Ignoring the stuff I posted in the griping thread (I’m through the crying phase and onto the bitter phase so I’ll keep it there), I got to start astronomy today and that is my favorite science, has been for as long as I can remember, ever since I was a little first grader watching my first planetarium show. I love it, and I love teaching about it. I love showing pictures of it. I love trying to get my students to see how amazing it is.
Plus, I now know how to run the planetarium myself (coincidentally, the same planetarium I sat in over 30 years ago) and so I can take my students in and play the star shows for them. I showed one today. Wednesday, they have a constellation quiz and then Friday I’ll show them another star show just before the semester ends.
I loved astronomy as a kid… until I discovered that real astronomy was mostly math and not looking at pretty constellations. I still have my copy of H.A. Rey’s The Stars, though.
[studies 30 or 40 junk mortgage offers which came in the mail yesterday]
Also, be prepared for the credit check to send out a beacon to every well-dressed con artist within a 20,000 mile-radius saying, “HA! Another sheep waiting to be sheared! [click click]”
Astronomy is the best. In a way it’s the study of everything; all around us, all the time. I learn about it voraciously, and I’ve managed to get my teen daughter interested in it. It blew her mind that a light year is a measure of distance, not time, and that you can have variations of it – light months, light minutes, light seconds, etc.
We wrapped up Impact Summit week last week and I got to see a lot of the amazing nature conservation projects we are doing. I work in the IT department so much of the time all I see are programs and data, rather than the frankly beautiful work happening around the world. It was a real thrill to see the actual end result of my oft abstract labours.
It continually baffles me that people consider the government to be so incredibly intrusive to the point of listening to all your phone conversations and internet chatter whether it’s innocuous or not. Ain’t nobody got time for that sh-, knowmsayin’? It barely has time for the things actually considered important, half the time.
(Refresh: Cube rat at small transportation company.)
Clients and carriers are already trying to wrap up for years’ end, so I’m getting daily calls and emails on invoices that were only sent in 48 hours ago. Oh, and somehow it’s our fault that a carrier is taking 10 days to move freight from KY to GA. Nope, I’m not driving the bus here, m’dear.
Oh, and I have one team member out with a stomach bug and another with Covid, so it’s been more of a blast than usual.
But I am currently having a taco salad for lunch, so that’s something!
Today I incorporated the Douglas-Peucker algorithm into our code to reduce the number of latitude and longitude coordinates we’re sending to the Google Maps Static API, works like a champ!
I’m pretty proud of myself. I’ve reduced the number of coordinates by 2/3rds without losing polyline detail woohoo!
I was just teaching about that yesterday in my class! I brought up a calculator and typed in the numbers to get from km/s to km/yr and said, okay, so the closest star to us is 4.3 times that number.
I even tell my students that one of my goals is to blow their minds because it’s so fun to do.
Maybe that’s why I still love it. I was never able to take advanced astronomy classes because they weren’t available at the schools I attended.
But then, I tell my students that astronomy is simultaneously the hardest and easiest science to study because you can step outside and look up and you’re doing astronomy, but you can’t touch the things you study. Pretty much ever.
Been working weekends for the past month since I got my job in June because trucks are now delivering the pallets on weekends. If only COVID didn’t happen since my previous warehouse job at a lighting factory was no weekends at all. The previous weekend was my first one off in a month. It’s gonna get worse with 3 days of two shifts next week and my later shift I had last week was temporary. Gonna miss those two extra hours of sleep. The people there are good to me and I’ve gotten the hang of my duties now, though.
The job search company I’m a client of for special needs is working on getting me back to the regular M-F job so this won’t last long.
Yeah AWS East down didn’t help, but, as usual, TriPeak DSP continues to suck … eggs.
Every single day.
And, as usual, when their owner and managers eff up, as in every single day, it’s like a d*ck-smoking convention with a bunch of effers in my way.
No. You’re not in my way when I’m running your logistics for your poorly managed company. I’m rolling 600 pounds straight ahead and you best believe I’ll burn you to the ground if you don’t move your fat asses.
And I’ll be doing that three dozen more times. Champions of the beloved game cornhole.
True of course, at least in the most obvious sense. But you also can touch it, in a way, thanks to Mr. Sagan’s brilliant observation about each of us being star stuff.
It’s called the Pale Blue Dot. It’s the Voyager probe’s image of the Earth and I try to get them to think about the fact that everything we know and experience is contained in that tiny dot. And there’s so much more around us to discover.
I work as an analytical chemist for a contract pharmaceutical company that specializes in the manufacture of oligonucleotides (think mRNA vaccine type stuff). Job is pretty boring and way easy but pay is ok. Due to being a contract manufacturer everything is always a crisis and testing/reports always needed to be done 3 days ago. Basically feels like I carom from one disaster to the next with no end in sight. Pretty much the way everyone feels.
Part of my job includes some work with other countries. Was planning a voice meeting for this morning with a country 13 hours ahead of our time here on the East Coast. Came in at 0430 this morning only to be told that connectivity crapped out on their end and they can’t fix it within the next few hours, so… meeting postponed to next week. Yay. I get to come in at 0430 next Wednesday again…
I worked in a hydrofluoric acid alkylation unit for 8 years. I moved across the country and now I’m working in a sulfuric acid alky unit. Pretty cool stuff. We basically take certain hydrocarbons and mix them with acid to make alkylate. We send the alkylate to another part of the refinery where it is blended in with gasoline. Alkylate is used to boost the octane rating of the gasoline.
I got through my tests today. One student cheated. How could I tell? Well, if you get a D+ on the chemistry exam and then you write an answer comparing diamonds and graphite and say that diamonds have an sp3 hybridized carbon structure and graphite has an sp2 hybridized carbon structure (something we never talked about in class and I had to look up to know what it meant), then, it’s pretty obvious that you looked the answer up. If she claims that she didn’t, then, I’m just going to ask her to explain what hybridized carbon is because I’m 100% sure she has no idea.
I’ve always said that teaching is the profession where you have to decide if the joy of teaching compensates for the agony of grading.
