Blog

• My Life with a Therapy Dog

  2016-06-13 • 📁 Therapy dog

  I have a therapy dog, his name is Chance. He mostly visits at the local hospital. You can occasionally spot him at the library reading with kids, or on a university campus around exam time.

  Serving the community with my dog is very rewarding and adds an interesting perspective on life. I want to share some of that here. So along with my tech and astronomy posts, I will be sprinkling in bits and pieces about my life with a therapy dog.

• Juno's Power [Link]

  2016-05-27 • 📁 Astronomy

  I ran across this today and I think everyone needs to see it.

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• Apple's Macbook 1

  2016-05-17

  Many people complain about Apple's new 12 inch Macbook.

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• Early Flash of an Exploding Star [Link]

  2016-03-21 • 📁 Astronomy

  My advisor was apart of a very cool finding, seeing the shock break out of a core collapse supernova (CC SN). A NASA press release is available, or for the more adventurous the full scientific paper is also available.

  Lets briefly explain what a shock break out is. To do this we will follow two parts of a star. When a CC SN finally succumb to gravity and stops burning like a normal star, it pushes a bit of the start out (part A), but most of it free falls and implodes. A small bit of the implosion bounces back (part B) and it is hot and moving very fast. When this shock (part B) catches up to and hits part A, there is a big and sudden flash. This flash is what was observed and is call the shock break out¹.

  Some day I should go into more details on how a CC SN explodes, but till then enjoy a movie/animation of the data they saw with Kepler.

  1. ‘Cause the shock, brook out. Aren’t scientist creative with their naming? ↩

• Lab Notebooks

  2016-03-18

  As a scientist documenting what you have done when is very important. Chemists and others who do experiments need to document procedures and results. They weekly (or even daily) see something that is new. As an Astrophysicist my life is different. It is very much like a data scientists. I or, more often now, someone else collects data and my day to day is filed with the analysis portions. I write code that looks at features of the data, I make graphs, but rarely does any of this feel like the “experiments” that lab notebooks are designed around.

  What I need is a research logbook. I need a place where I write down my research questions, methods to solve them, answers, and what input created that figure! I work on several projects at a time, and each project lasts months and even years. My logbook needs to have a quickly skimmable table of contents, searching by tags and words, link to code and image files.

  This sounds like a blog! So I will add to my website a sub-blog where I plan on keeping my logbook. A large part of science is communication. I hope to use this site as a form of communication to anyone with any background. That includes my peers getting links to my papers, code, and my daily logbook.

• Lost Mode

  2015-09-19

  My wife lost her phone tonight, but it all turned out ok.

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• Liftoff [Link]

  2015-09-18 • 📁 Astronomy

  Liftoff is a podcast about space where you don't need to be a rocket scientist to listen.

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