be bigger than South America in the Mercator Projection due to its great distance from the equator. But actually drag a copy of it down to South America and you'll see it's much smaller than Brazil, and comparable in size to Argentina. Comparing it to the U.S., the distance from north to south across Greenland is actually only just larger than the distance from the southern tip of Mexico to the Canadian border.

Anyway, it's lots of fun to drag countries around the map and see how they compare (you can have multiple countries active at once and also rotate them, allowing you to play games like fitting as many countries into another continent as possible). Hopefully you too can enjoy appreciating just how big (or small!) the world can actually be. A hui hou!

Satisfying Slug Shadows

Working from home as I have been the past few months, I've got a lot more time to appreciate the paintings I happened to have here with me when lock-down started. Or, to become more dissatisfied with my previous efforts, in some cases. Specifically, my blue glaucus painting, which has already gone through two different revisions. Turns out I still wasn't happy with the shadow I added (though I'm glad I added it), so I went back and reworked it a little more.

Primarily I found the shadow to be a bit too hard and sharp; it didn't seem like a shadow of something floating in shallow water, and being as sharp as it was it distracted the eye from the slug itself, muddying the focus of the composition. I've gained a fair bit of appreciation for the pigment transparent yellow oxide over the past few months (as it's one I have with me, and have been doing some experimenting with), so I decided to use a glaze of it to make the shadow look softer and less distinct. In the process I also ended up spreading some around on the sandy background too, to help the shadow blend in better. While I was checking reference images, I also noticed that on some the silvery coloration extended along the cerata, so I've gone over those with a thin silver glaze as well. Anyway, here's how all that turned out:

“Carefree Blue Dragon”, 18"×14", acrylic on canvas.

I think this shadow works a lot better now, being still visible but less distinct and not overpowering the main subject quite so much. At this point I think I'm finally satisfied with it, but then I've thought that three times before, haven't I? As the saying goes, “art is never finished, merely abandoned,” so we'll see if this truly is the final revision! A hui hou!

Orchestrating Handel's “The Harmonious Blacksmith”

Today I'm pleased to finally be able to share a new project I've been working on for a few months now. Back in February I mentioned I started learning LilyPond in order to engrave sheet music, and after finishing copying Ecossaise in E♭ Major by Beethoven as a warm-up exercise I was looking around for something new to practice with. I settled on Handel's piece known as The Harmonious Blacksmith, the name given to the fourth movement from his Suite No. 5 in E major for harpsichord. I discovered this fantastic piece last year, and in the process of writing the LilyPond code for it I listened to a whole bunch of different versions of it, including two versions of it orchestrated for a full orchestra. After copying a version for harpsichord(/piano), this inspired me to undertake something a bit more ambitious: making my own orchestrated version!

I settled on a sixteen-instrument ensemble, where two coincidences neatly dovetailed: MIDI handles channels in groups of 16, and the staves for those instruments also pretty nicely filled exactly one page vertically. It's scored, somewhat arbitrarily, for first and second violins, viola, cello, bass, harp, flute, oboe, English horn, bassoon, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, French horn, and xylophone. I started sometime in mid-March or so, and worked on it off and on for the next month and a half. In early May I gave a short talk at our astronomy department's weekly Monday lunch (which often features people talking about hobbies or interests) and gave the first public premiere of the (mostly) finished work by playing the synthesized MIDI audio. Since then I've tweaked a few little things (such as changing instrument parts to the correct keys for transposing instruments), and this weekend I finally worked out an easy way to render MIDI to audio. (Turns out there's a convenient Python package, midi2audio, which makes it a snap.)

Anyway, here's a video I made so I could display the sheet music along with the audio:

This was, obviously, my first such attempt at orchestration and I have to say, I really enjoyed it. I'm sure if I actually knew music theory I'd be able to weave even more beautiful passages, but even so I stumbled upon quite a few bits that still give me goosebumps, or which just sound lovely: the gentle introduction of the harp in the first variation, the punctuating xylophone taps on pages 8–10 (but especially on page 9) like little blacksmith's hammers, the interplay between trumpet and oboe (page 11), the pastoral, sublime repetition of the second variation (page 14) right after the bombastic introduction a page before, the staccato viola (page 17) interspersing with the flute*, the introduction of the third variation with its gentle, lilting interplay between the woodwinds and harp, the xylophone intermittently shadowing the oboe (page 23), the growing crescendo involving nearly all the instruments which ends that variation (page 24), those  two insistent growling low notes from the bassoon in the fourth variation (page 27), the trumpet making a surprise appearance in the fifth variation (page 34), the four-part instrument unison between the violins, viola, and trumpet on page 38 (never fails to bring out the goosebumps), and the entirety of the last two pages as everything slows, and builds, and crescendos before the final cascading descent to the finish. I've listened to this piece I don't know how many dozens of times at this point (both my version and others), and I have yet to tire of it.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. I hope you enjoy the music, and feel free to point out any musical mistakes I might have made—I did have an experienced violinist friend look it over so I'm fairly confident the strings don't have any unplayable notes (he found those already), but I might still have made mistakes with the other instruments. A hui hou!

*The staccato markings were one of the few liberties I took with the original notes along with adding a few trills in places, though there are a number of trills in the second variation in the original. The dynamics markings and tempi are also mine.

If Beethoven Wrote Variations on Children's Tunes

A few days ago I came across this incredible impression of the familiar tune “Old MacDonald Had A Farm” played à la Beethoven by Polish-Canadian pianist Daniel Vnukowski, and it's so good I simply must share it. I've listened to enough Beethoven over the years—he's one of my favorite composers—to tell that this is absolutely spot-on:

Variations, or variational forms, were a great favorite of Beethoven's judging by the number of them he wrote, though he didn't publish many of them suggesting it was something he did for fun. The Diabelli Variations are probably his most famous among the ones he did publish, though I especially love the Eroica [Heroic] Variations, both the version for single piano and how they reappear in the final movement of his third symphony, the ‘Eroica.’ Anyway, apologies if this song gets stuck in your head as it has mine, but there are certainly worse pieces of music to have that happen with. A hui hou!

Flowery Australian Flora

This past Sunday, due to loosening lock-down restrictions, I went over to some friends' to catch our church livestream and have lunch. As I was leaving my house, the surprisingly nice weather caught my eye and caused me to take a few photos of some of the plants in the front yard with rain from the night before still sparkling on them. The Sun was unexpectedly out—it's been rainy or overcast the past few days—and it lit up the raindrops in a really lovely manner.

I haven't been taking too many photos the past few months, so I felt like playing around a bit and experimenting with angles. Here's a bottle-brush still be-speckled with raindrops, with the blue sky in the background. A lot of stuff is blooming out-of-season this year, which is strange: apparently, in the first four months of the year, we've had more rain in Melbourne than in the entirety of 2019, and were even on track for having the wettest such time period ever. And we missed breaking the lowest recorded temperature on May 1st by a single degree (Celsius)! So it's not like it's been unseasonably warm or anything, plants are just blooming at strange times.

I don't know what kind of plant this is, I'm afraid, other than that it's different from the previous one. I was really feeling like pushing the limits of how close I could get a photo, and with the Sun shining brightly on the water droplets this came out pretty nicely I think.

And here's the culmination of my attempts to get up-close-and-personal with the plants. This is, yet again, a different plant from the first two, and I similarly don't know what it's called. (Edit: Whoops! I checked my front yard this morning and realized this is actually part of the same bottle-brush plant from the first photo.) I love the back-lighting of the fine hairs on the leaves, though!

I'm sure for my northern hemisphere readers this flowery foliage is nothing special as you head into summer, but I thought it looked nice, so have a helping of Australian flora! A hui hou!

A Magnetic Birthday

Today the Earth marks another revolution about the Sun and I turn a year older. Or is the act of turning older less of a discrete moment and instead spread throughout the year? Is a birthday merely the observation of—and subsequent collapsing of—the waveform?

Sorry, that got a bit philosophical. As I expect many of you, dear Readers, are, I've been working from home for about two months now. Since I'm spending a much larger fraction of my time at home, I've been ordering a few things online to make it a more pleasant experience, such as the office chair I got from Ikea to replace the borrowed kitchen chair I'd been sitting on.

This week I had two different packages come in on the same day in a sort of early-birthday-present surprise, and I wanted to share a bit about the contents of one of them, from a Kickstarter campaign I backed late last year by a company called Chargeasap. (If you're curious, the other was a pair of arm warmers to keep me warm as we go into winter in the southern hemisphere.)

For a bit of context (bear with me), I've had a heightened interest in magnets for about half a year now, ever since I bought a pair of wireless headphones back in August or so. In those headphones the battery resides in one earpiece beneath a molded plastic cover held on by a pair of magnets. For whatever reason, I found this to be a particularly elegant solution, and started noticing magnets used in various other places.

I first came across a company called Zubits which makes these nifty magnetic clasps which you can thread your shoelaces in such that you can replace tying your shoes with snapping a pair of powerful magnets together. This inspired me to make a piece of artwork involving magnets back in November, which I still think is a fantastic idea and which I'm eager to use in future projects somehow. I also picked up Xvida's wireless charger with automatic magnetic alignment, which I wrote about recently. For Christmas my brothers got me a Tie Mags magnetic tie clip, to hold your tie in place magnetically without needing to pierce it with a tie tack or something similar. And the list goes on, you get the idea. Magnets are a great way to hold things in place as firmly or weakly as you need without fading over time.

Anyway, the point of this long digression was that I came across a Kickstarter campaign back in September for what I thought was a really good idea: a set of cables, with a USB Type-C plug on one end, and a universal magnetic connector on the other which could connect to tips with either Apple's Lightning connector, Micro USB, or USB-Type C. These tips could then simply be left embedded in the thing to be connected, such as a phone or laptop. To make a long story short, I backed the project, and despite some slight delays from the unforeseen pandemic currently ravaging the world I got the cables I'd pledged for this week.

I was impressed with the standard of the packaging. Very professional-looking.

Chargeasap isn't the first company to come up with the idea of these universal, interchangeable, cables, and this also isn't their first iteration on the concept; I think it's their third or fourth. These Infinity cables incorporate a number of improvements from their previous designs, such as the brightness of the LED in the cable end letting you know it has power being lower so that it isn't as distracting if used to charge your phone overnight. The cables themselves are very nice-looking, being braided nylon in construction with durable plastic caps at both ends and the thoughtful inclusion of a little rubber strap to help hold them in place when coiled up. They feel very high quality, and seem durable enough to hold up to lots of abuse.

The (unfortunately a little blurry) photo above shows the end of a cable, with one each of the USB Type-C and Micro USB tips magnetically stuck to its sides. You can see the 10-pin design which allows the cables to transfer data as USB 2.0 speeds. Which I think I forgot to mention, these aren't just for charging, they'll fully be able to transfer data as well. In fact I used one while writing this post to get these photos off my phone, and they work very well.

They're also quite capable on the power front, however, with Chargeasap promising Power Delivery (PD) standard charging of up to 100 watts, enough to power and charge a laptop as I was testing above. In fact, one of the inspirations for these cables was Apple's old MagSafe connection for its Macbooks, which allowed the charging cable to come unattached instantly if snagged on something, without bringing the laptop down with it. (Chargeasap makes a special longer cable, two meters long, which is pretty much made for being used as a laptop power cord.)

Anyway, that's probably enough of me rambling on about cool new tech gadgets. I've had a few Kickstarter campaigns where I received the finished product and while it technically worked as advertised it just wasn't quite as cool or interesting as it'd seemed, but with these Infinity cables I'm still just as excited about the opportunities I can think of for using them. Unfortunately some of the things I'd like to connect are still at my desk at Swinburne, but I'm sure I can come up with something. I especially like being able to connect my phone to my computer with a single snap!—it should get me to actually transfer photos off it a bit more often as it won't be quite as much of a hassle anymore.

Stay safe everyone, and if you do decide to check out Chargeasap's lineup just be aware that they're based in Sydney so orders from overseas will be a bit slower to go out most likely. A hui hou!