A Tale Of Several Cities (III) : AAS in Long Beach

So I've finally recovered enough from a 9,000 mile trip enough to resume writing about it. Humans were never supposed to suddenly flit between 3 completely different time zones in a week, which is yet another reason we should bring back airships without delay. But I digress.

Long Beach was the venue for this year's AAS winter meeting. Two previous attempts for me to attend such a meeting failed spectacularly, but, third time lucky everything went to plan. I wasn't expecting a lot, having repeatedly heard Long Beach (which is basically a glorified suburb of Los Angeles) described as a dump. Which turned out to be very harsh, and having spent my formative years in inner-city Cardiff, I can most definitely tell you what a dump is, and Long Beach is Not It.

It is, however, a somewhat dull and lifeless place, though that might well be the hotel district in the middle of winter. It's also tremendously spread out, with the LA metropolitan area reputedly larger then the whole of Puerto Rico. And that's just silly.

The AAS meeting itself was indeed considerably larger than the summer meetings, almost too large. Going to every potentially-interesting talk and poster was probably impossible, perhaps because there were almost none of either in the summer meeting. On the other hand, there exists an entirely separate spacetime metric in which one can wander to collect freebies from the various booths without infringing on conference time at all. It's magic.

One thing I saw that I'll plug to a wider audience was Microsoft's World Wide Telescope. Yes. I know, it's Microsoft, the George Lucas of the computing world. They make products which everyone relies on and are a heck of a lot better (for many things) than the competition, but everyone hates them.*

* OK, George Lucas probably deserves it these days, because he's gone mad, but not ten years ago.

The fact of the matter, if you want my opinion (yes I'm aware that's an oxymoron) is that the WWT is a lot like Google Sky, except that it's better because it also includes something equivalent to Celestia. WWT has also done a much better job with the digitized sky survey images than Sky, so what you see out of the box (metaphorically - like Sky, it's free) is a lot prettier (though in fairness, Sky has done better processing on the SDSS images). You also don't get any ugly artifacts at the poles with WWT, and as the image tiles are loaded they fade in gradually, which looks much nicer than the instant replacement that happens in Sky.

I don't know if the 3D mode has quite as many features as Celestia, but it seems pretty capable. One thing it can do out of the box that Celestia can't is to zoom out to show the large-scale structure of the Universe (a phrase that never gets old). It shows a few hundred thousands galaxies, which is pretty fun... though I'm going to add the disclaimer that unlike my ALFALFA Sky video, it only uses a few template images - not 11,000 unique images. Cheats.

Another very cool thing I saw was in the booth of the Thirty Metre Telescope. Instead of bringing along a bulky, fragile model, they'd brought a lightweight, easy-to-pack hologram instead. Much like the plastic holograms that used to feature regularly as free toys in cereal boxes, only much bigger and better. The detail was really quite striking, as was the 3D effect but you'll have to take my word for that. I may have to investigate this further.

I also have to mention the freebies that Arecibo was giving away. Pretty conventional, but popular : stickers, magnets, keychains, etc. We also had two extras this year. First were some special CLAWS stickers. The Cat Lovers of Arecibo Welfare Society was formed over the summer to help care for the on-site cats, which it's done very successfully apart from an unfortunate incident involving a car (no, not my car, actually) which I won't go into here.

I made a CLAWS logo more or less as a reflex action, because it's what I do. Can't help myself. It's based on the old Arecibo logo from the Cornell era. It features LIDAR-car (who uses laser beams to study the atmosphere), planetary radar cat (who explores the solar system) and general astronomy cat (who makes cryptic philosophical comments about the Universe). Unfortunately we only printed 60 of these, which was a mistake because they were gone by Monday lunchtime.

My other contribution was a set of bookmarks used for a public outreach activity. The bookmarks illustrate the life cycles of stars of various masses, with ribbons for children (some of whom turned out to be at least 17) to tie different coloured beads on. Unfortunately, we only had a few groups of school-goers allocated to us, so we didn't really make much of a dent in the 900-strong pile of them we had with us. Thankfully, we got rid of almost all of the rest over the remaining two and a half days, which was nice. A few people even took them in bulk to use for teaching classes.

I was able to make the bookmarks in the space of an afternoon, although having made the star model some 9 years back does help, And somewhat gratifying to know that I got a least one useful product out of a hopeless project from such a worryingly long time ago in a city far, far away...

Short of talking about actual science, that about covers it for the AAS. Stay tuned for the final instalment of this thrilling journey, wherein I witness whales, dolphins, a Russian submarine and psuedo-Victorian booth babes wandering around a large old boat.

A Tale of Several Cities (II) : Grand Theft Bioshock

I've flown through New York several times, but I've never had the chance to actually see the place. Which is a shame because it's always been somewhere I'd quite like to visit. It is, after all, surely one of the most iconic of all American cities. Let's face it, who wouldn't want to visit the inspiration for Grand Theft Auto IV and Gotham City ?

So with the secondary goal of breaking up a 16 hour trip from London to Los Angeles, I managed to wriggle in a day trip to New York. Actually, two half days to be precise - an evening and a morning. I spent the first hour or more in my hotel sorting out a ridiculous Expedia problem whereby I'd booked 3 rooms instead of 1, then went off to explore.

I should first point out that my hotel was in the part of New York that inspired the first region the player encounters in GTA IV, except rather more surly-looking. "Iconic" is not the right word; "worrying" might be better. The only photos I took were from my hotel (while I was tempted to photograph the S&M shop advertising its video booths, I decided this probably wasn't a good idea, on balance). However, credit where credit is due, and the only people I interacted with did nothing more than give me helpful directions.

It was dark by the time I fixed the Expedia thing, but that's OK because this was the Big Windy Apple That Never Sleeps*. I couldn't make head nor tail of the online instructions for how to get around on the New York subway, so I instead opted for the more classical approach of talking to other human beings. This really does work remarkably well. I was in Manhattan about 45 minutes after setting off.

* Yes, I am aware that Chicago is the Windy City, not New York, but meh.

I should also say that the New York subway is indeed very good. I saw zero evidence - even when returning at about 11:30pm - of all those tales of how dangerous the subway is at night. Maybe it is in the small hours, I don't know, but when I was there it was very busy and yet a heck of a lot nicer than the London Underground (cleaner, better ventilation, more spacious and with more seats). This being America, however, it did have its surreal moments.

A sleeping man awoke and decided for reasons best known to himself to stand in between the railway cars. Doesn't sound that remarkable except that there are no enclosures between the cars, so he was effectively standing outside with nothing to prevent him from falling onto the track. Thankfully he didn't, and a few minutes later he came back in and went to sleep.

On another section, a couple of kids came by with a radio and proceeded to put on a brief attempt at a break-dancing display. No-one gave them any money, which was probably for the best*. More bizarrely, a small band came through playing some variety of Spanish music with an accordion, a trumpet and a full size double bass. Dedication or madness, either way it was quite impressive.

* I suppose the crowded nature of the London Underground does deserve some credit as it prevents the horrors of street entertainment from descending into the public transportation network.

Since time was limited I headed straight for my goal of the Empire State Building. Bugger the World Trade Center and ground zero and all that - mention New York, and it's Empire State that comes to mind. And also the Statue of Liberty, but I've heard several tales of disappointment on that one, and I'm not sure you can go inside any more. So on I went, quietly humming the Newport parody to myself, marvelling and just how gosh-darn tall the place was, and reflecting on how very similar it is to Liberty and Gotham Cities.

Empire State lit up for Christmas.

On reaching the Empire State I went immediately inside and found I had been transported into the world of Bioshock. The main lobby has been called a masterpiece of art deco, and rightly so because it is. It's downright gorgeous. I knew absolutely nothing about what to expect, so this came as an unexpected bonus.

From there it's a fast ride in a lift up to the 80th floor, where there's a small exhibition describing the construction of the building. I get the impression that this is really meant to accommodate crowds on busier days, but a cold night in early January isn't exactly peak time. From there, it's an even shorter ride up to the 86th floor viewing area.

I walked out into the freezing air and instantly knew that going up at night had been a very, very good idea. All right, America, I'll let you have this one. Well done. Very well done indeed.

The next day I had only a very little time before my flight, but an hour of wandering around Manhattan is a lot better than no time at all wandering around Manhattan, so that's what I did. Can't say I have a clue what I was looking at. I wandered into Times Square by sheer chance, which is probably for the best because it doesn't seem all that remarkable to me. Just a bunch of big grey buildings (albeit covered in signs), and I certainly don't understand why it's an iconic New Year's Eve destination.

Far more interesting to me was to simply wander around and gaze at the very tall buildings. Damned if I know what any of them are, but they're quite impressive. Though I am confused as to why America likes really grandiose post office buildings - yes, it's an essential public service, very nice, but in the end it boils down to a guy on a horse or a bike or in a van delivering letters. Why does that require a building with so many columns* ?

* In my view, the relative importance of old buildings is a direct function of the number of columns they have. The New York post office has a very high column density** and so must be one of the most important buildings ever constructed.

** Astronomer's joke. Sorry. It's a terrible pun.

That about wraps up my New York jaunt. From there I was whisked away to Long Beach (part of Los Angeles) for the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting, which I shall describe in the third and final instalment of this travel trilogy.

A Tale of Several Cities (I)

Christmas this year provided at least two miracles. The first one was catching the flight home. Having got into San Juan in about an hour, it took almost another 2 (in gridlocked traffic) to reach the airport (a distance of only about 10 miles). Then when I arrived in the airport, I found a sight I've only had the misfortune to witness once before - a total lack of anyone at the check-in desk. This was because it had closed.

This was, naturally, hugely frustrating, but not panic-inducing. Obviously, having gone through this once before helps. Also, and ironically, the previous Christmas disasters have built up a mental drive akin to that which makes salmon swim thousands of miles and leap impossibly high waterfalls to experience one almighty orgy before they drop dead from exhaustion. I was damn well going to get home for Christmas, a truth as sure as death and taxes.

Thankfully, being eaten by a bear was never much of a risk.

Although I wasn't planning on literally swimming (or even partaking in an orgy), which I guess makes me way less awesome than the fish, my determination to bloody well get home was enough that I didn't care how I did it - whether than meant waiting a day for the next flight or finding an alternative that evening, even if I had to shout at every airline operating in the airport.

Fortunately, it didn't come to this. The desk had only just closed. The nice people at American Airlines (the next desk, which was thankfully very quiet) were able to go and retrieve one of the British Airways staff, who, like some sort of magical wizard or perhaps the Ghost of Christmas Present, was able to make everything better. For a few minutes I face the prospect that I'd have to go tomorrow, then suddenly I found that I was able to get on the flight after all, even though the gate had closed 10 minutes before.

I learned later that the flight had been delayed slightly, which was probably how I was able to get on. Ah, but why was it delayed ?  Engine trouble ? GPS not working ? I think not. I place this one firmly into the Christmas Miracle category, it being the only truly logical and rational explanation. And then it started snowing in San Juan and everyone started singing in a street musical.

Wait... that's not San Juan at all !

Christmas Miracle 2 was even better. In the whole 3 weeks I spent in Cardiff, I never even saw a hospital, and after the previous 3 Christmases, that's probably the equivalent of our heroic salmon having survived his unlikely struggle in order to do the whole thing again next year. Hmm. Bad analogy. But it'll have to do.

Having survived the exotic city of Cardiff - and I describe it thus without irony, because exotic is a relative state - I embarked on an ambitious plan to attend the winter AAS meeting in Long Beach, California. This is ambitious for me since, due to previous Christmas disasters, I've never managed to attend one. Just to make things even more unachievable, I tacked on a day trip to New York in there as well, ostensibly so as to avoid a 16 hour flight but mostly because I've always wanted to visit New York. I shall describe my adventures in the Windy Apple That Never Sleeps, or whatever it's called, in the next post.

Website update !

Time for another website update, you lucky people. Quite a lot this time. Firstly, you can now buy selected renderings via StockTrek Images (click for a gallery of the images currently available). You can either buy images in high-resolution electronic format, or as actual physical prints. Quite why anyone would want to do this, I'm not sure, but apparently there's a market for this so what the hell.

A rather nice consequence of this is that I re-rendered the images at print resolution. Some of these needed a lot of work to bring them up to a more modern standard, which means now they're significantly improved I think. The most improved images can be seen below, with the old renders for comparison.

Aries IB lunar ferry from "2001 : A Space Odyssey"

Orion-drive nuclear spaceship leaving Earth

Orion launching from the ground

StockTrek have a contract which is nothing short of lovely for a commercial company - it's totally non-exclusive and I'm free to do whatever I want with the images independently. Therefore I've posted the updated images in full HD on my website, and though you can go through StockTrek to get the high-res versions, you can also negotiate with me directly, if you want. So I've avoided selling my soul to capitalism, which brings me nicely around to item 2.

Sometimes people contact me with requests for images that I simply have to outright refuse due to time constraints. I couldn't do that for the latest one - not in good conscience anyway. It would've kept me awake at night if it turned it down. The project was to illustrate a book cover for a sci-novel by a certain Robert Burns. The plot of The Unselfish Gene involves zombies, tsunamis of fire, Buddhists living on the Mooon, and oh yes, a a 40,000 tonne spacecraft propelled by nuclear bombs. Yet for some reason the original edition of the book had, as its front cover, this :

OK, it's a sexy lady, though I do wonder why our careless heroine has found herself sans clothing on a zombie-infested planet. Anyway, it's not an bomb-propelled spaceship escaping from Earth being hit by planet-killing comet, which is what we decided on for the new cover image. An earlier idea was to show the Anita blasting off from Dallas. As this would guarantee that Dallas would be even worse off than everywhere else (shortly before a giant comet wipes out the planet) - and by now readers should be aware that I dislike Dallas intensely - this was a very tempting option.

KABOOOM !

I didn't spend as much effort working out the physics of the Anita as I did the original Orion, of course, but I did do some fast-and-dirty numbers to check that the chemical rockets would be adequate. Not to get the ship into orbit, but just enough to get it off the ground. In fact they can do rather more than that, with enough fuel (based on the size of the tanks) to get it to 20 km. More than enough for a safe landing with a healthy margin on error.

Did I mention that the ship is friggin' massive ?

More images can be found on my website in The Unselfish Gene gallery.

And that leads me neatly into item 3. I discovered the wonders of Microsoft's Zoom.it service, which lets you convert huge (as in 400 megapixel) images into a format you can explore in a web browser. I have 3 zoomable images so far :

Timeline of the Universe - image I made for a public Observatory in Belgium.

Size Comparison Chart - of spaceships and other things I have made. 

The ALFALFA Sky - all eleven thousand galaxies in one image.

That's all for now. I'll be adding images to the StockTrek site as time permits. I'm also working on a colour version of the size comparison chart.

Told You So

Well, doesn't time just fly by. No, actually, it sort of trudges along with great reluctance most of the time. At first I couldn't quite believe it had been a month since my last post, and then I realised I couldn't believe it because it felt like a lot longer.

Anyway, I am pleased to report that my failure to acclimatise to Puerto Rican life has not been entirely total, contrary to popular belief. Firstly, I discovered during a drunken pre-convention Trek marathon (in a small, massively overcrowded flat) that my capacity for heat tolerance has improved tenfold. Those who mocked my former susceptibility to modest increases in temperature are now laughing on the other sides of their faces. Ahahahahah.

Secondly, just after returning from the UK, a small delegation from Arecibo participated in a mini-conference in a university in Rio Piedras, part of San Juan. Rio Piedras is a very nice place indeed. It's practically European. There are actual, proper streets. It has buildings more than 50 years old, and more importantly, bus stops.

My adaptation to the ridiculous climate of the Caribbean was verified through discussions with the Puerto Rican students who had been drafted - I mean, attended freely of their own volition - to the seminars. At least one of them thought it was too hot. I thought it was alright.

But wait, there's more ! The aforementioned student had spent some time in France, and wished that Puerto Rico had a similar public transportation system.

HAH ! Take that, whoever thought I was whinging needlessly about the lack of a bus service !

I should probably add that although there are buses in San Juan (and a train service too), apparently they don't go anywhere useful. Some say this is because the taxi drivers objected. This wouldn't surprise me, given that Puerto Rico is investing nearly $80 million to build a bus lane on the motorway. And yes, I really do mean building an entirely new lane, not just painting "Bus lane" all over one part of the road.

WILL NO-ONE LISTEN ?!?!

One would have thought that the great advantage of buses, over, say, narrowboats, is that they don't require any specially-constructed canals in order to operate most effectively. Actually, they seem to do best without them. In fact, they work really very well indeed - much better than trains - on plain old regular roads. Which is why building special lanes for them is one really quite spectacular way to throw away a large amount of currency that would have been better spent on, ooh, I don't know... a fleet of buses and a multi-city transportation system, perhaps....?