A while ago I wrote about writing. In this post I want to say a bit more on the subject. In particular, I’ll discuss one thing that can prepare you to become a better writer - reading.

If you want to write, you have to read. A lot. You have to do more than just scan the words, though, you have to read critically. Certainly if you want to write a scientific paper, you need to understand how scientific papers should be structured and what makes a good or a bad scientific paper. So … read a lot of scientific papers. Naturally, this is something you should be doing anyway to gain the scientific background you need for your research. As you read the papers, though, you should also make note of the way the authors tell their story. Look at how much background material is given in the introductory section. How much detail is provided in the experimental section? Take note of how figures are used, and how the discussion in the text relates to the figures. Follow the trains of thought that the authors take in interpreting their results and developing their conclusions. Not all papers do all of these things the same, of course. Sometimes the differences are a function of the journal the paper is published in. Physical Review Letters restricts papers to only four pages in length, for example, so they have to be very concise, with no extraneous detail. In contrast, papers in Physical Review E have no length restrictions and so can go into more depth. But other differences can be due to the writing style of the authors. As you read, think about whether the point of the paper is easy to understand. Can you follow the authors’ arguments? Do they explain things clearly and logically?

Don’t restrict your reading to scientific journals, however. Read novels. Read newspapers. Read blogs. Read non-fiction. Read everything – and develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t in all of these different types of writing.

Reading other people’s writing can help you to develop an understanding of what constitutes good writing. The next step is to apply that understanding to your own work. I’ll have some ideas on how to do that next time. 

Interesting paper on ancient Egyptian records of variable star 'Algol'!

Check it out here!: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Astronomers_discovered_ancient_Egyptian_observations_of_a_variable_star_999.html

The original paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6206

Ah, Vancouver in the spring. I grew up here, and there are some things about Vancouver that just seem to me to be perfect: the skyline of the mountains on the North Shore, for example, or the dark, damp green of the coastal forests. When these things register on my senses, my brain just pushes a button that says “home.” I moved away for good (so far, at least) after I got my Ph.D. in 1987. I’ve been back several times since then, but since none of my family lives here anymore, I’ve not stayed long. This time we are here for a month, which will give me a chance to get to know the place again. As with any friend you haven’t seen for 25 years, there have been some changes. One is obvious as soon as you arrive – it used to be a real pain to get from the airport to downtown by public transit, but now there is a quick and easy rapid transit link.

We are living on the 29^th floor of an apartment building in a trendy part of downtown called Yaletown. We have a nice view of lots of other tall apartment buildings, and if we lean the right way we can see Mt. Seymour. Yaletown didn’t exist when I was a kid, as far as I know. What is now Yaletown used to be a wasteland of light industry and warehouses; it was a part of town one never had any reason to visit. In the mid-80s is became the site of Expo 86, the World’s Fair. After the fair, they sold the area to a developer who tore down everything and built lots and lots of hi-rise apartments. It is now the most densely populated area of the city. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but in fact it is very pleasant. We are a couple of blocks from the waterfront, where there is a great sea-wall walk and bike path. There are dozens of restaurants within a 10 minute walk of our apartment, most of which are quite reasonably priced. Transit is close and convenient. There are parks. It would have been nice if our apartment had been dusted before we arrived, but otherwise we have no complaints.

I’m working at UBC while I’m here. That’s another place where there have been many changes. I haven’t counted, but I am sure that more than half the buildings on campus have been built since I left, and most of the others have had bits added to them. There is ongoing construction at half a dozen sites, and I gather this has been the norm for the last 20 years. I guess I am technically visiting the Math Department. My office is in what used to be the Computer Science Building; it has a new name and new occupants, including the Institute for Applied Mathematics, which is where I am sitting as I type this. Downstairs is the Complex Fluids Laboratory, where I have been spending a fair bit of my time. My hosts are Neil Balmforth, who is Director of the aforesaid Institute, and Ian Frigaard, who divides his time between Math and Mechanical Engineering. Both do research on yield-stress fluids. Neil is interested in geophysical flows, like landslides and lava flows and such, while a lot of Ian’s research has applications in the oil industry.  I will be spending part of my time working on an experiment that is supposed to model what happens when water flows beneath a glacier. Not only does the water lubricate the flow of the glacier, in some cases it can also cause the ice sheet to lift up significantly. Neil and his postdoc Ian Hewitt have been working on a mathematical model of this process, including the forces on the water due to the elastic deformation of the ice. The experiments will involve syrup flowing under a rubber sheet; the rubber sheet will exert forces on the fluid that mimic those due to the ice. At present we are at the “looking for stuff” stage of the experiments, but hopefully we’ll get everything set up this week. Meanwhile, I am enjoying the west-coast spring weather!

 

 

 

 

Image Credit: skyandtelescope.com

It's time for Eclipse again! Luckily, everyone in Southwestern Ontario will be able to witness Partial Solar Eclipse just before sunset. The eclipse in our area will still be in progress at the sunset.

So everyone get out there and witness this beautiful astronomical phenomenon BUT make sure you have special Solar/Eclipse Glasses! DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN WITH YOUR NAKED EYE! Looking at the Sun directly can harm your retina and can even cause permanent loss of eye sight. Normal sun glasses WON'T DO! Make sure to explain children about the ill effects of looking at the Sun directly. And no you cannot use Floppy Disk (do they even exist?) and Compact Disks (CDs) to view eclipse. Many indirect methods are also used to view the eclipse. 

For people (like me), who are crazy about photography, make sure to use proper solar filter! Camera is your second eye, you do not want to lose your second vision :) For more information on Photography of Eclipse, check this link out!

For more information on May 20th Eclipse, check this link! 

Stay safe, enjoy the beauty of nature!

 

The Maya civilizations have been known for their astronomical skills. Archeologists have found ancient Maya ruins dating back to early 9^th Century C.E. in Xultun, Guatemala, which include tables concerning the moments of the Moon, and (perhaps) Mars and Venus.

 

Check out the full article on Science Magazine!!!

 

Graduation season is upon us and many graduates are planning to celebrate (well at least some, who have found jobs or moving higher in the academic studies!!). Times have changed; unemployment and low income worries the fresh graduates! Here is an interesting article in the TIME magazine on how graduating is not a celebration time anymore! 

Here's the Link: TIME 

Some of you know that one of my hobbies is geocaching. For the blissfully ignorant, geocaching works this way: People put some trinkets in a container and hide it somewhere. They post the coordinates (latitude and longitude, accurate to a couple of meters) on a website. Others then use a gps to find the hidden stuff. There are some details, but they are unimportant. There's also some good physics involved, but we don't need to go into it now. It’s a fun activity, and a good excuse (if one is needed) for a walk in the woods. I enjoy geocaching when I travel to a new city, as I typically get led to interesting places that I otherwise would never see. There are about a million and a half geocaches hidden around the world, including several hundred around London.  One of the small pleasures of the game is that it’s a little bit subversive – you have to sneak around to find the caches, and you’re not supposed to let the un-initiated know what or where they are. Cachers occasionally get asked what they are up to by various authority figures. It’s all part of the fun.

While we were visiting my in-laws in Victoria this weekend, my sister-in-law pointed out this news article to me: http://www.timescolonist.com/news/Bomb+squad+called+after+suspicious+object+found+tree/6612573/story.html

The gist of it is that someone had found a suspicious object hidden in a tree. The bomb squad had been called out, and after several hours of doing I don’t know what, they determined that the object in question was not in fact a pipe bomb, but a geocache. I thought this was pretty funny. I wondered if this sort of thing had happened before, and in fact it had: in Toronto, just a few days earlier. Here’s the story on that one:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/offbeat/story/2012/05/10/pipe-bomb-scare-geocaching.html

In this case, authorities confined local residents to their houses for three hours while the bomb squad blew up the suspicious container. This cache had been sitting in plain view, attached to a lamp post with cable ties, for more than a month, but apparently it didn't become a potential bomb until last week. There have been other incidents as well – I found information about one in North Carolina, and another in Colorado Springs.

I suppose such incidents end up costing taxpayers lots of money. I find it hard to get mad at geocachers about this, though. Instead, I take it as a sad commentary on our collective mindset that otherwise rational people would conclude that a piece of plastic pipe hidden in plain view in a public space must be a bomb, rather than something totally innocent. I also find it odd that bomb experts would reach the same conclusion, even after looking carefully at said pipe. Surely there are ways to determine whether that pipe contains trinkets rather than explosives without spending hours at it, without detonating it, and without terrifying all the neighbours. What about using those swabs they always wipe over my laptop at the airport, for example? Or bringing in one of those bomb-sniffing dogs? Or, for that matter, what about going to the geocahcing web site and checking to see if there is a cache listed at the location in question? Perhaps bomb squaddies should put a geocaching app on their mobile phones, so they can easily do this!

Certainly one lesson from this is that geocachers should be careful to hide their caches where people prone to panic are unlikely to find them. Another is that a lot of people need to chill out a bit. Don’t forget, there are another 1.5 million of them still out there! 

In this columnist and University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist questions the need for the recent agreement between the Association of Universities and Colleges Canada (which includes UWO) and its controversial new agreement with Access Copyright, which will cost students an extra $26 per full time student per year, in large part to get copyright access to materials that they can already access! Geist, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, says 

If that wasn’t enough, the model licence purports to grants rights for copying that does not require permission. For example, it defines copying as including “posting a link or hyperlink to a digital copy”, yet linking to content can hardly be described as copying materials.

If would even prevent storing articles in cloud services such as Dropbox! I'm not going to get too excited since the company is covering my costs on this one so what the heck.

But maybe you should!

http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1165965--geist-the-most-expensive-copyright-insurance-policy-in-canadian-history

In a previous post, I promised a discussion about observing proposals, but Tyler beat me to it. So instead I want to shed some light on another aspect of the scientific life: the conference. I was thinking back on this, and amusingly, the first scientific conference I ever went to was the 1993 meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA), which was held right here at Western. I certainly never suspected then that I would end up back here as a prof.

There are different types of scientific conferences with different purposes. Scientific societies tend to have regularly-scheduled (N times per year, where 1/3<N<2) meetings. These provide opportunities for everyone in the field to get together: besides talks about science, they also often feature award presentations, trade shows, job interviews and meetings needed to run the society. We hosted the 2011 CASCA meeting here in London and have all mostly recovered from the experience. This type of meeting is often characterized as being more about networking than about science, though it can provide a good introduction to the field for new trainees.

Another type of meeting is the smaller meeting focused  on a particular topic. These meetings often have limited attendance and (at least in astronomy) are more likely to be on university campuses than at big conference centres. In this kind of meeting, the science talks and posters are the main focus. Networking also happens, of course, and can be more productive because all of the attendees have common interests.

I am going to 3 meetings this summer, which is more than usual. Meeting number 1 is the CASCA meeting in Calgary  which will feature an outing for the June 5 transit of Venus. Meeting number 2 is The Great Andromeda Galaxy, a specialized workshop on my favorite galaxy. And  meeting #3 is the 2012 Gemini Science meeting,  for which I somehow ended up being chair of the Science Organizing committee. I also wanted to go to a meeting called "Astronomy's Discoveries and Physics Education" but it's at the same time as meeting #2 above. Can't be everywhere.

When I tell my non-scientist friends that I am going to a conference, they often ask "Are you going with anyone else from Western?" and "Will you have time to do any sight-seeing?" I try to explain that the purpose of going to a conference is not exactly to have a holiday with your friends. It really is all about meeting new colleagues (or old ones that you don't see regularly) and talking science. Conferences can be intense and exhausting, particularly for introverts who find all the social interaction to be a bit much. But, in the best cases, conferences leave one energized and ready to go back home to work on all kinds of new ideas.

OK, I lied: sometimes conferences are related to holidays. My spouse is attending the 2012 annual meeting of the ISMRM and I am going along to Melbourne, Australia. Expect reports from the southern hemisphere next month.

In April last year, a launch was scheduled after teaching duties were over and before travel season started: the last launch of the space shuttle Endeavour, slated for April 29th. When prospects looked good, we booked a last minute flight & hotel to Orlando, and soon found ourselves at the Space View Park in Titusville. It's still quite a distance from the launch pad, but it offers a direct, unobstructed view of the launch pad. After a long wait, the launch was scrubbed and we extended our stay with a few days hoping to have a new attempt in the following days. That didn't happen, and so we had a few days to explore everything Kennedy's Space Center (KSC) has to offer (awesome^2!). As soon as the shuttle's external fuel tank was drained, it was safe to offer the Discover KSC tours again, which offer the closest views of the launch pad (1.8 miles I believe) that tourist money can buy. A fortunate consequence of the scrubbed launch was that we not only got to see the launch pad -- Endeavour was still on it!

Two weeks later, things looked good again, and another last minute booking brought me back to Titusville on May 16 2011. That day, not only Endeavour commander Mark Kelly was having a beautiful day, The 8 year old in me was having a blast, watching the final launch of Endeavour with awe and joy. Even at that distance,it's a most impressive sight -- the shuttle outline being very clear, and the rocket going up much faster than I seemed to remember from televised launches. You really get a sense of the tremendous power involved in bringing such a massive machine to high speeds! Unfortunately, Endeavour disappeared into the cloud deck after about 15 seconds, and from then on, people in airplanes had a better look than we did. Her last goodbye that day was the shadow of the exhaust plume that the early morning Sun cast on the low cloud deck. But we would meet again soon. Two weeks later, in the early morning hours of May 31st (while tweaking my talk), I saw her again from my hotel room in Toledo, Spain, silently crossing the sky only a few degrees apart from the ISS, less than a day after undocking.

On launch day, I rewarded the 8 year old's patience with a 60cm cast model of the shuttle Endeavour (ok, you're right, so I also got a smaller model as well and posters and calendars and whatnot, what's the big deal?). It's in my home office, and you would not believe how much joy a grown up (?) can still have  from just watching a model of a pretty spacecraft at the start of each working day.

When the shuttle fleet retired, I thought that that would be the end of our story, but this week, there was a nice and surprising little epilogue. The space shuttle Discovery will be replacing the Enterprise in the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. As you may have heard in the news, Discovery was flown from KSC to Washington D.C. on Tuesday, and today (Thursday), Discovery was welcomed into the museum with a big ceremony. By some cosmic coincidence, I happened to fly into Washington Dulles on Wednesday. I was wondering whether I'd be able to catch a glimpse of Discovery. Sure enough, there she was, stacked on top of the shuttle carrier just a few hundred meters to my left as we reached the gate. And although I was in the right terminal for my connecting flight, I quickly decided to take the airport shuttle to a different terminal and back, since the airport shuttle's route brought it much closer to Discovery's temporary parking spot. And in case there was any doubt, the 8 year old in me is still alive and kicking (and excited, satisfied and happy). After more than 30 years, I'm still as much in love with space and the shuttle as I was back then.

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