Happy New Year 2023!

In a piece of good news for the final hours of 2022, I discovered an early Christmas gift in that the two papers from my PhD, the completion of which has eaten up so much of my free time this year, were officially published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Christmas Eve. It's been a multi-year journey writing these papers (I think I started back in 2019 or possibly even late 2018), and I originally submitted them to MNRAS at the beginning of April so it's been almost 8 months getting them published as well. (Much longer than the average, according to my advisors.) These papers have been hanging over my head for most of the year and taken a lot of my outside-of-work hours to bring to completion, so I am extraordinarily relieved to see them finally published; I am, in a sense, finally “done” with my PhD. And now that I am, and have more energy and free time to do so, I hope to have a post (or perhaps a short series) out sometime next month actually explaining what my thesis is about. Tangentially, even counting this post, this year will mark the lowest number of posts-per-year for this blog, and it's hard to escape the conclusion that a large part of that was me not being able to summon the motivation to write more when I was already spending so much of my evenings and weekends finishing up papers/responding to referee reports/checking proofs for errors that inexplicably appear in the process of typesetting. With that out of the way, I hope to have a bit more time for doing interesting things, which will hopefully translate into more posts sharing said interesting things.

My life hasn't been completely devoid of interest this year, of course; getting a drone has been and continues to be a source of excitement and fresh perspectives on things, even if my dreams of up-close lava examination were dashed by no-fly zones during Mauna Loa's streak-breaking eruption. That aside, there are still plenty of awesome landscapes to explore on this island, and I expect to continue to do so next year.

And it's also true that some things in life are better when they're not exciting, like one's employment status and having a steady place to live. Thankfully both of those have been staidly boring this year, just the way I like it. That's not to say that my job is boring; while it might not be exciting, it remains consistently interesting, for which I am grateful. I've learned a lot about how DRAGONS works over the past year and have been able to make some significant contributions of my own (along with a lot of small improvements in between larger projects). Ultimately 2023 looks to be largely more of the same, and I am very much ready for it.

With that, as the firecrackers continue to thunder intermittently in the distance and 2022 draws to a close, I look forward to another hopefully “unexciting” year to come. (Though there may be some things of interest on the horizon to share.) A hui hou!

A Christmas volcano visit for 2022

Merry Christmas everyone! I finally got around to editing together a video from drone footage I got back on November 29 when I went up to see Mauna Loa's eruption on its second full day. I flew from Puʻu Huluhulu out towards where the lava was flowing, but it was still so far away at that point that even at the limit of my signal range it didn't look all that impressive on my controller screen. Which is a shame, because it meant I didn't bother taking that much video at the closest point, whereas it actually looks fairly neat when blown up to a larger size; a good lesson to learn for the future, I suppose.

One other very cool event occurred along the way, however, which I really wanted to include in a video and is a good part of why I eventually made this one. I left the camera recording while flying out toward the lava flow, and perhaps halfway there a flock of birds appeared out of nowhere, flying and diving around and in front of my drone. I almost had a heart attack as my first thought was that they they might attack the drone, but they simply flew along with it for around half a minute before diving out of sight. I'm not sure why they decided to fly along, as I was deliberately flying nearly at my height ceiling to avoid disturbing any wildlife that might be on the ground; maybe they were just passing by and decided to follow along for fun? You can watch the video and judge for yourself:

Just to be clear, while a no-fly zone was put in place over the eruption area the next day, to the best of my knowledge this was still an acceptable flight when I did it. It's a bit disappointing to me that there wasn't any flying allowed for the rest of the eruption, but I guess the lesson to be learned is to jump on the next one quickly. Anyway, that's my Christmas present to all of you this year. I may have some more mauna*-related drone photos/videos in the not-too-distant future, but we'll see how things play out. Mele Kalikimaka, a hui hou!

*Loa and kea.

Latest eruption wrapping up, it looks like

Well, it was fun while it lasted: over the past few days the indications are that Mauna Loa's latest eruption is coming to an end. It's always possible it could restart, of course, but observations of past eruptions suggest that's pretty unlikely. Interestingly, Kīlauea's latest eruption (which started the day I returned to Hilo last year, September 29th) also seems to have stopped, with the lava lake in its caldera abruptly cooling and solidifying. It's an open question how much influence the two volcanoes have on each other – for instance, historically Mauna Loa has often been active while Kīlauea was quiet, and vice versa, but that's certainly not always true. They're definitely two separate volcanoes with separate magma reservoirs, and go off independently, but their general proximity makes it seem likely that there could be some degree of influence between them. It's possible that magma erupting from Mauna Loa in this eruption relieved pressure on Kīlauea's magma chamber and in some part caused its eruption to end, for instance. But it remains an area of active research for now.

On the mundane side of things, this means Saddle Road is no longer in danger of being overflowed, which, depending on where it happened, could've been very bad news for the observatories on Maunakea (not to mention a very large number of other people who rely on Saddle Road to get across the island). The observatories on Mauna Loa remain cut off, as the flow crossed the Mauna Loa access road very early on in the eruption. It was definitely strange to see photos of it, considering how familiar I am with that road. Assuming that the eruption has indeed stopped at this point, I'm curious to see how long it'll take for the road to be reopened (or rebuilt?) and when I can get up to its end again. Once that happens and the volcano is deemed safe and the summit trails reopened I definitely would like to tackle hiking Mauna Loa's summit again, to see where the fresh lava coated the caldera's floor.

And that brings up the really interesting question: when will the next eruption happen? The thirty-eight year period between the previous eruption and this one was the longest in recorded history for Mauna Loa. Prior to this, it erupted fairly frequently; I've seen five and nine years for its average eruption frequency, so it might depend on how you count, but the point is that it happened pretty often. Of course, there was significant variability among historical eruptions, with multiple eruptions sometime occurring in a single year and a recent twenty-five year quiet period from 1950 to 1975. So who knows? We might be back to seeing eruptions every few years, or it might be decades again before the next one. We'll just have to wait and see! As I've said at least once before on this blog, life's never dull when you live on an active volcano in the middle of the ocean. A hui hou!

Lava viewing on Mauna Loa

It's been an exciting week as Mauna Loa continues to erupt here on Hawaiʻi island for the first time in 38 years. On Monday night last week (the first full day of the eruption) it was clear enough that from Hilo we could see a red glow in the sky off to the west. It wasn't the easiest to capture on camera, but here's a passable photo of it:

Glow of lava off to the west, as seen from Hilo.

My family left for home the next morning, and since I had the rest of the day off I took the opportunity to head up Saddle Road to see if I could see the lava. To make a long story short, the answer was yes, after an hour waiting around for clouds to lift. Which they did, thankfully, a little before sunset, allowing a good view of the rivers of molten rock coursing down Mauna Loa's sides from Puʻu Huluhulu.

Lava seen through trees on Puʻu Huluhulu (and clouds).

Here you can see a lava fountain in silhouette high up on the rift zone and the lava as it snaked its way down the volcano. This is as good a time as any to mention that I got a new phone last month, the Pixel 7 Pro, and I'm finding myself rather impressed with its camera. While its maximum 30× zoom isn't anything I'd want to share, I find it can still get good results like this into the teens× zoom range, and certainly much better than my previous (almost 5-year-old) phone (which got pretty bad beyond maybe ~2–3×). Anyway, here's one last wide photo to get a better sense of the scale:

View south from Puʻu Huluhulu toward lava coming down Mauna Loa.

The lava was still pretty far away at that point (I think about 18 km), so even though I tried sending my drone out towards it I couldn't get close enough for the view to appreciably change. The news since then has been all about how the front of the flow is approaching Saddle Road, though it's been getting slower over time as the lava reaches flatter areas, and even if it continues at it's current pace unabated (which is unlikely) it'll be over a week before it reaches the road. It'd be pretty major if it did, as Saddle Road is the shortest route between the east and west sides of the island and thus a major thoroughfare, and no matter which side of the Maunakea access road it hypothetically covers it'd create a major headache for some of the observatories up there. It's currently coming pretty much straight down the line dividing east from west, so at some point it'll have to split to one side or the other, and then we'll probably have a better idea of where (and if) it'll cross the road. (If it heads west, the road rises higher on Maunakea's slopes and will probably be fine; east is a bit more iffy, considering the road currently sits on lava flows from mid-last-century.)

I haven't been up since Tuesday since the weather has, unfortunately, been rather poor, often with thick clouds over the Saddle region meaning I wouldn't see much of anything even if I did go up. (It got lost among all the volcano coverage, but we actually got snow on Maunakea's summit the same night the eruption started.) I'm definitely keeping an eye on things, though, and if the weather clears up enough to make viewing reasonable I'll probably be heading up the mountain again, camera(s?) in tow. Anyway, to summarize, no one's in danger at this point (historical evidence suggests that the eruption will remain confined to the northeast rift zone and not threaten people on the west and south), and any potential danger to infrastructure is also likely not imminent (and even then, it's ultimately just a road, rather than a residential neighborhood or something). It has been (and will continue to be) very interesting to watch this develop, though! A hui hou!

Mauna Loa, awakened again at last!

Exciting news to wake up to this morning: after 38 years, its longest recorded quiet period in history, Mauna Loa is erupting again! There's not much information available yet, but apparently it started erupting about 11:30 PM last night, November 27. 

This is a frame from the USGS webcam situated on the rim of the summit caldera of Mauna Loa, which saves an image every hour into a 24-hour GIF; this one is the first showing the eruption breaking out along a fault line and spreading lava across the caldera floor. So far it seems like the eruption may be confined to the summit caldera, though it might also have spread a few kilometers outside it. We'll know more once they can do an overflight, hopefully today.

Oh, and there's the first snow of the winter season on Maunakea this morning too, apparently. It's a big day! I'm looking forward to having more updates soon on this historic event. A hui hou!

Waiale Falls and surrounds

One fun side effect of getting a drone and wanting simply to get out and fly with it in the beginning has been exploring and finding places relatively nearby that I hadn't been to or didn't know about before. One such place is Waiale Falls on the Wailuku River, just on the outskirts of Hilo. There's a bridge which crosses the river just below the falls, offering a nice vantage point, and it's actually more than just a single waterfall, as the topography makes for some interesting and complicated confluences and meanderings of waterways. Since it's only about 10 minutes from my house (while offering some relative solitude for practicing drone pilots), I've gone there a number of times both to take photos and practice my flying.

There are actually two main waterfalls in quick succession along the Wailuku river, two streams which join with it in the space of a few dozen meters, and an area where water splits off above the top waterfall only to meander around and join with the river again. In the image from Google Maps below, the road (Waiānuenue Avenue) crosses the Wailuku near the center-bottom of the image. To its left you can see the lower falls, then there's an island in the river and the upper falls, plus the Kapehu and Nakakauila Streams which join the river.

However, while the overhead view is useful if you know what you're looking at, a nice drone shot can be a lot more immediately understandable:

Here's a shot of the same area (looking roughly south-west), though with the lower falls hidden behind trees. It's hard to see, but the area where the cars are parked in the center is actually an island itself, as a stream splits off from just above the upper falls and meander down around below the bridge in the foreground, only to join the river again below the bridge below the lower falls. It's tricky to see because of trees, but here's a shot showing the area around the upper falls:

Despite what it might look like, the two pools of water here are not connected: there's a spur of rock that separates them (behind the foreground tree), letting the waters of the main river continue on the left while splitting those on the right off to meander around before rejoining the river. It's a really interesting formation and one that I suspect isn't particularly common!

Here's a shot showing the two falls and the area between them with a sort of gravel-bar island a bit better (the bridge is just out of shot to the bottom):

The lower fall clearly has some man-made construction going on, though I don't know the details. Incidentally, the name Waiale comes from the words wai and ʻale, meaning “rippling water,” so I suspect the pond's been there since before anything was done to the lower fall. There are some (rough, unnofficial) trails in the area which let you walk up to that area, and I've seen people swimming around the island. When the river's low like in the photos it's probably not too bad, but the Wailuku is the single most dangerous river in the state, responsible for something like 30% of river drowning deaths annually, so I wouldn't exactly advise it unless you really know what you're doing. When it rains the water flow of the river can increase by something like a hundred times over what it looks like in these photos in a very short span of time, so you definitely don't want to get caught in a flash flood. (In fact, the name of the river, Wailuku, translates roughly to “waters of destruction.”)

Here's one final photo of the lower falls, taken from below the level of the bridge just above the water to give a perspective on its power even in its relatively low-flow state:

(These photos were taken on different days, which is why the lighting conditions differ so much between them.) All in all, I enjoy this area (which I hadn't visited prior to June), and it makes a conveniently-nearby place to go relax and fly after work if I want something more interesting than houses in Hilo to look at. It's started raining more again lately as we come into the wet season here, so I'm hoping to catch it soon in a higher-flow state to compare with these photos. I might even put together a video if I can get enough good clips.

On a related note, my family will be visiting for a week over Thanksgiving and I'm looking forward to getting photos of the various places we visit, so I'll probably have a raft of new exciting photos to share before long. It'll probably take a bit of time to sort through everything and post them, but I should have some great new stuff to share in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, happy Thanksgiving! A hui hou!

A new tour of the Gemini telescope

On Friday I got to go on a tour of the Gemini telescope building at the summit of Maunakea. In pre-COVID-19 times this would be something all new employees would get at some (not-too-long) point after joining, but since tours haven't happened since early 2020 there were something like fifteen of us who'd joined in the last two years who went along. Gemini North is in shutdown at the moment for recoating the primary mirror (for the first time in nine years!), which afforded a very rare opportunity to see an 8 meter-class telescope without its mirror installed.

I actually went on a tour of Gemini (plus some other telescopes) a decade ago back in 2012 while I was an undergraduate at UH Hilo, so for comparison, here's a photo I took then of the telescope with mirror in place and instruments mounted on it:

It's hard to capture the telescope from within the dome because it's just so huge, but the blue-painted parts are the telescope structure, with the various boxy things beneath it being the instruments, which are bigger than refrigerators. The silvery struts above hold the secondary mirror, which can be seen near the top of the image. Now, compare this with the panorama I took on Friday:

The panorama distorts some of the angles slightly, but you can clearly see where the mirror goes inside the telescope structure in this image. The flap covering the aperture there is half of the mirror cover, which folds up accordion-style over the mirror when it's in place. The blue circular thing behind the telescope on the temporary scaffolding holds the mirror from beneath; here's a photo of it I took from from up on the platform running around the telescope:

Here you can see the actuators (the white disks) which sit beneath (or behind) the mirror and help change its shape as it deforms under its own gravity as the telescope changes its orientation. As a reminder, the primary mirror for both Gemini telescopes is 8.1 m (26.6 ft) in diameter, so this is a big piece of equipment. While I did get to see the mirror, it's down on the floor below this one where the mirror coating chamber is, and was hard to get a good photo of as it's on a stand with a cover on top. I did get a photo of the mirror-coating vacuum chamber itself, which is pretty neat:

This flying-saucer-looking thing is the mirror-coating chamber. It wasn't in operation while we were there, but we got to hear a bit about how it works. Unlike most of the mirrors on the mountain which use aluminum, Gemini's mirror is coated with silver, which gives it a better infrared reflectivity. Silver, however, is more chemically reactive than aluminum, and would tend to tarnish quickly over time. To help prevent this, the silver is deposited as part of a sequence of several thin layers of various metals (which I can't recall now unfortunately) to help keep it from tarnishing too quickly.

Overall it was a great experience where I learned a lot about the telescope, marred only by me forgetting my coat and spending the entire time rather chilly. (Thankfully a coworker lent me a jacket.) It's easy to forget just how humongous the various telescope enclosures on the mountain are until you're inside them, at which point the cavernous volume becomes somewhat awe-inspiring. We left Hilo at 8:30 in the morning and didn't get back until 5:30 in the afternoon, so it was a long and intense day due to the altitude, but it was definitely a really cool experience that I'm thankful I got to go on. Though next time, I plan to remember to bring my coat…

Secret Hawaiian waterfalls

One unexpected benefit of flying drones around Hilo and up the Hāmākua coast is discovering waterfalls. The Hāmākua coast, lying on the windward side of Maunakea in the path of the prevailing trade winds, has some of the highest average annual rainfall values of anywhere in the world. Lava from Maunakea is also not very porous (which isn't true of Mauna Loa, which has almost no rivers on it), leading to a multitude of streams and rivers (many of them year-round) making their way down its slopes to reach the sea. The nature of that lava and its stratified layers also tends to result in lots of waterfalls along the way.

Some of these waterfalls are pretty famous (and rightfully so), or known tourist attractions, such as Rainbow Falls on the Wailuku river which marks the line between Maunakea and Mauna Loa lavas, or Akaka Falls a bit up the coast from Hilo on the Kolekole Stream. But something I've learned from flying around is that there are a lot more waterfalls along the various waterways of the Hāmākua coast, and I've been delightfully surprised at some of the examples I've randomly stumbled across.

For instance, here's a rather striking rock formation I discovered while flying up the Wailuku river in a portion that isn't easily accessible. This is actually only about 200–300 feet downstream from Rainbow Falls, but it's just around a bend from the official lookout platform such that I'd never seen it before. In fact, I have no idea just how many people have ever seen this particular part of the river – for being so close to a tourist landmark it really is quite isolated and wouldn't be easy to access on foot. Maybe from the right bank, where as you can see there's a private farm, but I don't know if there's any specific viewing area. (I've yet to see what it looks like when the river is in full flood, but I'm eagerly awaiting a large rainstorm to find out!)

But while the waterfall on the Wailuku river is probably not familiar to many people, it's at least on the edge of Hilo with a possible way to reach it from one side, and (crazy) people do occasionally kayak on the river. The waterfall above is on an unnamed tributary of Kawainui Stream, which sits between it and Waiʻaʻama Stream in a wild and untouched part of the Hāmākua coast, just a little ways south of Akaka falls. I found it entirely by accident while I was filming a timelapse video flying down the flank of Maunaka towards Hilo; at the end of it I looked down, and found this gorgeous little double waterfall. I was able to find it on Google Maps, and given its location in a thickly-forested area between two streams to the north and south, there really can't be many people other than pilots who've ever laid eyes on it.

I hadn't expected to find these picturesque waterfalls when I started drone, but it's really cool to be able to find ones that likely haven't been seen by many people before me, and then share them with the world. There are lots of places on this island I'm still looking forward to taking my drone, but it's also fun to discover these unexpected surprises. I'm sure I'll have more to share in the future, too! A hui hou!

Bread-baking bowls

So I'm about a year and a half late to the homemade bread-making party, but better late than never, right? For whatever reason I just wasn't really interested at the beginning of the pandemic while the rest of the world was discovering it and tweeting about it. I don't know why; it's not like it's a foreign concept to me – my parents had and used a bread-making machine while I was growing up – but I think the only bread I've baked myself was the time I made the Berke family pretzel recipe.  

Up until this past week, that is! I recently discovered a nifty device for helping with bread-making, and it's such a simple idea it's a surprise I hadn't heard of it before. It's essentially a silicone bowl by a company called Lékué, which allows you to do all the steps within it: mixing, kneading, rising, and baking. Yep, just pop it in the oven to bake at the end (no need to transfer to another container), or in my case I just use my combination microwave/convection oven/air fryer. I made some bread using one of the recipes that came with the bowl this week, and for not having done it before it came out splendidly.

That's the bowl on the left.

I've now baked a second loaf, and can hardly wait to try out more recipes. The ones that come with the bowl are pretty small, but it could easily hold a more “normal” sized loaf, so that's something to experiment with in the future. It's great to have the smell of fresh bread wafting through the house, and I'm looking forward to baking a lot bread in years to come. A hui hou!

Volca-nomenclature in Hilo's roads

Hawaiʻi island is built (at least the portion of it above the ocean's surface) from five volcanoes: Kohala, Maunakea, Hualālai, Mauna Loa, and Kīlauea. Given the importance of these volcanoes to the people who live on the island, it's hardly surprising that some of Hilo's streets are named after them. There's no street named after Kohala that I can find, but the other four are all represented. What's interested me for some years, however, is the particular streets the names have been applied to.

Let's start with Maunakea and Mauna Loa; they're the two biggest volcanoes on the island and the only two directly visible from Hilo. The modern town lies mainly on lava flows from Mauna Loa, though a small part of it is located on Maunakea north of the Wailuku river (which flows along the boundary line between the two volcanoes). Given the prominence of these two volcanoes and the place of Maunakea in Hawaiian culture, you might expect their names to be attached to prominent streets in Hilo. So I find it somewhat amusing that the eponymous Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa Streets are both tiny alleys in a residential part of town, barely wider than one lane and quite short.

You can see all four streets in the image above, and just how short the first two are. Unless you live on those streets, you'll pretty much never have occasion to drive on them. (Though I have on occasion driven down the unlabeled street that passes through both of them.) Hualālai, though not visible over the Saddle between Maunakea and Mauna Loa, fares better with its eponymous two-lane road Hualalai Street. It's moderately longer, with a number of shops and services located along it, and I probably have occasion to drive at least part of it perhaps once or twice a month. (Not sure I've ever driven that little wiggly bit at the southwest end, though.) When I had to retake the driving test in May to get my driver license again after letting it lapse in Australia part of the route involved both Hualalai Street and Kilauea Avenue.

Speaking of which, the image above is actually incomplete, for the reason that Kilauea Avenue is actually several times longer than the other three volcanically-christened roads. Here's another picture which shows its full extent:

I'm not sure if Kilauea Avenue is the longest road in Hilo, but it's certainly up there. It's interesting to me that of the four volcanoes with streets named after them, Kīlauea gets by far the longest (and widest, going up to four lanes for perhaps a third of its length). While Hilo has no official "Main Street", I could make a decent case that Kilauea Avenue comes pretty close to filling the position. (Personally I probably drive on at least parts of it a few times a month, on average.) It's interesting because Kīlauea itself isn't visible from Hilo, and while it's one of the two most active volcanoes on the island, unlike Mauna Loa its eruptions pose no direct threat to Hilo.

Of course, it could also be chance and historical development. Hilo was much smaller in the past, after all, and it might be that when the streets were named they were closer in size and it wasn't obvious which might expand in the future. According to oral tradition, Hilo is the site of the first human settlement in the islands, with archaeology suggesting it's been continuously inhabited for around a thousand years at this point, so it's possible whoever named the roads expected Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa Streets to become bigger in the future.

I did a little looking around and found Old Maps Online, which…well, you can probably guess what it does from the name. Searching for Hilo led me to the map above, from 1917. It's jaw-dropping to me to see just how much smaller Hilo was a hundred years ago, but what I found interesting is that I'm pretty sure all four streets are on it. Hualalai Street is a bit shorter, but other than that it looks like all four were pretty much in their current locations already over a century ago. It's hard to gauge where Kilauea Avenue stops on this map, since there isn't a highway present for it to merge into and it seems to turn into a road between Hilo and settlements further uphill, but it tracks its modern course quite well from what I could see. Unfortunately there are no street names on this map, and I don't know when the names were officially assigned. But it looks like there's a good chance that whenever they were the streets probably weren't too different from their modern course.

Ultimately it's a minor factoid about Hilo, but it's one I've had in the back of my mind to share for literal years at this point. There may be more history-related posts in this vein to come; I've been getting more interested in local history recently and learning some interesting things (for instance, you may notice the presence of a railroad track on the map above which is not there in the present day). We'll see where it goes. A hui hou!

An aerial view of Richardson beach

I randomly learned today that August 30 is National Beach Day, so in honor of this day I'd never heard of before, have this lovely panorama I put together from a visit to Richardson beach a few weeks ago.

Richardson beach is a popular local place on the outskirts of Hilo to go for swimming, and I think snorkeling as well; those little outlying island help break up the incoming waves. It's actually appeared on this blog before, way back in the misty recesses of 2011, when I was still only an undergraduate student in my second semester at UH Hilo trying to get some decent sunrise photos. Since I don't, in general, tend to spend a lot of time near the ocean that previous trip remains one of the handful of times I've seen a sea turtle here. It's  Anyway, happy National Beach Day! A hui hou!

Experiments in AI-assisted art: DALL•E

You might have heard about DALL•E (a combination of Dali and WALL•E) sometime in the past year or so, a machine-learning AI system by a research team called OpenAI which can take a natural language prompt like “A corgi made of jello dancing on top of a ball” and produce an image based on it. It can mimic a huge range of styles from realistic photographs, to digital art, to hand-drawn sketches or paintings, and has produced some remarkable output. It got some coverage back around June when the team behind it started opening up access to a few people, who started sharing the images they were using it to create. I happened across the form to request access, and, intrigued, signed up, not expecting for a moment that I'd get it without entering a Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn profile. Near the end of July I saw an article that OpenAI had opened DALL•E up to a million people, and imagine my surprise when I got an email notifying me I'd been selected.

“A corgi made of jello dancing on top of a ball, realistic photo”, by DALL•E.

Above you can see one of the images I created with DALL•E. I was trying to explain it to someone as, “That new AI system where you put in a crazy phrase [at which point I tried to come with the craziest phrase I could think of] like, ‘A corgi made of jello dancing on top of a ball,’ and it spits out an image of it.” And then, well, I had to actually try it and see what I got. (DALL•E actually produces four variations every time you give it a prompt, which will look generally similar but have some differences in style, allowing you to choose the one you like best.)

“An Impressionistic painting of the Gemini Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea in the style of Vincent Van Gogh”, by DALL•E.

It certainly has some quirks. While the site encourages you to be descriptive and specific in the prompt you give, it's hardly perfect at interpreting what you mean. In the image above I asked for two very specific things (the Gemini Observatory and Maunakea), and while it's done a decent job of an image (I rather like the composition of this one) it's inexplicably given the observatory two domes instead of the single one it has in reality. (DALL•E was weirdly fixated on the notion that Gemini = two domes, as I tried several variations on this prompt and pretty much all of them had that feature.)

“A delicious-looking hamburger in the shape of a Rubik's cube, professional food photography”, by DALL•E.

One funny article I read recently had the author playing with phrases like “X in the shape of Y” in regards to food, which led me to try the prompt above. (Which, side note, looks scruptious and I would totally eat.) I find, in general, that DALL•E works best if you give it a fairly specific prompt about generic objects, though you can certainly include phrases like “in the style of X artist.”

There's been some hand-wringing online about whether DALL•E might lead to the death of various creative professions in the visual arts, like concept artists. Having played with it, I'm not too worried. Oh, sure, as it rolls out to wider use there'll probably be some changes, in the same way powerful new tools have always produced changes. There will probably be a lot of small jobs that might've been done by hand before that DALL•E will replace (stock photography, in particular, is something that DALL•E could fill in for quite well I think). But as my experiments with it showed, there are things I can see in my mind's eye which I can't figure out a prompt to produce with DALL•E, and if I want to show them to the world I still need to pick up a paintbrush or break out Blender or something to that effect. Sometimes something DALL•E puts out sparks something in my imagination, which is neat; I'm actually half-tempted to take my paints to the summit of Maunakea and attempt an Impressionist painting of the Gemini Observatory myself now. Ultimately we're just on the cusp of AI-generated images from natural language prompts (there are several other models around pursuing similar things), and we'll just have to wait and see where it takes us. I read about someone using DALL•E to produce a logo for a program they wrote, which I thought was a neat use of it.

For now, I'll keep throwing in the occasional crazy prompt I think of. While writing this post I had the thought that perhaps it would be useful for generating images for text-heavy posts where I don't have a photo or something else to break it up. I often find it surprising how well DALL•E can handle fairly abstract or abstruse concepts. We'll see how it goes, but you might start seeing more DALL•E images around here in the future. A hui hou!

Four weeks with the Steam Deck: a limited review

This past Thursday I finished making changes to my second paper and writing the response to the referee about it, and sent them around to my co-authors. While I'm not completely done at this stage, that should be the last really major bit of work I need to do on both papers, and I should – finally – start having a bit more free time to devote to other pursuits once again. Like, say, writing more blog posts.

My productivity these past four weeks has not been helped by the arrival of my long-awaited Steam Deck. If you don't know what a Steam Deck is, it's probably easiest just to show you a picture:

Briefly, it's a portable hand-held computer designed for playing games pretty much anywhere. Valve, the company behind Steam (the biggest digital game store for PCs), announced them out of the blue last year (I want to say around August), with a few days' warning before opening up a system where people could put $5 down to reserve a spot in a queue to be able to buy one as Valve produced them. Originally slated for Christmas 2021, they were delayed to the end of March due to supply chain issues, but have been steadily rolling out since with production ramping up over time.

They also turned out to be overwhelmingly popular. I got my reservation in about an hour and fifteen minutes after the system went live (which necessitated getting up at 4 AM in Melbourne), and it took over four months before they worked through all the reservations before mine and I got my eagerly-awaited email letting me know I could put in an order. (I'd have been in the first five minutes if the Steam servers hadn't overloaded and crashed with everyone trying to reserve one at once when it went live.)

It's basically the device I've been waiting for practically my entire life, though hardware and technology needed to advance to this point before it could be made. It's not the first portable hand-held gaming system on the market; there have been a number over the past few decades. But unlike the others, this is a full-fledged computer running a Linux-based operating system, which means it will run tens of thousands of games out of the box (including those from other systems via emulation). It's tightly integrated with Steam, which meant that upon starting it up and logging into my account my entire gaming library was available to download and play (though not everything works well just yet, as a lot of games don't have great controller support and have to use the trackpads for mouse emulation).

Take it outside and get some fresh air! (Though I wouldn't play in full sun. Also hand for scale.)

Anyway, this is the device I wished I had on every interminable, cramped, awkward flight I've ever been on. I've tried gaming on flights with laptops in the past, but laptops are a very imperfect solution to the problem of taking your PC games on the go. They're unwieldy in the confines of a tiny airline seat, and since they're general purpose devices you're wasting a lot of battery power on things superfluous to running your game. Ultimately, it was not a fun experience nor one I repeated more than once or twice. I'm still not looking forward to whenever I have to fly next, but at least I'll have something to help mitigate the misery now. 

Beyond future flight speculations, I've also found the Deck to be quite nice as a way to play games other than at my desk. This surprised me, since I've never thought of gaming at my desk as arduous, but it turns out to be really nice to game on the couch, or on my bed, or even (gasp!) outdoors. 3D games tend to sap the battery pretty quickly and I wouldn't generally play them on the Deck (I do still have a beefy PC for that), but smaller 2D games (of which I have a fair number) work quite well and many can be played for upwards of 6 hours (long enough to get me from Hawaii to the mainland or vice versa).

There's a lot more to the Deck that I haven't mentioned (like how it has a microSD card slot that you can put games on for effectively unlimited extra storage), but other people have covered it better than me by now, and honestly if you're reading this you probably already know if you want one or not. (Though I'll try to answer any questions people might have.) I've had it for a little over four weeks now, and I've really enjoyed having it around to pick up and play something for a short burst, or to do so away from my desk. I'm looking forward to years more enjoyment out of it (and some flights rendered less of an awful experience), and as it's getting late here I think I'll go do a little gaming in bed before hitting the hay. A hui hou!

Research recap, or: why I haven't had time to post this month

It's been pretty quiet on the blog front here this month, though not because things have been quiet for me. I realize now that I never mentioned it, but around the end of May (right when I had COVID-19) I received referee reports for the two papers I'd submitted back at the beginning of April (which contain basically all the work from my PhD project). After recovering from COVID I started working on making changes and writing our responses to the referees (one for each paper) at a leisurely pace. While I was certainly intending to be faster than the six-month deadline, I also wasn't in huge rush during the few-week recovery period where I still felt less able to concentrate or think hard. (Especially in the evenings after a full day of working my day job!)

At least, I wasn't in a rush until a few weeks ago. See, in addition to my two papers, there was a third (primarily written by my advisor but with all of us in my research group as co-authors) which we had submitted to the journal Science, with the intention that all three would come out at the same time. (If you don't know, Science is one of the two premier journals [along with Nature] in the physical sciences, so it being published there would be a big deal for our combined research.) Around the beginning of July we finally got the referee reports back for that paper, which were…mixed. Two out of three recommended the paper be published, while the third had some reservations and didn't recommend it for publication. One of their sticking points was that the Science paper relied on my papers for further details, and my papers hadn't been accepted for publication yet. Fortunately, the editor at Science in charge of our paper was inclined towards the two favorable reviewers, and after some back-and-forth indicated that my papers being accepted would go a long way towards resolving the unfavorable reviewer's qualms and help tip the balance in favor of our Science paper being accepted.

This had the immediate effect of turning my sedate response-generation process into a mad-cap dash to get the responses to the referees back and the papers accepted. In some good news, the changes needed for my second paper were quite minimal, I was able to submit it last week, and a day later I got the news that it was accepted for publication. Which is a big milestone, considering it's the first paper I've written that's been accepted; it's also the one which the Science paper primarily references, so its acceptance means that paper can move along as well. I've had no time to rest on my laurels, however, since my first paper still needs editing, and in order to have all three papers come out together it'd be good to get it resubmitted and (hopefully) accepted as soon as possible. So my free time has been in pretty short supply so far this month, as the first paper had a lot more comments to reply to than the second. That doesn't mean I haven't done anything else (I still have to rest and recuperate sometime), and I'm looking forward to sharing some of what I've been up to in future posts. (I originally meant this post to be about something different, but realized I needed to explain what I've been up to first.) But if those posts aren't immediately forthcoming, well, you'll know why. I'm optimistically projecting I'll be done with the first paper response by sometime next week, and then hopefully I'll once again have more free time on my hands. But we'll see! A hui hou!

Watch a cruise ship leave Hilo Bay

One of the places I've been flying my new Mini 3 Pro is a scenic lookout point along the coast just north of downtown Hilo, along the Hāmākua highway. From there you can get a good view out over Hilo Bay, as it's just across from the end of the breakwater protecting the harbor. It's pretty much the closest place I can go to fly over the ocean due to the proximity of the airport to the bay beaches, and as once I got over my worry that my drone was going to randomly plummet from the sky into the ocean, I discovered that flying over open water is pretty great because of the lack of obstacles or changes in ground height to have to pay attention to.

Coincidentally, the first time I went was on a Tuesday, which is the day each week when a cruise ship visits Hilo from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM. I got there just after the cruise ship had left the bay and was heading out into the ocean, and decided that it would be an interesting challenge trying to film it in the process of exiting the bay. The next week I went, the weather was bad, with spitting rain not long before the ship passed by and threatening overcast skies; I was also caught off guard by just how fast it could move, so I barely managed to get my drone in the air fast enough to catch it, and only got a few photos (which weren't great due to the lighting conditions).

With the days starting to shorten again after the summer solstice, I tried again this week, and this time the weather cooperated and I was ready (just). I could tell that my confidence was much improved even from just the week before, as I quickly got my drone into the air and sent it whizzing off over the waves.

But rather than continue to tell you about it, I'll just show you! I got enough footage to put together a short video, and here it is:

That ship was really moving, mind you; all but the very last shot in that video is from a single nine-minute take, and that includes the time getting to and from the boat at the beginning and end. The time the ship took to get out of the harbor once it lined up was no more than about three minutes, which is part of why I wasn't prepared for it the week before. All that movement made it a really interesting target to try to match velocity with and get some cinematic shots of, though, especially since I didn't have to worry about hitting anything else while flying.

As I was editing the video I realized it's been a little over a year since my last one (from before I left Australia), and it felt great to get back into editing again. Hopefully this will be merely the first of many to come! A hui hou!

Laupāhoehoe Point, aerial edition

Yesterday morning I visited Laupāhoehoe Point  with a photographer friend of mine. I'd told him about getting a drone, and he suggested an outing wheret I could fly my drone to get some photos and he could get some photos of it (and me) in action. I last visited Laupāhoehoe Beach Park back in 2015, but it was pretty much the same as I remembered.

This shot is back up the gulch we drove down into to reach the point.

Laupāhoehoe Point sits at the end of a gulch, a little spit of land jutting into the Pacific in stark contrast to the sea cliffs on either side. Both times I've been it was beautifully sunny weather with a few clouds, and a strong wind blowing off the ocean. This was actually the windiest I've taken my drone up, so I was a bit worried it'd encounter some problems. Luckily, the Mini 3 can handle surprisingly strong winds—while it was definitely buffeted about a bit, I was never worried that it wasn't going to be able to make it flying against the wind or anything like that.

Panorama at Laupāhoehoe Point. Click for a larger view.

Though, due to the wind I didn't fly quite as high as I might otherwise have. I got this nice panorama looking out to sea from about 50 meters up (of the 120 m I could've gone). The drone-generated panorama had some visible glitches in the horizon (probably from the aforementioned-buffeting), but I saved the raw photos and was able to get this lovely panorama out of Hugin. I got it at a good time; the wind was intermittently blowing clouds overhead, and I was surprised to see, upon reviewing the photos, just how washed out and dull the ones in the shade looked compared to the one in full sunlight. (You can see this in the top photo, actually, though the valley further back in the center was still unshadowed.) It doesn't show in the panorama due to the distortion, but those sea-cliffs to either side of the point run basically straight from north-west to south-east.

It was a fun trip, and is the farthest I've gone yet for drone flying (it's about 40 minutes out from Hilo). Interestingly, while my original intent with getting a drone was simply getting aerial photos and videos, I'm finding that I'm coming to enjoy the simple act of flying at least as much. I'm excited to go out and fly, even in places I've explored before or where I don't end up taking many photos. It's a new experience, but I think I finally have a proper outdoor hobby. So expect more aerial photos (and videos) in future! A hui hou!

Dreams of flight, fulfilled!

I don't remember when I first heard about remote-control quadcopter drones, but it must've been some time ago, approaching a decade. I remember because my impression at the time was that they were toys: a little RC helicopter-like device you could send hovering around in the air for a few minutes. Neat, in a way, but not something I was really interested in.

Over the years I didn't pay much attention to the improvements taking place in drone development (especially the inclusion of cameras), until about two years ago. Sometime a few months into lockdown in Melbourne in 2020, I started watching videos incorporating drone footage that were popping up in my recommendations on YouTube. At a time when I could leave the house for no more than an hour a day (and then only to walk about enjoying a grey and dreary Melbourne winter), seeing people's soaring footage from around the world (often from before the pandemic, to be clear) made me realize that drones now had the potential to be more than mere toys: in the right hands, they could be conduits to completely new perspectives on familiar things, vicariously allowing people the power of flight in something other than a ponderous airplane. I was quickly hooked.

But of course, I was completing a PhD at the time; I had neither time, money, nor access to anywhere interesting to fly, and no prospects for any in the near future, so it remained a dream. But if there's one thing I can be when needed, it's patient, so I bided my time and started learning more about the various kinds of drones out there, dreaming of a day when I might possibly return to Hawaii and have a drone of my own, able to show off the natural wonders of my adopted home like other people were doing for places around the globe. Miraculously, the first part of that dream came true last year when I was able to move back to Hawaii with a great new job. And this week, the second part came true when the DJI Mini 3 Pro I ordered arrived!

An early-morning shot looking north-east towards Hilo bay, from about 60 m up.

Yes, I've finally made the jump into drone flying, and I am having a blast. I had plenty of other more necessary things to spend money on when I first arrived back in Hawaii, so I've been waiting patiently for months. In January rumors of a new DJI drone in the Mini family surfaced, which piqued my interest, so I held off until it was officially revealed in May. The Mini line of DJI drones represents drones under 250 grams, which both means they don't need to be registered in the US if used for solely recreational flying, and makes them eminently portable on, say, a nice long hike. They're not the highest-end consumer drones out there, but they're highly capable little flying cameras, and the Mini 3 Pro continues that tradition. So when it came out to good reviews (the specs having been leaked a few weeks earlier), I took the plunge and ordered.

A few miles out of Hilo, about 1000 feet in elevation. (Find me near photo center…)

I'd been vaguely hoping it would arrive before my trip back to California last week, but alas. It instead arrived on Tuesday, and I've been eagerly taking it out flying almost as often as possible; I was so excited on Wednesday after flying it the first time Tuesday evening that I woke up early and went flying before work—then again after work. The Mini 3 Pro routinely gets upwards of 20 minutes of flight time on a single battery, so even with just one I can get out for a good length of time and take photos and videos and practice my flying.

Another shot towards the bay; greater distance from the airport let me go up to the full 120 m limit.

I find the experience of flying itself magical, though it's a bit nervewracking, to be sure, especially sending my (not exactly cheap!) drone far away from myself either horizontally or vertically. Still, being able to get a perspective from up in the sky is worth the nerves, and the feeling of directing it around through the air is a lot of fun. I haven't been more than a few miles out of Hilo yet, but I love being able to look out over the city and recognize places from the air. I'm still practicing my cinematography skills, but I can hardly wait to start exploring some of the amazing sights this island has to offer in photos and video. (To aid with the latter I've got some additional batteries on order to allow longer flight times, but they won't ship until July.) National parks are off-limits (a fact I'm both happy and sad about), so don't expect any cool aerial shots of Kīlauea or anything like that, but there's still a lot of island available to fly over, and I'm looking forward to having more photos to show in the future. Now, it's off to bed so I can get up early and fly again tomorrow morning while the Sun is low. A hui hou!

Catching COVID-19

Well, I suppose it was bound to happen eventually, but I finally caught COVID-19. I took a short trip back to California to visit family over Memorial Day weekend, and came down with what I initially took to be the flu in the middle of it. The incubation time for the Omicron variant matches up suspiciously well with my outbound flight, and I started feeling vaguely off over the next few days, so that's most likely where I picked it up (though I can't entirely rule out catching it earlier, before leaving the island).

While I did have some vague feeling of coming down with something, it really came on quickly overnight. I woke up the next day having slept horribly with aching muscles everywhere and feeling utterly drained of energy. I thought it was the flu based on how powerfully it hit me (and how little I'd reacted to my COVID-19 vaccines), and the experiences I had with the flu back in 2018 and 2019. I actually only took an at-home COVID-19 test to rule it out, only for the result to come back extremely positive. Thankfully, while it was pretty awful for two days, I'm definitely on the road to recovery and it's since morphed into a more cold-like set of symptoms like a cough and sore throat. And night sweats. I'll not miss waking up each morning drenched in cold sweat for the past few days now.

I have to say, with how utterly wretched it's made me feel so far, it retroactively gives meaning to all that time I spent in Melbourne isolating at home. I wouldn't wish the experience of having COVID-19 on anyone (and if I reacted like that while fully vaccinated, boosted, and generally young and healthy, imagine if I wasn't!), and it's nice to think that all my self-sacrifice and restraint (along with tens of thousands of other Victorians) was for something all those long winter months of lockdown. If you're one of the increasingly-rare individuals who hasn't caught COVID-19 yet, and are wondering if it's worth just “getting it over with”…take it from me, it's not. Omicron may be milder than Delta (I'm not equipped to say), but it is by no means mild. This would easily go in the top five times I've been sickest in my life (though I think my 2018 flu still takes top place there).

On a positive note, I'm clearly past the worst and making a recovery. I don't seem to have lost my sense of smell at all, and while it's hard to make definite pronouncements at this juncture I'm optimistic that I won't end up with long COVID. I also took the remainder of this week off as sick leave, so I'm getting some actual rest and relaxation such as I haven't had in years. That part, at least, has been very welcome, and I actually felt motivated to paint today for the first time since leaving Australia, so perhaps I'll have something to share in the near future. A hui hou!

Lāhainā noon, May 2022

Now that I'm back in the tropics again, I got to experience a uniquely tropical phenomenon today: at noon, the sun stood directly at the zenith overhead. In Hawaii, such days are known as “lāhainā noon” days, after a contest held by Bishop Museum in 1990 in which that was the winning entry. Briefly, as the Earth travels around the sun, the latitude at which it appears directly overhead (the subsolar point) varies from +23.5° on the June solstice to −23.5° on the December solstice. Points at those latitudes will see the sun reach directly overhead on just that one day, but points between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn will see the sun pass directly overhead twice a year. On the equator this happens on the equinoxes, then steadily closer to the solstices the further away you get.

Here in Hilo, at a latitude of +19.7°, the two lāhainā noon days are May 18 and July 24 (at least for 2022, it's possible the exact day could shift by one depending on e.g., whether it's a leap year). So this is the first one I've experienced since moving back at the end of September last year. For the next two months, roughly, the sun will appear north of zenith in the sky. Directly at lāhainā noon, however, shadows are cast straight down, so tall straight objects like flagpoles effectively have no shadow. I tried to get some photos, but there was a haze of clouds over the sun that made shadows very faint—I could make them out by eye, but they didn't really come out well on camera. I'll just have to wait for July to try again.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the name, it comes from the Lāhainā region on the island of Maui, which, being on the leeward side of the island, is prone to droughts. It can be translated fairly literally as “cruel sun.” Another, older, Hawaiian name for this phenomenon is “kau ka lā i ka lolo,” which has the humorous translation of “the sun rests upon the brain.” Anyway, that's all for now. Hopefully I'll be able to get some photos next time the sun comes around overhead. A hui hou!

Birthday #33

Another trip around the Sun, another birthday. The first one I've spent in Hilo since 2017, in fact. Which in itself is a birthday present. We finally got some belated winter rain for most of April and the beginning of May, but the weather's been really pleasant these past two weeks or so, with a mix of brilliant sunny days, enough clouds to keep it from getting too hot, and light showers.

This past weekend was AstroDay here in Hilo (also my 137th birthday on Mercury!), annual event where various observatories and astronomy-related organizations (like the UH Hilo astronomy department) set up tables in the mall and engage with the public. I've volunteered before both as an undergrad and with the JCMT, but the latest I would've done it would've been 2015, so it's been a while since I last participated. This time I was at the Gemini Observatory table with a few co-workers, and while it was rather draining (so many people!) it was also a really positive experience. It's nice to interact with a generally very supportive and interested public and engage in some outreach, and with the pandemic this was also my first chance to really work together with some of colleagues in person.

Anyway, I'm off to play board games with some friends as a birthday get-together this evening. Here's to many more birthdays in Hawaii!

Terraforming Mars (again)

This past week a game called Terraformers, about (what else?) terraforming Mars released on Steam. I've been waiting for its release for a while now, having played both its initial demo for Steam Next Fest nearly a year ago and then the free prologue that came out back in October. It's a neat game, and it's been interesting to see how it developed over time, but instead of telling you about it here, I will link to an article about it which I submitted over at Gaming on Linux, and which came out today. I didn't really plan to write an article beforehand, I just enjoyed Terraformers enough while playing it that I figured the worst that could happen was that it didn't get accepted. If you're interested, check out the article! A hui hou!

(And if anyone's wondering about the closing sentence over there, the other three games I have about terraforming Mars are Surviving Mars, Terraforming Mars, and Ad Astra.)

Expanding the Farmstand: Part II

This weekend I performed my first complete reset on my Farmstand—that's where I harvest all the plants, take it all apart and clean it, put it back together, and reseed (generally with new seedlings, though you could transfer mature plants over if they were still producing). Lettuce Grow recommends doing this about every three months, which at first I thought was a bit frequent, but I can see the rationale behind it better now. Plants—at least the ones offered for use with the Farmstand—grow fast enough hydroponically that they've generally finished their useful lifespans in less than three months after arriving as seedlings. For instance, my dill, which I planted at the beginning of December, flowered and died off in less than four months, and most lettuces start bolting (growing tall but with small leaves) after 5–9 weeks. So there's not really much point to letting things continue growing indefinitely. I've learned that lesson after this first cycle, and will be a little more prompt in harvesting things in future. (And proactively pruning, because pruning the bushes that my oregano and thyme had become by this point was un-fun, to say the least.)

The actual process was straightforward, if somewhat physically exhausting. I ordered some replacement seedlings, and spent the last two weeks before they arrived systematically harvesting various plants. I've been composting the organic remains with Lomi, but it has a limited capacity per run so I tried to spread things out over as much time as I could. Lettuce Grow was also running another promotion for a free Farmstand level with purchase of at least eighteen seedlings around the time I ordered, so I took the opportunity to expand up to five levels with a capacity of thirty plants in total. 

And here it is! It's nearly as tall as I am now—I can still see over the top flat-footed, but only just. I used to wonder why Lettuce Grow only ever talked about going up to six levels—after all, the pump used to bring water up to the top is quite strong and could easily lift water higher—but putting the fifth level on for the first time I understand why. Even at that height I was needing to connect the electrical connections of the light-providing Glow-Rings (which go up the inside of the Farmstand) sight-unseen in the highest levels. I imagine I might need to stand on something for a sixth level, at which point the Farmstand would officially be taller than me. When everything's producing, thirty plants is going to putting out a lot of produce, so I'm again in no major hurry to add a sixth level, but who knows? It's nice to be able to share the excess with people, so if there's another promotion later this year…well, we'll find out, won't we? A hui hou!

Berry good!

Now that I'm no longer spending my nights and weekends getting my papers ready, I've once again got time and motivation to dash off silly projects like this Venn diagram comparing things we call berries, and things which are berries according to botanists:

I got the idea for this upon learning this weekend that pumpkins are actually giant berries, botanically speaking. I already knew raspberries and blackberries weren't berries, so I got curious about just how large the overlap is. This is by no means a comprehensive image; I listed everything I could think of with “berry” in the name, then looked at the Wikipedia page on berries for more such things and examples of things that were berries botanically. There are definitely more things that fall into the bottom circle, I'm sure; I left a few controversial ones out, like avocados, because there's apparently some disagreement about whether they're actually berries or not.

On the whole, I was actually slightly surprised at how many things fell into the intersection of the diagram. I was expecting more entries in the top circle, but it looks like possibly a majority of things with “berry” in the name are actually berries, botanically speaking. Though there could very well be more things called berries than I could think of, so if you think of any please leave a comment!

A few things in the bottom circle also surprised me; like, I can see how tomatoes and grapes could be berries, they're similar enough in form to things like blueberries or cranberries that it makes sense. But pumpkins? Eggplants? Bananas?? Bananas definitely surprised me. Guess I've got a fun bit of party trivia for the future.

And speaking of strawberries (which are actually “accessory fruits”), I had my first one from my Farmstand! They're a bit on the slower side to grow (compared to, say, lettuce), since I started the plant at the start of January, but the strawberry I had was deliciously sweet. There's another red one and a few still green that are coming along, so I'm looking forward to having some more perhaps later this week or the next. I'll probably have some more news on the indoor farming front around that time as well. A hui hou! 

Papers are submitted!

It's been six months (plus a few days) since I arrived back in Hilo, and yesterday was a pretty significant milestone for me: I finally submitted the two papers that form the basis of my thesis to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society! While the papers were mostly written before I moved (indeed, they've been being written for literally years now), they went through a long period of editing and refinement and rewriting since, and even had some new sections added along the way. (Including just this past week!) It mostly took so long because I was having to do it on weekends and holidays and weeknights after work, but it's finally done.

My two papers were submitted along with another two (including one to Science) by people in the solar twins method research group as part of a coordinated wave, revealing the method I spent my PhD establishing and its results: a constraint on variation in the fine-structure constant nearly 100 times more precise than the current best constraints from astronomy. (At some point in the future I'd like to write a post series explaining my PhD work in simplified terms, so I won't go into detail here just yet.)

This is just the first step; from here the papers will go to peer review (assuming they're accepted, but I don't expect that to be an issue), and probably within a few weeks or months I'll get them back and have to make changes for the final published versions. The upshot, however, is that—for now—I actually have free time, for basically the first time since moving. I'm luxuriating this evening in the lack of a feeling in the back of my mind that I really ought to be working on my papers, for the first time in over half a year (I've got other things I need to get done that I've been putting off to work on my papers, but now I can finally start checking them off.)

It's a significant milestone for a few reasons: for the solar twins method, as these papers will establish its validity and open it up to the wider research community, allowing people to build on it in the future. And for me, I'm finally getting to share all the work I've been doing for the past 4½ years beyond the handful of people involved. Many, perhaps the majority, of PhD students in astronomy already have several papers published by the time they get their degrees, so it's validating to finally have my work published as well. (Due to the nature of my establishing the solar twins method almost from scratch, it didn't really make sense to publish results along the way; instead we needed to have everything done to prove everything worked before we could really publish any of it.) With my papers submitted (and eventually published), I'm also finally going to start having more free time to begin recovering from the past few years of nigh-unrelenting stress and toil, and start getting to enjoy living in Hawaii again. I'm bursting with ideas of things to do and create and try, and hopefully that'll translate to more posts this year sharing the results of those ideas. Maybe not immediately, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's more than just the point it's been for years. A hui hou!