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!