Posted by barb on Oct 13, 2003 in
Movies 3/5 stars
CIA analyst, Jack Ryan, chases down a terrorist group who has gotten their hands on a nuclear bomb with plans to detonate it in the United States.
This is the fourth Jack Ryan movie so far. The most memorable are Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger — the two with Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan. This latest installment introduces Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan, and seems to pull back the hands of time a bit (Ryan has just started dating his future wife, whereas in Patriot Games, his wife and child are threatened by IRA terrorists). While I’m not, in general, a huge Ben Affleck fan, I think he did a good job in taking up the Jack Ryan torch.
Posted by barb on Oct 13, 2003 in
Books by Caleb Carr
In the year 2023, information comes at a fast and furious rate. In order to process it all, people can’t afford to scrutinize all the information with the care that it might require. This is the perfect environment for false information to be diseminated.
While investigating the murder of a friend, Dr. Gideon Wolfe finds evidence of faked information — information pertaining to the assassination of the United States president. His subsequent investigations put him in the middle of a jailbreak, and right into the group perpetuating the deceptions.
I could not get into this book as much as Carr’s other novel that I’ve read, The Alienist . For one thing, I could tell that it had been serialized, because every single chapter had to end with some kind of leading or shocking sentence. That got a bit old. Also, like a few other books that I’ve read lately by other authors (e.g. James P. Hogan), this one was a bit too preachy on the state of the world today.
All in all, not bad, but not great.
Posted by barb on Oct 12, 2003 in
Movies 3.5/5 stars
Two LAPD officers (Joe Gavlin (Harrison Ford) and K.C. Calden (Josh Hartnett)) investigate the murder of a rap group who was just about to make it big. Gavlin moonlights as a real estate agent, and has all his money tied up in a house that just won’t sell. Calden moonlights as a yoga instructor, which also provides a ready-supply of women.
The movie was fun, though at times a bit confused. This is Ford’s first real foray into comedy, and while I had reservations going in, I found him to be up to the challenge of a new genre. Of course, I’m still more at home with the action hero Ford or even romantic lead Ford, but I think that he could certainly pull off more comedies.
Posted by barb on Oct 12, 2003 in
Wedding The Arlington Planetarium was actually quite nice, and is a good candidate for the wedding site.
A few things:
- The planetarium seats 71. This may not quite be enough, since our guest list is currently at 67, and if we think of anyone else to invite, or if our parents request any other invitees, then we could be in trouble. In fact, we already know that we’d like to invite our respective music teachers, so that’s possibly 4 more people.
- The seating is all facing front, rather than concentric, which is much better for a wedding.
- It would be nice if we didn’t have to use the first row of seats (2 seats on either side of the aisle), because that would be very cramped.
- There were no really bad seats in the house — though there were a couple with partial views.
- There are a couple tables up front, which could probably be moved, but we would want to ask the director about that.
- There isn’t much room in the front area, so it could be difficult to have a live musician for the processional and recessional — though it might be possible to have someone play as part of the service, if we put them in the aisle near the projector.
- There is a black board up front that we would want to cover with something — a poster? a swath of celestial cloth?
- There is a mural painted in the hallway/entryway outside the main planetarium, which could be used as a celestial backdrop for pictures, if we wanted.
- The planetarium is very close to the Ballston area, where we could probably find a nice hotel for the reception.
Posted by barb on Oct 11, 2003 in
Around DC,
Wedding We went to see Just Imagine, a show at the Arlington Planetarium. I frankly wasn’t expecting much from such a small planetarium, but the show was quite good! It is broken up into four parts, each asking the viewer to explore different areas of astronomy.
The first section, Just Imagine A Sky Full of Stars, talks about the stars in the night sky, and the constellations. It points out that the pictures seen in various star groupings vary from place to place, and that no one way of describing those constellations is better than another. Astronomers have chosen 87 standard constellations, but only for convenience.
The second section, Just Imagine The Earth Without the Moon, discusses the effects that the moon has had on the Earth over it’s lifetime. The Moon caused the Earth’s rotation to slow, and also causes our tides. In addition, the Moon was our first target for extraterrestrial travel — perhaps without such a close extraterrestrial body, we would not have been so driven to travel off of our world.
The third section, Just Imagine The Last Days of the Universe, introduces the two main theories of the fate of the Universe: infinite expansion or eventual collapse. In the course, dark matter is briefly discussed, and a picture of what the night sky might look like in both scenarios is presented on some future world 15 billion years from now.
Finally, the fourth section, Just Imagine Our sun as a Different Star, talks about the different classes of stars, and how life might be different if our sun was not a run of the mill yellow star.
Overall it was an excellent show.
It also gave me the idea to explore how to fund a planetarium show that either focuses on women in astronomy or somehow relates to the missions I work on. I’m certain there could be a way to develop such a show through an E/PO grant through NASA.
Posted by barb on Oct 11, 2003 in Uncategorized
Andrew and I went out relatively early (for a Saturday) this morning to take in a flea market at a nearby park. We ended up with a new stack of books, and a flyer for another sale in the parking lot of a nearby church. We packed up and headed over to the church. Unfortunately, most of the stuff for sale was kids’ items, which we have little use for. I did pick up a few frame-puzzles and Golden Books for my niece, but that was all that caught our eyes.
After I’d made my purchases, I went over to the bake-sale tables to pick out a small treat. Andrew had already had a brownie, since he had skipped breakfast. Just as I started looking the the array of treats, my vision started to fuzz out. A %$#@ migraine. Well, I still took time to grab some peanut butter and chocolate cookies, but then Andrew and I quickly returned to the car, so Andrew could get me home and into a dark room. Fortunately we had had the foresight to drive the Echo, since Andrew can’t drive my Tercel (it’s a standard transmission). This meant that Andrew was able to drive me home, rather than me trying to navigate traffic again without my full visual field (that’s really fun).
Fortunately, my migraines seem to have changed character over the years. Ten years ago, before I really knew what they were, I would get a debilitating headache that would keep me in bed, in agony, for the whole day. Now it seems that as long as I get into a dark room, with ibuprofen or Extra-Strength Excedrin in my system, I don’t get the full-blown debilitating headache. Don’t get me wrong, it still sucks. After sleeping for several hours, I wake up with a monster headache, but not one that I would prefer death to, and, in fact, I can generally function with the monster headache (I’ve gotten used to headaches recently). In addition to the headache, though, I still have dizziness and usually the “stupids” (that’s what my aunt and I call it — I’m just kind of out of it for the rest of the day, like I’m in some kind of dream state). But at least it’s not the full-blown headache. That’s even worse.
Posted by barb on Oct 10, 2003 in
Thesis/Grad Life I had some preliminary results of running the pipeline on four different sources: 3C 111, Akn 120, IC 5063, and Mkn 348 I had tried using several different “minimum” time bins for extracting the spectra. Oddly enough, the change from 15 ks to 55 ks didn’t change the number of spectra by much for most of the sources (Akn 120 had 106 spectra for 55 ks bins, whereas it had 103 for 15 ks bins) — I think this is due to the count rate variability of the sources, though I may want to look closely at what the pipeline is doing just to make sure.
Unfortunately, there were some weird results with a couple of the sources. For example, in one of the Akn 120 spectra, the power-law index jumped up to 4 (which is not physically reasonable). The next step is going to be to run some well-studied (and published) data sets through the pipeline with a couple more models, and see if we can recover the published results. In addition, I will look through the pipeline results to find any spectra that are behaving badly, and re-analyze those by hand. We are agreed that I can’t possibly do all of the data by hand, but we are concerned that the pipeline is not giving physically reasonable results. So, we hope that most of the spectra are well-behaved, and that by re-analyzing the few that show odd behavior with the pipeline, I can reduce the number of spectra analyzed by had to a manageable number.
Posted by barb on Oct 8, 2003 in
Saxophone I hadn’t had much time to practice this past week (migraines Thursday, Friday, and a near one on Sunday, and we spent Saturday at the Renaissance Festival, so I could only practice Monday-Wednesday), so I was just sure this lesson was going to suck.
After I set up my horn, I reminded Fred that I’d gotten the new mouthpiece last week, so rather than starting on new material, I practiced some old stuff to get myself accustomed to it. He had me play a few things — mostly scales — to hear how I was coming along with it. His comment was something like, “You’ve only had that mouthpiece a week?” To which I said yes, but that I really only was able to practice with it since Monday because of migraines.
He seemed quite thoughtful about this, and said that we were at a point where we needed to think about moving into longer pieces or something (I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was along those general lines). I’ve expressed some interest in doing more classical type pieces, which may take some research, since there isn’t a proliferation of classical music written for saxophone. Then he seemed to get an idea, got up and started out of the room, and turned to say that he knew what we could do, and that I would find it a bit scary. When he returned, he had a book of sax duets. He opened it up to the first page, and said that we’d try a couple right now. And he knew that I found sight reading scary.
After we got ourselves in tune with each other, we started on the first piece. After one false start (I was supposed to be playing lead, but true-to-form, I was playing quietly because I wasn’t sure of myself), we played through the first two lines. And frankly it sounded pretty darn good if I do say so myself.
Fred turned back another couple pages to another piece. This one was a bit more complex, and we weren’t playing the same thing as much as the first piece. Unfortunately I got lost after the first line or so, and had to wait another line to jump back in. But when I jumped back in, I was playing the wrong notes (reading a C as an E for some reason).
This week I’m going to look through the book and pick a couple to try next time. I’m also going to continue through my old book, because I still have several scales to learn, but I’m looking forward to continuing with the duets.
Posted by barb on Oct 6, 2003 in Uncategorized
Dream 1: I was chosen to be an astronaut on a mission. This decision seemed to be made like a lottery, with names drawn at random, and the winners had to be ready to go right then and there. I got suited up, and the started to fasten myself to my station on the ship. This consisted of attaching a bunch of magnet-like things around my feet and strapping my torso in to the wall. However, when I got done, I was standing, but everyone else was in a squatting position. One of the other astronauts came over and suggested that I might prefer sitting, but there was nothing to sit on. I unstrapped myself, and went searching through this large warehouse-like building, trying to find something to sit on. I finally found two small ramps that I could put together to form a box-like thing to sit on. By then I realized that I really needed to use the bathroom, and thought it would probably be a good idea to go before getting myself strapped back in. So then I went in search of a bathroom, and started thinking about how astronauts use the bathroom in space. I also started worrying about how many Gs I’d be experiencing during take-off, and wondering if I’d be able to handle it. I started to think that it was a bit weird that they were sending several of us out without any testing or training. I woke up at about this point, and needed to pee very badly.
Dream 2: I decided to get a mammogram, and since I’m too young, according to the prescribed ages of my health plan, I went to the mammo-van when it came by my area. I wanted to do it earlier than prescribed because I had a cousin who developed breast cancer in her 30s, and I was nervous (this part is true). So, I went to the mammo-van, and got a number. Oddly enough, the van was more like a building with long hallways. I found that I was constantly in the wrong place, and when they were ready for my mammogram, I still had my shirt and bra on, so I started undressing there in the hallway. The nurse or technician did drape a paper vest over my shoulders, but it did little to cover me up. Then I went into the room and woke up.
Posted by barb on Oct 5, 2003 in
Around DC,
Pictures We decided to skip last year’s Renaissance Festival, because we’d burned out a bit the previous two years. But this year, we were ready to go back! Mushi brought along a new costume that she had sewn, and the rest of us wore our old costumes.
We didn’t end up spending as much time at the shows as we have in past years. I was worried that this would bore Andrew, but he seemed to have a good time shopping with us. The shows we did see were Renaissance Man: Stand-up Tragedy – Act I and Hilby the Skinny German Juggle Boy. I recommend both shows, but particularly Hilby. I think the best part of his act were his facial expressions — they reminded me a bit of my brother David when he and I used to practice funny faces together in front of the mirror. His finale was on a 9-foot tall unicycle, juggling a knife (with gum on the end that he was supposed to grab at some point and chew), a plunger and something else (can’t remember).
Melissa had never seen a joust, so we also went to one of the three jousts. The MD Ren Fest’s jousting arena is far from ideal, though. It’s only about two-thirds as long as it should be, causing the riders to have to stop short at either end. Of course, I love watching the horses — I’ve been a horse lover (though without the means to actually have horses, or the time to take care of any) for as long as I can remember.
Much of the day was spend shopping. We bought Andrew a print of an old map, which even I thought was really nice. The map is done in the shape of a lion, with the eastern-edge as the lion’s back (so north points to the right). We also got a new lamp for our guest room — the base has stars and moons carved into it, so will fit in with the decor perfectly. I got a new barrette for myself at a brass dealer, with a fairy and moon on it.
Mushi and I also catapulted frogs in one game, and threw knives at another game. Though, frankly we weren’t playing to win anything — just for the joy of throwing things.
I took only one picture the entire day — here is Mushi getting burned at the stake:
