...Farmer!

Yesterday I discussed passing my thesis defense, and becoming in some sense a "real" (astro)physicist, thus fulfilling the first part of this blog's domain name. Today, let's talk about that "farmer" part.

For those who might not know me as well, the Berkes have been farmers in Nebraska for multiple generations, stretching back over 150 years to the mid-1850s. My dad got a PhD in crop breeding rather than more traditional farming, but was always growing things as I was growing up (especially after we moved to five acres in California when I was eleven, where we had several vegetable gardens and orchards of as many types of fruit trees as he could get to grow in the climate). I, on the other hand, have never had a green thumb (I once managed to kill a resurrection plant), and found myself drawn rather to the starry heavens than the organic. I picked up a lot of knowledge related to growing plants a long the way, but other than a few abortive attempts over the span of my life was never really interested in doing so.

At least, not until fairly recently. I'm not sure when it started happening, nor can I point to a specific day, but over the course of the past two years (and centuries months of lockdown) I found myself wanting to grow my own food. Maybe it was always latent, maybe it was triggered by a desire to see things green and growing again after so long cooped up inside (especially through two Australian winters), maybe it was playing Stardew Valley starting in 2018 with its idyllic view of farming and sharing your bounty with others, but whatever it was, by the time I moved back to Hawaii I found myself with a burning desire to see what food I could grow for myself.

Then, a bit of a reality check: for one thing, I'm in an apartment with no area to grow a garden outside, and for another, Hawaii has endemic parasites that cause angiostrongyliasis, commonly known as rat lung-worm disease. Put simply, parasitic worms founds in land mollusks like slugs and snails in the islands can cause some serious damage to the human central nervous system, so if you're ever eating fresh produce in Hawaii make sure you wash it really well. Unable (and somewhat unwilling) to start an outdoors garden, I had to think outside the box, or rather, inside the house; and that's how I became a hydroponic gardener.

Hydroponics is the art/science of growing plants without soil, with nutrients delivered to the roots by dissolving them in water. Some years ago (before I started my PhD) we took a family trip to DisneyWorld in Florida, where we went on a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the gardens that grew the food served at the park, including a large hydroponics section. That's the first large-scale exposure to the concept I can remember, and it obviously stuck with me for me to remember it now. Anyway, as soon as I knew I'd be moving into my current place I started doing some research and soon after moving in I put in an order for a Farmstand from Lettuce Grow, one of several companies making consumer-ready hydroponics systems.

Just under three weeks ago, on December 2nd, the seedlings I'd ordered arrived (the parts to assemble the stand having arrived a few days earlier), and with expectant anticipation I arrayed them in the little recesses provided for them and set up the water pump and LED grow lights (which work on a schedule). Here's a photo I took of the first seedlings all ensconced in their places (with labels so I could remember what was what):

Farmstand, assembled!

For this first trial I picked a selection of different types of lettuce, some herbs, celery, and a cherry tomato plant. My motivation was that I'd like to be able to grow my own salads and avoid having to buy them as often. Once cool part about the Farmstand is that it's expandable; I've got the minimum of two layers, but it can go up to six, and I can already see myself growing a larger selection of vegetables in the future.

Anyway, I was a bit worried for the tender seedlings the first few days as they all looked a bit under the weather from their short trip here by FedEx, but they all not only survived, but thrived. Within a few days I could tell that the fastest-growing among them were visibly bigger, and by the end of the week even the slowest were showing growth. At the two-week mark I was able to pick my first few leaves of lettuce to put in my sandwiches for lunch or add to the store-bought salad I was having. Over the weekend I had my first salad entirely from my own lettuce mixture. And today, one day short of three weeks...well, see for yourself:

The grow lights make it hard to get natural-looking photos after dark.

Every morning now I come down from my bedroom upstairs eager to see how my plants are doing and have been growing over night. The lettuces are prolific, and are starting to look like leafy explosions in slow motion. The herbs are a bit slower, but still busy putting out leaves. Just this past week I discovered that the crafty tomato plant (on the far side in these photos), though not showing much too much outward growth, had sent one long thin root all the way down into the central reservoir, so hopefully it'll start picking up the pace. It's an amazing feeling to be able to just walk over and pick a few leaves from various plants for salads or sandwiches, and I think it's safe to say that I've found a new long-term hobby.

And that's the "farmer" part fulfilled now that I've eaten my own produce, at least on a small scale. (Though I have...plans. Indeed I do.) It's amusing to me that it ended up happening so close to the "physicist" part, but this blog's domain name is now finally topical! And it only took almost a dozen years! I'm sure I'll have much more to say on the topic of indoor gardening in the future, but this post is probably long enough for now. There'll be plenty of time to talk more about my new hobby. A hui hou!

Edit (12/29/21): One thing I forgot to mention, for anyone who might be tempted to get their own Farmstand, is that you can use my personal referral code FRIEND-YKPW to get $50 off the price of a Farmstand. (It also gives me $50 in credit.) That said, Lettuce Grow is hardly the only company making consumer-ready hydroponic growing systems, so look around to see what's available if you're thinking of making the leap to indoor gardening.

Physicist...

When I first started this blog, almost twelve years ago now, I needed to pick a domain name to use, and after some thought I settled on "physicistfarmer". It wasn't, perhaps, the deepest of thought, but it expressed something of a dual nature: on the one hand, an aspiration to be a physicist, one who studies the deepest fundamental workings of nature, to answer that insatiable thirst to know why things work. And on the other, a recognition of the past and what felt like the present, the generations of farmers in Nebraska in my family and the feeling that, for all my newfangled learning, perhaps I was a bit out of my depth in college. (And also "physicistfarmer" made for a nice alliteration, though I have deeply regretted it many a time since when trying to point people towards this blog!)

Today the first part of that aspiration is finally fulfilled, as I passed my thesis defense this morning and feel I can finally call myself an (astro)physicist. Tonight it feels like I can finally let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding for a long, long time, perhaps ever since I started getting a PhD. The process isn't completely finished yet, as I still need to make some minor revisions to my thesis and turn it in again, but those are formalities; traditionally, you're allowed to start using the title of "Doctor" from when the review panel gives you a passing grade.

I'm still struggling to process it all, in some ways. It was certainly an interesting, four-country Zoom call! Besides me and the coordinator from Swinburne, on my panel I had Dainis Dravins in Sweden, a well-respected stellar observationalist some of whose papers (going back to 1982!) I've cited and were instrumental in understanding some of the systematic errors we encountered in stellar atmospheres, and Susana Landau in Argentina, a theorist in the field of varying constants whom I wasn't as immediately familiar with but still recognized by name. They had some questions and some interesting suggestions related to my thesis and while I certainly found the entire affair rather stressful it went off without a hitch. I've spent the rest of the day coming down from the adrenaline high, and am still a bit exhausted, so I'll keep this post short.

Oh, and what about the second second half of that domain name, you ask? Well...keep an eye out for tomorrow's post to hear about some recent developments in the "farmer" area! A hui hou!

So apparently I'm a morning person now...

 ...and I'm not entirely happy about it.

For some context, I actually was a morning person in my teens (shocking, I know), and even up through college, where a combination of job shifts occasionally starting at 6 AM and having at least one class at 8 or 9 AM almost every semester enforced a certain "early to bed, early to rise" ethos. Over time, after college, this gradually shifted to being more of an evening person; this was in turn partly due to jobs (like working at the Visitor Information Station or as a telescope operator) that required staying up late, but even while working a desk job for the JCMT I found that my most productive time of day was typically in late afternoon to evening, and I would usually find myself getting to bed later in the evening.

Starting grad school, with the attendant need to conform my schedule to that of the morning train into Swinburne, represented a good opportunity to readjust my schedule slightly earlier in the day, though not terrifically early; I'd usually get into Swinburne about 9:30 in the morning. However, all that gradually eroded with the pandemic and the endless centuries months of working from home. With no need (or ability) to catch the train, it was only morning meetings or events that necessitated my wakefulness, and thankfully Swinburne was pretty good about not scheduling such things earlier than 10 AM. Over the course of several months, my natural sleep cycle settled on going to bed between midnight and 1 AM, and waking up between about 8 and 9 AM. (Setting your own work hours is the [very] double-edged sword of grad student life.)

Upon getting the job offer with Gemini, I contemplated using the move to reset my schedule forward a bit again. This was partly because, due to the time difference between Hawaii (Gemini North) and Chile (Gemini South), events scheduled for both locations have to happen in the morning in Hawaii (which is afternoon in Chile). The flight from Melbourne to California was enough of a time difference that after three or four days of heavy jetlag I completely readjusted to Pacific time during the week I spent with my family. Then, upon moving to Hawaii, the jetlag from traveling west manifested as being (to me) a very early morning person, waking up at 5 or 6 AM and getting tired by 9 PM.

I was far too busy taking care of things upon my arrival to pay too much attention to my sleep schedule, and it was only some time later that it slowly dawned (no pun intended) on me that I was still waking up with the Sun and getting tired at what felt like a very early time of night. I think I've well and truly switched my chronotype to morning person at this point, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. As a former evening person, it feels like I'm now permanently jetlagged. I start getting tired after 9 PM, when before I would sometimes start creative projects (sometimes pretty hefty ones) at that time of evening due to being awake and alert and creative. Even if I'm up later than usual some night or don't have an alarm set the next day I can't really sleep in, forcing me to get to bed far too early from my point of view.

That said, I'm not entirely unhappy with it, nor am I in a huge hurry to change it. (Partly because it's not obvious to me how I would even go about doing so, since I don't understand the change in the first place.) It's useful for waking up for early morning meetings at Gemini, and I don't actually mind being awake soon after sunrise; I do enjoy the early morning feel, especially with how it's not ridiculously cold at that time of day here in Hawaii. From lockdown I got used to making breakfast at home rather than getting it somewhere on my way to the office, and this lets me enjoy a relatively leisurely breakfast before work. We'll see how it goes; perhaps old habits will reassert themselves over time and I'll shift back towards a later chronotype again, but for now I'll enjoy the post-dawn feel in the air when I wake up. A hui hou!

Back to nā mauna!

It had to wait a few weeks since arriving back on the island for me to sort out various things, but I've finally been back to visit Mauna Loa and Maunakea! The first weekend after I got my car I went for a drive up to 11,000 feet on Mauna Loa where I used to operate the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array. I didn't stick around at elevation very long (since just by driving to the Saddle I was already higher than the entirety of the continent of Australia), but now that I have an all-wheel drive SUV I felt (a bit more) comfortable about exploring some of the side roads off the main, paved access road. One of them—which I'm pretty sure goes to the NASA experiment where they put people in a simulated Mars camp for months at a time—was closed off, but I got a pretty neat photo of my car with Maunakea in the background.

I thought the colors worked really well in this shot. You can just see Maui in the background.

Then, this past weekend I took my new AWD capability for a spin up to the summit of Maunakea. Now, I've been up there probably a few dozen times as part of my volunteering and later working at the Visitor Information Station, but I honestly can't remember if I ever drove up there or not (as part of the guided summit tours, that is; I certainly never took my two-wheel drive car up there). If nothing else, this was certainly the first time I drove up there in my own personal vehicle with no demands on my time, and I found myself loving it. I felt a strange joy welling up upon arriving at the top and driving around the familiar telescopes that left me positively giddy, though that might've been the altitude, it's hard to say.

It was a beautiful day while we were up there.

I took along some fellow new coworkers from Gemini who moved here about a month after I arrived and haven't yet experienced the sights. It turns out we got up there just in time, as a mere two days later the summit was covered in snow and ice, and we've had a blizzard warning for the past few days (apparently Hawaii has now received more snow this season than Denver). We spent a few hours up there hiking to the physical summit and staying to watch the sunset, then leaving immediately afterwards because the wind came up an hour or so earlier and it got cold.

I always love seeing the shadow of the mauna projected on the sky like this at dusk.

I'm really glad I was able to get back to my two favorite volcanoes, even if just for relatively brief periods of time. Expect to see more photos in the future as I continue to settle in and reacquaint myself with some of the places I enjoyed visiting before. (There are a number of fellow Gemini employees new to the island, so I've got excuses for organizing day trips and hikes!) Now that I've got a GoPro, one of the creative projects I've wanted to do for literal years—making timelapse videos of some of these amazing hikes and experiences—is finally within my grasp, or at least it will be whenever my desktop computer finally gets here for doing the editing. In the meantime, you get these photos, and I get to enjoy the experiences anew. A hui hou!

Thanksgiving 2021: a year in review

Well, here we are, Thanksgiving 2021. Four hundred years since some of my ancestors participated in the first one, and like them I both crossed an ocean earlier this year to start a new phase in life and have much to be thankful for.

Where to begin? Less than two months ago I submitted my thesis for examination, and just today I got back my thesis examiners' reports. They were both good, with just a few minor revisions suggested (a very common outcome), so as I move towards my thesis defense in a little less than a month I can be quite confident of passing. (Intellectually confident, at least, I'm sure it'll do nothing to calm my nerves on the day.)

Moving back to Hilo and getting set up as a functioning adult again has been a major stressor these past few months, but now that I'm a little more than a week settled in my new place the worst of the stress is finally over. I've got my own car and place to live again for the first time in four years, and I'm enjoying the hospitable Hilo climate. I'm still waiting for the stuff I shipped from Australia to arrive, but while I'd like to have it here (now that I have a place to put it) I can afford to be patient a little longer. And in the absence of most of my hobby-related stuff, I've managed to take up yet another hobby or two, so expect to hear more about that before long.

Of course, this move wouldn't have been possible without the job with Gemini Observatory I currently have. I always wanted to move back to Hilo, but actually doing so was entirely dependent on finding a job here. That one showed up at the right time just as I was finishing my Ph.D., and that I got it is little short of breath-taking. (Especially since it was the only job I applied for; I know other students at Swinburne who applied for dozens of jobs before getting one.)

And finally, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage (though hopefully begins to wind down), I've got my doses of a high efficacious cutting-edge vaccine. I'm also living in an area with very low spread at the moment (daily cases are roughly in the teens for Hilo right now), and am fortunate enough to have little to fear for myself. Last year at this time...all right, I don't remember exactly when the first vaccines began to be approved, but there certainly weren't any available for the likes of me! It took a bit longer to get my shots in Australia than it would've in the US, but I got 'em in the end, and I'm incredibly thankful to have so far survived the worst pandemic in a century without loss of anyone close to me or serious damage to my health.

So all in all, I've no cause for discontent this year, and look forward with anticipation to the new year to come. Who knows what it'll hold? Happy Thanksgiving! A hui hou!

A new place to live!

Following the acquisition of a new set of wheels in the last post, this time I'm ecstatic to report that I've finally got a new place to live! It's maybe 10 minutes' walk from where I lived before in Hilo, and has the same convenience for getting to work. It's an interesting new situation for me, moving into a new place without furniture (or much of anything really) and starting from a blank slate, and I'm savoring the opportunity to start fresh and customize my living space how I want. (As for the stuff I shipped from Melbourne, the latest update I got had an ETA of November 30 for the ship to arrive at Los Angeles...so given the situation there, who knows when it'll make its way back across the Pacific to me?)

If you've noticed a general lack of posts the past two months, it's not because I don't have things to write about (I've got a few post ideas in my head) or even the time to write about them. It's more that it's been an extremely stresseful period of time, and it's been really hard to concentrate with so much uncertainty hanging in the air like a noxious fog. However, as I fell asleep last night for the first time in my new place (in my brand-new bed), I could feel the stress beginning to lift now that I have my own private retreat from the world once again. Maybe don't expect a flood of new posts (I'm still working full time—and thank goodness), but with the gradual easing of care I hope to have some more time for writing before too much longer. A hui hou!

A new car!

It's been exactly 4 years and 2.5 months since I last had a working car, but since Tuesday I finally have my own wheels again!

I got a used 2018 Nissan Rogue (<50k miles), in the gorgeous "Monarch Orange" you see above.

It's actually been a bit of a shock driving again after four years of not driving in Australia (except for a single time in early 2018). My previous car was a 2013 Honda Civic, and while only five years elapsed between the production of that and my current car—well, SUV—it feels somewhat like I've just emerged from the Stone Age only to take the controls of the Space Shuttle.

This vehicle is chock-full of what feel to me like extremely futuristic features. It's got a touch screen, for one thing. It's got cameras around it giving a 360-degree panoramic view. It's got a push-to-start system—not even a physical key hole for ignition. It's got remote start, and an "Intelligent Key" system that makes locking and unlocking it without taking the keys out of your pocket a snap, a rear-window wiper, a huge powered moonroof, a powered, remote-triggerable back hatch, and a host of other little conveniences and exciting features. My previous car had a digital speedometer, and that felt like a serious innovation at the time (to the point where every person I gave a ride to commented on it), but compared to this SUV it retroactively feels like driving a horse-and-buggy.

A shot of the cameras when reversing, showing the stitched-together panoramic view.

Now I know cars have been slowly getting new features throughout my life, but never have I had so many new (to me) features all at once in a car that I own. The first time I saw a push-to-start ignition system was just back in September while I was spending a week with my family on my to Hilo, in my brother's car. I've seen cars with rear-view cameras before, but never the panoramic 360-degree view that this one has. Cars with key fobs that can lock and unlock them are familiar at this point, but this SUV can detect if the key is close to the door or back hatch, and if so, you can press a button on the handle to automatically lock or unlock the door as appropriate without even touching the key. I've seen cars with in-built navigation screens before, but never owned one, and the list goes on (though I don't think I've personally seen a car with remote start before).

I could keep gushing about all the many features that I'm still discovering a few days later (the heated seats and steering wheel might be nice when I get up at altitude), but for the sake of brevity I'll spare you. Needless to say I'm quite blessed to have been able to find such an impressive vehicle in this period of car shortages. I was really glad to get one with AWD drive, which'll allow me to get some places I wouldn't want to take my 2WD Civic—I can finally drive to the summit of Maunakea, for example, and I've got some other places in mind that I might see about exploring. And I'm certainly pleased with the color; I quite like orange (as evidenced by this blog), so when I found a car matching what I was looking for in such a beautifully striking shade I could hardly believe my good fortune. (Funnily enough, yesterday I saw a vehicle that could've been the identical twin of mine—same model, same color!) Anyway, I'll spare you further gushing from me for now. A hui hou!

An October update for 2021

I've been pretty busy since starting my new job on the 10th between the job itself and my continued efforts to procure a car and place to live, so this'll just be a quick note to say, "Yes, I'm still alive!" The good news is that I'm enjoying my job so far. This week I found my first (very minor) bug in DRAGONS and submitted a fix, so I feel like a real programmer now. It's also quite relaxed and non-stressful, which is great, because the bad news is that I'm still busy getting a car and a place to stay. 'Tis a long tale so I won't go into it now, but it's also kept me pretty stressed out, which isn't conducive to writing interesting blog posts. For various reasons I'm hopeful that this week might see some progress on one or both fronts, so hopefully I'll have some more good news to report soon. Anyway, that's it for now. A hui hou!

Pandemic! Earthquakes! Thesis submission!

It's been a long time coming—four years and one very long week, to be exact—but today I finally, finally submitted my thesis. It's an odd feeling, now, having...free time again. I've been living with the sword of Damocles over my head for so long at this point that I've forgotten what it's like to not have something I should be doing at the back of my mind every waking moment. It's a pleasant feeling.

To be fair, two years—almost a full half of my thesis—was spent in a (hopefully) once-in-a-century pandemic. It's hard to tell if that contributed to the delay (remember, this was originally supposed to be a 3 or 3.5 year program), but it certainly didn't make that extra time very fun. I'm incredibly thankful I've been able to move back to Hilo, because I'm honestly not sure I could face moving somewhere new with all the additional stresses of moving during the pandemic. (Like needing to get a negative COVID-19 test both to fly back to California, and to fly to Hawaii, and the extra hassle and stress that came with that.)

This last week in particular has been pretty brutal. Most of that is the stressful-but-ultimately-mundane work of endlessly writing, editing, re-writing, addressing comments, writing, surprise updating thesis \(\LaTeX\) template, and, you guessed it, more writing that I'm guessing accompanies the race to the finish for every graduate student. Part of it was realizing on Thursday that I needed to update the official title of my thesis on record with Swinburne (untouched since I scribbled something down in my admission paperwork four years ago, before I'd even settled on a project). Another part was realizing on Friday (Saturday in Australia) that I didn't have access to a critical Turnitin module on Swinburne's online student management system, which provides a report that must be included at submission time. Yes, this module is critical for students to actually submit their theses. No, I don't know why it isn't enabled for default for all graduate students (I wasn't the only student it'd happened to, I learned). It worked out, at least, in the end. However, I also had a few slightly less...usual things to contend with this week. (To set the stage, I should briefly mention that Gemini has very graciously set me up with a rental car and a temporary apartment for the first month I'm here, while I'm finding more permanent forms of both for myself.)

1. Sunday I went back to back to the church I attended before leaving Hilo (where I had a very warm welcome back), then afterwards went grocery shopping. When I came out, my rental car wouldn't start due to a dead battery. I was able to call roadside assistance, and they got someone over to give me a jump after about an hour and a half. I once drained the battery on the car I had when I lived here before, so like that time I went for a long drive to charge the battery up figuring that would be the end of the matter. (It wasn't.)
2. Tuesday I felt a little earthquake as I was sitting in my sixth-floor apartment, just strong enough that I wasn't entirely sure it'd even been an earthquake. (It was magnitude-4.6, officially.)  I only remember feeling two earthquakes in the eight years I lived in Hilo before (and none in Melbourne, though I actually missed out on a magnitude-5.9 earthquake that rattled Victoria less than a week after I left) so this was an interesting event. (And, like the car problem, I thought that was the last of it...)
3. Friday I went for a quick pre-breakfast shopping trip to Target, and my car battery died again in the parking lot. This time—I kid you not—it took over six hours before I was able to get someone to come by for the 30-second job of getting a jump start. Thankfully in the meantime I'd talked to my contact at Gemini and they'd talked to the rental car company, so as soon as I had a working car again I high-tailed it up the road to the airport and got it exchanged for one without a dud battery. This wasn't a particularly pleasant experience on its own, but I also had the added "fun" of losing six hours of prime working time two days before my thesis was due for submission. (At least the new car—SUV, actually—is nice, and working so far.)
4. Finally, today, Sunday again, we had another earthquake, meaning I've now felt as many in the last fortnight since arriving in Hilo as I did in eight years previously. This one was a lot bigger, at magnitude-6.2, though at least the epicenter was off the southern coast of the island and about a  hundred miles away. That didn't stop my sixth-floor apartment from swaying alarmingly for a few seconds, though! I haven't heard any reports of damage or injuries, thankfully, but I'm definitely looking forward to having an abode back on the ground again; I don't mind earthquakes half as much when I'm not vividly thinking about how just how high up in the air I am.

However, at the end, after a gruelling week of writing to the point where I could barely put two concepts together in a coherent fashion anymore, my thesis is submitted. I'm free. Well, until tomorrow morning, when I start my new job with Gemini, but hopefully that'll be a bit less demanding. The beauty of a normal job is that when you're off the clock, you're actually off the clock. And with that, I should wrap this post up. Perhaps I'll have some more happy things to blog about before too long! A hui hou!

In Hilo!

 It's been four long years, and a circuitous route to get here, but I'm finally back in Hilo!

I arrived yesterday, on Tuesday, after a bit more excitement than I prefer in my traveling when I missed my original flight on Monday. (It was a combination of unexpected slowdowns in Bay Area traffic and the fast pre-flight COVID-19 check needed to avoid quarantine in Hawaii taking longer than advertised online; either alone would probably still have been surmountable, but together they torpedoed my chance of making my flight. Thankfully I was able to reschedule for almost the exact same flights the next day.) Yesterday was overcast with intermittent showers, but this morning dawned bright and clear as you can see in the photo above (at least over the island, it was pretty cloudy off to the east). I'm temporarily in the Hilo Hawaiian Hotel, right next to Moku Ola or Coconut Island, so I popped down to take a look before breakfast and was greeted by the ever-breathtaking sight above of Mauna Loa, Maunakea, and Hilo nested between them all around the bay.

I've got plenty to do now that I'm finally here before I start my new job with Gemini in a week and a half (finding a car and a place to live, finishing and submitting my thesis, etc.), but it feels...relaxed. Non-stressful. I even saw that just today Kīlauea's started erupting again in Halemaʻumaʻu crater, so who knows, there might be some interesting volcanic activity to investigate soon! For now, however, I'm feeling the effects of jetlag, so I'll keep this short. A hui hou! I mua!

In transit

As foretold in my previous post, I'm currently cooling my heels in a hotel next to Sydney airport, from whence I'll depart tomorrow on the second leg of my journey back to the US. Thankfully, everything's been going smoothly so far, which is saying something in a global pandemic. I got my second COVID-19 shot on Thursday, then a travel test so I can get on an airplane to enter the US. Friday was a helter-skelter race to get everything I'm bringing with me packed so that I could hand everything else off to the movers (who were really efficient, by the way, taking just about an hour and a quarter to get everything packed up and loaded). Then I spent the night with friends, got a ride to the airport bright and early, and flew out of Melbourne at 6:30am. (I've seen some less-than-busy airports in my time, but Melbourne airport at 5:30am during a global pandemic takes the cake.)

Here's the view from the hotel Gemini put me up in, looking out over the Sydney airport.

I could think of several things to say here, reflecting on my just-shy-of-four-years in Australia, but I'm rather tired from sleeping poorly the past two nights, so I'll leave this post short. Hopefully I'll have time and energy to get something more substantial up in the next week or so. A hui hou!

An idealized Australian afternoon

As of today, it's one week until I fly out of Melbourne. Seven days from now at this time, assuming everything goes swimmingly, I'll be in Sydney, followed—at some point afterward which times zones and the International Date Line make more confusing to calculate than I feel like doing at the moment—by being back in California to visit my family for a week, before flying on to Hilo. This next week is going to be a whirlwind of activity as I get everything ready to move.

For today, however, I wanted to share a painting—well, two paintings—which I'll be mailing to my grandparents this week as a souvenir. I've been informally calling this the “Grandparental Diptych,” but let's go with “Australian Afternoon” as a formal title. I'm almost certainly not going to have time to paint this week, so these'll be the last paintings I finish here in Australia.

“Australian Afternoon,” 60×15 cm, acrylic on canvas.

It's an idealized Australian landscape rather than a specific place, with a few eucalyptus trees in the foreground (and a few Australian animals in them). To represent the hundreds of species of eucalyptus trees in Australia, I painted all three trees with different techniques for the leaves and different combinations of colors make them unique (though trees in general and eucalyptus in particular are still something I could use a lot of practice on!). I've discovered I really like doing these multi-panel pieces, such as to explore more extreme aspect ratios than you would normally find, like the 4:1 ratio here. I've got a few ideas for future works utilizing such techniques squirreled away in the back of my mind, though I'll probably have to put any painting on hold for a few months while my art supplies make their way across the Pacific.

I thought for this work it'd be interesting to try to create two pieces which could each stand on their own as an independent composition, but also work combined as you see here. I'm not entirely sure how well either aim worked out, but it was an interesting learning experience all the same—I certainly still have much to learn about composition! Anyway, time to get back to the million and one things to do before I leave. A hui hou!

Happy 30th birthday, Linux!

I'm a few days late for this (much like the last time, five years ago), but it was Linux's 30th birthday this past week! I've been using Linux for a bit over seven years now, though back in 2010 when I was first getting introduced to it I didn't like it very much. Still, just a few short years later and I was installing it on my new custom-built gaming desktop…which I'm still using today, though I'll have to say good-bye to it for a few months in just under three weeks while it's being shipped.

What brought me around to Linux in a few years after such a negative initial impression? I've mentioned parts of it before, and this will not be a comprehensive list, but here's a few things:

1. Native package manager. The ability to install software with a simple sudo apt-get install is magical and so refreshing after manually downloading installers on Windows and macOS. Being able to update everything with a couple of commands is also amazing after having to manually check each thing I wanted to update and downloading a new version of it. I'll never be able to go back to an OS that doesn't have a package manager again.
2. I feel like I rave about this frequently, but the second automatic clipboard that copies text you highlight automatically and pastes is on middle-mouse-click is so, so handy. I now get actively annoyed every time I try to use it on another operating system and discover it's not available. (macOS almost has a “worst-of-both-worlds” thing going on, where it is available…but only in the terminal, nowhere else.)
3. General stability. Crashes are incredibly rare (certainly much more so than with Windows or macOS), and I almost never need to restart my computer. System upgrades happen in the background, with graphics driver updates being pretty much the only reason to restart (and even then I could get around it by restarting the graphical evnironment, it's just less work to restart.) Updates happen when I want them to, and I never have to worry about the things I've heard about Windows 10 choosing to update and restart at the worst possible times for people. Linux comes with more responsibility to manage my own upgrades, but also more freedom to do so. And that's really the biggest draw, though it can be hard to convey: the freedom Linux gives, freedom from corporations intent on getting more money out of you, freedom to set up your computer the way you want, for it to actually be your computer.
4. Lots of other little convenience and quality-of-life things that I can't think of now, but notice the absence of acutely when using other operating systems.

One of the downsides of choosing Linux back in 2014 was the comparatively limited number of games that'd run on it, at least easily (though still in the low hundreds, even at that point). While you could try using Wine to run Windows software, including games, it definitely wasn't an intuitive or simple process. What I couldn't have foreseen back then was Valve incorporating Wine into Steam via a fork called Proton a few years later, making it trivial to attempt to run a game without a Linux version through Steam. That doesn't mean it'll always work at the moment, but I've been able to play quite a number of games that would otherwise have been unplayable. Valve are also promising that every game will “just work” with Proton come December when the Steam Deck launches, and while I remain a bit skeptical they'll be able to get 100% compatibility any increase they can pull off will be nice. If Valve stopped working on Proton today I'd still have thousands of games available to me, besides all the ones that are providing Linux versions. Basically, I feel like my jump to Linux was unintentionally timed pretty well, and it's looking positive for the future. Here's to the next 30 years of Linux! A hui hou!

Immunization update the first

Yesterday I was finally able to get my first COVID-19 vaccination shot! And yes, that probably sounds strange to my fellow Americans who've been able to get one for months now, but it's been a lot slower here in Australia. The government last year went big on AstraZeneca (which could be produced locally) with a smaller amount of Pfizer, only to run into a problem of not having nearly enough supply to vaccinate everyone in a reasonable time frame. (Two months ago, when something like 60% of Americans had received at least one dose, the rate for Australia was around 12%.)

To make matters worse, the AstraZeneca vaccine was discovered to have some extremely rare but serious blood-clotting side-effects, to the tune of 1–2 deaths per million recipients. There's always a risk with any vaccine, of course, but the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation declined to recommend it for people under some age limit, I think 50 or 60. So despite there actually being a decent (if still insufficient) supply of AstraZeneca shots, the perception developed that it was inferior to Pfizer, leading to a lot of people (even those above the age limit) putting off being vaccinated until they could get a Pfizer shot. And the much more limited Pfizer supply was initially going to more high-priority people like health workers (partly since it only had a 3-week cadence for both shots instead of AstraZeneca's 6 weeks so people could get fully immunized faster).

I wasn't eligible for a shot at all until the premier of Victoria announced AstraZeneca as being available to under-40s a few weeks ago (only took 6 lockdowns!). Though interestingly I seem to have unintentionally gamed the system: last week I signed up for an appointment for an AstraZeneca shot under the logic that even a single shot before I flew out was better than nothing, with an intention of getting a second shot in the US. This past Monday however it was announced that due to a recent delivery Pfizer was now available to under-40s, though not wanting to be one of the (literal) myriads of people canceling appointments for AstraZeneca in favor of Pfizer I didn't pay it much attention.

When I got to my appointment yesterday, various people kept asking me to my great confusion whether I wanted a Pfizer shot instead of AstraZeneca (at least six or seven times!). I didn't know that the day before it had also been announced that people who'd signed up for AstraZeneca would be offered Pfizer (at least for a short period of time, I'm not sure of the exact details). Anyway, I wasn't aware at the time that Pfizer had a 3-week waiting period, since it's been being delivered at a 6-week cadence (like AstraZeneca) here in Australia to help relieve supply shortages.

I thus figured I'd just get the shot I came for, until I mentioned in response to the nurse's small talk that I was finishing up my PhD and flying back to the US in a few weeks. She immediately mentioned that Pfizer only actually had a 3-week wait instead of 6-weeks like AstraZeneca, and that they could set me up for a second appointment in 3 weeks (which is two days before I fly out!). When I realized I could be fully vaccinated instead of just half, I finally changed my mind and accepted the offer.

So that's how I ended up unintentionally gaming the vaccination system and will be fully vaccinated before flying back to the US next month. I'm still a bit amazed how it worked out, but it's certainly a huge relief. I'm still a bit tired like last night (which I spent feeling like I was either coming down with or recovering from a mild-but-weird cold), so I should end this here and get to bed. A hui hou!

Terraforming Mars

While I've been here in Australia I was introduced to the board game Terraforming Mars by a friend at one of the student board game nights. It came out in 2016 and has received both a number of awards and five expansions to date. In it, two to five players take on the role of corporations (each with a unique specialty) competing to, well, terraform Mars, accomplished by raising three parameters (global temperature, oxygen level, and oceans). Many actions are accomplished by playing cards, which are randomly drawn throughout the game (and there are literally hundreds with all the expansions); choosing a winning strategy from among the cards you get is a big part of the appeal. I also like it because, while you're competing for points at the end of the game (after Mars has been completely terraformed), there's little direct competition within the game itself other than a few cards that let you steal or remove (small amounts of) resources from other players.

Now while I've enjoyed the board game a lot, I've held off on buying it so far as it's pretty pricey (and bulky) with all the expansions and I'd just have to move it anyway (though it's definitely got a place in my ideal future board game collection). I did, however, buy a digital version of it (which released in 2018) on Steam a few months ago and have been playing a lot of games against the computer. (Though both the board and digital version also have a single-player challenge where you need to terraform Mars in a certain amount of time.)

I've noticed a particular pattern recurring in games, and today I decided to see if I could show its existence. The game takes place over a number of “Generations,” within each of which players take turns performing actions until all players have passed their turn, at which point resource production happens and the next generation starts. Each player can take one action and skip the rest of their turn, two actions, or pass on taking any turns for the remainder of that generation. Actions can be many things, though the most common involve paying for and playing a card. (Many cards also allow you to take certain rare or unique actions once per generation.)

Here's a screen shot during a game in generation 4, though not the one I mention later on, showing the (rather lovely) map along with some of the tiles players have placed on it. On the bottom left you can see the resources in the game: money, steel, titanium, plants, energy, and heat. On the right are the terraforming parameters; oxygen is just over half-way, heat's about a third done, and 3 of 9 ocean tiles have been placed.

Anyway, the pattern I'd noticed is that players tend to take a bunch of actions in the very first generation, but drop off steeply in the second, before climbing back up over the rest of the game. (For reference, a five-player game might be over in seven to nine generations; a two-player game might need twelve to fourteen.) This is because each corporation has an amount of money (and potentially other resources) that it starts the game with, and the Prelude expansion from 2018 also allows players to choose two other bonus cards in the set-up phase. Much of the game is about investing in production which increases over time, but since the average player resource output is still going to be much lower on generation 2 than the initial resources available, the number of actions players can take (which are constrained by costs) generally nosedives on that second generation.

Today I decided to finally quantify this observation by recording the number of actions each player took in each generation and plotting it. I started a game with myself and four medium AI players, and proceeded to take careful notes for the entire game. And here's the results:

I've plotted each player by the color used in the game (I'm green, if you're curious) with the number of actions in a generation on the y-axis, and generation number on the x-axis. We can clearly see that every single player has a drop of one or two actions in the second generation compared to their first generation, which starts to slowly rise again over the next five generations. Cards can have very different costs, which partly explains why players had anywhere from one to seven actions in this game. Interestingly, despite being fairly middle-of-the-pack in actions (and rather distracted), I still won this game, which I suppose demonstrates the importance of quality over quantity of actions.

Here's the same game as in the above screenshot (though not the one in the plot) in generation 7. Here you can see that the terraforming parameters on the right have been raised a bit, and there are some more tiles placed on the board. The player order changes each generation since going first offers some advantages.

Anyway, this was a fun little experiment to verify a pattern I'd seen across a lot of games. I can definitely recommend the board game version of Terraforming Mars, though note that it typically takes several hours to play—it's not difficult, but there can be a lot of things to consider with all the nigh-infinite combinations of cards that players can get, so it definitely requires some free time and concentration. While the digital adaptation is serviceable, and I've been enjoying it, it's a bit limited in comparison, with only the Prelude expansion available despite being out for three years at this point. I'm really hoping that additional expansions get released soon (especially Colonies is fun and adds some interesting choices), so if you're used to playing with the expansions just be aware that they're not available digitally yet. If you're fine with that limitation (and even with just the base game and Prelude there's still a decent amount of stuff), it's a good way to get some practice in playing on your own or to play over the internet with friends. A hui hou!

If lockdown == 5; lockdown++;

Well, I wasn't expecting to write this post so soon after the last one! We exited lockdown 5.0 here in Melbourne on July 27 as expected, two days after my previous post, but less than two weeks later we're back in lockdown #6. Quite suddenly, too; we had a day of zero cases on Wednesday (I think), then six surprise cases of the Delta variant on Thursday, and by 8:00 PM we were back in lockdown for a week. With good reason, as it turns out today, as there were 29 new cases reported this morning, most (all?) of which were out and about while infectious. That's the largest case number reported for Victoria so far this year, by the way—we haven't had case numbers that high since probably September or October last year. 

For comparison, Sydney, too, had a record-case-number day today, with 319 cases reported, which provides a distressing reminder of where we could be if this outbreak gets out of hand. We're unfortunately still chugging slowly along on vaccinations in Australia (because of low vaccine supply, to clarify, not vaccine hesitancy, at least not yet), and I have no idea if I'll be able to get a shot before I leave.

Speaking of which, I now have flights booked! If everything goes according to plan (a dangerous assumption in a once-in-a-century pandemic, but a necessary one) I'll be flying out of Melbourne on September 19th, spend a week with my family in California (perhaps getting a shot there), then fly into Hilo on the 27th. Which, coincidentally, is exactly four years to the day from when I flew out to go to Australia (and no I didn't actually plan it like that, I only noticed just now).

In the meantime I've started doing a bit of planning for moving, looking at things to toss or otherwise leave behind. Even though I'll be getting my moving expenses paid for I won't actually be bringing all that much stuff with me on this move; basically all my furniture is second-hand graduate-student-on-a-budget quality stuff, nothing of sentimental importance. Plus, it could be a few months before everything gets delivered with the state of shipping right now, so it'll be more practical to just buy anything that I need back in Hawaii. (I will be bringing some of my paintings with me, though I'll also be leaving some here, including the ones hanging in the stairwell at Swinburne.)

Anyway, that's probably enough for this post. Hopefully we'll be back out of lockdown before too long after quashing this latest outbreak and I start clearing out my desk at uni. I'll try to get a few posts out in the intervening weeks even as things get busy, but we'll see how things go. A hui hou!

Lockdown 5.0

We're currently sitting in Lockdown 5.0 (as I've seen it called) here in Melbourne, and while I've been pretty sanguine about the first four lockdowns, I'm starting to feel the teeniest bit annoyed by this point. For those not in Victoria, a brief history lesson (going from memory, so not super precise):

1. Lockdown #1 happens in March 2020, and lasts till around the middle of May. This is The First Wave that pretty much the entire country goes through together. (It's much less worse than most of the rest of world, only notching a few thousand cases total and much less than a thousand deaths, country-wide.)
2. In June 2020, breaches of the hotel quarantine lead to The Second Wave starting in Melbourne (and a bit in the rest of Victoria). Lockdown #2 happens around the end of June, and it's The Big One, lasting until November, with peak case numbers of over 700 per day being reported at its peak (I want to say around late August?). By the time it finishes Victoria has had something like 90% of all cases in the country. It's important to keep in mind that the rest of Australia mostly didn't experience anything like this; New South Wales had the occasional flare up, and I think there might've been a few sub-week lockdowns in South Australia, Queensland, and Western Australia, but for most of the rest of the country there was one wave and that was basically it.
3. Lockdown #3 happens in February 2021, and it was a pretty short one; I don't remember exactly, but I want to say it was only about a week (comparable to the few that had happened in other states).
4. Lockdown #4 happens in late May 2021 and was slightly bigger, for perhaps two or three weeks. Unknown to us at the time, it helps sets the stage for the next one, as some Victorians unknowingly bring COVID-19 with them as they flee to Sydney, setting off an minor outbreak there. (The Delta strain shows up in Melbourne for the first time during this lockdown, but luckily the restrictions stamp it out before it can blow up.)
5. Sydney's dealt with the occasional outbreak over this past year-and-a-half, but they coincidentally get a case of the Delta strain that spreads in the community sometime around when the fourth Melbourne lockdown lets up. This pretty quickly blows up beyond the ability to contain it, triggering what looks to be at this point a Sydney equivalent to Melbourne's second wave, forcing Sydney into its first major lockdown since the first wave back in March 2020.
6. Unfortunately, some infected movers unknowingly bring some cases of the Delta strain back to Victoria in the early days before New South Wales really locks down, setting off another outbreak in Victoria a scant six weeks or so since the last one finished (Lockdown #5, which started July 16). Thankfully, it looks like the rapid lockdown here in Melbourne has managed to squelch unrestrained growth and it looks like we might be able to exit as planned midnight as Tuesday, as long as the large anti-lockdown/anti-vaccination protests in Melbourne (and Sydney, Adelaide, and Brisbane) over the weekend don't trigger too many new cases. (Sydney's likely to be hit pretty hard by this given that they keep finding people who've been out and about while infectious and they had several thousand people in a protest that got a bit out of hand, but we probably won't find out for a week or more.)

Now, the first two (Melbournian) lockdowns were last year, before there was any vaccine available. Given Australia's ability to control and quarantine foreign travel, they were an excellent way to eliminate COVID-19 from the population (and repeatedly did so, with new cases only arising from leaks in the quarantines program over time). The February lockdown was still pretty early on in the vaccination roll-out, and excusable for a population still vulnerable. By May it was starting to become evident that there were issues with the pace of the roll-out, with barely a tenth of the population vaccinated. By now, while the lockdown's still the only conscionable tool for handling an outbreak, it's becoming more and more annoying given that only some ~12.5% of the population is vaccinated. (According to the latest numbers I've seen, though it might be a week or two old at this point. It certainly hasn't climbed more than a percentage point or two, however. [Edit 7/22/21: apparently it was up to ~15% the Thursday before this post was written.]) We could be sitting in this lockdown with the feeling that this might be the last one necessary before enough people were protected not to need them anymore, but instead we have no idea when that'll happen; almost certainly not before the end of the year unless something drastically changes.

Part of the problem is the vaccine supply; Australia invested heavily in the AstraZeneca vaccine which could be produced locally, with a small order for additional Pfizer doses, but the doses available right now are nowhere near enough for everyone. AstraZeneca has been linked with (literally) one-in-a-million deaths from blood clotting in young people (under 50 or so, I think), which has resulted in it not being officially recommended for people in that age group…i.e., a very significant chunk of the population. A very constrained vaccine supply, which a large fraction of the populace can't even get without discussion with their physician, has led to this point where just over one in ten people are vaccinated, with the numbers rising glacially slowly each week. Currently, I can't even find a government vaccination site nearby that'll give me an AstraZeneca shot even knowing the risks (and the rare Pfizer doses are being prioritized for older people and essential personnel, I think—at any rate not available to someone under 40!). At this rate I might get vaccinated faster by moving back to the US around October—there's supposed to be a moderately large shipment of Pfizer does arriving in Australia that month which'll be enough to open them up to a larger age range, but that'll be too late for me. While I'm generally quite approbative of how Australia handled the pandemic in 2020 (certainly orders of magnitude better than the US did), the vaccine roll-out is a pretty dismal failure by any stretch of the imagination at this point. (Currently, Australia is ranked 38 in the OECD countries on vaccination rate…out of 38. [Edit 7/22/21: we're up to 37 now!])

Anyway, that's where I'm at right now. The reality of moving in around two months is starting to sink in—I've got a video call with a moving company this week to see what I'll be bringing, and am starting to think about things like “flights” and “travel exemption requests.” I'm also still working furiously to finish up my PhD in the meantime, so it's going to be a wild ride to the finish line in the next few months here. A hui hou!

A topsy-turvy week

It's been something of an up-and-down week this past seven days, or rather, down-and-up. Last Wednesday I learned that my paternal grandmother had suddenly passed away back in Nebraska, possibly due to a blood clot or stroke from a fall a few days earlier. She'd been in good health otherwise, having sent me a birthday card just last month (like every year), so it came out of the blue. I wouldn't say I got to know any of grandparents as well as I'd like to, due to living in either different states or different countries from all of them for practically my entire life, but having been born in Nebraska myself some of my earliest fragmentary memories are from visiting my grandparents' house way out in the country: the scent of baby's breath or dill growing in the gardens, the sound of driving down the long gravel road out of town, the feel of the wind over the Nebraskan prairie. (The same feeling is found thousands of feet up the sides of Maunakea where the wind blows over the same low grass and gently rolling slopes, bringing those memories back unexpectedly.)

There'll be a funeral in a few days which I'l be attending via Zoom—there's virtually no way I could get a travel exemption from the Australian border control (out and back in) on such short notice, and the cost of flights is prohibitive: the absolute lowest were still over $12,000 this close to the event. To be honest, the death of a relative has been something of a nightmare scenario for me ever since both my maternal grandparents came down with COVID-19 about a year ago (they both survived and are doing well, but it was a bit dicey for a while), since getting back to the US (or, more accurately, back into Australia) has been non-trivial since March last year. I guess I can stop worrying about it happening now that it's happened, at least, in the same way the mother of the boy playing ball indoors can stop worrying that her expensive vase might get broken.

To complete the emotional roller coaster this past week, I also received some very welcome news indeed: three weeks ago I had an interview for a position with Gemini Observatories, and yesterday I got (and accepted) a job offer! Gemini Observatories operates two identical telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, and, as the job was for software development and could be done from either location, I indicated my preference for Hilo during the interview and as a result will be heading back there in a very short time, nominally less than three months. I put nearly two months' effort into polishing my résumé and cover letter before applying, and the position sounds like I'm definitely going to enjoy it (as I've come to realize that I really love software development over the past few years), so I was ecstatic to have been selected. And, of course, there's the whole “getting to return to Hilo” bit as well, all the more alluring in the grip of a Melbournian winter. I'll be working on Gemini's Python package for reducing data from Gemini instruments, but I'll have more to say about it in the future as I figure out how that looks in practice.

These next few months are going to be rather busy it looks like: not that they weren't already, as I work furiously to finish up the two papers I'm working on and submit my thesis, but now I'll have moving preparations on top of that. Still, I now also have both some positive motivation and a lack of stress about what I was going to do after wrapping up my PhD, so hopefully I can really buckle down and get things done these next few weeks. That may or may not have an effect on my posting schedule here, but I'll try to keep things going at a low level, at least; there should be no lack of subjects as I prepare, only time! And that's been my roller coaster of a week: somber, a little sad, yet looking forward to the future with a renewed optimism. A hui hou!

Belated Tau Day, 2021

I remembered to mention Tau Day yesterday in the CAS Slack, but forgot to mention it here until today! Possibly because I came down with some sort of stomach bug overnight and maybe wasn't thinking clearly yesterday evening. Thankfully I'm mostly recovered today.

While I'm ruminating about it, I figured it might be a good time to talk briefly about where I'm at in my PhD, and life more generally. As I've probably mentioned before PhDs in Australia are nominally three years, but enough people go longer that extensions to 3.5 years are pretty routine at this point (at least at Swinburne). The greatest import of the extension is that it extends the stipend PhD students get to live on—quite important in an expensive city like Melbourne. My six-month extension expired at the beginning of April, but luckily I'd saved up enough to live off for a few months and there was—coincidentally—an announcement for applications for a special COVID-19 stipend extension of up to three months for students in my position (having exhausted the regular six-month extension but just needing a few more months to finish, plus a few other criteria).

I applied for the extension at the end of April, estimating that I hoped to submit my thesis before the end of August. I got an email back acknowledging receipt of my application and waited for the results, which had been mentioned to be announced around mid-May. As the end of May came and went, I asked around and heard from two friends (fellow astronomy PhD students) that they'd both gotten an affirmative answer the Friday before, so I was starting to wonder. This was right around the time Melbourne went into its fourth lockdown for two weeks or so, so I figured maybe the process was moving slowly (so not all the announcements went out at once) and working from home had perhaps slowed it down. Finally, after another week I sent a polite inquiry as to when I might expect to hear something back.

To my great surprise—and no mild shock—I got a reply back from the dean of the Science, Education and Technology faculty (who was in charge of reviewing the applications) saying that the person who'd sent the acknowledgement-of-receipt email was no longer with Swinburne and that he had no record of my application(!) but that I could send it to him and he'd take care of it. (He could obviously tell from the email timestamps that I'd sent it before the deadline.) Thankfully it proved to be a quick process when I did (with a casual mention that I was coming along nicely with the thesis completion plan I'd laid out back in April), and this past week I got word that my application had been approved and extension granted.

So that's where I'm at, at the moment: still working away at the two papers which will contain pretty much the entirety of my PhD research, and then form the basis of the science chapters of my thesis. Which I'm still hoping to submit by the end of August. And I now shouldn't have to worry about running out of money along the way any more, so while I won't be truly relaxed until after I submit I'm a lot less stressed than I was a week ago. And that's probably enough for this “brief” post. A hui hou!

Banana slug on a redwood tree

After all my May posts I got a bit tired of working on my banana slug painting (another reason I don't usually show off things I'm working on—too much self-inflicted pressure to finish), but I finally got around to finishing it over the past few weeks. There wasn't that much to do, actually, since the last photo I took, but I think I'm done with it now. (Of course I also thought that about my first slug painting and then heavily revised it twice, so we'll see if that feeling sticks!) Now, behold the second painting in what I hope to be my ongoing “Limax” collection:

“Banana Slug on Redwood,” acrylic on canvas, 14”×18”

This face-on photo unfortunately conceals the three-dimensional nature a but, but does reveal my secret inspiration behind the entire painting: the slime trail! Which came out looking crummy. I got the inspiration for it from my earlier solar twins painting, where I discovered almost by accident that a light brushing of iridescent medium makes for a pretty good imitation of the Milky Way's sheen…but also of a gastropod's slime trail if the light catches it right. I'm not sure why it worked in that painting and so well in this one. Possibly the color of the underlying background matters—in the previous painting the iridescence is on black, whereas here it's on a light reddish-brown. It might also suffer from my trying to paint a slug trail from memory based on the occasional snail trail I see around here when walking rather than from a reference photo. Oh well. I'm still pretty happy with the 3D aspects of the painting, and the bark came out pretty nicely too. (It might be interesting to try some more 3D bark sometime, too…) That's it for now, but I've already started on my next project, which I hope to have finished before too long. A hui hou!

Brumal Melbourne weather

Well it is most definitely winter here in the southern hemisphere, as Melbourne had its first severe storm of the year come through this past week. And what a storm it was! An estimated 290,000 homes (including mine) lost power from 100 kph (60 mph) winds and the local Ringwood–Lilydale train line still isn't running due to “tree damage to infrastructure.” The power went out for me Wednesday night about 9:40 PM and was out for almost exactly 24 hours, but there are apparently people in Victoria projected not to get power back until Sunday (still in the future as I write this Saturday evening). I spent a highly unpleasant Thursday sans heat, the thermometer in my room hovering between 14 and 15 °C [57.2 to 59 °F], but the temperature outside dropped Thursday night down to 6 °C (42.8 °F) overnight, so I really feel for any poor people still without power. In a twist of irony, we do have a natural gas heater at my place…which requires electricity to light, so no heat for us on Thursday. Our internet's still out as I write for whatever reason. (Luckily I can use my phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot, or you wouldn't be getting this post!)

I can't wait to someday own a home with a battery back-up and solar panels and laugh in the face of power outages, but today is not yet that day. Though even cold and miserable as I was on Thursday, I still made use of the lack of electricity to run an experiment I never would have otherwise to see how much a hot shower would warm up the bathroom in the absence of any other heat. The answer, unfortunately for me, turned out to be an unnoticeable 0.5 °C (0.9 °F), up to 14.5 °C (58.1 °F). (Though I guess should be grateful our water heater must use a continuous gas pilot light or something—I didn't really think about it until after the shower and realized it might very easily have been electric!) Still, power's back now, I am once again warm, and I hope to have some paintings to show off before too much longer, including my banana slug which is definitely nearing completion. That's all for now, though. A hui hou!

Lunar eclipse of May 26, 2021

Thursday night we had a total lunar eclipse which turned out, quite surprisingly after a cloudy day, to be visible for most of its duration in the early evening. I'd been expecting to be clouded out so I had to scramble a bit, but I managed to set up my GoPro and take a video of nearly the entirety of the central, umbral portion. Taking an exposure every ten seconds for three hours got me thirty-six seconds of footage, which I've put into the video below (with a little zoom in afterwards on the Moon during totality).

I continue to be impressed at how good the quality of night footage a GoPro HERO 9 can get, especially with its comparatively minuscule aperture. While the full Moon is wildly overexposed at the beginning and end of the eclipse (which is to be expected with how bright it is), it actually works out pretty well during totality when it's darkest. I was amazed that you could even glimpse the dust lanes of the Milky Way at that point—I went out to look at it around then, and I definitely couldn't see a trace of them by eye. I'm glad I got the chance to try filming it, and thankfully the clouds only came in after totality and didn't block the main event. As the center of the Milky Way rises higher overhead in the weeks to come, I might try filming it around a new Moon if I get another clear night like tonight to see how well it comes out. Depends on the weather, of course, so we'll see! A hui hou!

Mercury: Birthday #133

Finally, rounding out this month of birthdays, it's Mercury's turn! And wow, 133! Over twice as high as Venus. Getting three Mercury birthdays per Earth year really puts in perspective just how fast it goes around the Sun (every 87.97 Earth days). There's an option, when setting up the planetary birthdays calendar, to skip every so many Venus and Mercury birthdays, but I don't want that. Being 133 on Mercury doesn't make me older—or feel any older—than I am, and I want to see just how many birthdays I can rack up there.

Much like Venus, Mercury has a rotational period much longer than an Earth day. It also exists in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance with the Sun. This fact in particular makes figuring out how long my birthday has actually been happening on Mercury…complicated. A solar day on Mercury is 176 Earth days—even longer than Venus' 116.75—so in theory my Mercury!birthday has been going since mid-March (coincidentally around the time my current Venus birthday started, though it will outlast that one by going till almost mid-August…just in time for Mercury to make another lap around the Sun on August 24th). The whole concept of a birthday really kind of breaks down on Mercury, since laps around the Sun are twice as common as sunrises, so I think I'll end this speculation here.

Instead, let's get back to slugs! Er, slug paintings. If you remember from last time, I'd decided to build up the slug with some flexible modeling paste. I've done just that in this next photo…

…though it's admittedly hard to see a difference from the previous photo. Just trust me when I say that I've built up the body a bit, and also closed the gap between the front and rear parts. It now feels much more like a real presence on the canvas.

I felt that the modeling paste buildup was complete, so I moved on to painting. You might wonder why I'd need to do any painting, since I've been mixing some yellow paint in the modeling paste as I go along, but there are two reasons for it. For one thing, the modeling paste is very, very, viscous. You can see in the photo above that it preserves individual brushstrokes in incredible detail. Each session working with it requires a lot of time very carefully flattening its surface, trying to keep the most egregious ridges down. But this is a slug, and should be more smooth-looking! (Though banana slugs do actually have some mild texture on their latter two-thirds, which I still need to figure out how to represent.)

The second reason has to do with reflections. When dry, modeling paste is quite a matte material, meaning it doesn't reflect light in concentrated spots; it has diffuse, rather than specular reflection. It's the opposite of glossy, which is more like how we expect a slug to look. So the purpose of painting the modeling paste is two-fold: to smooth out some of the texture caught in the paste, and to give it a more glossy reflection.

And here it is after the first coat of glossy paint. This light isn't the best illustration (especially because, in the previous photo, the still-wet modeling paste also shows some weak specular reflection), but you can kind of see how it looks smoother and more glossy. Most paints are somewhere between glossy and matte, and I've got some gloss gel and some matte gel that can be added to tip the balance one way or the other. I used matte gel in the paint for the bark background, which should make the contrast with the glossy slug all the more obvious.

It's definitely coming along quite well and looking mighty nice, but I'm not done yet! I still have a few last little touches in mind, so there'll be (at least) one more post finishing up this journey. I also  unexpectedly* managed to get a video of the total lunar eclipse last night, so expect that soon as well. A hui hou!

*It'd been all or partly cloudy from a big weather front all day so I really didn't have much hope for the evening, but then it cleared up about an hour before the umbral portion of the eclipse began.

Earth: Birthday #32

Yes that's right, it's time for the big binarily-significant \(2^5\) birthday! Here on Earth anyway. Now there's just my Mercury birthday to wait for later this month. I don't have much more to say about it—you've heard the song and dance by now—so let's get back to talking about…

…this painting. If you remember from the previous post, I'd tried painting the shading of the slug from a picture, and decided I really didn't like the outcome. I then had the thought that perhaps this was a job for my favorite trick of putting some dimensionality into a painting by extruding it into the third dimension. It's unfortunately a little hard to tell due to the face-on angle of the above photo, but I've painted over the slug's body with some flexible modeling paste mixed with a little yellow paint. I immediately liked where this was going much better, so this'll be the new direction for this painting. I did another painting session adding more modeling paste to the posterior two-thirds of the slug's body, and tried to get a photo from a different angle that would show the topology a bit better:

It's still not the best lighting, but hopefully you can see how I've built up a kind of crest ridge along the back (as the real slugs indeed have). I need to go back over it and even it out with the front a bit, but I'm really enjoying this sort of…reverse-sculpting? The modeling paste is apparently marble dust in acrylic, so it's almost like the reverse of sculpting something out of a block of marble. One tricky aspect of the paste is that it's very plastic and easily retains brush strokes, so it's a very delicate process and when I've got it built out to where I want it I'll have to give it all a layer of paint to smooth it out a bit. Still, I suppose the little imperfections keep it from looking too perfect and give it some character. This photo's from the latest painting session a few days ago, so I'll have to get back to it to have something to show…for my next birthday! A hui hou!

Venus: Birthday #52

Today I have my 52nd birthday on Venus! Well, this Earth day. Days on Venus are a lot longer due to its slow rotation, and then when I looked it up I had to wrap my head around the difference between a sidereal day and a solar day again. On Earth, with its fast rotation, the difference between the two is only about 4 minutes. On Venus, with its slow retrograde rotation, the difference is about 126 Earth days.

Given that we generally mean solar day (the time between when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky) rather than sidereal day (the time when a planet makes a full rotation with respect to the background stars) here on Earth, I'll do the same for Venus, which has a solar day of 116.75 Earth days. By that metric, it's been my birth“day” for almost two months (~58 days, so since mid-March) and will continue to be until early July. Which is pretty cool I suppose!

Anyway, continuing on with my in-progress painting, I'd left it with the beginnings of a bark texture. As mentioned, I didn't follow the color of my tree model, and that's because this is supposed to be a redwood tree. And on that redwood tree will be a majestic banana slug. I somewhat dislike giving away the final vision this early on, but as I started painting it in I can't show off more photos without revealing it. Nothing for it but let you all in on the process, I suppose!

Here, the big change from last time is actually not the beginnings of the slug I've started painting in, but the extra detail in the bark. I went over it again with a few colors, including gray. This turned out to be a much more important color than I'd anticipated, at it helped tone down the colors a bit and make them feel a bit more muted and natural, while making the saturated colors pop more.

Of course, the rough sketch of the slug is pretty eye-catching. I used some bismuth yellow to fill in an underlayer, and it turned out pretty fluorescent. A bit too fluorescent, so I painted it over with…

…this. I was attempting to do some shading from a photo, but A) I'm bad at shading, and B) it didn't exactly fit with the shadows from the bark. Almost every part of the slug here except for the outer fringe of its foot will be covered over…in the next post! Yes, I'll leave it here, and do some more work on it over the weekend. (Also, you might be able to see that I replaced the light bulb in my room with a brighter one in between the two photos.) Anyway, see you for my next birthday! A hui hou!

Mars: Birthday #17

In the first of this month's birthdays, today I have my 17th birthday on Mars. That'll be the lowest number we see this month, since Mars orbits the Sun the slowest.

To give me something to talk about in these posts, I've decided to do something I don't normally do and post some photos of a painting in progress. I started this one in March, and it's not finished as of today, so this will be some good motivation to keep working on it. It was actually directly inspired by my previous painting, though I expect the link will not be obvious; I'll reveal it when the painting's done, and leave it to your imagination in the meantime.

Anyway, for this painting, I needed a background looking like bark, so I decided to try something new and do some plein air painting. En plein air is a French term meaning “outdoors,” and plein air painting is the act of painting outdoors, as opposed to inside a studio. While I could simply look up bark textures online, I decided I wanted to paint one from life, so I packed up some supplies and headed out to the nearest tree.

Setting up the easel and canvas next to my model.

Turns out plein air painting, especially with acrylics, is a very different beast to painting indoors. I picked a moderately sunny day, and my acrylic paint—already known for drying quickly—was drying even faster both on the palette and the canvas. I made liberal use of the spray bottle I brought with me, furiously misting everything in an attempt to keep everything damp enough to work with, but still ended up rushing to capture the texture as quickly as I could (I sketched it out roughly on the canvas first). While this generated a unique sort of pressure to the painting, I don't think it was negative, exactly; I ended up using some very fast, loose brush strokes, which gave it a somewhat freer quality than normal for me, I think. Anyway, here's a shot I got of myself with the finished product:

The Sun came out from behind the clouds after a while.

…and here's a closeup of the canvas:

Sort of looks like bark, if you squint?

As you can see, I only used the tree as a reference for the texture, not the color. As to why I chose the particular colors I did, well, that's part of the composition…which I'll reveal on my next birthday! For now, I'll leave you with the fruit of my first experiment in plein air painting, while I get back to work. A hui hou!