Spring 2006
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26 May 2006
Happy Birthday, Robert!
23 May 2006
Happy Birthday, Bossi!
18 May 2006
Ahh, it's always fun to find a really good and comprehensive Wikipedia entry, especially when it's about such an interesting subject. I do have one quibble with it though. No mention of "carajo" anywhere, and this is perhaps the quintessential swear word in Puerto Rico. There is a short semi-definition of the word elsewhere on the website, but it's not entirely correct (only the last bullet point somewhat approximates its meaning) and doesn't do justice to the flexibility and complexity of the word. Tsk tsk, Wikipedia. Tsk tsk.
13 May 2006
Noooo, noooooo, noooooo, it can't be! Noooo!!! Seventh Heaven got renewed for one more season! Noooooooooooo!!! :'( Whyyyy? It's such a crappy show, and it had such a horrible "series finale"... It's not fair. This means that I'll be compelled to watch it again, like that horrible car wreck on the side of the road that you just can't help but look at... Whyyyyy??? With any luck, I'll just forget that the show still exists and won't be drawn to it. But still, whyyyyyy would it get renewed??? Crappy shows get renewed and good shows get canceled. It is so not fair.
9 May 2006
Wii? Wii... Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!
8 May 2006
Sea la madre, goddamit, maldita sea, rayo parta! I just watched the most awful, craptacular, horrendous series finale ever. Ok, so, I've watched "Seventh Heaven" pretty much all through the ten years it's been showing. It's not that I *like* it or anything, because really I don't -- it's like a car wreck: you just can't look away. The show was so-so in the beginning, and it got progressively worse over the years. The last 4 or 5 years have been the worst ever, with the show becoming uber preachy and unrealistic. I just watch it pretty much to yell at the TV, as in some kind of bizarre masochistic Monday night ritual (and I'm not the only one who hates it but watches anyway). And today was the series finale, their last chance to have a good episode. Well, it was craptastic. Horrible. Awful. The wedding that was supposed to happen in the episode "happened" during the last fricking commercial break! Before commercials, people were getting ready for the wedding. After commercials, people are in the reception talking about what happened at the wedding. And no one had the courtesy to say what the heck actually happened at the frickin wedding! In the last minute of the show, they FINALLY revealed that Simon and Rose did not in fact get married because they realized on their way to the church that they couldn't go through with it. What the f#@k?!?! Off-screen plot points and after-the-fact exposition at its worst. Gah!!! But at least there's one good thing that happend when the show was over: I'm free! I'm free! I'M FREE!!! I won't have the involuntary compulsion to watch this crap anymore! It's over! I'm free!!! ... Oh, and by the way, anyone who watches this episode will be able to calibrate their suckiness scale, because this series finale tops it, no doubt about it.
2 May 2006: 12:15am
Oh! I almost forgot! Another cool thing that I found today (well, now technically yesterday) was that there's a new promo video for the upcoming Nintendo DS game New Super Mario Bros. Oh man, I can't wait for this game to be released. It is going to be super duper uber mega awesome. And in just a few months (hopefully), the Wii (formerly called Nintendo Revolution) will come out too! Whoo-hoo! Ahem, sorry -- what I meant to say was: Wiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!
1 May 2006: 11:40pm
Ohhh man, if you haven't seen Stephen Colber[t]'s (that's right, the "t" is silent) speech at the White House Correspondent's Dinner from last Saturday, then you haven't had a good laugh lately. He totally burned Bush right to his face. It was awesome. He was dead-on calling all of them on all the crap they've been pulling. And the uncomfortable "laughs" from the audience were priceless. No, wait -- the thing that was REALLY priceless was Bush's constipated look that just screamed how uncomfortable he was and how much he wanted Colbert gone. You can watch the speech on YouTube [no you can't, it was taken down for some reason -- updated 4/may/06]. This is all over the blogosphere by now, and people on teh interwebs are thanking him for his courage (I'm on page 175 of the comments). Jon Stewart commented on it on "The Daily Show", and described the speech with a very peculiar (and appropriate) word. And right now, I'm watching "The Colbert Report", and Colbert just showed a clip of one of the best parts of his speech (the comparison with the Hindenburg), and added cricket chirping noises to the shots of the audience in shock, hehehehehe. Really, it was awesome. Go watch it. Now. You'll enjoy it.
1 May 2006
[singing] No more grading, no more graa-ding, I have no more graaa-aaaa-aaa-ding [/singing] ... Yes, I officially finished grading today. Entered final grades into the system and everything. Whoo-hoo! I must say I enjoyed the teaching experience, but the grading was very time-consuming. And I get the impression that in general my students liked me, so yay to that. Now my only remaining duty is to proctor a final exam on Friday night, but that is definitely not as stressful as having the grades of 40 students depending on me (not to mention the responsibility of teaching them in such a way that they actually learn something and don't come out of the semester hating astronomy). Tomorrow I'm staying home to do some studying for the upcoming Gravitational Wave Sumer School, because I'm going there on the first week (5-9 June) to be Cole's TA, and since I'll be Cole's lieutenant I need to be prepared -- and he sent me the link to his class notes from last year's summer school to read, study and solve problems so that I can be better prepared for it. Ahhh, I finally have the time to get back to thinking about black holes and gravity waves and research in general full-time ... well, almost -- I have about 200,000 roses in the Million Roses Challenge in We Love Katamari, but that's on the side ;-) And Wednesday morning I'm going to get physical therapy for my knee. The knee doesn't hurt all that much anymore (I'm not even limping!), but it still hurts somewhat when I go down stairs. I hope they can teach me some exercises to do to make the pain go away fast for when it comes back...
29 April 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Mamá Sofa!
26 April 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Wilmaris!
25 April 2006: 8am
Oh man, this has certainly not been the best semester for me, health-wise, given that I had bronchitis (a.k.a. big bad respiratory infection) and gastroenteritis (a.k.a. big bad stomach flu) about a month and a half or two months ago (and both within a week of each other!). And what happened now? Well, about a year ago I injured my right knee somehow when John and I went to Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey. I have no clue what I did to my knee, but the result was that I could barely bend my leg without mind-numbing pain, and I had to stay away from stairs for a while (which is hard to do in my apartment, of course). With some ice and Tylenol the pain went away after a couple of days. After that, I'd been getting that knee pain sporadically every few months. Every time it happened, I just tried to stay away from stairs (going up and down stairs, especially down, are the most painful moments), and the pain would go away in a few days. Well, yesterday I was proctoring an exam, and while going down the steps in the auditorium I noticed that my knee was hurting. I didn't think much of it, figuring that the pain would go away. After the exam, I went to get lunch at the HUB. To go to the food places, you have to go down a flight of stairs. Ohhh man, that was uber painful, more pain than I had ever experienced in the knee. And then going back up the stairs was no piece of cake either. I then decided that I'd had enough and the pain was unbearable, so I called the University Health Services (UHS) and talked to a nurse. She told me to go there immediately and see a doctor, which I did. They took some x-rays and the doctor examined my knee by bending and stretching and pushing and pulling and twisting every which way while saying "Does this hurt?" (of course it hurt!). After the whole ordeal was over, the doctor told me that after looking at my x-rays he can tell me that my bones and tendons are OK but the ligaments seem to be a little sprained. Apparently I put too much stress on my knee or something. So they gave me a neoprene knee brace to wear (which is tight and annoying and feels like it's cutting my circulation, but that's how it's supposed to fit apparently), and ... crutches. If you click on that link you'll see an image of how to walk in crutches and you might think "Oh, that doesn't look so hard". Well, you're wrong. They are a pain in the ass to walk with. Actually, not a pain in the "ass" per se, but more like a pain in the armpits and hands. Seriously. I used the damned crutches most of the day yesterday and today I woke up with totally sore armpits and hands. The reason for the crutches was that I have to keep my weight off my right knee, but today I figured that they're hurting me more than they're helping me (lousy armpit rest thing, grrr), so I thought I'd just limp around all day -- can't be that bad, right? I left the crutches in my car and limped to the bus stop and then limped some more to Davey. Yeah... bad idea. My knee still hurts a lot, and the limping is kinda making it worse. The knee brace is also hurting somewhat, so I'm thinking that maybe I didn't put it on properly. And the crutches may be annoying me because I'm not using them correctly. I'm dreading the thought of having to go back to the parking lot to get the crutches out of the car... Oh, did I mention that they told me that I need physical therapy to get the healing going along quickly? Yeah, that's gonna suck... All I want is for this day to end so that I can go home and lay in bed and not have to walk anymore until my knee magically feels better all by itself... though I know that's not gonna happen :-/
22 April 2006: 8:30pm
WTF, WTF, WTF, WTF, WTF?!?! The most disgusting thing just happened to me. I had a craving for a V&S sandwich, so I went downtown. After getting my sandwich, I'm waiting at the light on Pugh to cross College Ave, and it's cold and rainy. Then, some random fat old guy SLAPPED MY ASS!!! What The F@#k?!?! I mean, who does that, seriously??? I thought that women getting slapped in the ass by random nasty old men stopped happening in the 1950s. WTF!?!?! Canto 'e c@br#n hijo 'e p&t@ viejo verde. Ugh, I feel dirty...
21 April 2006
This is awesome. For a long time, numerical relativists have been trying to simulate the merger of two massive black holes. It's a very complicated problem because of various issues that I don't fully understand yet (something to do with the singularities and the grids moving, or something like that -- hey, I'm not a numerical relativist). But, very recently my advisors/coworkers in NASA Goddard's Gravitational Astrophysics Lab (Code 663) managed to simulate a black hole merger and the emission of gravity waves from the merger. This is not exactly "news" to me, obviously -- I knew about it from Cole, and then the papers appeared on astro-ph and gr-qc, and then Michael presented the results at the EGM9 (where I also gave a talk), and then when I went to Goddard two weeks ago I saw that they made the cover of the Goddard Tech Trends, Spring 2006 issue (link is a PDF). Big news in the gravity wave community, since it is a major breakthrough. And they will present these and newer results at the APS April Meeting 2006 in Dallas, and the 6th International LISA Symposium in Goddard, and the Physics and Astrophysics of Supermassive Black Holes conference in New Mexico, and also in countless other scientific meetings. But also --and here is why I started this post by saying that it's awesome-- the news found their way to non-scientific audiences. It was dugg and slashdotted, and now it has been boing-boinged, thus making the general public (or at least the blog-reading public) aware of this very amazing breakthrough. It's always good when exciting science news reaches non-scientific audiences. This is awesome.
20 April 2006: late afternoon
I'm a pseudo-aunt again! My cousin Luimary gave birth this morning to her second kid, a baby girl that they named Yasira. So now I have two pseudo-nieces -- this one who was just born and Luimary Yamil who is 22 months old :-)
20 April 2006
Happy Birthday, Matt!
17 April 2006
If there is one thing I hate about spring, it's the bugs. Well, not all bugs, but bees and wasps in particular. I hate them. I'm very phobic of bees and wasps, and also slightly allergic to them too, which contributes to my enormous fear of them. And they start showing up in the spring, a fact which I absolutely hate... Why am I ranting about this? Because when I walked to my car today, ready to leave for work, there was a yellowjacket wasp sitting idly on top of my car. A yellowjacket, one of the most vicious types of wasps there are. And it was sitting ON MY CAR. Fortunately it flew away and I was able to get into my car, but I was dead scared... You know what's sad? This actually makes me yearn for winter, because during winter there are no bees and no wasps. They die or hybernate or something. And that is the only good thing about the cold in the winter here in the North: that it gets rid of annoying, frightening insects like bees and wasps. They should become extinct, seriously. I mean, what good do wasps do? Nothing. And bees? Well, I'm sure modern science can develop ways to polenize flowers without the need for stingy insects... Gah, I hate bees and wasps...
11 April 2006: 9:20am
I'm sitting in the waiting room of the Honda dealership in State College waiting for my car to get a state inspection and an oil change. They started about 20 minutes ago and said that it should take about an hour. I am SO glad they have wireless internet here :-) If they also washed my car, I'd be happier, but I know that's not gonna happen, hehe. Poor Chandler Feynman, he's so dirty... Hasn't seen a carwash in more than six months... Anyhoo, what's going on with my life? I went down to DC last Friday to get me an apartment for the next year or two. I found a super-duper awesome apartment in Laurel, which makes me really happy. I've been saying it's like a "grown up apartment" because it's a 1bed/1bath apartment with a family room also, and it's 1100 square feet, and it's all for me. I'm looking forward to living on my own, buying furniture, decorating my new place whichever way I want... you know, being an adult and all that stuff... After getting the apartment, I went to Goddard and met with Cole, John (Baker) and Joan, and we talked about my research. Pablo had told me that I should be ready to graduate in two years (!!!), and so I told them, and they agreed that two years seems to be a reasonable time. Cole and I discussed some coding and the next steps that my research will take, and we pretty much set an agenda for the next six months or so. I'm excited about my research and a little overwhelmed and intimidated by it, but it's all good -- hey, after all, if I wasn't, what kind of a PhD student would I be? The only frustrating thing about that Friday was the fact that on that very same day, Jorge Cham came to Penn State. You know, Jorge Cham! The dude that draws the PhD Comics, which is like the best comic strip ever, if not for the fact that it's the only comic strip about the lives of grad students. Gah, that was very frustrating. I didn't know that he was coming here that day. Had I known, I probably would have scheduled my trip to DC on a different day. I've heard from people that went to his talk, "The Power of Procrastination", and the general consensus seems to be that it was a great talk. Grrr, I wish I could have gone to it... But at least I didn't miss on getting my PhD books autographed, because I already have them signed by him, hehehe -- ahh, the perks of pre-ordering stuff :-) So, what now? Waiting for my car to be ready, then going home to take a nap, then going to campus around noon-ish, maybe 1pm. The semester is almost over, which means that soon I won't have to grade anymore! Yay! Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying teaching -- what I don't enjoy much is grading, because it's repetitive work, and after a while it gets boring. Soon enough I'll do my TA choice lab (about black holes!), and then the semester will be over, and I'll have a few weeks of non-interrupted research and 27-hour sleep/wake cycles :-) Then hopefully I'll get a chance to go visit my cutie John in San Francisco for a week, and then he'll come here to help me move. I move in to my new apartment on June 15. Then I turn 25 three days later (gaah, I'm old!), and then I start working in Goddard again on June 19, just in time to attend the LISA Symposium, yay! ... Ok, I've rambled enough. I'll fiddle around elsewhere online now while I wait for my car to be ready...
6 April 2006
Happy 2nd Birthday, Chandler Feynman! CF, my car, is two years old today, and it's just under 20,000 miles :-) It's all dirty though, so I probably should take it to a car wash as a birthday present ;-)
5 April 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Miriam!
3 April 2006: 11am
Well, this was a very fun weekend :-) I was finally able to have my "spring break", but I use the term loosely. As you may or may not remember, I was horrendously sick during my spring break, to the point that I had to cancel my trip to spend spring break with John in California, and he had to come here at the last minute and took me to the hospital. We rescheduled my flight for this weekend, and I came back last night from a very abridged and belated spring break, which of course lasted only from Friday until Sunday because I have to teach today... I left State College on Friday afternoon and got to San Francisco that night. We then went to Fernando's (a Mexican restaurant) for dinner. They have the best chicken quesadillas there. Oh my god, they are SOOOO good. On Saturday we went to the Exploratorium, which is a hands-on science museum in San Francisco, close to the Golden Gate Bridge. They had a special one-day exhibit of a jello model of San Francisco, and we just had to go see that. It was amazing, with lots of details -- and it was a good simulator for what happens to the buildings during an earthquake. Outside the Exploratorium there were lots of eucalyptus trees which smelled really good. Then at night we went to Best Buy and got We Love Katamari, which is the sequel to that marvelous PlayStation 2 game Katamari Damacy. John played a little bit, and then went to sleep, and I played A LOT more, hehehe... Then on Sunday I had to get back home, leaving SFO around 1pm PDT and arriving in State College around 11pm EDT. And now I miss John, and his two playful kitties too.
26 March 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Yessenia!
25 March 2006
Happy Birthday, June!
24 March 2006
Greetings from MIT! Me and 11 others from the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics here in Penn State left yesterday at noon for Boston to attend the 9th Eastern Gravity Meeting. I pretty much hadn't had time to prepare my talk (well, except the title slide, hehe) before yesterday (because I'd been grading like crazy in the last few days), so I had no choice but to prepare my talk on the drive up from State College. The drive would take about 8 hours (Boston is very far away from State College), and my new laptop's battery lasts four and a half hours, so it was all good :-) Then after we found the hotel (which was quite an adventure by itself), I put some finishing touches on the presentation and went to bed around 1am... to wake up today at 6:30am. Ugh, so early. I am not a morning person. It was necessary to get up early because the conference started at 8:30am and my talk was at 10:30am, right after the first coffee break. I was rather nervous about my talk. I mean, I've given many talks before, but none at an actual conference. And the time limit for talks is 12 minutes, so I was very concerned about going over-time... So, how did it go, you ask? It went really well! I gave my talk, people laughed at the couple of jokes I told, I didn't run out of time, and I even got 5 questions from 4 different people (which I answered quite well also, I believe, and Kelly and Cole agreed with that too). So yay to that! I even got compliments from people in the conference, who told me during the lunch break that they liked my talk and that it was very good. Whoo-hoo! And for lunch we went to an Italian restaurant near the intersection of Main Street and Mass Ave, and the pizza there was delicious (and huge)... Now I'm all giddy that I finally connected to the internet, and I'm finally able to write this update and check my email (and IM John). And I can now sit back and relax while watching the rest of the talks today and tomorrow because I have no stress about giving a talk anymore. We'll return to State College sometime on Sunday... Ok, time for me to pay attention to some quantum gravity talks...
20 March 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Mami! Also, Happy Vernal Equinox!
12 March 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Papi y Tío Luis!
8 March 2006
Yes, I'm alive -- barely. I haven't posted anything since February 19 (all these birthday and anniversary announcements were posted after the fact, just a few minutes ago), but I've had a good reason. I've been horrendously sick. First I got bronchitis and a sinus infection, which forced me to stay home for over a week and fall behind on absolutely everything (grading, research, blog reading, etc). Then, as I'm recovering from the bronchitis/sinus infection, on Thursday, March 2nd, one day before I was supposed to fly to San Francisco to spend Spring Break with John, I got a really bad migraine with nausea and dizziness. The migraine went away a few hours after taking the medication, but the nausea turned into vomiting. And more vomiting. And even more vomiting. Come Friday, I was too weak to do anything. I couldn't eat because I would vomit immediately afterwards -- I couldn't even hold down water! So I had to postpone my California trip. I felt like crap. Luckily, I have the best boyfriend in the whole entire Universe. John booked a last minute flight to Philadelphia, where he landed at 5am on Saturday morning. He rented a car and arrived in my apartment at 8:30am. He fed me some chicken noodle soup and gave me some medications, and then I dozed off. But when I woke up later I felt even worse. I was nauseous and weak, and my body felt like it was half asleep. I couldn't even stand up by myself. Then John took me to the hospital, where I puked once more in the nurse's office in the ER. After a doctor saw me, there came two paramedics with the needles... I needed an IV, and they needed to take blood from me... Have I mentioned that I hate needles? I'm terrified of needles. I screamed bloody murder while the needle pierced me, and John tried to console me. The IV had some fluids and some medicines, and after a while it started working and my stomach started to settle. They gave me some ginger ale to drink (my first time drinking ginger ale), and I didn't puke it up, so they let me go. In all I spent about 4 hours in the hospital. They gave me some anti-nausea pills and some info about which kinds of foods I can eat until I'm cured of the stomach flu I seem to have caught somehow. On Sunday I felt slightly better, and I started eating solid foods -- and John set up my new laptop (the MacBook Pro), which had been sitting in its box for more than a week since it arrived. But on Monday I woke up nauseous. John gave me one of the pills I got at the hospital, but they knocked me out. I slept for 8 or 9 hours after taking the pill, and this was just after waking up in the morning! When I woke up I felt really weak again. On Tuesday I felt slightly better but still weak, so it was finally decided that I can't make the Spring Break trip. I postponed the flight for the first weeekend in April. John then had to leave, because he had to drive 4 hours to Philly for his return flight. Obviously he couldn't stay here the whole week -- he does have to work, and with the haste of the last-minute trip he could only leave enough food and water for the kitties for 4 days. I am extremely lucky to have such a caring boyfriend that he came all the way across the country to take care of me when I needed him the most... And now, well, I'm still in the recovery stage. Still eating lots of chicken noodle soup, and bananas and jello and other non-threatening foods, hoping that I won't get nauseous and that I won't puke again. And getting used to OS X. Man, everything is SO WEIRD on Macs...
8 March 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Teddy!
7 March 2006
Feliz Aniversario, Mami y Papi!
3 March 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Titi Cely!
26 February 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Belmarylies!
24 February 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Titi Norma!
19 February 2006
I hate being sick.
15 February 2006: 8:30pm
I just saw something really cool. I got home and parked, then got out of the car. I looked up (as I always do) and noticed a remarkably clear sky. Orion was very prominent, and Canis Major, and Taurus. As I'm scanning from my left to my right passing through the zenith -- whoosh! there it goes! A meteor! Yes, I saw a "shooting star"! A meteor! Wow! It's been a while since I've seen a meteor, and this one was quite bright, and it's not associated with any meteor showers (that I'm aware of). Last time I saw lots of meteors was during the Perseids in August 2002 and Leonids in November 2002, and then I saw a few meteors during the Quadrantids in January 2004, but nothing since then. And now, out of nowhere, BAM! A meteor! It was sooo cool!!!
13 February 2006
So... busy... ... ... So... much... work... ... ... So... tired... ... ... John... leaving... tomorrow... ... ... So... sad... *sniff*
6 February 2006: 8pm
So, I'm in my office reading stuff online when I should really be either grading labs or reading papers for my research --gee I hope Cole's not reading this-- and then I find a website called NationMaster that has a whole lot of statistics about everything you could ever imagine (I think I may have found it through digg.com, though that was about three hours ago and by now I don't remember anymore). So, of course, I immediately jump to the part where they have statistics by region and go to see stats for Puerto Rico. I see all the stats they have for my dear little island, and of course notice that they're missing a whole lot of information on some of the categories -- no big surprise there. Then I see they have articles, and so I browse through them. I read one about Puerto Rican politics, and of course became annoyed. For those of you who don't know, the political status of Puerto Rico has been an eternal struggle that needs to be solved sometime and somehow, and lately there have been some new issues happening, so it's an even bigger mess-o-crap than before (well, not really -- it's always been a big ol' mess-o-crap), but I don't want to go into the details now (if you feel curious, go see the comment I left on this post on Chris Mooney's blog which summarizes my thoughts on the situation). Anyhoo, the thing is that later I was reading an article on Puerto Rican demographics and found out that in 2003 there was a DNA study of Puerto Ricans carried out in UPR-Mayagüez (my Alma Mater) and lead by Professor Juan C. Martínez Cruzado. Ok, so I'm like three years late to the party, sue me -- this study is news to me, so whatever. The study discovered that Taino DNA is more prevalent than had been thought! This is an awesome discovery! Tainos, btw, were the native inhabitants of Puerto Rico when the Spanish Conquistadors arrived in 1493. They found out that looking at maternal lines, 61% of Puerto Ricans have Taino DNA, 27% have African DNA, and 12% have Caucasian DNA. However, when they looked at paternal lines, only 5% of Puerto Ricans have Taino DNA, 20% have African DNA, and 75% have Caucasian DNA. This actually makes sense to me, beause in every Puerto Rican history class I took we were told that the Spaniards took the native women as wives, and when slaves were brought into the island, the Spaniards also took the slave women as wives. What is surprising about these results is that 61% maternal Taino DNA. We're always told that Puerto Ricans are mostly a mix of three "races": Spanish, African, and Taino -- but we're also told that we're mostly Spanish (about half), then African (little less than half), and "a little bit" of Taino leftover because the Tainos were mostly killed off by the early 1600s. Well, I guess the Taino DNA wasn't killed off then. This is very, VERY interesting. A while ago, Cristian and Bea told me and John that they participated in a study in which they took a little sample of blood and then analyzed it and told them what their ancestry is. I really wish I could take part in that kind of study, because I am REALLY curious about my ancestry now. I know that two of my great-great grandparents were from Spain, but I have no idea what they looked like, and I don't know anything about the other 14 great-great grandparents -- heck, I don't know much about many of my 8 great-grandparents either (just about the two or three that have been alive during my lifetime -- and they don't look either Caucasian, nor African, nor Taino to me). And John is also curious now about the whole ancestry thing, hehe... Well then, I guess I'll just keep calling myself Puerto Rican (or "puertorrican" as I've written on purpose in this website many times) and nevermind the backstory... And now I will stop procrastinating and go back to work... Yes, I will grade some labs or something...
6 February 2006
Hehehe, ok, this is interesting in a cute and quirky way. John's cats (Sampson and Jeremy) have started a blog: Two Smart Cats. Yes, my boyfriend's cats blog. Nothing wrong with that ;-)
5 February 2006: 3am
Not too long ago, a NASA climate scientist had his research pretty much censored because it didn't fit well with what the Bush administration considers "sound science" (btw, I learned of their use of that terminology from the excellent book The Republican War on Science). Yesterday, NASA administrator Michael Griffin sent an email to all NASA employees (I got the email too!) in which he states that he supports "scientific openness". This was also on the New York Times, and in that same article there was something that has created shockwaves all through the blogosphere. It seems that a presidential appointee in NASA HQ (who btw, apparently never graduated from college -- 7/feb/06 update -- and later resigned from his position at NASA -- 8/feb/06 update) insisted that the word "theory" be added after every mention of the Big Bang in NASA websites, because according to him, the Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion" and that this is "more than a science issue, it is a religious issue". GAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!! Scientific ignorance at its finest. I'm sure he doesn't know about all the evidence supporting the Big Bang, and he doesn't know what a "scientific theory" is either. And this is all over the place in the blogosphere. I first found out about it from Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy Blog, and from there I saw that it is also being discussed by Sean at Cosmic Variance, PZ in Pharyngula, Atrios at Eschaton, our very own Steinn in Dynamics of Cats, John at Stranger Fruit, and Chris (the author of that book I mentioned way up at the beginning of this rant) at The Intersection. See? I told you it was all over the place. And the story broke on a weekend. On SuperBowl weekend. And I found out about it at three in the morning on Saturday-to-Sunday, while reading blogs because I'm still not sleepy. I should go to sleep though, but now I'm angry because this has reminded me of all the scientific ignorance that just runs rampant in the government and tries to overpower scientific literacy, grrrr.
4 February 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Edgardo!
1 February 2006: 4:15pm
It seems I can't say the words "migraine" and "doctor" in the same sentence. I scheduled an appointment on Monday to see a doctor on Tuesday so that I can get my migraine prescriptions refilled, and what happened? All day Monday I felt like I was gonna get a migraine, and I finally got it late at night. And on Tuesday night I got another migraine. And today? I woke up feeling like I'm gonna get a migraine, and it just kicked in about 20 minutes ago. I took a Maxalt hoping that it will make the migraine go away soon. And by "soon" I really mean soon, because I have to go teach at 4:40pm. Lovely, isn't it? If the Maxalt doesn't make the migraine go away, I'll be teaching with a migraine, and that will not be pleasant at all. And if the Maxalt does make the migraine go away soon enough, then I'll be teaching with the post-migraine side-effect of the pill, which is to say that I'll look like I'm drunk, and that will not be pleasant either. And then at some point after that I have to drive home, and that will definitely not be at all pleasant either. Gah, I hate migraines...
30 January 2006
I don't wanna get a migraine, I don't wanna get a migraine, I don't wanna get a migraine, I don't wanna get a migraine, I don't wanna get a migraine, I don't wanna get a migraine, I don't wanna get a migraine, I don't wanna get a migraine, I don't wanna get a migraine, I don't wanna get a migraine...
24 January 2006
Ok, I found another cool thing on the Interweb. I found a website where they have some snippets of text from a book titled Science Made Stupid. The book seems to be out of print now, but from what I can see in that website, it must have been hilarious :-)
23 January 2006
The things one can find on the internet. I found a recursive short story. This thing is hilarious. It's so weird and confusing and convoluted, kinda like a recursive Fortran 90 code to produce a merger tree of dark matter halos :-P
22 January 2006
I just logged on to AIM, and I heard a swooshing sound. I looked at the top-left corner of my screen and I had a little mail icon saying I should check my [current-username]@aim.com email. Huh, interesting, since I never made an account there... and I didn't know it existed in the first place. So I click on it, out of sheer curiosity, and discover that AIM now has email. Then I get to thinking, "Exactly how many email accounts do I have?" Well, let's see... There's the Penn State Astro email, and the Penn State generic email, and the NASA email (which are really two -- one @nasa.gov which gets forwarded to the other one, which is @milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov, my main inbox). That's 4 so far. Then there's the Gmail account, so that's 5. And of course I can't forget about my Yahoo emails, which were the ones that introduced me to the Wonderful World of the Interweb way back in the late 90s -- ergo, add 3 more to the count, and now I got 8. I still have an @uprm.edu email, so that's 9, and an @icq.com that I haven't checked in ages, so that's 10. And, oh yeah, AIM has email addresses now for people that have IM screennames. Ok, add 3 more. So... 13 emails. Do I have any more? Well, Comcast gave me an email account when I signed up for high-speed internet in Beltsville, but I discontinued that service when I moved back to PA... However, when I move back there in May/June I'll sign up for that again, and I'll have that email account again, so, 14... And if I'm not mistaken, Sprint PCS assigns email accounts to each cell phone account with PCS vision -- ergo, one more. Thus, 15. I may have forgotten some, but if that little summary is correct, I have fifteen email accounts. FIFTEEN! I used to think it was physically impossible for any one person to have more than 6 email addresses. Oh well, this just proves that I'm an uber-dork or something like that... Although really, I don't check them *all*, of course. My main email is the one @astro.psu.edu. I get the Gmail and the other PSU mail forwarded there. And I check the NASA email regularly because if I don't I could miss some important stuff (even if I'm not currently in Goddard). The Yahoo emails get checked like once or twice a month, mostly for spam-deleting purposes and for keeping up with the people who keep forgetting to update their address books. The ICQ mail and the UPRM mail haven't been checked since 2003 probably... The Comcast mail, well, I never even checked that to see if they welcomed me as a customer. The Sprint PCS mail has been useful when sending Picture Mail to my friend Kathy who also has a Sprint PCS Vision phone, but that's pretty much it... And, of course, these newly discovered AIM mails will very likely just sit there and be useless, because I have no need for them anyway... And just in case you're wondering, because I never mentioned it -- no, I never had a Hotmail account, nor will I ever have one. No reason for that, other than it sucks and Yahoo was always better until Gmail came along ;-) All right, enough procrastinating. Back to grading...
21 January 2006
This is awesome. A guy named Chris Doyle built a LEGO Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Wow, just wow. It's awesome!
19 January 2006: 12:30am
I was just about to go to sleep (in about a half hour) when I realized that I haven't complained about the weather here in the webpage. Well then, let's do that. On Tuesday we had some freezing rain which was no fun at all. When I got to my car in the commuter lot at night there was a glossy coat of ice all over it. Looked pretty, but not very nice to have. And the stairs to get up to my apartment were totally icy and incredibly hard to go up. And Wednesday? Super duper windy. And windy means cold. Very cold. And I don't like it when it's really cold. Gah, winter...
15 January 2006: 8pm
Just came back from Dulles Airport. John's flight left at 4:30pm, and now I no longer live 40 minutes away from the airport (with no traffic), so it took me about 4 hours to get home (State College). John had been around since he helped me move out of Beltsville and back to State College in mid-December, so we spent about a month together. This was the longest continuous time we've spent together, and now I miss him more than ever. I got used to having him around... *sniff* ... Now I have to wait until Valentine's Day-ish to see him again... Ok, I'll stop talking about it now before I get depressed... I am almost completely done unpacking (only because John helped me -- if not, lots more boxes would still be unpacked). So, I will spend the rest of the night unpacking... Or grading. I do need to grade the "Before Questions" that I left for my students last week... Oh, and I need to fix the Lab Schedule for my Monday section... And take my migraine pill because I haven't taken it yet today... Hmmm, what to do first?
12 January 2006
I'm back in State College. Just came back from the AAS meeting in DC. I'm really tired. And my room is full of boxes that need to be unpacked (I moved back here in late December, remember?). And I just did something I never thought I'd do... I... went online... and ordered... an Apple laptop. Yes, I know *hangs head down in shame* ... My 15-year hatred of all things Macintosh (due to the crappiness of the Apple IIe machines we used in my elementary school) had to be put aside as I realized that my Windows laptop is not powerful enough for research (and it has been threatening to die out on me at any time for quite a while now) and I am not computer-savvy enough to administer a Linux laptop on my own. And so, given that Apple just went and got Intel chips and re-did their 15in PowerBook, I ordered that one. I should be getting my brand-spanking new MacBook Pro sometime in February (they're not available yet, even though they were unveiled two days ago). So yeah... a Mac... argh... grrr... mumble mumble... Hopefully I'll adjust quickly to the totally different OS. And John promised to help me, what with him being a Mac guru and all... As for my current Windows laptop, well, it will become a "desktop" and just sit on my desk at home and perform simple tasks that (hopefully) won't make it crash every hour.
11 January 2006
I just discovered a very nice new blog conglomerate -- ScienceBlogs. A couple of the blogs I regularly read have moved over there, which is how I found out about it. A few other blogs I read seem to be on the verge of making the move too. And I've discovered some other science-oriented blogs that I didn't know about and seem to be very good. It seems like a great idea, to gather a bunch of science blogs in one place so that people can find them easily. I'm sure the website will grow more as time passes and more scientists start blogging and get invited to join the group.
8 January 2006
Feliz Cumpleaños, Kathy! Oh, and I should mention that I'm writing this from Rockville, MD. John and I are staying in a hotel here and taking the metro into DC to go to the AAS meeting this week. We just came back from spending a week in Puerto Rico, in perfect tropical paradise weather. Highs in the low 80s (F) and lows in the upper 60s (F), with reasonable humidity and almost constant sunshine. Ahh, so good. Much better than when we went in the summer because it was way too hot then. DC is obviously colder than that, but of course a bit warmer than State College, so this is kind of a buffer zone for me to get used to the North once more... My winter break was very nice and relaxing (except for the moving out of Beltsville and back to State College to then go to Ohio the next day, which was a bit rushed). Christmas was spent with the "in-laws" in Ohio (which involved lots of Katamari Damacy on PlayStation 2 with John and his brother), then New Year's (and Three Kings Day, on January 6) was in Puerto Rico with my family. And now we're back in DC for AAS until Thursday when we'll drive up to State College. John will stay with me until Sunday, when sadly he has to go back to California because if he doesn't, well, you know, his advisor is gonna start wondering where he is :-P hehehe. And now we'll go to bed because it's late and there's a bunch of talks tomorrow that we want to go to and they start bright and early.
6 January 2006
Feliz Día de Reyes!
4 January 2006
Happy Perihelion!
1 January 2006
Feliz Año Nuevo! Happy New Year!
