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!

...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.

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!

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!

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!

Farewell to 2020

With less than four hours to go to 2021 as I type this, I wanted to cap off a turbulent year with one final post.

Where to begin? I have so much to be thankful for over the past 366 days. Just under a year ago, in early January, I flew through Shanghai airport on my way back from visiting family in California, just a few days after hearing about a new disease called “COVID-19” which was showing up in China. Thankfully I avoided catching it, either then or since. And while multiple members of my family caught it back in the U.S., they all survived more-or-less unscathed, a fortune not shared by millions of grieving people around the globe this year.

My PhD research has also thankfully been mostly unscathed by the tumult of transitioning to working from home from early March. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more upset-resistant project than mine: my data is all archival (so I don't have to worry about observing runs being disrupted), I already had it all downloaded on a hard drive I can bring with me, and all my research happens on my university-provided laptop (so no worrying about the Swinburne supercomputer being down or having a faulty internet connection like many of my fellow students). I've continued to make slow but steady progress over the past ~9 months, and haven't had unavoidable delays like students in other fields who were doing lab work have. While the transition to working from home initially produced psychological stresses not unlike a house move (which was interesting to observe), once those wore off after a few weeks I've been quite happy not to be taking lengthy public transportation every day, and am probably going to continue working from home for the remainder of my PhD. (Which should hopefully be finished before the end of March.)

Sure, what I'm calling The Great Melbourne Lockdown was a bit rough. But I made it through with a guaranteed student stipend, the newly-discovered ability to order groceries online from my local grocery store, and the natural propensity of an introvert (or maybe just a hermit) to be at home when given the option. The winter was miserably cold, since keeping my room warm all the time in Melbourne's "What's insulation?" housing would've been prohibitively expensive with a space heater, but when, outside of the tropics, aren't winters miserable? (I'm channeling it towards motivation to find a job in the tropics again.) And on the plus side I didn't have to tramp a kilometer to and from the train station every day no matter the weather—on near-freezing rainy days I could time my daily walk with a break in the clouds, or even skip it altogether.

So on the whole, I really do have many things to be grateful for this past year. But what's on the horizon for 2021? 

Well, as mentioned, I hope to be finishing up my PhD and submitting my thesis by the end of March. Along the way I plan to submit two papers, containing the results of my three and a half years' of work. (I'm also contemplating a series of posts covering my research aimed at a layman audience now that the results are nearly done.) This is the time of year for astronomy jobs to be posted, so I'll be kicking the job hunt into high gear next week. It's no secret that I miss Hawaii and will be checking for jobs there, but who knows where things will go from here? I'll be looking for astronomy jobs first, but the skills I've learned from my PhD are quite broadly applicable; this year's put a lot of things into perspective for me, and I wouldn't mind potentially putting my skills to work in a medical field for a few years.

In the meantime, the prospect of summer is looming in the near future…probably. While we had some extremely hot days in late November presaging the approaching estival season, the weather here in Melbourne took a dip back to cooler temperatures for most of December. I've been wearing warm clothes and occasionally running the heater the past two weeks (including on Christmas) due to the antarctic cold fronts blowing up from the south lately. Now, as much as I dislike being cold, I can at least mitigate it with clothing and heating; cooling down from Melbourne's intensely hot summers (with nights that sometimes barely cool down) is a bit trickier, as the AC unit we got installed last year is out in the living room and doesn't really reach back to my bedroom. Supposedly we're in for a cooler and wetter summer due to a La Niña year in the Pacific, and I will happily take that over the more typical Melbournian summers I've endured the past few years. (I've also got a new gadget that might help out a bit with that, but I'll save a full discussion and review for a post early next year…)

As we approach anno Domini 2021, I'm feeling fairly upbeat. Yes, there are the multiple promising vaccines that will hopefully bring an end to the worst pandemic in a century; but I'm also really looking forward to finishing this PhD into which I've poured a tenth of my life and moving on to something different. Exactly what, I don't know yet, but that's the exciting part. I've been reading two books lately: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein, and Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement, by Rich Karlgaard. Range is a study about how many of the greatest breakthroughs and innovations throughout history have come from people who, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of specializing ever more deeply in a single subject, were broadly acquainted with many, allowing them to see and make connections their more specialized peers weren't equipped to. And Late Bloomers complements that by documenting many people who, despite society's push for us to be high-achievers by our 20's, bloomed and discovered new talents much later in life.

Range argues that instead of knowing exactly what we want to do for the rest of our lives before college, we are actually very ill-equipped to make that decision and should instead spend time during and after college trying various different jobs and experiences out for short periods of time, both to become more well-rounded and experienced and to have a better chance of discovering what exactly we want to do. Late Bloomers similarly advocates for patience in figuring out our path, due to full brain development demonstrably happening later in people these days (with a median age around 25, but even into late 20s or early 30s), and being open to the possibility of change and discovering new talents and interests throughout life.

Taken together, they've been very comforting to me. I've been secretly bothered for a long time by the way my brain doesn't really fit with the prevailing societal pressure to “pick something early and specialize in it forever.” My interests shift with the years, and I've held several jobs over the past decade rather than a single one. Range taught me to look upon my breadth of experience as an asset rather than a disadvantage, and Late Bloomers taught me not to fear the changes of time, or to worry about not already having changed the world or become a multi-millionaire. I've learned a lot over the course of my PhD; research methods, for sure, but I've also had time to become much more knowledgeable in Python (which will serve me well for any number of possible jobs) and I've discovered latent talents like painting and music scoring I never knew I had. I've learned that maybe research (or at least academia) isn't for me like I thought when I was younger, and I'm eager to try something new when I'm done with my PhD. Between it all, while I don't know what the future holds, I'm feeling more optimistic about it than I have for the past few years. And with that, here's to a Happy New Year 2021! Hau'oli Makahiki Hou!

Australian Thanksgiving, 2020 Edition

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I had my own little Thanksgiving meal this year after noticing this mini turkey loaf at the grocery store the day before:

What a year it's been, eh? I'm certainly thankful that all my relatives that caught COVID-19 (including my parents and maternal grandparents) are still alive, and that I haven't gotten it myself that I know of. I'm thankful that Melbourne today recorded a full 28 days since the last COVID-19 diagnosis (I think the last active case was declared cleared a day or two ago). Certainly, even with the fact that Victoria was hardest-hit by far among Australia's states and territories, we're truly blessed here considering basically all of the rest of the world.

While adjusting to working from home (or “living at work,” as one of my grad student friends put it) was an upheaval (similar in scope and stress to moving house, I found to my surprise—I guess it's the sudden breaking of most routines), I've adjusted to it pretty happily now. I do not miss the roughly hour-long commute to and from Swinburne amidst crowds of people on public transport. I can tailor my daily exercise to the state of the weather, instead of having to tramp back and forth to the train station at a specific time, often in pouring rain or burning Sun in the heat of the afternoon. The latest news from Swinburne is not to expect to be back on campus until February, and while I would still have potentially three more months to finish up my PhD at that point I think it'd be easier (and I'd prefer) to just continue working from home for the remaining time rather than re-adjusting to a different schedule.

Speaking of, the PhD remains a constant struggle, but at least we had some encouraging news last week: my advisor finally performed the last few steps on my results to get constraints on variation in the fine-structure constant, \(\alpha\), and even with just a subset of about 15% of the most Sun-like stars in our sample the error came out to be just 10 parts-per-billion (ppb). (The full preliminary result was \(\Delta\alpha/\alpha=11\pm10\) ppb.) We'd previously estimated a final error of 10–100 ppb, so having it come out directly at the low end of our estimation was a pleasant surprise. That also means that the constraints we'll be getting from my PhD work will be a full 100 times better than the current best constraints from astronomical tests, which are at the 1000 ppb (1 part-per-million) level. Even a factor of 10 improvement would be quite impressive—PhDs are awarded for less—but a full hundred-fold improvement is really quite remarkable, and really speaks to the amount of information available from high-resolution stellar spectroscopy (though extracting that information to that level of precision has taken the preceding three years—almost 10%!—of my life).

There's still a number of sources of systematic error to investigate, and we may refine exactly how we calculate that number, so it may change in the final result, but likely not by much—certainly not by a factor of 10, probably more like a factor of 2. With that level of precision we'll be going for a short paper in Science, though probably not until next year when it can coincide with my already-in-progress papers on the process of making such measurements.

With that in mind, I've finally signed up for my own ORCID ID number. If you haven't heard of ORCID, it's a not-for-profit organization which curates ID numbers for researcher, allowing them to have one unique identifier that can be used to unambiguously identify people's contributions to research. Admittedly, in my case there are exactly zero other Daniel Berkes publishing in astronomy—I checked—but it's useful for people who might share names with other researchers, and it just makes it simpler for people to look you up without having to search by name by offering a simple URI which can hyperlinked, encoded in a QR code, etc.. It also offers one convenient place to tie in all the information about your career such as education, employment, papers, and so forth, and you can check mine out right here:

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7181-3020

Anyway, that's all for tonight! A hui hou!

Lockdown Letup!

As of today, the 111-day lockdown in Melbourne has finally ended, with two days of zero new COVID-19 cases on Monday and Tuesday. Travel is still restricted to a 25 km radius within the Melbourne metropolitan area, but we can now leave our houses for any reason at all again, instead of just the four approved reasons¹ that've been the law of the land for nearly too long to remember at this point.

Sometimes referred to as Lockdown 2.0, I'm lumping it in with the first lockdown from ~March to mid-May as The Great Melbourne Lockdown of 2020, since I (more fool I) held off on actually emerging from the first one for a few weeks out of an abundance of caution. Had I been in any other state (or even city in Victoria) I'd have been fine, but due to a combination of bad luck and bad decisions that led to COVID-19 getting out of the quarantine hotels via private security guards I was just about to resume external activities in late June when the second lockdown happened. Maybe it wasn't so bad for the people who enjoyed the few weeks of freedom in late May and June, but for me I've been effectively locked down from mid-March to late October.

I find myself a bit conflicted at this point. Even now, I'm not entirely unhappy to be staying home; it's nice being able to pick the time I want to go outside, instead of being forced to tramp through whatever weather we happen to be having around the time the trains are running, and I'm saving something like 1.5 hours a day in commute times (plus the costs). But I'm also quite happy to have the option of leaving; I'm going to see about heading into Swinburne this weekend² and pick up as much of my painting supplies and equipment that have been sitting there for seven months as I can. Even if I personally don't particularly want to be leaving my house all that much, there's something that eats away at your mind like acid when you're not allowed to. I think I may see about getting involved with prison ministries in future; if nothing else, this has given me a lot more empathy for the incarcerated and a greater appreciation for personal freedom.

For now, at least, Melbourne seems to be in a pretty good place; there will undoubtedly continue to be scattered cases over the coming days, as we definitely haven't eliminated the virus, but hopefully the government's beefed up its contact tracing enough that it can jump on any outbreaks. For all of the hardship it's been, at least we're looking to be in a much better place than much of the rest of the world which is rapidly spiraling out of control in terms of case numbers. The big question going forward is, will there be a third wave? I'm struck by how well the first two waves here in Melbourne mirrored those of the 1918 H1N1 influenza outbreak, which, tellingly, went through three waves with the second being much worse than the first. Of course, the rest of Australia as this point has only been through effectively a single wave, proving that it's possible to break out of this morbid historical re-enactment, so here's hoping we can break out of it here as well in the future. A hui hou!

¹ Grocery shopping, (essential) work, (essential) education, and personal exercise.

² If I can get security to let me into the astronomy building; after enough people were flouting the more lax “work from home if you can” restrictions between the two lockdowns Swinburne deactivated everyone's security cards to stop people from coming on to campus to work.

The Lockdown Life

This past Wednesday, Melbourne (and one shire to the north) went back into Stage 3 lockdown for six weeks due to rising case number of COVID-19. This is after we'd gotten all the way down a few days in early June with zero new reported cases, then a few weeks of just single-digit new cases. Then, near the end of June, we started getting double-digit numbers, which stretched into two weeks, then eventually breached triple digits just within the last week or so. In contrast, most of the rest of Australia has been completely or almost completely free of reported new cases, other than New South Wales which is still getting a low number irregularly. Practically overnight Victoria has became a pariah state, with all the other states and territories closing their borders and politely but firmly making it known that Victorians aren't welcome 'round these parts, y’hear?

It's a bit of a disappointment, considering we seemed to have beaten the virus more-or-less and were starting to open back up again. Out of an abundance of caution I didn't go anywhere since the lockdown started to lift in late May except for a single visit to friends, but as June progressed I was starting to think about heading into my desk at Swinburne to pick some things up (especially some more paint and something to paint on, as I have a very limited selection of the former and have nearly run out of the latter).

It's odd that this second lockdown hit me harder than the first one, considering I hadn't even really come out of the first one to begin with; I know friends who were starting to get out and about in the interim where it seemed like we were on top of things. It just feels more unjust somehow—those of us who've been being good for months now are forced back into lockdown through no fault of our own due to the actions of a relatively tiny amount of people who took "lockdown being lifted" for "business as usual" and ignored social distancing guidelines put in place to prevent exactly this happening. Before the lockdown, someone could be excused for not knowing what was happening amidst the confusion and unwittingly spreading the virus before becoming symptomatic; it's a lot harder to justify such behavior afterwards when they should know better.

Then as I was preparing to lead our small group Bible study Thursday night, a verse in 1 Peter I'd been looking at all week jumped out at me:

For is it better, if the will of God, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.
   —1 Peter 3:17

While it's still pretty annoying to have to forego any hope of taking a trip anywhere further than walking distance for another month and a half, I can at least agree with this in principle: I'm glad the lockdown isn't of my doing, and I don't have any lives on my conscience from spreading the virus to potential victims. It's just frustrating when the reward for doing good is the absence of a negative rather than a more tangible positive, but I suppose that's just the world we live in. And that I'd probably feel rather differently if I were in the other position.

In the meantime, it's not like I'm ever going to run out of things to do from my home: I've still got a Ph.D. to finish, papers and a thesis to write, plenty of games that won't play themselves, some art projects I should really get around to finishing and sharing, and I've started copying Brahm's absolutely fantastic “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel,” which is of pleasantly maddening complexity. (I find myself needing to dive into the LilyPond documentation quite frequently to figure out how to represent the various intricacies and special cases of music notation that pop up.) And hey, at least it beats being in the hospital! A hui hou!

Update: COVID-19 2020 edition!

I realized that I haven't posted here for a few weeks, and unless you've been self-isolating pretty hard the past few months it's probably not hard to figure out why. With all the global turmoil surrounding COVID-19* I've been a little busy lately and haven't gotten around to posting.

First of all, I'm fine. There are over a hundred cases of COVID-19 here in Victoria, and the government is cracking down hard on international travel and meetings of people, but no one I know has caught it yet. Most of the astronomy department at Swinburne (including me) has been voluntarily working from home this past week, indefinitely, and all our meetings and colloquia have gone remote.

Personally, I am loving working from home so far. I never really realized how stressful it was, upon waking up each morning, to have a ticking time constraint before I needed to be at the train station until I suddenly…don't. It's absolutely fantastic, and I've been reveling in this socially-acceptable reason to be the hermit it was apparently always my calling to be. Productivity has suffered a bit, this past week, as I settle into the idea of working from home, but I'm getting better at it. And not losing ~2 hours commuting each day definitely gives me more time to be productive.

It's also made me feel a lot more creative, as I'm no longer so drained at the end of each day from being out and about, so I might have some more stuff to post about soon. For instance, I've discovered that I can paint in the background while watching someone's talk from home—and I often end up paying better attention when I've got something to keep my hands occupied…

Anyway, that's what's been happening here. I'm sure this is just the start of some serious world-wide changes this year, but I'm in a pretty privileged position where my PhD is unlikely to be affected, so for now I'm just going with the flow and seeing what happens. A hui hou! 

*Can I just say what a boring name this is? It sounds like something astronomers would come up with. Given that it apparently came from a bat, can we call it “Bat Flu” or something? I'm just imagining telling my grandchildren one day about how I lived through the “Great COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020!”