The Most Important Things Ever

dissertation
and schutz finished reading the last big chapter. i still need to redo a conclusions chapter now that i've gotten the big stuff back at least once, and an abstract, and do a once-over on the appendices, but yeah. it's coming along now. he is being non-committal on whether i'll still be around next semester, so it'll be fun trying to figure out my living situation.

soundtrack
jenni, matt, and i worked on the soundtrack for the film noir that's being filmed this december. it was kind of difficult, since none of us had ever written this kind of music before and i, at least, had never played this kind of music before. jenni did most of the work on the intro piece. at some point, we realized that it was going to go on longer than it was supposed to, so we had to cut out the part where matt had the melody. we wanted a bridge section, though, so jenni suggested leaving in the trumpet part that had played the background for matt and they did call-and-answer with that. i thought it turned out pretty well.

the outro was fun because i finally got to play loudly.

matt also recorded a solo bit for the introduction of the movie's lead female. there were many attempts and we gave a couple of them titles based on his ability to get laid by playing that song: 'no sex for matt' and 'only a blowjob'.

anyway, that was fun times.

172 revisited
finally flew solo on the 172. things went better than i expected; it probably helped that there wasn't much wind. went to lockhart originally, but there were a couple people already in the pattern, so i headed to san marcos instead. was about to turn final for the 17 when someone announced that they were approaching for an instrument landing on the 13. we both abandoned our landings so we wouldn't collide. but yeah. last time, when i flew with an instructor, my landings were a bit bumpy, almost as bad as when i was first flying in the 152, but they were a lot better this time around.

apollo 12
it's the 40th anniversary of apollo 12 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_12 )!

this amused me, anyway. i remembered that it had launched in november, but i didn't remember the exact day, so i wikipediaed it and found out it was today. w00t! this is the one that got struck by lightning twice and that landed within 200 yards(?) of surveyor iii. that was a big deal, because it took them a long time to figure out exactly where eagle from apollo 11 had landed; they didn't figure it out until after the mission was over. so to go from just landing somewhere in the ballpark of your target to landing within eyesight of a specified target on the freaking moon in just four months was pretty sweet.

also, as mentioned in chaikin's 'a man on the moon' and in the tv series 'from the earth to the moon', this was the crew that had the most fun, and that was mostly due to pete conrad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Conrad).

w00t! water on the moon!
i think paying too close attention to all the news about the space program could make someone manic-depressive. so they found lots of water on the moon, apparently:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/091113-moon-water-colony.html

maybe that's enough incentive to go back. one would hope.

i found out because himanshu was passing by in the hall and asked if we'd heard that they'd found large amounts of water on the moon. it's kind of nice to be working somewhere where that's big news.

more on the dissertation
and i talked to schutz again. got back most of what used to be chapter 5 and is now chapter 8. i was thinking of what used to be chapter 4 and is now chapters 4-7 as the most important part, but he thinks chapter 8 is and said that we should think about eventually publishing it in a journal. also, he was talking about aiming to send the draft to the rest of the committee at the beginning of december so we could have the defense in mid-January. which would be nice. and which would be a lot of work.

another adventure in biking
so i got pulled over today. there's a little stretch (30 meters?) on burnet where i go the wrong way on a one-way road, and there happened to be a cop coming this time around. i kind of wonder what he was thinking as he watched this cyclist coming straight at him while clearly going the wrong way.

as he was explaining what i was doing wrong, he said, "i want to be politically correct," before informing me that bicycles were supposed to obey some of the same traffic laws as cars. but he probably wanted to tell me i was being a complete moron, and there's some truth to that. anyway, he was pretty nice about the whole thing and he didn't give me a ticket. and i've got an alternate stretch that i can take, but it's like taking two sides of the triangle instead of the hypotenuse, so that's annoying. anyway.

space politics
so i stumbled across this website a little while back:

http://www.spacepolitics.com/

they're saying that the administration won't likely make a decision about the future of the space program until december. that means it will have taken them 11 months to figure this out. and yeah, nasa has been doing stuff during that time, but they're doing it without knowing if it's going to mean anything, and i would think that would have an effect on their morale. it's also kind of wasteful monetarily, since you're having this organization work without a clear goal in mind, and i would imagine they wouldn't have much motivation to work very hard if they don't know if their work is going to be used for anything. it also sends a contradictory message to statements that science and math education is important. feh.

fun stuff
so MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) is currently still using fudge factors, which is disappointing. The general idea makes more sense to me than waving your hands and shouting, "dark matter!" when you don't know what's going on, but that fudge factor thing needs to be fixed.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/091105-missing-matter.html

and they're coming up with a way of making tools on the fly:
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/091104-tw-3d-replicator.html

they want to take it on trips to mars and such in case spacecraft parts or tools break, so i guess the obvious question is what happens if the tool-maker is the thing that breaks?i imagine they'll have some kind of workaround for that. maybe two tool-makers?

stuff
got to go flying today. it was probably the most perfect weather i've gotten to fly in: winds were perfectly calm and there were no clouds in the sky. more stalls, which i am still not fond of. i looked up the requirements for the instrument rating, which i want to try to get after i get a real job, and you need 50 hours of cross-country time, not including the time spent on getting your private pilot license. so far, i have 2.3. so as soon as i do a solo flight in the 172 (which will hopefully be monday), i would love to cart people around on cross-country flights to split the cost.

got the rest of chapter 4 back from schutz last week, which is actually a big deal, since it is the main focus of the dissertation. it's getting chopped into tiny pieces, though. four of them. originally, only one section was getting separated into its own chapter, but the page count for the others was going to creep over 100, so it got cut into three more.

update
3 for 3. although i took laurent's suggestion and emailed him, so i found out in advance that he wouldn't be able to make it.

dissertating
so i was supposed to meet schutz today at 1400. as i walked down the hall to his office at that time, i saw him leaving. i'm assuming he was meeting with tim and charles, because they were both leaving their offices at the same time. he saw me and told me that he wouldn't be able to meet today, but if he hadn't seen me in the hall, he wouldn't have thought to tell me.

as i told jeff, the likely outcome of the meeting today was that he wouldn't be able to meet, would suggest meeting tomorrow even though he has a class on campus in the morning and rarely makes it up to csr in the afternoon, and then he won't be able to make it for some reason or other for that meeting, either. so far, i have gotten 2/3 of that prediction right. probably we'll try to set another meeting for thursday which will also not work and will finally settle on sunday afternoon, if the pattern is consistent.

yay, grad school.

i dunno, maybe he thinks i'm a fuck-up and is trying to keep me around until i'm ready or something. or maybe he just doesn't care. i don't know which it is.

172
finally got checked out in the 172. probably i'm going to solo in it at least once before subjecting other people to it, but things are moving along in that respect. w00t!

eyes
so yesterday, i put in my contacts, just like i do most days. my right eye was fine, but i noticed that my left eye saw everything kind of blurry. i tried closing them one at a time and there was a definite difference. there's generally a small degree of blurriness because of my astigmatism, but this was much worse. i could see better with the contact in, but it was still noticeable. that night, i had the same problem with my glasses, so it wasn't a problem with the contact (i also threw out the old ones and put in new ones that morning, and had the same issue). so all of that had me a bit concerned.

and today, it was back to normal. does that ever happen to other people?

i think i've actually noticed something similar a couple times. usually, i can't see the numbers on my alarm clock from my bed, but a couple of times when i woke up way back in the day, i could read the numbers decently well. that level of eyesight went away probably within a couple hours, but i remembered getting really excited for a bit.

i think i've heard that you can temporarily mold your eyes to different shapes (people would use special contacts to do that for a day or so leading up to eye exams), so maybe that's happening somehow. dunno.

dude!
dude! i've been saying this for years!

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1577

icesat
so it looks as if icesat is pretty much dead now: the last laser failed. they're going to try to restart it, but i don't think anyone is overly optimistic about that. optimistic enough to make the attempt, i guess.

one of the problems is that we'll lose a good chunk of funding if it's not operating anymore and people will have to find money from other sources. i suggested they handle it like a sitcom would and just act as if nothing's wrong and use fake data and such. tim said they were discussing that at a meeting and someone suggested that maybe that's what has been happening the entire time.

ares 1-x
so they rolled out the new rocket to the launchpad, or at least the first stage of the new rocket. that's supposed to launch sometime between october 27 and 29, so that will be exciting.

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/091020-ares-1x-rollout.html

bike lane
so they've started to put in a bike lane on braker near mopac, which is pretty nice. that area kind of bothered me back when i lived in the duval apartment. i guess they're doing it because the domain is right there now. but yeah, my route to work has become a little bit safer now.

global warming conspiracy
so there are apparently a good amount of people on facebook who think global warming is a government conspiracy. it's interesting in a bad way reading some of the comments people make to posts on the issue. and sure, politicians are probably using the issue to gain more power for themselves, but that doesn't mean the issue isn't there. it's also a little insulting in that there's an implication that i'm faking my data to help out shadowy government figures. or maybe they just assume that i'm incompetent. oh, well.

yeah, there is a possibility that the data is being misinterpreted and it's true that we don't have great models for making predictions, but just looking at the temperature trends for the last century shows that something is going on. there are ups and downs, but if you plot a trendline to the data, it shows a linear increase. a lot of the arguments are things like, "well, it's colder at this time this year than it was last year, so global warming is bogus", and that bothers me. it seems as if this kind of stuff should be explained better to everyone. maybe it is and the people aren't interested in reading it?

anyway, stuff like this makes me anti-democracy, possibly anti-republic. the problem is, where do you draw the line about who gets to make decisions? would i make the cut? dunno.

more on from the earth to the moon
so i've watched up to the apollo 9/10 episode. i'm really impressed with this series: it shows the engineering stuff as well as the astronaut stuff. each episode focuses on one mission, in general, so it makes you realize how important each apollo mission was (except for apollo 10, which always seems to be almost forgotten: it only had about 60 seconds devoted to it). they needed apollo 7 to test out the spacecraft, but also to restore confidence in the space program after apollo 1, so it needed to work really well. apollo 8 happened partially because the russians were getting ready to launch a crewed spacecraft around the moon and partially because the lunar module was running behind schedule, and they had to get all the software ready for a completely new kind of mission in only two or three months. apollo 9 was testing out an entirely new kind of spacecraft that wasn't meant to return to Earth and that wouldn't survive reentry, and it was doing a lot of pretty risky tests in one mission. etc., etc.

tim taped these off tv a few years ago, so there are always previews for the upcoming episode (except, i'm assuming, after the last episode). for the apollo 11 episode, they said something about, "on a very special episode of 'from the earth to the moon'", just like they would for some tv show dealing with some very sensitive issue. so that amused me.

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