♪♫ caek's corner ♪♫

that's a nice city, i have some cousins there. one is a foxy tv presenter, i'll send you her facebook.

― the late great, Wednesday, July 4, 2012 10:00 AM (8 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you never her

Caek

whats it all about, really

caek have you ever met this guy: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~jmangum/

I work w/ him on the journal he edits & I like how he has a link on his page for "not THAT J3ff M@ngum"

i have not met him, probably due to the weird schism between radio and optical astronomy (i am optical)

xp, i know right?

http://images.gizmag.com/hero/esa-planck-cmb.jpg

this is a decayed map of the world someone found in the back of an old shed, who are they trying to fool

gah

http://images.gizmag.com/hero/esa-planck-cmb.jpg

i think a lot of people are kind of disappointed there wasn't definitive evidence of significant non-standard "anomalies" in those results, although it seems like there is probably something slightly weird going on. otherwise they've measured a bunch of numbers we already know to greater precision.

some good summary coverage from one of the uk-based cosmologists working on it

http://www.andrewjaffe.net/blog/science/000553.html
http://www.andrewjaffe.net/blog/news/000554.html

caek I just want you to know that I am going to read all of this thread (missed it somehow until now) in preparation for MCDONALD OBSERVATORY SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE time!

cool! this is still a can do go situation!

Caek

how can a person be said to exist at all, were one to use a galactic scale? How does yr answer to this question inform yr pickup technique?

Cos i see it having ultimate neg potential tbrfr

I think that might fail as a neg. True, space is mostly empty, but the earth is not. I am in torquay marks and Spencer's right now so I can say this with some certainty.

-_- *perspective*

Dear caek,

1) Which telescope will you be using at McDonald?
2) Whatcha gonna do with the telescope?
3) I seem to recall reading somewhere that the color of the universe is kinda muddy olive. T/F?
4) What kind of beer do you like to drink in West Texas?
5) What is you favorite kind of taco?

Blue taupe iirc

i will be on the 107" aka the harlan j smith. i will be measuring the mass of the most massive black holes (i.e. this stuff http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20528137)

the universe is as black as midnight on a moonless night in my experience.

the west texas beer situation is improving thanks to the big bend brewing co in alpine, and i am really looking forward to drinking a vulgar amount of this on my forthcoming trup. but apparently they have struggled with licensing, and i have not had a chance to try it. so i usually drink alamo golden ale or shiner or whatever is on happy hour, i.e. bud/miller light.

i don't eat meat so my favourite taco is the fish taco. i love fish tacos!

In the optical telescope world, does bigger always equal "better" or do different size telescopes do different things better/worse?

Also: what is your all-time favorite telescope?

And: how does one go about booking time on a major telescope? Do you have to pay for it, or drink beers with the right people, or????

yes, basically.

bigger telescopes have technical difficulties. e.g. you can't machine a single piece of glass for the mirror much bigger than about 8m, so to get above that you have to build segmented mirrors like keck in hawaii. and segmentation requires active optics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_optics, which is complicated and therefore expensive and unreliable. and if you put exactly the same instrument configuration/optical set up on a bigger telescope as on a smaller telescope then you'll have problems with a tiny field of view (think like the zoom lens on a camera). and small field of view is generally not a good thing, especially if you are observing "extended objects", i.e. galaxies, blobby things, etc. but you would never do that. so in practice, bigger is better, cost and robustness notwithstanding.

my all time favourite telescope is the 200" hale telescope at mt palomar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hale_telescope. it was the biggest telescope in the world for most of the 20th century. the dome is beautiful (and because of old school mount, still the biggest dome in the world, i think). if anyone is in socal ever then i highly recommend a visit. it's a great site, maybe even prettier than the mcdonald.

you get telescope time by applying in a competitive process. they put out a call for proposals every 3-6 months, you say what you want to do, how many nights you need to do it etc. and then an anonymous committee ranks the proposals and a scheduler tries to fit all the highly ranked proposals in. once you get awarded time, it's free, except you might need to pay for bed and board on site (e.g. i have to pay like 100$/night to stay in the lodge at the mcdonald). you can't really stay off site, even at a place like the mcdonald, which has towns relatively nearby.

http://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/images/blog/EscondidoBrochureCover.jpg

Somehow read that as "One of California's Greatest Booty and Recreation Spots"

hey caek gimme a holler when you're in san diego

i thought you were in new york? but yeah, definitely!

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/

I don't know if this is your thing Caek, but could you recommend any good docs about the Cambrian Extinction? I watched an old beeb one recently and thought maybe they have new data since that one.

I don't know anything about that stuff. It is very cool though. I do remember thinking evolution by Carl zimmer was great by that's not what you're looking for. Too general.

Thanks anyway. The doc was an episode of Horizon called The Day The Earth Nearly Died (2002) and it was very interesting. Previously they thought the Permian Extinction was some extremely rapid event that took out 96% of life on the planet and in this they found new data. It was multiple events and it took hundreds of thousands of years to nearly take us all out of the game.

imminent detection of dark matter in the news a lot at the end of last week. here's why most of those articles were nonsense. http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/04/03/ams-presents-some-first-results/

some more planck stuff. pity the people who staked their careers on non-gaussianity: http://telescoper.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/has-planck-closed-the-window-on-the-early-universe/

also max i enjoyed your article about black hole death.

The issue of our time

A Good Story

Dear caek's Corner,

I strongly suggest that you stop everything you are doing, quit your job, pack all necessities into your car (if you have no car, insert step of *procure car*), and find a way--any way--go get your ass to wherever caek is, ever, but particularly at the McDonald Observatory in the Middle of Nowhere Texas (ostensibly Ft. Davis).

Pictures and commentary to follow.

Suffice it to say that you, YOU, need to do this.

Wanted to belatedly thank caek for answering my rube questions. Particularly interesting was the two-bodies-orbiting-their-shared-center-of-mass. Looking forward to quincie's pics and commentary.

i'm selling my macbook pro! and i can't be bothered with ebay!

if you're in europe i can post it to you. if you're in london i can give it to you in person. please pass this on to anyone you know is in the market/is not a dick.

http://pentangle.net/macbookpro/

my internal monologue for 2013 may 14 and excellent video accompaniment for the daft punk lp:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~ghezgroup/gc/pictures/ncsa_3dmovie.shtml

http://scienceblogs.com/universe/files/2013/01/LOLA1.jpg

Before the invention of computer flight simulators, engineers at NASA needed a way to help astronauts visualize landing on the moon.

So they built LOLA, or Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach, at Langley Space Center: a system of massive glowing murals and scale model-orbs criss-crossed with ribbons of track. In total darkness, pilots would ride in carts along the tracks, poised at relevant angles from the ersatz moons, and practice translunar approach and orbit establishment in a field of simulated stars, front-projected onto screens by a four-axis “star ball” mounted over the cabin.

http://scienceblogs.com/universe/2013/01/22/l-o-l-a-lola/

Awes

Caek are you back in the States yet???

no, waiting for my visa. plan is end of june.

a good chance i will be in DC in jan btw.

Well that is no help to me, as I hope to still be in Baja then! But I will definitely be back in DC by May 2014!

ok i'll check with AAS, maybe that can move their winter meeting?

that = they

Yes I think that would be wise!

I hope you are planning to post on the teacher thread (on 77) when your class starts!!!

ayo caek it was good meeting u and i'm sorry to perhaps seemingly ignore u when i left. let us drink again sometime

I have a question. Will the instruments on Voyager still be capable of returning data when it breaks through the heliosphere into interstellar space? Won't it just disappear into extreme cosmic radiation and never talk again?

caek you are a v good sport for answering all these physics questions. my roommate of the past year was always such a dick when people asked him anything but the most elementary question, would just answer "you can't understand it and will never understand properly" ... really pissed me off... think it had more to do with his own embittered relationship with physics than snobbery but still

caek, I am in munich on weds for a week

where shd we eat? we eat fish, not meat

mookie: yes! let's drink again.

parrot: i'm not sure exactly how powerful voyager's communication systems are, but the heliosphere does not fatally hinder radiation. you can see this simply by noting that we can see stars, which proves that electromagnetic radiation from outside the solar system can get past the heliopause. of course it's going to get harder to communicate, and there must be some point where the strength of the signal from something that far away is going to fall below the noise level of detectors on earth. afaict tho the voyager team are in for the long haul.

would just answer "you can't understand it and will never understand properly" ... really pissed me off... think it had more to do with his own embittered relationship with physics than snobbery but still

the bitter lols of recognition.

coz: i eat fish not meat too.

the fish situation in munich is generally pretty dreadful. one notable exception is paros, a greek restaurant nr. max weber platz. they have a fish special on wednesday, or all the wine you can drink for €5 on mondays. they do the best tuna steak i've ever had. afaict they do that every day, not just wednesdays. i suggest the mixed veggie and fix starter plates for all + tuna steaks to follow + retsina. if the weather is good and you want to sit outside then you'll want a reservation. they will make you do ouzo shots if you stay till later on. the waiters tend to be obviously drunk. it's great.

there is apparently an excellent sushi place at munchner freiheit but i've never been and i know it is €€€. let me know if you want me to track down the name.

for veggie stuff, there's a surprisingly good ethiopian place called blue nile on belgradstr. there are indian restaurants too, but none of them are worth the trip for someone based in the UK imo.

it's crazy i never made it to this place, because it's supposed to be excellent too: http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g187309-d718281-r134252669-Prinz_Myshkin-Munich_Bavaria.html.

just to say you've had it, if you find yourself in a beer hall or bavarian place, you should order käsespätzle, which is kind of like german macarroni cheese. you'll think the portion is too small, and then you'll have your first mouthful. if you finish it then watch out for the symptoms of heart failure.