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!