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!