Dan Thalkar

7/5/05

The day after the Fourth of July, I wonder how it feels. Probably neglected and unloved, full of violent envy for its predecessor, cool enough to have a national holiday named after it. Poor Fifth of July.

We awoke around 9:00 and began the first leg of our trip to the VLA (Very Large Array, aren't these scientists clever?). Last week the other Daniel bought a book by C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity," so I read most of that on the way over. I finished it on the way back, sparking a long, most interesting and sometimes boring religion conversation, but I'll get to that later, so back to the VLA.

Picture the movie "Contact." Now picture Jodie Foster at the VLA with all of the antenna dishes. Now replace Jodie Foster with Don, Scott and seven Earthwatch students. That was my trip to the VLA.

We got to go inside one of the antennas and actually climb to the top of it, but it then started to rain and lightning was spotted, so we got down. The sight of all of those spread out across the flat, empty desert was, for lack of a desire to find a better word, awesome. For our presentation on Friday I'm talking about the VLA, so I won't go in-depth on it now. Maybe once I have info collected for that I'll put it here.

After the VLA we went to Stephen's for dinner. The food was good, we played some more hearts, and then we left. The ride back went fairly quickly, since it was helped along by the religion conversation and some good music. We got back, watched Family Guy and a few other shows, then went to sleep. The end.

7/4/05

Independence Day, and the most "American" one I have ever celebrated. We woke at around noon and left at 2:00 for Galens, where the festivities began. We went to the neighborhood pool, where a live band with a repertoire of CCR and "Sweet Home Alabama" was playing. That was neat. After being attacked by several inflatable alligators and a malicious child with a super soaker, we played some pool basketball. On one play Elli gouged my arm, but I scored anyways, so no harm done.

We were then sufficiently hungry to leave and eat, which we did. As another dose of Americana, it was a picnic. We watched an exceptionally strange movie entitled "The Way Things Go," which follows the workings of a Rube Goldberg-like device for half an hour, only to end with a waft of smoke. It was pointless and fascinating, like watching a bee pollinate a flower. There was then a jam session mainly consisting of Disney songs; needless to say, I remained in the audience for this.

Around 8:00 we walked over to where the fireworks were. Four of us started an intense game of hears while we waited, but had to put it on hold for the show. The fireworks were pretty good, better than most that I've seen, but I'm not sure that Mike's soundtrack of "wooooooooooooooa"s added anything.

We then walked back to Galen's for some brownies. They were good. It was then that Gavin and Mike discovered the Rubix Cube. They spent several agonizing hours with it under Johns tutelage (he can do it in a minute fifty-three), but have yet to completely solve it as I type this, two days later.

And so, after a wholesome day of swimming, eating and fireworks watching, we came back to our hotel and watched some TV. Eventually, around 1:30 or so, we slept.

7/3/05

Laundry day. Guys are lazy slobs and so we tossed all of our stuff together; it's faster and cheaper and only mildly appalling. The sad thing is that none of us knew how to do it. Sure, none of us admitted it, but you could tell; I could smell the uncertainty, though that may have just been all of the dirt laundry. We did it, though, and I think that most of the clothes now in my bad are actually mine--mission success.

We also ate at Sonic, which was quite amazing. It's a fast food restaurant, but a drive-in. I had only heard rumors of these places, vague whispers and intimations carried on the wind. Also, the grape vine has mentioned it to me before.

Later in the afternoon Don gave us a radio astronomy lecture. It went on for a long, long time and we were all rather tired, but it was interesting stuff. Some of the images created by it are breathtaking, especially when you consider how they were made. "How were they made?" you ask. Carefully. Very carefully.

Jon then gave us a bunch of graphs and charts he made dealing with the orbit of our asteroid. Some I didn't get, others I did. The basic idea behind all of them was that we were lucky and because of that we were close.

Then, after not enough down time, we went to Fenton Hill, accompanied by Galen and his kids and some other people who seemed to just show up. That's happened a lot on this trip, past Earthwatchers showing up with friends at random times to eat or observe with us. A sign of how good a recruitment tool this is, I guess, but I think it's time they move on. Anyways, we went to look at the stars.

After setting up our telescopes while we still had daylight and devouring a meal, we began a Messier marathon, which consists of gathering a list of Messier objects and looking at all of the visible ones. We saw some really cool stuff (spiral galaxies, colliding galaxies, star clusters, nebula, etc.), but after a while one fuzzy object looked exactly the same as another fuzzy object. Andy (Galen's son) brought his van up so we could listen to some music, but that only delayed the inevitable. By the end of the CD we were all inside.

Eventually we got bored and ambitious enough to go back outside, but productivity eluded us. Laying on a concrete slab staring at the stars is not comfortable; doing it for close to an hour even less so. We then went back inside where people either slept, ate, listened to music or, what I did, a combination of all three. We would arrive at our hotel near 4:00 am.

On the ride back we slept.

7/2/05

Today we got up at the early time (for us) of 9:00 in order to go to Santa Fe. It was boring, Real boring. I was bored. It started out okay, with the Georgia O'Keefe art museum, which was kind of interesting. Part of the exhibit was "The Flowers of O'Keefe and Warhol." I don't like his art at all, it strikes me as manipulative and self-serving. What now, art critics? O'Keefe was pretty neat, though. She was one crazy lady, with all of her deserts and flowers and bones and pictures titled "Black lines." Black lines? I liked "Blue Flower"; it was neat.

Then the boredom began. Hours of walking around the expensive art, leather, and jewelry market. Here the guys and girls split up, since they're far too into shopping for my taste, and we wandered around aimlessly. We ended up eating burritos, watching some live music, and buying a chocolate cigar to fool Don and the girls with. We fooled Don, but it melted in my pocket before we could trick the girls. Foiled again.

I almost forgot, when we first got there we were accosted by a rather profane bum. He started talking to us about golf and Montana and soon moved to blaming Los Alamos for all of the pollution in the world and quite a few other problems which I can't recall just now. Oh yes, and he asked us for a dollar for some beer, which we declined to give him. He swore a lot.

On the ride back we slept.

After extensive debate we decided to go up to Fenton Hill to examine binary stars; we were to see just how close of a separation we could notice before it looked like one star. We ran into numerous problems with the alignment of our telescope and with our lenses and gave up relatively early (after only a few hours). The girls continued the hunt, but the rest of us went inside and ate some Ramen Noodles.

Scott was listening to his friend's radio show that comes out of Boulder, Colorado. I called him and asked if he could rap for us, but he said he needed to get drunker first. According to Scott, he is an excellent rapper, but I will probably never know, unfortunately.

On the ride back we slept.

7/1/05

I have a problem--I don't particularly like math.

I have another problem--I enjoyed most of this afternoon.

And just what, you are probably thinking, is the problem here? Well, most of the afternoon was spent doing math, boring math, at that. Since we got the remainder of the data for our asteroid project last night, we finished up the calculations today. We plugged new numbers into the same equation as yesterday and--well, you don't care. At least, I hope you don't; I certainly wouldn't.

That's what I discovered at the lecture later in the evening. It was basically about the water on Mars and the guy who gave it knew an incredible amount about the topic and is undoubtedly intelligent. Add to that a dash of cutting age research and some interesting topic and you should have the recipe for perhaps the Greatest Lecture of All Time.

The problem? I wasn't the one doing the research and I wasn't the one giving the speech. The parts of it that I heard were fascinating, but they were also few and far between.

It was just too dry, like Mars (or is Mars wet and it's the New Mexico ground with little moisture, or is it both, or. . . ). Okay, so I didn't learn very much.

I guess that explains how the afternoon was enjoyable; actually conducting the experiment is exciting and interesting, but hearing about it later on is much less so. I couldn't even write a sentence detailing the science involved with the asteroid without falling asleep, but I stayed up until 4:00 am two days in a row to do it.

The plan for the rest of the night was to skip Fenton Hill and, after catching the end of a convert at the ski slopes, get some real sleep.

This did not happen.

The concert wasn't much, just a couple of guys playing some rock jams with the occasional intrusion of bad vocals. It was a good time, though, as we tried to weasel top-secret info out of Don. It didn't work, but he may yet crack.

When we got back we were supposed to crash, but instead stayed up until 2:30 watching cartoons and tennis in my room. Gavin and I attempted to cook EZ-Mac using an ice bucket and a microwave, but put in too much water and cooked it for too long. I ended up throwing out the ice bucket, but it has since been replaced with a new one. We will get this to work.

6/31/05

I wrote the summary for today, so I'll keep this short: we slept, ate, did some calculations, slept, ate, and looked at stars.

6/30/05

We awoke at the relatively early hour of 8:00 in order to go on a hike, which I was fairly excited about. Then we got to the park and the hike turned out to be nothing but a myth; we went on a walk instead. It was, however, still pretty cool, as we saw the remains of a Pueblo village.

After the hike and some lunch, I finally got a badge in place of the visitor one I had been wearing. I'm a real person now, with a real picture on my badge!

The afternoon was pretty laid back--we slept. Then we went to a lecture on asteroids hitting the earth, and I wish I could have slept. The speaker was a nice guy and probably knows an enormous amount about the subject, but as a public speaker he is a failure. Losing one's train of thought in the middle of losing one's train of thought sounds impossible, but I'm pretty sure he did it, several times.

What really disturbed me, though, was his smile. He smiled a lot, but never made any jokes and nothing funny really happened, except for people dying; he seemed to find that hilarious. "Tokyo would be totally wiped out," he said at one point, as his eyes twinkled with joy. "One two people died because of the collision," and here he paused before the punchline, "and one died because of a stroke." Hilarious.

After that macabre lecture, we went over to Fenton Hill for some star/asteroid observing. The ride over was. . . interesting, and included many jokes that I probably shouldn't repeat here.

We were stocked up on food and the sky was clear and so we stayed until past 4:00 am.

What could we possible keep occupied with that late into the night, you ask? Well, we spent quite a bit of time waiting for one of the telescopes to work. The clamps for the finder scope didn't work, and so others had to be found before it could be set up and eventually calibrated. Eventually John took over and ended up taking of the lens and playing around with it until it worked; it was all rather fascinating.

We saw Jupiter--her rings and moons and the structure of her rings, although I don't think any of us actually saw that. But we were told about it, and it sounded neat.

We also checked out Mars, which surprised me. It looks like one pissed off planet; like the eye in Lord of the Rings, though scarier since it's real. It burns.

Also the moon, closer and more familiar and so not as intimidating, but cool nonetheless. It feels almost voyeuristic watching that, the craters and shadows seem so intimate and vulnerable.

And now I realize that I lied when I said that the sky was clear. It was, except that smoke from the Arizona fires clothed the lower portion of the sky in a modest garb of haze, perhaps to make up for the brazen nudity of the moon.

We arrived back at the hotel at 5:00 am.

6/29/05

Not an extremely exciting day, but an interesting one.

First--well, not first, but the first thing I remember--we went to the classroom for some lecturing which lasted almost the entire afternoon. Apparently one of our observational projects will be measuring the radius of an asteroid's rotation. Most of the afternoon was spent discussing just how we would do that and the math behind it. Now, I would say that I hated it and it dragged on, but the lecture lasted a couple of hours and they didn't seem like a couple of hours, as incoherent as that may sound. Some of the math we'll be using didn't make much sense to me (surprise) and my sketch will probably look more like Mickey Mouse than a star chart, but oh well. I guess I'll find out some evening.

After the asteroid lecture we played around with some color filters on the telescopes and made a color image. The technology for that is fairly backwards and takes a long time, but it was cool to play around with.

And I just realized how dry and boring this has been so far; I'm sorry, you poor souls who are reading this.

Anyways, for dinner we went to a Southwestern restaurant with, supposedly, the best guacamole around. I do not like guacamole, so wasn't too impressed. What did impress me was that our waiter, who got our food out remarkably fast, likes the Doors and was about my age when they were big. Okay, I guess that didn't really impress me, but it seemed nifty at the time.

In the evening we went to an Opera for some 'culture;' we saw the Berber of Seville. That was about as dry and boring as this entry, especially since for most of the first act the translation device wasn't working and I, unfortunately, am not fluent in Italian. "Figaro Figaro, Figaro!" That's the guy's name, and about all I got from the first 90 minutes.

Most of the time I watched the lightening going on in the sky behind the stage.

At intermission we all went outside and somehow ended up looking at the sky for stars and the general location of our asteroid. What a strange sight that must have been, 7 poorly dressed teenagers with heads tilted full back making nonsensical jokes about dust and dark matter and "wanna see my big dipper?" all while wildly waving at various constellations. Exciting stuff, this astronomy.

For the ride back we had some singalong to the Barenaked Ladies before getting back at the relatively early hour of 12:30.

Now I go to nap, perhaps my next entry will be less . . . bad.

6/28/05

So, our first full day in Los Alamos. We learned, well, that no one really knows what’s going on "up there" at a cosmology lecture during the evening. Apparently 95% of the universe consists of . . . stuff—dark matter and dark energy, actually. I think it’s called dark because the sky is dark, though it probably also has something to do with the fact that it is rather mysterious. No one knows what it is or whether it actually is there; "collisionless matter," ze German speaker called it. Whatever that means.

We also discovered that 4% of the universe consists of hydrogen and helium, but it seems to have been misplaced. Strange stuff, this cosmology.

One of the kids here--another Daniel, actually--pointed out before the lecture that Big Bang Theory (a proper title?) is just as much a religion as Creation (may as well capitalize both). Something to think about, I suppose. Definitely more strangeness.

After the lecture and some deliberating, we drove up to Fenton Hill to see some stars, since that is, ostensibly, why we are here. After our van narrowly avoided becoming intimate friends with an elk, I made a new enemy: Clouds. The very same clouds that I admired on the drive up here from the airport took on a malicious, conspiratorial nature. A star would appear clear, we would bring the telescope around to it, and the fiendish clouds would cover it again. Michael and I looked for Vega for far too long, then eventually gave up and found a new star.

The stars were up there, but the darkness, the Dust, as we called it in our second overused joke of as many days (we we’re all still using both), kept getting in the way. That didn’t stop us, though, from looking at the stars from 12 to about 3 a.m.

We saw planets and stars and star clusters and galaxies and greens and reds and an incredibly, brilliantly white, waning moon.

I live in an area with an incredibly dark sky, perfect for observing stars, but I’ve never done it. This cloudy, frustrating night was the first time that I can remember actually appreciating the cosmos. I even found myself philosophizing on Dan #2’s theory of faith in science versus faith in God--whether that was due to the profoundness of the universe or a giddy sort of exhaustion that only comes in the confused hours between 1:00 and 4:00 in the morning, I may never know.

Either way, it was the clearest cloudy sky I’ve ever seen.