Dr. Pamela L. Gay
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Archive for the 'Personal' Category
May 11th, 2008
Comments(2) The First Day of Summer Not-a-BreakThere is a fascinating myth that academics get their summers off to play in the Sun. While the only time most of us are allowed to take vacations is in the summer, we generally work just as hard from the last day of spring semester to the first day of fall semester, as we do […] Read more...
May 11th, 2008
Comments(3) Detritus of a Geeky ChildhoodWhen my husband and I moved to Illinois we packed all our belonging in two PODS with some (but not much) room to spare. When my parent’s sold their house 3 months later, they shipped me my childhood in a PODS-sized space inside a classic moving truck. It took two months for my husband and […] Read more...
May 8th, 2008
Comments(4) End of Semester CarnivalI JUST FINISHED GRADING EXAMS! I JUST FINISHED GRADING EXAMS! I JUST FINISHED GRADING EXAMS!
May 7th, 2008
Comments(14) Things man will never do 1: Rebuild the SunThere are certain themes that arise in Astronomy Cast comments and fanmail. Most of the themes are happy, good, warm fuzzies. There are also your typical cranks. There are also, in the humorous category, a regular stream of well-meaning, highly hopeful people saying my mind isn’t open enough who accuse me of not talking to […] Read more...
May 5th, 2008
Comments(2) Researching Ourselves: Trends in Paper CitationWhile poking through arXiv, I came across a fascinating piece of community introspection. Titled “Disentangling Visibility and Self-Promotion Bias in the arXiv:astro-ph Positional Citation Effect”, this paper by J. Deitrich (accepted into the Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific) asks why papers that appear at the top of daily arXiv listings tend […] Read more...
May 4th, 2008
Comments(7) Majoring in Astronomy: Like English, but more expensiveToday while gardening my iPod got stuck on “repeat” while my hands were very very dirty for several hours. This resulted in me listening to Jonathan Larson’s Tick, Tick, … Boom three times before I could get my hands clean enough that I dared touch my happy little white iPod. While I was (on repeat) […] Read more...
May 4th, 2008
Comments(2) Caring for Students: 1 in 4 need moreI have to admit that I am a long time SNL fan. There is no good reason, other then tradition, to spend most Saturdays watching, but… It’s what I do.
May 2nd, 2008
Comments(2) Sunday, Eta Aquarids and Opposing MoonsIt is a warm, crisp and clear, spring evening. The stars are bright and Sirius cast an angry glow in in the west as I walked home from a local pub with my husband. I live in a historic neighborhood filled with older homes and midwestern attempts at English gardens. Literally 1000s of plants are […] Read more...
May 1st, 2008
Comments(0) Anniversary edition of the Carnival of SpaceOne year later, and still going strong the Carnival of Space plays an anniversary visit to its founding blog, Why Homeschool. Check it out here. Read more...
Apr 30th, 2008
Comments(0) The Middle Ages: Globular ClustersAs an undergrad and even for most of my graduate school years, astronomy had this problem: Globular Clusters seemed to be older than the universe. We all knew this was a matter of someone calculating something wrong, but no one knew what. Cosmologists, looking at the still being explored expansion of the universe, kept getting […] Read more... |