Inbox Trust (TM) is one of those things you have to be really careful with. The reason people are able to spread malware and bilk too many people out of money is the same reason people sometimes take the wrong person home at the end of a date. The person crying over the “perfect guy” who disappeared after leaving a false phone number  is the same sort of person who cries over the Nigerian prince who abused the bank account numbers they shared – Both sets of people misplaced their trust because they wanted something to good to be true to fast.

You need to know whose links you can trust, which attachments can be safely opened, and to whom you can share minor confidences without fear of forward.

What always gets me is the people who try and force inbox trust, and how often people fall prey to this. In some ways it is like any forced vulnerability. We’ve all been there in real life – there is that late night conversation with an acquaintance (or even a newly met person) that somehow leds to over sharing at 4am. They say “Can I trust you?” and we all want to be trusted, so too often everyone ends up saying too much, and through this shared vulnerability friendship is created. There is a difference between a face to face moment of TMI, and someone in your inbox asking for confidentiality. As the saying goes, on the internet, anyone can authenticate their dog. You just don’t know who or what is really behind that message you’re getting. At least when that middle of the night TMI turns out to have occurred with a crazy person, you know who that person is and how to get them back out of your life as needed. With your inbox, that crazy person can just come back with a new and improved user name.

I often get emails like the one I screen captured above. They start with the “Can I trust you?” theme. They then ask me to do something that will endanger myself to prove I’m trust worthy; open an attachment, send bank numbers, etc etc. It is psychologically clever. I bet lots of people fall prey to these attempts to scam / infect / harm them and their privacy/identity. Just by saying, “Can I trust you?” they are priming people to do things that prove they are deserving of trust.

The other type of email I get a lot also starts with “Can I trust you?” but it is a type that makes me sad because they come from mislead individuals who don’t realize how dumb they are being. These are people who say “Can I trust you? Will you please keep the following in complete confidence?” and they go on to describe some science theory they have or some other issue they have that they want my assistance with. These people are assuming, based on the person I appear to be online, that they can trust me, and they reach out to me without introduction. Now the thing is, the person I play online is actually pretty true to who I am, so people who reach out to me and make themselves vulnerable are safe, but it makes me worry. Not everyone out there is the person they play online. If someone struggling with something reaches out to the wrong blogger, they could get mocked by name online.

As we all become more an more virtual, we need to change how we interact. Yes, we all still want to be trusted, but we need to all also be much more careful in the venues in which we give our trust, and in which we give trust to others. If you say something online, always ask yourself, “Am I prepared for what I said to be blogged?” Ask yourself, “Am I ready for my email conversation to get forwarded to friends, family, employers?” Ask yourself, are you ready to be digitally stripped naked?

Trust is a hard thing, and as we become more and more digital, the levels of trust we must have are getting greater and greater. Protect your selves, and be aware of the psychology of the simple phrase “Can I trust you?” And remember the other old adage, if they have to ask, then answer is probably no.

Image by Alan Friedman of Archimedes Crater

Twas the week after Christmas, when all through the halls
Not a student was stirring – they’d gone out to the malls
The professors were all doing their research with care
In hopes that peer review would be gentle and fair.

The servers were whirring all snug on the cloud
While theorists muttered their equations out loud
With data in columns, I figured and plotted
Checking every t’s crossed and every I dotted

When from the fax room there arose such a clatter
I sprang to my feet cursing what ‘er was the matter
Away to my door I flew in a flash
Slaming it shut, my actions perhaps a bit rash

The noise from my stomach on this once quiet morn
Told it was time for a break for popcorn
When, what on my microwave snack should appear
But a schematic sleigh, and eight handdrawn reindeer?

With a few quiet curses, so creative a quick
I knew in a moment who’d played me this trick
More rapid than eagles his Christmas fails came
I opened my door, and looking about I called him by name

Now, Belstein! Doctor Belstein, Each year at this time
The telescope, the servers, something new you undermine
From the top of the mountain, to this very popcorn
You treat everyones stuff with contempt and with scorn

As old papers that under the suns UV rays
When they meet with some handling, crumple away
As he rose out of his chair, and came tottering my way
I regretted my words, and wished in my office I’d stayed

He was dressed all in wool, from ankle to shoulder
And his cloths were nerd chic with their fancy pen holder
A bundle of printouts he held tight in his hand
And he was mighty annoyed about having to stand

His eyes-how they pierced! His forehead so crinkled!
His cheeks were flushed hot, His shirt was so wrinkled!
His droll little mouth was drawn into a frown
And the hair on his head limply hung down

He was chubby and plump, a right chunky old prof
Why oh why had I dared tick him off
The red of his eye and the twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had all things to dread.

He spoke just a phrase, before getting to work.
“I found him”, he said, then turned with a jerk.
And using a red sharpie he wrote on my door
A series of symbols no one had thought to explore
He want back to his chair, as I gave a low whistle
Santa’s sleigh flew on a neutrino-powered missile
Somehow faster than light, he flew faster than sight
Problem solved! QED! And to all a good-night

online everywhere

I’m currently sort of on vacation. I say “sort of” because modern day technology and society combine to really makes it impossible for many of us to be totally off work, totally away for a couple of days, and totally removed from instantaneous communications. Everyday of this trip, either my husband, or I, or both have received an “urgent”, “high priority” or “need response immediately” email or text message. He is trying to figure out how to set up a telecon tomorrow (that isn’t during dinner), and I’ve been sorting paperwork. As people working in technological fields (I do astronomy-related new media and he is a Flex and Java programming consultant), we are caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is our soft money reality. I live grant to grant and he works contract to contract, and we can’t afford to miss any opportunities. The hard place is our high tech existence. We have in our cruise cabin enough technology to run a high tech startup, and the people we work with know they can count on us as needed.

(Here is where I insert a disclaimer: I love what I do. I am a work-a-holic. This is not meant as a complaint as much as a essay pointing out the reality that we find ourselves in. Without the outside world intruding, I’d use the time doing graphical design or writing. That’s just how I’m wired.)

Our situation isn’t unique. In our current economy, where a jobless recovery means we are all doing more and earning the same paycheck, redundancy in the workplace just doesn’t exist. For instance, Astronomy Cast’s website stopped displaying images for mysterious (likely hacked) reasons, and I don’t have a staff member capable of fixing the site for me, so later today, when I’m not 40 minutes from needing to run, I’ll be working to fix the website or (if I’m bandwidth limited) to document everything that needs done for Fraser. I also know that if Pingdom warns me IceHunters is down, that’s on me too. In our modern world, more and more people are living this type of a “crap – I actually am in a vital role” existence. There are times that it is nice to actual not be required.

This is having a couple major effects on us both as a society, and as humans in bodies not designed for this type of stress.

As a society, we seem to be creating this spiraling-out-of-control set of “always on” expectations. It is not unusual to get requests Friday afternoon for things that need to be done by Monday morning. This isn’t a problem with my institution. The requests I get are as likely to be from a collaborator working on a grant, as from a grant officer needing a last minute review, as from a magazine editor needing a last minute set of revisions to a story. It is not unusual to have colleagues spread across timezones requesting telecons / Skype-cons / webex meetings at hours spanning from 8am to 9pm. I’ve had situations where when I didn’t return an email on a Saturday within 2 hours, my phone started ringing on my actual and Google phone numbers. In a field where jobs are scarce, and money is scarcer, there is always concern that if I say no, if I don’t answer my phone, my email, my text messages, the opportunities those communications represent will instead get passed on to someone else who is able to answer questions at questionable hours. The only way to fix this societal “always on” mentality is for everyone to change at once – for everyone to say enough is enough, weekends aren’t for work, and after dinner isn’t either, and for all of us to shut our laptops off and take a personal timeout to live.

But that’s not going to happen. Right now, the person who draws a line in the sand and says, “I don’t work weekends” is labeled lazy and irresponsible. I hear these comments from senior faculty and senior researchers. They say, “So and so will never make it. They don’t take work home or come in on weekends.” I remember my last few weeks of undergrad getting called into one of my professor’s offices. At the time I was working 29 hours a week, had leadership positions in several clubs, and was maintaing a 3.7 GPA. I didn’t sleep very much. At least I didn’t think I did. The professor who called me into his office said he wanted to give me a bit of advice as I prepared to enter graduate school. He was concerned that if I wanted to succeed, I really needed to learn to sleep less and work more. I just kind of blinked at him. Now, roughly 15 year later, I realize he was right, and I have learned to get by on less sleep and to simply always do more.

This societal expectation that we have (and this may be a mostly US / Northern Europe / Australian kind of thing) that the successful will be constantly engaged  in work (or something like going to the gym) for 16 hours a day, every day is having physical consequences on many of us. For me, I admit, constant worry about getting everything done and everything funded manifests itself as weight gain (stupid stress hormones), worsened allergies (stupid stress related immune reaction), and insomnia (which is at least useful when up against deadlines). But I look around my friends and my colleagues and I realize I’m seriously lucky. Lucas Randall, an out going and friendly Aussie I know from TAMOz and Twitter, <a href=”http://t.co/CaJ0qx9″>had an anxiety attack come out of no where</a>. I’ve watched heart issues, blood pressure problems, anxiety, and weight gain to the point of diabetes effect others. I’ve seen in those I’m not too close to, the stress has led to finding doctors who will prescribe Ridalin and Xanax so they can get just that extra edge, and I’ve seen abuse of stronger things. People are pushing and pushing and pushing.

And they are pushing themselves because they love what they do and there just aren’t enough jobs and there just isn’t enough money, and as long someone is willing to work themselves to the bones to stay ahead, we all have to work ourselves to the bones to stay ahead.

And that’s the irony. Some of us are working ourselves literally to death (not me, I’m just working myself to the occasional allnighter) because we love what we do – we are working so hard we no longer know how to go on vacations, and are working so hard we are physically manifesting our stress – we are working so hard because the option of not doing what we do is an option we just can’t accept.

And the only solution I know (other than all of society changing at once) is to take these fields we love and create more jobs. This is a manyfold solution. It would allow people like me to staff things properly so that when I travel I know there is someone on my staff who can do everything I do (I think I’m 2 staff positions away from that, so back to fundraising). It would also mean that my husband could sign contracts 4 weeks out from a new job instead of the current, and stressful, 2 weeks, or sometimes just 2 or 3 days. And it would allow all of us to breath a little bit and fear a little bit less if email needs to go two days (or more) unanswered.

But until the world gets economically sorted out, my cell phone is on and I will respond if Pingdom calls my website’s name.

Seat 20A (by Pamela L. Gay)

On January 13, 2005 I joined the American Airlines “AAdvantage” frequent flier program. The podcast I was part of, “Slacker Astronomy,” had taken off, and I had been invited to go to AAS in Washington DC and AAPT in Anchorage, Alaska to give talks 2 weeks apart. This was something I’d never really expected – I was just an utterly average scientist working in a mostly instructional role at Harvard. Travel was what the fulltime researchers did, and what the people with “professor” in their title did. My job? I wrote labs on my computer, I built equipment in the machine shop, I fixed the telescope on the roof top, and in my spare time I let my voice play with others online. I wasn’t the one who traveled. But then someone – a few 1000 someones – heard our show. And then someone – maybe a few 10s of someones realistically – read our research. And then I got a frequent flier number.

I hadn’t realized that those two trips and that frequent flier number would lead in so many directions. From Boston I moved to Southern Illinois (I met the department chair who hired me on that Alaska trip), and my title changed to include that word: Professor. I went from being someone on LiveJournal to someone with a Blog. From Slacker Astronomy, I went to Astronomy Cast. And now, according to American Airlines, I and my travel related flights, hotels, and purchases have earned me 813,245 ‘miles.’ I’ve seen every continent except Antartica as I traveled to talk astronomy. I’ve seen Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, and South Korea.* And I’ve seen Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, and Washington.** I’ve slept on planes, ate on planes, a couple of turbulent times I wondered if I’d die on a plane… But mostly I’ve just been that business traveller plugging away on their keyboard in a window seat.

But right now I’m home, and it’s a good place to be.

A couple weeks ago, I was in Boston giving a talk at Boston University. Several of the graduate students asked me what it takes to get to do all the (some would say crazy) things that I do. A few months ago, while else where, I had someone ask “How do I grow up to be you?” Well, um, you don’t want to be me. The inside of my head is a pretty messy place (so is my desk, and my car…) and I tend to fall off horses and hurt my self. Silliness aside, these questions got me to thinking, and I realized that sometime in 2005, quite by accident, I decided to become someone who builds things – websites, podcasts, datasets, class curriculum, words and bytes – and since the 2009 International Year of Astronomy I have been working in various ways to build a network of people I’ve met in real life, and whom I trust, and with whom I can build awesome things. We’ve built 365 Days of Astronomy, and the Second Life Island. Zooniverse came from Chris Lintott and I talking in an elevator lobby at Oxford and deciding to write grants. For basically 3 years, I’ve worked myself ragged doing things I love so that someday, hopefully starting in a few months, I’ll get to stay home a bit more, and sleep a bit more. How is this magical thing known as “Sleep” made possible? Well, I and a team of awesome people at NASA Ames, Capitol College, Arizona State, and here at SIUE just earned ourselves a NASA grant*** that let’s me hire a postdoc. (The job posting should go up in January prior to AAS, if only just barely, and I will make an appearance in the AAS job center). I think I have learned that the key to academic life is to reach that point where you can bring in enough money that an actual clone a post doc can be hired.

This isn’t to say I’m going to slow down. This blog post is my first sign of not slowing down. Prior to IYA, I was pretty good (not great) about blogging regularly, and with this post I’m going to try to get back to blogging. Those of you who listen to Astronomy Cast know that Fraser and I (mostly I) have gotten our acts together and are recording much more regularly. And, starting after the New Year, we’re looking to add a new video lecture series to what we offer online.

And next year I’m not exactly going to stop traveling. How could I with a Venus Transit visible from Alaska, a Solar Eclipse viewable from Australia, and an End of the World cruise sailing the Caribbean? I’ll earn my miles next year, but the goal is to not have Foursquare congratulate me on spending 4 (or more) weeks in a row in airports.

But for now, I just want to say, I’m home.

And I’ll be blogging more.

* Add 5 more countries for personal travel – Russia, Finland, Croatia, Greece, and Egypt – if you want a complete list.

** Counting personal travel, I’ve visited every state except Oregon

*** This grant and others, and in partnership with many others – Galileo Teacher Training Program, Astronomers without Borders, the Planetary Society, LRO, MESSENGER, STScI, Dawn and more – is allowing us to build a new community called CosmoQuest. This blog post isn’t about that, but you can click over there and learn bit by bit what we’re working to build. (Launching January 1, 2012.)

Currently I’m in Nantes, France attending the joint Division of Planetary Sciences meeting ( DPS is a part of the American Astronomical Society) and the European Planetary Science Conference. As part of this week-long science extravaganza, there was a session on educational programs that make a global impact. I talked about citizen science (1, 2), and otherwise got to sit back and hear about other projects, many of which are children of the International Year of Astronomy that were able to grow and continue to thrive.

From TWAN: Starry Sky of an Alien Lake by Wally Pacholka

The session started with Mike Simmons of Astronomers without Borders. While Mike and his network date back to before IYA, they really came into their own during IYA with the coordination of 100 Hours of Astronomy. During a few brief spring (North) or fall (South) days, his team succeeded in brining together the world’s population in one global star party. IYA taught all of us that trying to engage the entire planet in one 100-hour span is hard work, and some people are guaranteed to be busy, so in recent years the program has transformed into the Global Astronomy Month, which invites everyone to look up during April. Different weeks and weekends have different themes. Beyond this amazing project, Astronomers without Borders also maintains The World at Night (photo project) and is planning global events for this June’s Transit of Venus. Poor Mike did all he could to pack it all into his 10-minute time slot, but it was to no avail. He was chased off the podium 3-minutes over. Honestly, his programs needed 55 minutes to do them any justice at all.

From Mike it passed to Roger Ferlet and Hand on Universe – EU. This project takes many of the best online / digital astronomy ideas of the past 15 years and does them using real NASA data processed using an interface called SalsaJ. Imagine, instead of using a simulator like CLEA to study the motion of Jupiter’s moons or the pulsations of a star you just looked at Jupiter’s moons and an actual pulsating star. SalsaJ is now on my list of things to learn sooner rather than later, and I’m hoping that if any of you are classroom teachers using SalsaJ, you’ll leave a comment about how you like it.
I went third and then passed the stage off to Connie Walker of the Dark Skies Awareness initiative (They do regular 365 Days of Astronomy shows!). These are the folks that every year bring you Globe at Night, a global data gathering project to measure how light pollution is impacting our ability to see the stars (and galaxies, etc) in the sky above us. In the past, this has been a once a year event involving getting everyone around the globe to look at the equator riding constellation Orion. Students and members of the public turn in information on how many of his stars they could see compared to a series of images, and we get a global reading of the sky. The thing is, lots of weird things can effect light pollution. Snow for instance. If you have a lot of street lights politely pointed down onto grass in parks, that isn’t too horribly bad, but if those same lights point onto snow… Well, that’s a nice mirror of light reflected into the sky. This year, to look at variations, and to see who can participate when, they’re introducing 4 different Globe at Nights events: January 14-23, February 12-21, March 13-22, and April 11-20 (that’s 2012).

With a line up of special events defined for us, the podium (or lack of podium) was handed over to Rosa Doren, a woman who is a force of nature bent on improving teacher preparation on a global level. Working on a budget of sofa change and sidewalk dimes, she has shown us what it means to leverage existing resources. As head of the IYA’s Galileo Teacher Training Program (which is still going strong!), she has brought together a global collaboration of people who are doing teacher training and providing teachers astronomy certification (at a variety of levels) by engaging them in a collections of activities in different content areas. The thing that consistently impresses me about this project is it realizes that schools aren’t all the same in terms of resources, but the same concepts of wanting to engage people rather then lecture at people apply. Don’t have a computer? That’s ok – they have a plan. Have a telescope and the most modern of technologies? That’s fine too. The sets of possible things teachers can do is varied enough to recognize the vast diversity of classroom needs, allowing teachers to learn concepts through tasks matched to their resources. Are you a teacher? Want to get the leg up on your astronomy content in a way that is relevant to the classroom you have instead of the classroom you wish you had? Check out the global listing of teacher workshops on their website.

Algol, the Demon of the Sky by EU-UNAWE Spain

The final talk I listened to well was on a classroom project I know I’ve mentioned before: Universal Awareness (UNAWE). Lead by Pedro Russo (formerly lead by Carolina Odman who’s no doing different awesomeness), and presented by a nice younger fellow whose name I didn’t catch, this program is designed to get little kids to love and learn space science through story telling. On their resources page they have a myriad of activities (including signing activities and telescope activities!), artwork from stories telling sky-lore from many different cultures, and all the teacher resources you might want (as a non-teacher, I like to download and print the art). Editions are available in multiple languages. The story that I heard (not told today, sadly) that most made me love this project was actually a story on it’s cultural impact. Through one set of activities, they get the kids telling their stories to a visiting outer space alien (a doll sewn by one of the community parents), and the alien in turn tells the kids stories about space through this curriculum. One teacher reported that after doing UNAWE in her class, an transfer student from a foreign country was seen as an interesting new thing – a source of potential stories and friendship. This was in contrast to how her kids normally treated transfer kids, as well, aliens in the not so warm and fuzzy story telling sense.

So the reason I said “listen well” is today I also learned I’m not really all that compatible with French food. I’m fine, but for a while, sitting a bit dehydrated (beverages are primarily expresso and wine here), and way overheated (no or limited AC and in the 80s), I just decided that rather than listening closely, I’d turn a color that caused a worried friend to ask if I was ok. After the session, I grabbed a couple cans of soda (failing to find hot tea, which I now have), and got to feeling better slowly but surely. I’m now fine, but during a few of the talks I wasn’t listening as much as I was doing a mental inventory of things like water bottles and tea bags I will hence forth always a) bring, and b) not leave on the plane (as I did with my water bottle on Saturday).

Unfortunately, this means the best I can do is offer you a link to the program for the rest of the session. No fear though, Thursday is another education session, and next week I’ll be at an astronomy communications meeting in Beijing (where I am compatible with the food). I’ll report what I hear. And tomorrow (room space willing) I’ll try and get you some science. So far, I fear to say, I’ve been thwarted by rooms with more people than space. Ah well, Emily Lakdawalla is early to arrive and easy to fit into small spaces and keeps managing to fit nicely into all the coolest sessions. Follow her on twitter and the Planetary Society Blog for all the best science this meeting has to offer.

Unfortunately, the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast is in trouble due to a lack of funding and audio. (donation page at Astrosphere)

Right now, we are seeking the audio and funding needed to keep 365 Days of Astronomy going through December 2011. We seek commitments for 82 episodes and $5000 in funding. We would like our last episode to be December 31, 2011.

How we got here: When the 2009 International Year of Astronomy, came to an end, we decided to keep the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast going for two reasons: We had momentum and we knew the Year of the Solar System was coming. It was my (and I take the full blame here) belief that the Year of the Solar System would be able to carry much of the energy of IYA into the future, and that people passionate about our home star system would add their voices and donations to support 365 Days of Astronomy through this new celebration of space. This just didn’t happen though. Let’s face it, the economy sucks and many people are just tired. Finding the energy to donate time or money is hard when listening to the radio makes you want to hide under the bed.

Why we’re asking: At a certain level, it is hard to walk away from something feeling like it is halfway done. This is the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, and we’d like to complete the 2011 calendar year.

Can you help?
We want your audio! You can signup to produce an episode by emailing signup@365DaysofAstronomy.org

We need financial help. 365 Days of Astronomy is a product of Astrosphere New Media, a 501(c)3 non-profit. Your donations are tax-deductible in the US, and appreciated no matter where you come from. You can donate via paypal:

Please help?

UPDATED: You can also become a Sustaining Supporter of 365 Days of Astronomy  We have set up three ways to become a sustaining supporter of 365 Days of Astronomy. You can donate: $1 / week, $1 / day, or the equivalent of 5 Caffe Latte’s a week at Starbucks. All subscriptions are 5 months in duration.

Dollar a Week : $1.00USD – weekly Dollar a Day : $30.42USD – monthly Donate Coffee Money : $68.25USD – monthly

For me, the life of an academic includes what can only be described as way the hell too much travel. My career focuses on finding ways to effectively engage people in learning and doing astronomy, and part of that is going out and actually talking to people, both from the stage, and also from a chair at the lunch table or in the bar at public events. I live in a small town, and to be able to effectively reach people, I need to get out of my small town (with a population roughly 1/3 that of Dragon*Con) and go where the masses are. Today, getting away means traveling to Graz, Austria and the International Space University where I and several other astronomy and space science communicators (hi @moonrangerlaura) will be teaching the next generation of aerospace industry employees how to communicate to the public.

In general, travel and I get along. I don’t require a lot of sleep. I bounce timezones without too much hassle. I can sleep in planes, trains, and automobiles like a champ. But today I am suffering from utter, total, and complete sleep deprivation induced travel fail. This follows on the heal of weather and weird passenger fail yesterday.

I am not an inexperienced traveler. I do tend to be a last minute planner if I know no visa is required, but…. But today has been fail at a level epic enough to make a good secondary plot on a tv show.

As you may have seen on twitter, last week I was at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. I flew home late Wednesday night, getting in after midnight (technically Thursday) and was home 54 hours (which due to laundry and human interactions wasn’t filled with much sleep) before catching a 6:35am Saturday set of flights that would eventually land me in Austria. And for the entire 24 hours I’ve been attempting to get to Graz, Austria, it has been building levels of fail.

Waking Saturday, the sky was filled with lightening and it was raining not entirely gently. We boarded on time, but took off 10 minutes late. As we neared Chicago, the pilot came on and warned that, due to rain, we would be circling for 25 more minutes (STL to ORD is only about 30 minutes flight time normally). As we circled, my layover shrank, and as we landed 40 minutes late, I had just 20 minutes to catch some caffeine and my next flight. Annoying, but no big deal. Boarding flight 2, Chicago to London Heathrow, I got on, got settled, and had a very not-happy-to-not-be-upgraded Indian (will be important in a moment) sit next to me. As we waited, me on my iPad and him on his phone, working and talking respectively, the plane failed to depart and began to get warmer and warmer. As we hit the 10min-since-we-should-have-left mark, the captain came on and told us they were repairing one of the plane’s air conditioning units. Another 20 minutes, and we were on our way. After a sad breakfast (why would you combine potatoes, onions and peppers with French toast?), the stewardess let the grumpy fellow go lay down in the mostly empty business class. I thus had room to myself and happily worked on a grant (and napped for 20 minutes) until they started preparing breakfast. At this point, the Indian fellow returned from business so he could (not his choice) eat in economy. When he found me still working, he decided to strike up conversation and ask what I do. The conversation quickly turned to how US science and math education is really second rate compared to India and China, and (as we contemplated airline pizza) he sprung on me the fascinating belief that Muslims are the problem with the US, and that the construction of new Mosques is a sign they are trying to take over, and Kashmir and other problems in India were mentioned. Ok, fail. I don’t even know where to go on this topic, so I decided to comment on the fact that personally I find the Tea Party terrifying, and we were able get back to discussing the problems of science education. But seriously, on what planet is “the Muslims are destroying America” topic a logical or valid airplane conversation?

I arrived in London at about 11pm local time and made my way happily to terminal 4 and the Yotel, a small in-the-terminal hotel that allows you get cubbyhole rooms by the hour. Designed for people trying to catch a shower and a couple hours sleep between connections, it is clean, convenient, and has people coming and going at every hour of the day. My “room” was unfortunately right next to a set of 4 stairs in the hallway, and every 40minutes or so, the thump-thump-thump of luggage going down stairs awoke me. Still, it was at least a little sleep. I woke a final time to my alarm at 6:45am London time, thinking I was refreshed but actually completely stupid.

Packing and getting myself out the door, I was on autopilot, and I found myself all the way to terminal 3 before I remembered I wasn’t flying AA to the US, I was flying BA to the EU. Based on remembering from the past that BA flies out of terminal 5, I turned around and headed to terminal 5. Except my memory, while correct, no longer applied. BA now flies some EU flights out of terminal 3. As I attempted to go through security in the wrong place, I was turned around and directed back to terminal 3. (Circles are the perfect shape, aren’t they?)

And here is where I suffered complete fail in security. At Heathrow, your toiletries must be in a ziplock sandwich bag, not a zippered equivalent of a 1quart freezer bag. They have bags to give you and are happy to throw out things that don’t fit (I no longer have toothpaste, since that is the easiest to replace), but I absolutely could not close the bag. My fingers said “no”, and the baggie said “I don’t wanna.” As I struggled I told people to go around me. Finally, the security lady just took the bag and said “that’s fine” and put it on the conveyor belt open. I sheepishly slunk through the metal detector and gathered my things.

My morning plan had been to get to the terminal and through security 2 hours early so I could get breakfast in the BA lounge. But, after the chaos, I found myself in the AA lounge (where the food kind of sucks) with 20 minutes to spare. I scarfed a couple bites, and headed to the gate.

On boarding the plane I promptly sat in the wrong seat. My ticket said 12F (window on the left) and I sat in 12A (window on the right). A friendly mom and daughter sat next to me. They had 12a and 12b, but since they were as sleep lagged as me, they thought that was aisle and middle. All was well until a grumpy business man with the 12c aisle seat demanded his seat. This forced everyone in 12 a,b,c,d, and e to all move so I could get where I belonged. The person in the middle in the other set of seats had begun to hope the window would be empty and he could move, and he was none to happy to have me crush his hope, and for the rest of the flight he pwnd the armrest and made me cling to the arm rest as he spread his arm into my space while he tried to sleep.

By the time I got to Vienna, I just wanted to get myself on the train to Graz so I could sleep a bit. Following my habit, I asked the person at the info desk for information on how to get from the airport to the needed train station. She unhelpfully and a bit sarcastically responded that the train to Graz left the train station, and that I needed to take the train station shuttle bus. Um. Sure. As I walked to the bus station I was attacked by a host of taxi drivers asking if I needed a ride. They were plentiful and aggressive, and a bit intimidating. Making it to the bus station I discovered there are 12 buses and more than 1 train station. I knew from my map what metro station I needed, but not which bus station, and since the metro required 2 changes, I thought (wrongly) the bus was really the right was to go, so I opted to try again to get better info. I saw a friendly sign for a Visitor Center and followed it only to end up in a parking garage (had I gone outside, I later learned, the visitor center was outside at ground level).

Giving up, I turned on international roaming and googled.

I finally found the bus, verified with the driver that it was correct, and settled into a seat. According to the schedule, as best as my high school German allowed me to read, I needed the second stop. Here I should say, my only failing grade on a report card was my German midterm. When the bus stopped after a tedious time driving in traffic, the driver said something incomprehensible. Only one person stood up, and the other family I’d heard mentioning the station I needed stayed on. When we got to the next stop, I tried to confirm with the driver that it was the right place, but… It was not. That incomprehensible thing he’d said had been the stop I needed, and the other family, not speaking any German, had, like me, stayed put (and unlike me didn’t confirm, and were on their way inside). The Bus driver told me I needed to pay another 7 euro and get on another bus. Hanging my head, I headed over, but the second bus driver took pity on me, said taking his bus was dumb, and wrote on my iPhone metro directions. 1 failed ticket machine and 2 euro later I was on my way by rail to the train station, and had vowed that when given the choice of metro or bus, I will next time choose metro. Getting to the correct station finally, I found the 1 available ticket machine blocked by a nun talking to friends. I waited for another machine, and finally got a ticket.

I got to the platform at the exact moment the train I needed was leaving.

It turns out that on Sunday, the train that I’d verified runs every 30minutes actually runs every hour. So I waited. And then almost got on the wrong train. I read the signs. I did what the signs said. Luckily, I asked the train conductor and, at the last possible instant, I was able to run across the platform and catch the right train.

I’m now sitting in a train car with a bunch of 20 something’s who are traveling on holiday. They are exceedingly friendly, and all is finally ok. When I get to Graz, I’m taking no chances – I’m taking a taxi to the hotel, and then I’m going to follow @moonrangerlaura like a baby duckling.

Sleep deprivation makes you dumb. QED.

Goal: Setup on EC2 an Ubuntu server configured to run PHP software on an Apache Server connected to a MySQL database on an RDS (This is a LAMP server)

Uses: This type of configuration can be used for WordPress, phpBB, SMF, and any number of other php online toys

Notes: There are two ways to set this up servers. You can either go through the online GUI or use a commandline toolkit. For advanced features you have to use the command line, but… For basic setup you can just use the GUI. Also: Amazon does not allow capital letters and _ marks in all situations. It is easiest just to avoid uppercase and underscores at all times.

Step 0: Go sign up for AWS. Give them your credit cards, acknowledge this won’t be free. There is a good tutorial here, and it is worth going through, starting and terminating a server.

Step 1: Setup a Database. This step takes the longest for Amazon to process, so get it going first and it will be ready for you to configure things when you are done getting your EC2 server setup in the next step

• Sign into your AWS console
• On the RDS tab, set up a mysql db. Set up a 5GB instance and otherwise use all the defaults
• Add a security group other than default (I called my web)
• come back later and…. When the DB is finished setting up, modify it to add the new security group so it shows “default, web”

Step 2: Get security keys. You will need a whole variety of security keys. Might as well set them all up now. These can be found under AWS Account > Security Credentials

• X.509 certificate and private key file (rename these to something useful. I use X509cert_instancename.pem and X509priv_instancename.pem
• AWS account id
• Keypair (I use the naming convention key_pk_instancename.pem // key_rsa_instancename.pem)

When you have all the Keypairs, put them somewhere you won’t lose them (I use ~/.ssh on my local machine)

Step 3: Create an EC2 server. The set of default Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) may not include what you want. These change regularly, and when I setup my server they were useless. A complete list of AMIs can be found on the Cloud Market. Official Ubuntu installs are posted by the user “Canonical.” I found the most recent for the current stable version of Ubuntu. On 1/22/2011 this was Maverik Merrkat and ami-c0a959a9.

• Go to the Cloud Market to find the AMI you want and note the code number
• Sign into your AWS console
• On the EC2 tab, launch a new instance. To use the AMI you selected, click on the “Community AMIs” tab and type in the code number you noted above. I just used default values for everything
• For you sanity, give the instance a name. You may find your self growing servers like mushrooms
• You will be prompted to create a new keypair – this is required for you to login. Save it to ~/.ssh (naming convention instancename.pem)
• Create a security group with the same name you used for the DB (you’ll still need to link them).
• Add default ports for HTTP, HTTPS, MySQL, SSH for the whole internet
• While it is launching, go to the RDS tab > DB Security Groups, and edit the security group you created in step 1 to include the EC2 security group you just created (you’ll also need the account ID, which can be found under account > security credentials)
• NOTE: If the Public DNS is ec2-123-456-78-90.compute-1.amazonaws.com the IP is 123.456.78.90

Step 4: Login to your server and set up user. Initially your server will only require the keypair in order for you to login. This is mostly safe, but you likely want to force a password as well. It is also good to not do all your work as root.

• Note: The username varies with type of instance. For ubuntu it’s ubuntu
  localhost:.ec2 $ ssh -i instancename.pem username@ecX-XX-XXX-XXX-XX.compute-X.amazonaws.com
  This will provide you a regular command line login
• Setup the new user :~$ sudo useradd -d /home/username -m -s /bin/bash username
  :~$ sudo passwd username
Enter new UNIX password: NEWPASSWORD
Retype new UNIX password: NEWPASSWORD
passwd: password updated successfully
• You also need to add to the sudo file
  :~$ sudo visudo
  Go to the line ALL = (ALL) ALL and add the new user following example of admin (the leading % not needed)
• Give the user ssh access
  :~$ sudo cp /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.original
:~$ sudo chmod a-w /etc/ssh/sshd_config.original Change PasswordAuthentication to yes
:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

Step 5: Update your distribution and install LAMP and EC2 Tools. The Ubuntu AMI you started is a plain install of Ubuntu and doesn’t have all the libraries you need. That’s ok. These are easy to get via apt.

• Log back into your instance as the user you just created.
• Install updates
  :~$ sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade
• Reboot
  :~$ sudo reboot
• Log back in and use apt to get needed software
  :~$ sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql postfix mysql-client unzip php5-memcache php5-curl memcached php5-gd
:~$ sudo a2enmod rewrite headers expires
  Say yes to all options, including the mysterious postfix options
• Check if it works by going to your public IP or public DNS. You should see a basic apache test page
• Install the EC2 Tools after enabling multiverse
  :~$ sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup
• And edit the sources.list file so that all the multiverse lines are uncommented.
• Update the list of apt files and then install the commandline ec2 tools. You’ll need these if you ever need to configure dynamic servers.
  :~$ sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install ec2-api-tools
• Copy your certificates to your .ssh directory. From your local machine
  localmachine: $ scp -i ~/.ssh/instancename.pem X509priv_instancename.pem X509cert_instancename.pem ubuntu@ec2-67-202-7-11.compute-1.amazonaws.com:~/.
• Configure on the EC2 instance your Bash profile (and the user you created’s profile) to include the following lines
  export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=$HOME/.ssh/X509priv_instancename.pem
export EC2_CERT=$HOME/.ssh/X509cert_instancename.pem
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/
  And then enable these features using :~$ source .bashrc

Step 6: Test MySQL. Call me paranoid, but this is a whole lot of work to have something not work.

• Test ability to connect to db from command line
  mysql -u [Master User name] --password=[Master Password] -h [Endpoint hostname]
• That should work! If it doesn’t, um… Google.

Step 7: Setup Virtual Host. By default, your server wants all its web files in /var/www. This is fine, but requires a whole lot of sudo (or permissions changing), and limits your ability to have a bunch of applications (potentially with different domain names) all on the one server. This is a rather boring virtual host that simply sets up a project folder. I assume you are working as ‘username’ and the code is in ~username/public_html/Project and if you are allowing uploads, they are in ~username/public_html/Project/uploads.

• Backup the apache default config incase you step on something, then create copy to change and change it
  :~/ sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/default.original
:~/ sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default.original /etc/apache2/sites-available/ProjectName
:~/ sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/ProjectName
  Edit the file to look like
  <VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /home/username/public_html/Project
<Directory /home/username/public_html/Project>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>


  # Don't let anything in wp-content/uploads be executed as php
<Directory /home/username/public_html/Project/uploads>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
php_admin_flag engine off
</IfModule>
AddType text/plain .html .htm .shtml .php .php3 .phtml .phtm .pl
</Directory>

  ErrorLog /home/username/public_html/Project/logs/error.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /home/username/public_html/Project/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

• disable the default site: :~/$ sudo a2dissite default
• enable the new configuration :~/$ sudo a2ensite ProjectName
• restart apache :~/$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
• Create a test file in your new directory: vi /home/username/public_html/Project/test.php
  Include in the file the code
• Copy the test.php file to the uploads directory
• Test both files. The first should show a php config file, the second should show the file contents

Step 8: Connect to MySQL via php. This should be the hint you need to do everything else.

• Create a mysql test file :~/public_html/Project$ vi mysqltest.php
• make the file contents
  <?php
//connection to the database
$con = mysql_connect("name.abc123def456.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com",root,"PASSWORD") or die(mysql_error());
echo "Database connected.";
?>
• Go to the webpage for mysqltest.php (http://SERVERNAME/mysqltest.php). This should give you a “Database connected” message

Optional: SAVE your AMI in case you need it later

• Upload your private key and x509 certificate if you haven’t yet (and you should have, but…).
  localhost: $ scp -i ~/.ssh/instancename.pem X509priv_instancename.pem X509cert_instancename.pem ubuntu@ec2-67-202-7-11.compute-1.amazonaws.com:~
• And then on the Amazon image, move them to /mnt
  :~$ sudo mv ~/*_instancename.pem /mnt
• Next export everything
  :~$ sudo ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt -k /mnt/X509priv_instancename.pem -c /mnt/X509cert_instancename.pem -u -r x86_64 -p sampleimage
  (Use apt-get as needed and indicated by error messages)
• check that it is there with
  :~$ ls -l /mnt/sampleimage.*
• upload it with
  :~$ ec2-upload-bundle -b [name of s3 bucket that will be created] -m /mnt/sampleimage.manifest.xml -a AWS-ACCESS-KEY-ID -s AWS-SECRET-KEY --location US

Optional: Download and install the Amazon API Tools locally

• Create ~/.ec2
• cp your 4 .pem files to ~/.ec2
• Download and unzip the Amazon API Command Line Tools and move the bin and lib to ~/.ec2.
• Your directory should now look like this
  styx:.ec2 $ ls
UserID_PK.pem
UserID_PUB.pem
X509cert_instancename.pem
X509priv_instancename.pem
bin
lib
• You also need to configure some environmental variables. Edit you ~/.bash_profile to include the text below at the end.
  # Setup Amazon EC2 Command-Line Tools
export EC2_HOME=~/.ec2
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=`ls $EC2_HOME/X509priv_instancename.pem`
export EC2_CERT=`ls $EC2_HOME/X509cert_instancename.pem`
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home/
• When you are done editing your bash_profile, you will need to use restart your shell
  styx:.ec2 $ source ~/.bash_profile
• Check if it works
  styx:.ec2 $ cd ~/.ec2
styx:.ec2 $ ec2-describe-images -o amazon
• This will produce a list of available EC2 Images. Grep can be used to find specific features.

Yesterday I took several pages of notes on the Kepler results (Kepler 10b in particular) and once I have time to chew through those notes I’m going to put together a longer blog post. One thing that occurred to me earlier today is that I’m just not able to write at these meetings the way I used to, and I actually want to write about that. This is a Seattle meeting of the AAS. This conference rotates between four sites (Seattle, Austin, Long Beach, DC) and this is the first meeting of my third post-PhD AAS cycle. Seattle 2003 I presented my PhD work, having just defended. It was a wild meeting for me – my first as a journalist working at Astronomy magazine – and I was trying to learn my new journalism job while still being a scientist. Seattle 2007 was my first meeting as a ‘professor’ (assistant visiting prof at that stage), and I was learning how to be an academic while still being a podcaster/journalist.

I guess, in retrospect, this is a meeting where I seem to like to undergo life changes. This year it’s nothing that specific or pivotal, but I am noticing this meeting is nonetheless different. Somewhere in the past couple years I stopped being someone who could run manically and joyfully from press conference to invited talk to science talk, writing and recording as I run. It takes a certain freedom of movement to live that way. Now, my time is not entirely my own, and I find myself with responsibilities that force me away from the places – the talks – I want to see, to the places I need to be. Yesterday was a mix: I had a 2 hourish meeting with other NASA folks where we heard some new policy and had worksheets for communicating our needs from NASA. It was useful, but not really bloggable. Last night I had a policy meetings, all good ideas with great people and excellent food followed, but while I relished my sauteed mushrooms, I wasn’t consuming new discoveries I can share with you. Today it has been almost all about places I should…, thing I should…, lots of I should … And not a lot of things to write.

I think I became a responsible adult, and that means balancing time i could spend
learning about things outside of my subfields with time i should spend collaborating with people with whom I can work inside my subfield.

With age (and collaborations and grants) comes telecons (and WebEx) and meetings. This is part of effectively herding large groups of people in working in a coherent way. Good telecons and meetings are firehoses of content and data calls (based on new info, everyone tell us…) and then a listing of action items and a call for people to take responsibility for action items (this last is why the guilt of a voice on the phone is
needed over email to a certain degree). I’m realizing more and more that the time I once spent learning non-required things and writing things for the joy of it is now taken up with committee work, collaboration communications, and paperwork.

Looking around this meeting, there are lots of bloggers, tweeters, and other new media communicators. As near as I can tell, they are mostly (but not entirely) young.
While some of this is a technology bias – students are far more likely to be Facebook savvy – in part it’s a free time bias. It seems my next life stage, my next post-Seattle stage, is one of working with others (good) and knowing my choices on how to spend
my time aren’t always my own (bittersweet). I am still a scientist and a writer. But now I am a voice in an academic choir of collaboration and committee work as well.

But I still tweet while I walk. They can’t take that away from me.

First though, I have a confession to make. Yesterday I played hooky. During the opening session a friendly woman on the organizing committee admonished us all to go out and see Rome. Being one to (often but not always) do as I’m told, I set out with another colleague to explore. With a certain amount of brownian motion, we wended our way from the conference site (near the Foro Romano) all the way to the Vatican. While we did go into St Peter’s Basilica (which was overwhelming), the lines were too long to get into the Sistine Chapel or the Vatican Museum.

Having walked myself out, getting one set of blisters from one pair of shoes on Sunday and getting a second set of blisters from a second pair of shoes yesterday, I have officially walked my feet off and I’m prepared to sit through today’s LRO talks, tomorrow’s MESSENGER talks, and Thursday’s Education and Public Outreach talks.

This mornings LRO talks spanned both instrumentation and geophysics. In my head, the overall theme seemed to be, how do we better understand the geophysics of the moon through impacts, and how does this relate to past, resent and future lunar exploration.

LRO is perhaps uniquely designed to address these themes. It possesses cameras that are taking the highest resolution lunar images ever achieved. From its low (50km, I believe) orbital altitude, the LRO’s Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) can obtain images with 50cm per pixel resolution. This means that an average sized person like me, sprawled out on the surface of the moon, would show up as a couple pixel blip. In addition to this super hi-res capability, the Wide Angle Camera (WAC) possesses 7 different filters, allowing it to sample the Moon’s reflected light all across the UV and visible light wavelengths. Since different minerals reflect different colors of light, by looking at maps made by comparing light in two different wavelengths (for those of you wanting numbers, they use maps of 321nm/689nm & 415nm/689nm) they are able to map out different minerals. While this may sound like a lot of boring geochemistry, the reality is they’re able to overlay the reflectance ratios on the high resolution images and show how impacts reveal a variety of different minerals and the dig through the lunar strata, how lunar melt transported minerals of a given composition, and the overall variation of the surrounding plains. While these images aren’t a replacement for actually going and picking up rocks, they are a start to understanding the point by point composition of the moon and they do help us find places of interest.

In addition to revealing hints at mineralogy through color, the NAC images just flat out reveal amazing detail simply by being really amazing images. From expansion lines in the crust on the highlands on the far side of the moon (called extension features), to melt flows and land slides, to the fine details in craters, the images reveal a whole new moon. And they reveal the moon in stereo. The NAC images are actually done in pairs, and done over and over in different lighting conditions. From the left and right (technically east and west) pairs, we can get a 3d view of the moon. By comparing the moon under different lighting you can reveal different features. With the sun near zenith, different minerals are easier to discern from their reflectance. If the sun is near the horizon in an image, shadows will be long, allowing boulders and spacecraft to more easily be found by following long shadows to their source. By registering the stereo images with lunar laser altimetry data from LOLA it is possible to get a fine grained understanding of lunar topography.

One of the frustrations of this meeting is that fabulous images are being shown that aren’t public or published yet (there is a strict NO PHOTOGRAPHY rule). The most amazing images they showed this morning were actually slope maps. I know, sounds boring, but loop rather like modern art (googling for examples will occur when I have real Internet. We’ve all probably seen topographic maps of the moon where the bottoms of craters are one color, and the lunar highlands are another, with a rainbow connecting these extremes. What is obscured in these images is the slopes from one altitude to another. In slope maps, the floor of craters are seen as flat (with sometimes a cusp in the center), and the highlands, again, are shown as flat, with the slope from one extreme to the next showing up as a variety of colors. No where else have I seen the terraced nature of some impact basins so clearly delineated.

In the vocabulary of geophysics, craters come with many names. The largest of the splotches on a surface are actually called impact basins, and due to their size and the energy they impart to the surface they’re hitting, they often create a series of concentric rings, like shock waves solidifying in the lunar surface. Smaller impacts, simply called impact craters, may sometimes have a central hump, but are more generally conical walled with a single rim.

To understand what type of craters and basins are formed thru what types of impacts, various nations have thrown things at the moon. The soviets did this largely by accident, landing some of their Luna missions a bit harder than intended. The Americans purposely impacted the top stage of the Saturn rockets (the SIVB impacts) into the lunar surface. Since each of these missions had a mostly understand angle of impact and velocity (errors were enough that not all landing locations were where we thought), we’re able to look at each impact and say, If X hits a surface composed of Y with a velocity V, then we get an impact that looks like Z. Such impacts provide calibration information, helping to put larger and smaller craters in a known context.

Understanding craters is important for a lot of reasons. To first order, craters are important because by counting them we can sort the ages of different surfaces. Highly cratered surfaces are very old, showing evidence of the age of Heavy Bombardment that impacted the early solar system. Newer surfaces have few or no craters, and have been resurfaced by volcanism or other techtonic events. Since different size crateres are created at different rates (and at nonlinearly changing rates over time), craters of all sizes are counted, and the overall distribution is used to get point to point ages. This technique would work easy easy if only the moon had a smooth surface made of just one type of material. Since the real moon has all sorts of terrain features and a varied surface composition this actually is fairly complicated. For instance, in counting craters on the three landslide segments around the Apollo 17 landing site, different ages are determined for each of these segments, even though they should have formed at the same time. These variations may come from differences in slope or sheltering from impacts by the topography. Similar odd discrepancies in age are also seen when comparing ages of the melt pools and ejecta blankets of the Tycho and Copernicus craters. Here, the differences are believed to come from surface differences in hardness between these two features. Craters that span regions are seen to have different depths where they overlap each surface.

The more we look at the moon, the more it is clear we have a lot to learn. One of the things that keeps coming up is the need for more rocks – for more tangible ways to calibrate our crater mapping to get accurate surface ages. While robots are nice, people are more versatile, and in looking at craters, notes are also being made on where craters stay in constant shadow (with potential ice and where we can build safer human habitats out of direct solar view and with fewer temperature variations to deal with), and where polar surfaces are almost in constant light (which is good for solar panels). It is clear, the more we learn, the more we want to just go and again dig in the lunar dirt. While robots are capable (and the Lunokhod 2 lander certainly showed a rover can rove all the heck over the place if it wants to), people still just want to fly away to the moon.

Currently I’m sitting in a lecture hall in the Angelicum Center at the Pontificia Universita San Tommaso d’Aquino (or in English, the University of St Thomas Aquinas) where I am attending the Fifth European Planetary Science Congress hosted by Europlanet. On Thursday I’ll be giving a brief talk on Moon Zoo early education research results, and in general, I’m on a continued mission to keep up to speed with the quickly evolving field of geophysics.

Due to lack of Internet in the conference rooms, my twittering of the meeting will be limited (I’m saving my data plan for when I’m lost and need google maps), but I will be doing my best to blog the meeting.

While you may often hear that astrophysics is undergoing a golden age of discovery, I have to say that if that is true, than planetary science is undergoing a platinum or perhaps diamond age. Today’s fleet of planetary missions and ground and space-based telescopes is delivering data as fast as (and sometimes faster than) the science community can process it. From discovering water on the Moon, to uncovering the origins of dust devils on Mars, to even trying to understand the atmospheres of planets orbiting alien stars, today’s planetary scientists are rapidly rewriting the field of geophysics.

This meeting, will have 50 sessions with results from 900 abstracts presented by more than 500 attendees. Thankfully, everything is presented in English. Due to parallel sessions, it won’t be possible to attend everything.

Luckily, this morning opening session has us all sitting in one room. My first impression of the meeting is that it has the feel of the International Year of Astronomy. They have mentioned several times that this is the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter. They are stressing the need to do public education hand in hand with doing science, and the morning started with the presentation of an EPO award and a call for ESA to do as NASA does and include Education and Public Outreach funds in its mission budgets.

Watch the Stars – Light the Night [buy tickets here]

When: Thursday, September 2, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Emory Math & Science Center, 400 Dowman Dr., Atlanta, GA 30322
Proceeds to go to Light the Night – the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

Dragon*Con [buy tickets here]

When: Friday, September 3 through Monday, September  6, 2010
Where: Atlanta Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, AND Sheraton
NB I have yet to attend a Dragon*Con where my schedule exactly matched what I got the week before the con, so be prepared for changes!
Don’t forget to check out our fan table in the Hilton! We’ll have T-Shirts for sale!

• Title: Space Trivia!
  Description: Do you know a lot about space & astronomy? Are you good with trivia? Think you know more than our experts? Here’s where you can test your knowledge!
  Time: Fri 07:00 pm Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Mystery of Hanny’s Voorwerp
  Description: Who’s Hanny? What’s a Voorwerp? How’s Hubble involved? See the World Release of the webcomic that explains it all & the 1st Hubble images.
  Time: Fri 10:00 pm Location: Crystal Ballroom – Hilton (Length: until we’re done )
• Title: The 2010 Parsec Awards
  Description: The Parsec Award is available for original Sci-Fi & Fantasy & Speculative Fiction within the new frontiers of Portable Media.
  Time: Sat 04:00 pm Location: Regency V – Hyatt (Length: 2.5 Hours)
• Title: Astronomy Cast Live!
  Description: Take a facts-based journey through the cosmos with Dr. Pamela Gay and Fraser Cain
  Time: Sun 01:00 pm Location: 204 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Skepticism and Education
  Description: JREF now has a Director of Educational Programs – what else is being done out there and how can skeptics help educate the next generation?
  Time: Sun 04:00 pm Location: 207 / 206 / 205 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Your Daughter Can Too
  Description: These women have successful careers in engineering & science.  They can tell you how to help your daughters do the same.
  Time: Mon 10:00 am Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)

I’d like to start this blog post by saying just one simple thing I know to be true: I am a scientist. I may spend my days writing software, teaching, and too often doing astronomy communications research, but at the end of the day I’m a PhD Astronomer trained to do research in variable stars and galaxy evolution.

That said, I’d like to say one more thing that isn’t contradictory to me: As much as I’m a scientist, I’m also a Christian.

Being both puts me in a rather horrible position in our currently divided culture. Right now, there are Christians out there eager to condemn me for knowing, based on mulitple-lines of evidence, that we live in a 13.7 billion year old universe (give or take 0.2 billion years). There are also skeptics out there actively condemning me for believing, without evidence that would hold up in any lab, that there is a God.

As a human, I don’t really like knowing that there are people out there actively hating on me because of what I know to be true and what I believe to be true don’t match what they choose to adhere to.

I wish I could put blinders on and focus on educating people about science without needing to address my philosophical detractors, but I can’t do that for one simple reason: The modern culture wars between the New Athiests and Young Earth Creationists are getting in the way of teaching science.

Here’s the problem, summarized quite nicely on Whiskey Before Breakfast (in a post that triggered what I’m writing now because he wrote something that recognized what it’s like for me at times.): There is currently a philosophy that “skepticism is a proper subset of atheism: that is, not all atheists are skeptics but all skeptics are atheists.” Since scientists, if they are good scientists (and I’d like to think I’m a good scientist) have to be scientific-method-employing skeptical thinkers, this philosophy than would profess that since all scientists are skeptical thinkers, and all skeptics are atheists, then (using set theory), all scientists must be atheists, and just as a non-skeptical scientist is a bad scientists, than a non-atheist scientist must also be a bad scientist.

This is false logic. Being a skeptic does not preclude a belief in a God. Being a skeptic simply means I have to admit that there are things I know are scientifically true and based on evidence (such as the age of the universe), and there are things that in the absence of sufficient data I may choose to believe in or not believe in (such as God).

In our classrooms, this distinction between what we scientifically know to be true (vaccines work), and what individuals choose to believe in without sufficient data (that life must exist somewhere else in the universe), has been lost in too many cases. This is harmful because it sours people to learning science.

Several years ago I had some students come to me with an exam written by another professor. This was an Astonomy 101 class for humanities majors. They had been studying the cosmology chapter of the book, and the final question on the exam – a throw away question with no right answer meant to get easy points – was, “How do you believe the universe will end?” (In similar situations I’ll ask, “Explain why you do or don’t think life on other planets might or might not exist?” *¹ ) The word believe was the word on the exam. There were no further details to the question. It didn’t constrain the students to discuss only the theories taught in class. It actually asked, “How do you believe the universe will end?” This was back in the days before dark energy, before the 1998 discovery that the universe is accelerating apart. Back then we taught that the universe could be open — expanding apart forever — or that maybe it is closed and will someday collapse in on itself. I think we all hoped for a flat universe (that would certainly have made the math a lot easier). This professor had read the students’ answers and given 0/20 points when they described instead of one of these three scenarios the second coming of Christ. With that badly worded question, and those 0/20 grades, a professor placed a wall between himself and his students, preventing them from being willing to listen to the scientific facts that describe how a universe without interference will continue to evolve. To him there was no debate, they weren’t allowed to believe in the second coming of Christ, at least not if they wanted to get a good grade. (Had I been grading, I’d have realized I had written a stupid question and tossed it out)

This is an impossible situation for a student, and not even a rational one for a scientist. Sitting here as an astronomer, I have to acknowledge we could live in a universe that hasn’t yet collapsed to the lowest energy level, and it might tear itself apart doing so someday. I have to admit, we could live in a multi-verse where our universe and another will someday merge, destroying the reality we know. Or, as a person not wearing a teacher hat, I can admit there could be a God that decides to hit the cosmic endgame button (but I won’t teach that in a science classroom). While all these things could be possible, with people believing in the possibility of each, I know based on evidence that, if left alone to continue doing what it’s doing, our universe will expand forever and suffer a rather horrific energy death. Do you see the distinction? Given evidence, and a scientific scenario, I can know a true outcome. But there is still room to believe in non-contradictory possibilities.

Had that Professor simply acknowledged that it was a poorly worded question with no right answer, those two girls could have gone on to continue enjoying astronomy. Instead, I ended up with them upset and angry in my office*^2,3 telling me that they couldn’t even look at their astronomy book without getting mad.

Negative emotions don’t exactly aid learning, and what could have been a positive learning environment was completely destroyed by equating scientifically testable hypotheses with beliefs.

Reality is complicated, and not all questions have answers provided by science. Life would be a whole lot easier if we could run an experiment to prove what is right and what is wrong; to do a chemical assay to assess good and evil. Science can’t do those things. Right now, it can’t even tell me if string theory is true. And in the absence of data, there is room for belief. I don’t have laboratory evidence of a God, but I choose to believe in one, and I will let others hold onto their beliefs as well. We also don’t know if aliens exist on other planets (although that one has a lot more hope of being solved with a telescope), and I choose to believe at least one other world in our great cosmos contains a technology loving society. What is key is I know what are beliefs, and I know what are scientifically based facts. In the realm of data, I am a skeptical thinker. But I am a human whose mind goes beyond the constraints of science to question, and to sometimes, without laboratory data, dare to believe.

I am a scientist: Give me evidence and hear me teach. Give me observations and watch me do research. But I am a human who can have beliefs, and having them doesn’t harm my ability to do science, to teach science, or to communicate science to you.

*(1) The actual wording of the question from last time I used it was “Part 1) Write out the Drake Equation and explain who values for each of the variables can be determined, Part 2) Considering the above, explain why you do or don’t think life on other planets might or might not exist?”
(2) I ended up with them in my office because I was their observational astronomy prof. This was the standard, Prof A didn’t boost my grade, so I’m going to see if Prof B raises my grade. I don’t remember if they knew before hand that I was a Christian. This is a common phenomena. I’m known as a prof who will listen, and at least once a semester someone comes in an tries to get me to go to some other prof to change a grade – this includes being ranted at about an English prof and an Engineering class.
(3) It has been assumed that I took the students’ side, and condemned my colleague to them. No, that would be unprofessional (there was no ethics violation and we all have academic freedom), and since it was a tenured professor, it could also have gotten me in a lot of trouble. I told them they should have asked for clarification during the exam, because while it was unreasonable for them to lie about what they actually believed when being asked what they believe, the fact that they didn’t demonstrate any content knowledge wasn’t useful. I start each semester now by telling my students I will ask at least one dumbly worded question each semester, because historically I know this is true. He or she who points out my dumbly worded questions earns my respect, and probably the adoration of their classmates.

I have to admit, somewhere in the past couple months I went from traveling a lot to traveling too much. I have acquired opinions about the wheels on luggage and the distribution of electrical outlets in different hotel rooms. I have visited cities spread across 4 continents and stumbled through eight times zones to the east and twelve timezones to the west. Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve gone with friends and we’ve worked to communicate astronomy to the world while drinking local beers and devouring local foods. IYA brought me countless experiences, a now full passport, 1000s of photos, and 20 pounds. Other than the 20 pounds (And sadly I don’t mean Great British Pounds) I wouldn’t change a thing.

Not all my trips have been good. Rio left me saddened that such a great city could decay into such poverty and disarray. Shanghai I see hope for, but today its pollution and construction chaos made the city one I will wait a while before I visit again.

Coming to Cape Town, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I know this is a growing nation with excellent universities. I know that it also has a lot of social issues: huge disparity between the haves and the have nots, lack of consistent infrastructure, high AIDs rates, and is being isolated in geography, and in bandwidth. This is a country that is still recovering from apartheid, but it is recovering.

All my concerns were unneeded. I have to say, Cape Town and its surroundings have continuously impressed me.

Landing Monday, the airport felt somewhat like landing in small town America. It was small, with aggressively friendly taxi drivers, and my rush hour taxi ride across the city carried me past some urban slums (but not ones that terrified me like the post-armageddon like slums in Rio and Shanghai). These slums were houses made from found objects – scraps of aluminum and random wood – that sadly resembled the hovels seen on some native american indian reservations, and in homeless camps in and near some major US cities. But beside these slums were mostly were just stretches of urban housing, condos, factories, shopping districts and all the other signs of middle class and upper class populations.

The city is very modern looking, with impressive shipping yards, docked cruise ships, and a safe and tourist filled water front. The dollar is of value here, and food and hotels are very affordable (Internet is not! I have spent a fortune on internet, which is charged by the megabyte, after forgetting to turn off my remote backup). The people are friendly and tolerant of stupid tourists, and I have to admit, this particular trip I seem to be demonstrating the definition of stupid tourist. The first day I was here, I was so tired that somehow I managed to get from the conference room to my hotel room with my laptop and purse, but not my computer bag. When I realized this mistake after a later dinner – somewhere around 11pm – the hotel found someone to let me search the conference room. My search was to no avail. I restlessly slept, trying to come to terms with my lost beloved tumbuk2 bag. I decided it was 9X% odds I left the bag in the room, open and showing the money in its front pocket, and it had wondered, or X% that I had left it in the conference room and it had wondered. I got up the next day, accepting the fact that it was gone, and asked some locals I know how to handle the problem. Our conference organizer, the amazing Kevin Govender, disappeared, talked to his contact with the hotel staff, and reappeared with my bag. A friendly soul had seen it and locked it away safe. Having been reunited with my bag, I promptly forgot that I shouldn’t put my iPhone in the pockets of one specific pair of black trousers I own because it will fall out. My last iPhone explored both Hawaii and NY by taxi thanks to those pants, and it has landed in my sofa cushions more times than I care to think about. Nonetheless, in a moment of jet lagged exhaustion, the phone went in my pocket, we both went into a taxi, and only one of us got out. Since I just got in a taxi with a bunch of others at the curb, we have no idea what taxi company it was. The front desk of the hotel, however, has tried really hard to figure out who we should call, and has left all sorts of messages. I have to admit, I’ve lost hope on the phone. No matter – this happens – Nonetheless, I’m impressed at the honest effort the hotel has given this exhausted to the point of stupidity American. I’ve stayed in hotels more nights than I’ve stayed at home in recent months, and this level of service is rare and deeply appreciated.

Beyond the friendly humans and the overall city impressions, I have to say the geography is amazing. Hotels.com somehow managed to get me in a corner hotel room for the same price as a tiny single at the conference rate. Out my windows I have a view that spans from the ocean to the fabulous hills.It is amazing to wake each day to see cargo ships and cruise ships coming into the harbors.

Yesterday, the conference released the whole lot of us to go out and explore, and along with several new and old friends, I went on a wine vineyard (and chocolate and cheese) tour of the area. It was a fabulous day and of being in awe of geography, observing goats (a source of cheese), and drinking samples of over a dozen wines and champagnes. Our night wound down, watching the mountains fade away as the stars – Orion upside down – winked into sight behind the dramatic mountains. With the coming darkness, we went to a tourist trap for dinner, and enjoyed a buffet of African foods from across the continent and the performance of dancers doing local tribal songs and dances. (It was pointed out that the dances we were seeing shared a lot of elements with hula dance. I wonder if anthropologists can track native dance styles as a way of looking at cultural migrations). It was a good night. This weekend I’ll be going up to Sutherland to see SALT. My hope is too see an animal other than a bird that I’ve never seen before.

If you are looking for a fabulous place to visit and get offline, come to Cape Town. (And if you’re looking for a semester abroad, Cape Town Uni. is solid, so add it to your list of possibilities!)

But tonight I gave a talk that began with the reading of Bible verses I selected, read from the pulpit in Asbury Seminaries Chapel. My brief talk was meant to contextualize our place as humans in the cosmos. Aiming for just 15 minutes, it is quite short, after after receiving a few requests via twitter, I’m going to post it here.

Please, please, don’t flame. Please.

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Hubble Ultra Deep Field [credit: NASA / STScI

Genesis 1:1-5
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

John 1:1-5
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood[a] it.

Colossians 1: 16-17
16 For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Romans 1:20
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Good Evening. I have to admit this was perhaps the hardest 1500 words or so I have ever prepared. I am a Christian, and I am a scientist, and most days I find myself dancing a careful dance where I try to avoid verbal bullets from atheist scientists and Christian young earthers. I have learned how to speak safely and when to speak unsafely to scientists, but this is my first time speaking before Theologians. I don’t know how far out of your comfort zone astronomy may take some of you. No matter what ideas you come to this conference with, I’d ask you to open your mind to learn new ideas, and in the breadth and magnificence of this universe which cosmology allows us to understand, find God in what is clearly seen.

Here on the surface of the Earth it is easy to see our universe as small and understood. Each year the seasons tick past in explainable ways, and 400 years after Kepler, the motion of the planets is just something we take for granted. Solar eclipses no longer make people tremble as the Asseryians trembled before the 763BC eclipse of Amos 8:9. Instead eclipses are just a roughly twice a year things that thousands of people turn into vacations.

From the surface of the Earth, it is easy to feel safe, and in control because we have the knowledge to understand the universe.

We have science to explain the supernovae, the comets, the ever twinkle and gleam in the sky.

But we are small, and life is fragile in this vast universe, and there are more things in heaven and earth waiting to be discovered than are dreamt of in our sciences.

Our human minds struggles to grasp at the scale of our universe. Any number over a million is simply large, and in discussing the cosmos, we discuss the billions and billions of galaxies, the billions and billions of stars, and distances so vaste that light has not yet had time to travel from most distant galaxies we see in the north to the most distant galaxies we see in our Southern skies.

“]

Saturn with Earth tucked in the Rings (left side, small blue dot) [credit: NASA / Cassini

Carl Sagan referred to the earth as Pale Blue Dot and in this image taken by the Cassini space probe, we can see the distant Earth in its smallness. Sagan wrote of our world, “Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, … every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Not only do we struggle to grasp at our smallness, but we also struggle to understand our place in time.

Our planet is a transitory thing. Formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, it will be able to support life for only another 50 million years before the Sun’s slow increase in temperature makes life intolerable on Earth. In roughly 5 billion years our Earth will be destroyed entirely as our Sun bloats into a red giant and either consumes the planet or simply broils it with intense solar winds. We live in the twilight years of our world, and time is ticking.

But our planet is just part of a cycle.

We live on a rocky world orbiting a star that is rich in heavy elements. If you shine sunlight through the most amazing of prisms to make a rainbow, you will be able to single out dark stripes mixed in the light, many of which arise from Iron, Titanium, and other metallic atoms in the sun’s atmosphere.

To get at this richness of atomic diversity, our universe had to be created, and generations of stars had to live and die, all before our own Sun could be born.

When our universe formed, 13.7 billion years ago, it was pure energy – pure light. Within the first fractions of a second, that energy began to solidify into particles. Mass and Energy are just two faces of the same thing, and as the universe cooled, the mass divided from the light. At first there was matter and anti-matter, but through the miracle of asymmetry, for every 1 billion anti-matter particles there was a billion and 1 matter particles. The particles collided – they destroyed one another, and they left behind matter. And that matter, at that moment, and for almost the next 3 minutes, was as hot and as dense as the center of a star and nuclear fusion was able to take place. Protons combined. Neutrons were created. Hydrogen nuclei grew into deuterium, which in turn fused to helium and trace amounts of lithium and beryllium. Our theories tell us the ratios of these reactions, and when we look out at the oldest stars, we find the correct fractions fossilized in the elemental abundances of these ancient stars’ light. This is just one of many lines of evidence proving the big bang.

After the first 3 minutes, nuclear reactions shut off, but the universe was still too hot for neutral atoms to form. Everything was an opaque mash of nuclei and electrons and light, colliding. It stayed too hot, and it stayed opaque for nearly 300,000 years, but then one day it cooled enough that the electrons could bond with the atomic nuclei, and when that happened the light was released. Today we see this escaping light as the cosmic microwave background.

The cosmic microwave background demarks the point beyond which we can never observe. It is like the barrier beyond which your headlamp just can’t reach when scuba diving, or that place in the fog your candle cannot illuminate because it’s just to far away. Our universe, within this shell, is 93 billion light years across, but what we can see is likely no more than a few percent of the whole. But it is all the universe we will ever know.

And after the light separated from the atoms, our universe slowly cooled and expanded some more, but now structures began to form. It was only about 30 million years after the big bang that we believe the first stars lit up the then dark universe. The first stars lit up, the largest of them living and dying in the briefed million or so years. When these first stars died, they rained heavy elements on the gas and dust that was preparing to form future generations.

That stars could form is another miracle of our universe. There is no reason we can identify that the density had to be just right for stars. It could have been denser – and everything could have collapsed straight into black holes. It could have been less dense, and no stars would ever have formed. But it was neither of these things. The universe was just right to support stars, and those stars embedded in the darkness are what allowed life here to exist today.

We live on just one small pale blue dot orbiting a metal rich star. We exist because matter and anti matter were formed in unequal parts. We exist because the universe’s density was just right. We exist, because other stars formed, created heavy elements, and died, distributing the elements back into space to form our world and others.

And most amazingly of all, we live in a universe that is at once something we can learn to understand and something that is beyond our imagining.

Every day we are finding new things that defy our theories and force us to expand our ideas – We now know 26% of the universe is made of dark matter – a material like nothing experienced here on earth – and 70% of the universe is contained in dark energy – something we know so little about all we can really do is say we have a name for this rather large blank are in our scientific understanding. And every day we discover new planets in places we never imaged. New galaxies. New types of objects – all things we would have never imagined in our wildest science fiction.

We have been placed in a wonderful universe that is like a palace we have been allowed to explore. The rooms are many, and we can each find our own corner to ask our own questions concerning this creation.

But living in a universe with an amazing underlying physics that guides its evolution, does not preclude free will, or the occasional needed intervention. While A may lead to B it does necassarily dictate 200 years from now we will have D, E, and F occur. We live in a universe not dictated my certain outcomes, but rather one guided by probabilities, and in each possibility there is a chance for the future to be changed, either through the batting of a butterflys wing, through our own decisions, or through the intervention of a greater power – Our God – even if it is just a small voice in the dark reminding us that even in science we should have faith and believe while we look up and explore this amazing universe we live within.

Please don’t flame. Posting this was hard, but it was something people asked to read.

5:10pm A presentation will be by Dr Laurie Leshin, Deputy Associate administrator, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. Title : “New Oppurtunities in the President’s FY2011 Budget”

5:12pm Speaker is not dressed in back. While there are people downstairs pre-lecture drinking in the bar, I don’t think it will be too awful. I fear for man (or at least manned space exploration) but I trust in science (or at least Obama’s support of science and science ed)

5:14pm This liveblog is made possible by my Verizon 3G cell card and the power strip under the mixing board (and the help of the friendly person manning the mixing board).

5:19pm They are now micing people up and the room is filling.

5:24pm New slide show on screen “Planetary Science Division Program Status” by James L Green, Director, Planetary Science Division

5:33pm Getting started with about 950 people in the room.

5:34pm Jim Green speaking first, then Laurie (introducer had to double check titles since everyone at NASA is moving around HQ)

5:35 Many changes in NASA HQ. Some friendly faces retiring: Marilyn Lindstrom I’ll miss, along with Karen McBride, Tom Morgan and Dave Lindstrom. Coming in are Kristen Erickson, Jeff Grossman, Amy Kaminski, Tiffany Nail, and Andrea Razzaghi. There are likely to be more hires in future.

5:38pm Three New Frontiers announced: MoonRIse (SPA Basin Sample Return), OSIRIS-Rex (Asteroid Sample return), SAGE (Venus Lander) Go forth and steal rocks!

5:42pm Top Line budget: Earth Science +29%!

5:45pm Total SMD Budget Increased (FY11-10) by $512M. New Initiatives: New Climate initiative at $380M & Planetary Science growing $145M! This is not costing other directorate’s budgets

5:46 Bugets

Approved Cassini “Solctice” mission through 2017

• NEO identification and characterization not at $16M/yr – major increase in funding
• Cost sharing arrangement with DOE to restart Pu-238 production
• Continues to operate 11 planetary missions including LRO
• Fully funds: Juno, GRAIL, MSL, LADEE, and MAVEN
• Develops Advanced Sterling Radioactive Generators for 2014-2015 launch readiness
• Continues funding for Europa Jupiter mission

5:54pm Congress upset that NASA keeps money unspent to long. It turns out that while grants are 5% of NASA expenditures, 50% of these expenditures are billed by universities months and months after work actually happened. (will need to check with my grants office…)

5:56 Upcoming highlights:

• Nov 4, 10 EPOXI  at HArtley 2
• Mar 18, 11 MESSENGER orbit insertion
• July Juno launch Oct MSL Launch
• Aug 2012 MSL Lands on Mars

5:59pm Dr Laurie Leshin, Deputy Associate administrator, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate now on podium

6:00pm You are here now: NASA has 4 directorates ARMD (Aeronautics Research), SMD (science), SOMD (Space Operations), ESMD (Explorations Systems. This talk focuses on ESMD

6:01pm The Presidents FY 2011 Budget Request takes a new approach to goals – “focusing on capabilities that will allow us to reach multiple destinations including the Moon, Asteroids, Lagrange points, and more.”

6:03pm “PResident’s Budget challenges NASA to embark on a new human space exploration program that invests near term in obtaining key knowledge about future destinations and demonstrating critical enabling technologis for human space flight and exploration” It requires NASA to show tech works, show returns are worth it, and then build tech for people.

6:06pm New efforts to expand links to commercial space flight are a different way to same manned-spaceflight goal. Yes, Constellation is cancelled, but that is not the end of manned spaceflight. Just the end of a program. The people behind Constellation made the best of an underfunded situation; the worked hard and did well with what they had. But Obama wants to take a different path.

6:10pm Just as NASA helped facilitate development of commercial cargo rockets (Go SpaceX – your Falcon 9 is pictured), NASA will now help commercial space craft get crew (=people) to ISS. Commercial groups build, NASA procures.

6:11pm by investing in new technology (and demonstrating new technology) we can bring down costs/masses/worry concerned with future missions. This is tied in Flagship Technology Demonstrations. “Mars destination is a driving case for high leverage demonstration and technology”

6:16pm Exploration Precursor Robotic Missions “rovide venue for flight validation” While Mars is a goal, practicing on the Moon is in the “slides”. Partnerships span gov’t+commercial+international – everyone welcome

6:18pm While LRO + LCROSS had no followup projects in old budget, the new budget allows this. These missions proved that precursor missions are needed in so many ways. The example shown is how LRO’s CRaTER (cosmic ray detector) demonstrated that the Moon reflects Galactic Cosmic Rays – a form of radiation we’ll need to account for when humans land

6:24pm Asked about termination costs of Constellation. These are still being determined. So far $9B spent, but cost to actually get to Moon was going to be much much more.

6:35pm Several people asking questions that point out that we’ve gone from NASA having a series of very specific goals and very specific timelines to general goals and no timelines. There is concern and a desire for specificity. Leshin asks for patience. Honestly, I’m ok with NASA hitting the reset button and starting from scratch to define their future in a way we will believe

All packed up

Okay, so this is a bit off topic, but … There are a series of questions I keep getting, “How do you stay connected while you travel?” “What is your recording set up?” “What books do you…?” “How do you…?” So, I’m going to (in a desperate attempt to force myself to blog better) work on launching “Monday Must Haves” posts centered on answering these questions.

I travel a lot. In 2009 it was over 100,000 miles (sadly not all on one airline), and in 2008 it was about 50,000 miles (also, not all on the the same airline). With my time split between short 2-day dashes somewhere random in America, and longer trips to more distant destinations, I’ve developed a survival schema that keeps me sane (or at least functional) when my brain is no longer sure where I am.

Luggage

I have gone through 4 sets of luggage in as many years. Most bags only made it a few trips before a wheel broke or worse. With many bad bags behind me, I now swear by SwissGear luggage (found at Target or on Amazon) When it comes to rock solid construction and ability to stand up in the face of cobblestone sidewalks, these bags take a licking and don’t spill your underwear on the sidewalk.

That said, their are trips when tiny matters. For those trips I turn to Travelon.

I own 2 bags from each of these companies, and here is how I use them.

The Quick Trip: For a trip of 4 days or less (if you pack like I do), a Travelon underseat bag can be your best friend. Pros: These little bags actually do fit under the seat! I was flying to Atlanta on a tiny American Eagle flight – I think I was on an ERJ-145 or similar – and all the standard wheelie bags were taken away from their owners and put under the aircraft while I got to keep my bag!  It did fit nicely under my seat! Cons: They don’t always fit in the overhead! Fully packed, they are a bit too potbellied. Here are the two I have and why I love each:

• Travelon Ladies Wheeled Carry-On: This bag is really easy to pack, is very stylish (in my nerd opinion), is curved and quilted in a way that makes it a great pillow when you spend the night in O’Hare, and it has a really comfortable handle for carrying it up and down stairs when public transit fails to have escalators and ramps. At the emotional level, its polka dots cloth lining just makes me happy. The only thing I hate about this bag is that it is more fragile than I’d like. An evil Italian on an air Iberia flight was able to tear off one side of one of the handles while forcing (with great force) his bag into the overhead bin beside mine.
• Boeing-branded under seat Carry-On: This is not a girly bag. It is not pretty. It is not stylish. It just behaves well in airports (unless you need it to be a pillow). It is designed with a built in cooler for food, with a pull out cup holder for a travel mug or water bottle, and the bag has an expandable pocket in the back perfect for shoving a wrap from Au bon Pain or that book you can’t be bothered to put away. One issue: The bag doesn’t open all the way up, so getting things in and out can be a pain.

A long(er) Trip: For anything requiring a more substantial bag I reach for my SwissGear. I have two bags again, this time picked for their sizes and nothing else. Both bags are part of the SwissGear Zurich series. The smaller of the two is a Carry-On, Rolling, 20″ laptop friendly bag. The second is a Carry-On, Rolling, 20″ laptop friendly bag The smaller bag is just (barely) big enough for a 1 week trip with an extra pair of shoes and formal and play attire. The smaller bag can fit inside the larger bag (for those times you are coming or going with more (or less) than you started with). While the 20″ has a laptop compartment as its bonus feature, the larger bag offers an area for suits on hangers on the inside flap. While I would never use hangers, this section keeps my suits perfectly protected and flat. As near as I can tell, you can do these bags no harm. I’ve overpacked them. I’ve let them get rained and snowed on. They have experienced cobblestone, and they have experienced Denver and Heathrow 5 luggage handling. They are still perfect.

Luggage Accessories for all trips
Let’s face it, there are some things that just make travel easier.

• Toiletry Containment:Once upon a time I thought it was sufficient to use the little bag for toiletries that comes comes with every bag I’ve ever bought, and once upon a time I simply purchased travel size this, that and the other thing. Then I started traveling so much that I was rotating between bags and never really unpacking. At a certain point, you just want to grab your toiletries and go, and at a certain point travel sized shampoos are no longer an option. To combat the little bottle blues, I bought a set of Humangear GoToob Silicon Travel Bottles. They come with rotating rings that can be used to high-light what is in the container, and they are easy to squeeze. No more shaking the bottle to get the shampoo out! I filled these bottles with my shampoo, conditioner, soap, and lotion, and tossed them in clear zipper bag from Walgreens. These bottles, a baby toothpaste, fancy face cream (that only comes tiny), toothbrush, and deodorant fit perfectly in this TSA sized bag.
• Makeup Containment: You’re on your own. I have fantasies of an all in one kit, like this one from Lancome, but in reality I throw 4 random small mismatched cosmetic containers into random places in my bag.
• Luggage Tags No One Else Has: All bags look alike. Really. No matter how unique you think your bag is, someone else has it too. So… I bought bright pink and red poppy luggage tags that I found on a bottom shelf of an eclectic little store that I won’t tell you where is. I recommend finding your own little place to purchase from. Then do something to your luggage. The next step for me was wrapping my luggage handle in a 2dollar polyester scarf of the bright (but pleasant) pink variety. Now, while I’m not exactly a pink kind of girl, I’ve never struggled to spot my luggage.
• Travelon Bag Bungee Black If you’re like me, you stack your carryon / computer bag on your roller bag while rolling from A to B. Sometimes you may try to add a jacket to this pile. Or shopping bags. Or maybe even the kitchen sink. After having a bad moment with an escaping winter jacket, I invested in a Travelon bag bungee, and life is much safer for me, my belongings, and anyone following too close on the jetway.

Computer friendly Carry-On Bags and Toys

Never one to only travel one way, I again have two options: netbook trips and notebook trips. In either case, I always carry my handy-dandy Verizon dongle for instant online access from (almost) anywhere.

Fossil probably didn't know they made a laptop bag

Traveling Tiny: There are times when the only thing I have to do on a trip is live blog and work on email. My back loves these trips. For these glorious moments I take my handy dandy ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, throw it in my Fossil Sutter Flap bag, and I’m ready to go. This tiny bag can hold my Eee PC, its power cord, a tiny camera, my iPhone, a thin book, my deflated travel pillow and mask, my passport, credit cards, and a few random things like chapstick and a pen. The best part is, it doesn’t look like I’m carrying a laptop! As someone more likely to be in a social situation with a computer than a, well, anything normal, its kind of nice to not always look as nerdy as I am. Pro: It is all so nice and tiny! Con: My international power adaptor doesn’t fit, nor does my travel power strip. (more on those below)

Traveling with my WHOLE office: I work with people all over the world, and when I settle in to work hard I don’t want to be without the comforts of home, so I’ve been known to take it all with me. Making this possible is my Timbuk2 medium-sized custom laptop bag. This is the second of these bags I’ve had, and the first one is still in perfect condition after being used almost daily for 4 years. I simply got sick of the bright colors (red, orange, and yellow – why did I do that?!?) and bought a second one that was a bit more mellow (see pcit above). Into this bag I toss my 15″ MacBook Pro along with:

• Belkin Mini Surge Protector Dual USB Charger: Charge everything at once, cords or USB, and let’s me be ready for the hotel room with only 1 outlet.
• Kensington All-in-One Travel Plug Adapter: This is an anything to anything adaptor that works anywhere in the world. Loan it to visiting foreign friends or keep yourself powered abroad.
• Random Bits: An 8MB USB stick, an 8MB SD card, an SD to USB adaptor, a tiny USB hub, and an iPhone cable
• Neoprene Cable Pouch: Filled with all the above! It fits, although the zipper hates me.
• A camera & charger (you’re on your own here). I have both a Casio Exilm and a Panasonic Lumix (two because I realized I left my camera at home while traveling in Europe). I’d like to get a Canon PowerShot SX20IS, but that camera is a bit bigger and a large bit more expensive than I can justify (when “want” meets “logic”, cool cameras stay in someone else’s camera bag.
• Goldtouch ergonomic keyboard and a Logitech Marble Mouse: I told you I sometimes take my whole office with me! I’m fighting RSI, and this is how I fight it. (Well, this and MacSpeech)
• Plantronics Folding Headset: These aren’t as nice as the Sennheiser HeadsetI live in at home, but they work with Skype and Dragon Naturally Speaking / MacSpeech.
• A small wristlet (because I’m a girl) that can fit a flip wallet and my passport along with some cash, my iPhone, and a pen. I admit it, I like Coach products. I can be a girlie girl. The wristlet is nice because it is easy to pull in and out of the bag, and when the bag does get locked in an office or a hotel room, I’m left with something small, and hard for a pick pocket to reach into because, well, it’s attached to my wrist.

Apps for Airports, Trains, & Travel

Travel (and other needed) Software

I am an iPhone user, and my iPhone makes my travel a little more sane. Here are the apps that keeping me going from gate to gate:

• Xpense Tracker: An easy way to log how much you actually spent while away. (In my case, it allows me to answer the age old question of how much did my Illinois State per diem not pay for). Best Feature: You can take photo’s of receipts. Photos won’t work for all accounting departments, but…
• Trip Deck: This travel software helps you find gates, baggage carrousels, check on delayed flights, and it even helps you find alternate flights so that when you look sadly at the gate keeper you can ask “Can you please rebook me on flight X” rather then simply asking “Can you get me there today?.” This software can be tied to a TripIt account (be my friend?) and allows you to input all your travel plans just by emailing your flight plans from your airline or online service to TripIt (works with flights, hotels, and rental cars). This software has saved me from digging through emails for confirmation numbers while standing in line, and that alone makes it worth it. (Don’t want to pay for TripDeck? Check out FlightTrack)
• Best Camera: Take pictures with your phone? Want to tweak them before you Twitter them? Best Camera does what you need. It links directly to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
• Stanza: I love real books, but sometimes they are impractical. (Like those trips when I’m already carrying my whole office with me and have lots of walking to do). For times when digital is my only option, I click on Stanza. Get both new titles for a cost, and thousands of older (or independent) books for free. (They have the Guttenburg Project books all online to download for free!) I also use the free Classics app, but it has limited titles.
• WordPress: Sometimes you just gotta blog while standing on a crowded train.
• Twitterific (for simple needs) and TweetDeck (for lists and tracking too many things at once): May the twitter be with you. There are many options. These are ones I use.

So this is how I live: All packaged up in products from Amazon (this is what happens when you travel too much to go to the mall. I’ve included links to all the products I live by, and if you decide to live by them too, can you use the links here? They are tied to an Amazon Associates account and all proceeds will help pay for this blogs webhosting and the occasional latte in an airport.

Safe Travels

Standard Disclaimer: I bought all of these purchasers after doing my own research. I’ve used them and no one has asked me for this review. I’m simply trying to save you the problem solving I’ve faced. The links above are Amazon links, and all proceeds for anything you buy will be used to offset the cost of airport food.

Earlier this evening I got an IM from a friend alerting me that this afternoon there had been a shooting at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Details are sketchy, but it looks like a faculty member who was recently denied tenure went into the biology faculty meeting and shot 6 people, killing 3 of the 6.

On twitter I’ve seen people express mystification at how this could happen.

Like I said a few years ago, about another school shooting, what really surprises me is how rarely it happens.

Academia as a system is deeply flawed in a lot of ways. One of the ways it is flawed is how the tenure system gets employed. For those of you who don’t know what it means to have tenure, it means you are a God. You can never again be fired without really significant cause (felony criminal charges, embezzling from a grant, cheating on your wife with an undergrad who gets pregnant, etc). Faculty with tenure often abuse their power, assigning junior faculty the largest classes, the worst committee tasks, and the hardest/most time consuming service assignments (like running outreach events). These young faculty, under the weight of these assignments, are required to spend 3 to 6 years demonstrating they are excellent researchers, excellent teachers, and solid community members. People do crack. But rather than take the time off to take care of themselves, they push on, because if only they can get tenure, they will never have to worry about finding a job ever again.

And we are all taught early on that we are failures if we don’t get tenure.

I don’t have tenure. (But then, I haven’t really looked for it)

A few years ago I was attending a meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers. I was giving workshops on doing real science in the classroom, and giving talks on other research I’d done. I was trying to liveblog what I could in the midst of all this. All the presentations went well, the blogging went well, but I spent each night of the conference in my room in tears. Over and over the same thing happened – I’d give a great talk/workshop/etc and then some gray haired males (and it was always gray haired males) would come up to me to talk about my work, and then ask “So, when did you get tenure?” I’d explain I’m just an assistant prof. They’d say, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll do fine when you go up for tenure!” But I’m not tenure track. And when they heard this, they always asked – what did you do wrong? who did you piss off? – or some version of that same question.

It was always assumed that there is something wrong with me that I didn’t have tenure. I’d only had my PhD 5 years at that point. I’d only applied once for a tenure-track position and I didn’t get that one position. But because I wasn’t inline to join them as Gods in the top of the Ivory Tower, I was (and I guess I still am) a failure. It is this type of “What is wrong with you?” attitude, that breaks people. I simply went back to my room and cried myself out at the end of every day. I can see where someone less emotionally stable would on day 2 or 3 of the meeting start punching people or worse.

I wish this was a one off attitude problem, but as someone without tenure I know it’s not.

The people I know who’ve been denied tenure have generally had to completely start over or mostly start over at a new university. This means facing a second 3 to 6 years of being hazed, of working too hard and never sleeping. It means facing a second 3 to 6 years of postponing children and telling your spouse, “I’m sorry,” over and over and over again as you crawl into bed too late because of the grant deadlines, and then again as you accidently wake them as you get out of bed at 5am to grade, because 5am is the only hour left empty in the day. It means another 3-6 years of knowing you can have everything taken away at any moment yet again.

I’m not sure this means anything to someone outside of academia. People loose jobs all the time and it is no big deal. But academics are essentially self-employed. We design our own research. We raise our own money through grants and donations to do that research. But all that money goes through the university. We are like small business owners who can get kicked out of our own business at any moment. If someone is denied tenure they loose all their equipment they raised money to purchase. They loose all their computers, software, money for staff, and everything else. They may not even get to keep the grants they’ve been awarded that still extend years into the future. It’s terrifying.

Academia is a field that eats its young. It is too often the regurgitated, half digested mass of a human that is left when it is over that gets tenure.

We need to revise the system. “Well, I survived” can no longer be the phrase of the day. There are too many brilliant people crying when they should be working to make our world better.

It shouldn’t take a broken woman shooting people to recognize the problems.

sorrow

Invited Talks

Press briefings are scheduled for following dates and times. You are invited to attend all events on the Astronomy Cast UStream Press Conference Channel. Please feel free to embed this channel on your own webpage!

• Mon., Jan. 4
  • 10:00 a.m. Battling Black Holes
  • 1:00 p.m. Kepler Early Science
  • 2:30 p.m. Exploding Stars

• Tues. Jan. 5
  • 9:00 a.m. Stellar Mysteries
  • 10:30 a.m. Galaxies Near & (Very) Far *See it in Second Life
  • 2:30 p.m. Pulsars *See it in Second Life

• Wed. Jan. 6
  • 10:00 a.m. Cosmology’s Dark Side
  • 1:00 a.m. Exoplanet Exotica *See it in Second Life
  • 2:30 p.m. TBA

• Thurs. Jan. 7
  • 9:00 a.m. Galaxies Stirred, Not Shaken
  • 10:30 a.m. Spicing up the Solar System

And…

Want to meet us in person? There will be a meet up Wednesday night at 7pm. Location TBA.

*ALL PRESS/AAS MEMBERS WHO WISH TO ATTEND THE EXPERIMENTAL SECOND LIFE SESSIONS, PLEASE EMAIL YOUR REAL LIFE NAME AND SECOND LIFE AVATAR NAME TO ADRIENNE (astronomy2009insl@aas.org) AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AND NO LATER THAN 1 HR BEFORE THE SESSION START. Our press sessions will be CLOSED to the general public and you will need to be on our “entry list” in order to teleport to the ‘Astronomy 2009′ island and attend.