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!