Across the Universe

Melissa and I traveled to UC Santa Cruz on Sunday for the UC-HIPACC summer school.  Santa Cruz is disappointing thus far because, before I came here, several people told me that the area and the campus were “nice” or even “beautiful”.  The campus and the surrounding area are better than Riverside in some ways, but the climate is very cold and I have not yet seen anything that would qualify as “beautiful”.  We’ll see if that changes; I haven’t seen the entire campus yet.  We also haven’t gone to the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park yet.

The summer school has been the highlight of the trip so far.  It’s nice to be surrounded by other people who work with simulations.  I haven’t really experienced that since I graduated from GMU in 2008. The presentations this week have been focussed on the simulation codes ART and Enzo as well as the visualization and analysis package, YT. Many of the presentations were similar to the presentations that I gave at UCR earlier this year. While I haven’t learned anything fundamentally new yet, I have become inspired to learn the Python programming / scripting language.  I stayed up late last night learning the basics of Python and playing around with the IPython shell.  Unfortunately that has caused me to be too sleepy to focus today.

All of the students have been given time on the Triton supercomputer in San Diego so we can run mini simulations and analyze data.  I haven’t wasted any of my computing time yet so I’ll have more time to use GADGET, Sunrise, or my own little code.

I expect the next two weeks to be more interesting because GADGET and Sunrise will be discussed.  Hopefully I’ll also have some time to work on the code for my qualifier project as well!

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My teaching duties for the summer are coming to an end this Friday.  On Sunday I will be traveling to Santa Cruz for the “2010 UC-HIPACC International Summer School on Astro-Computing: Galaxy Simulations”.  I’ll be there for three weeks.

I haven’t had much time to work on research for the last few weeks, but I have managed to translate my code from GNU Octave to C++ and add a few new features.  I seem to be on course to complete my qualifier project sometime in September–especially if I have some free time while I’m in Santa Cruz.  I could have been much closer to completing the project at this point, but I’ve spent some time working on writing my own gravitational tree solver so I can increase the number of particles in the simulations (and to have the experience of writing the tree solver).

Last Friday, Melissa and I celebrated the  six-month anniversary of our first date by returning to the scene of the crime:  The El Mirage Dry Lake.  We camped on the edge of the lake and took some night photos. I finally had a chance to try out my new lens!  The resulting photos were rather nice:

Friday was a major day for another reason as well:  Melissa lost her job.  She was presented with two unpleasant options:  1) follow an order which would prevent her from doing her job effectively, or  2) be fired for insubordination.  She chose the latter. The company she worked for reminded me of the timeshare resale company where I worked after I graduated from college;  many of the employees are related, the owners and managers are incompetent, and they spend most of their time in meetings talking about what they want to do rather than actually implementing plans.

A few months ago, My car started having problems starting. The problem escalated over the last several weeks to the point where I was afraid that the starting system would stop working altogether.  Yesterday I finally drove the car to the Toyota dealership in Riverside to be diagnosed and fixed.  The problem was apparently an electrical short in one of the components in the starter assembly–perhaps the solenoid.  That’s what they said anyway.  They didn’t show me the actual faulty piece of hardware.  I’ll find out if it’s really fixed in the next few days of use.  They also did some routine maintenance and took care of an oil leak that was getting worse.  After taxes, the repair and maintenance bill was over $1200.  That’s a ridiculous price, but it seems that every automobile repair shop around here is equally ridiculous.  Unfortunately I don’t have the time or equipment to fix things here, so I’m stuck with either not having things repaired or losing large chunks of my savings.

I went to the court in Victorville to pick up papers requesting a trial by written declaration.  Hopefully the judge who reads the written defense will be reasonable, but I doubt it.  It’s pretty clear that Victorville uses its traffic cameras as a source of income rather than a tool to improve public safety.

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Today was the first day of summer. Exactly one year ago I started working on my balcony garden and then I began preparing for the comprehensive exam. It’s amazing how much has happened since then!

I’ve made a lot of progress on my project over the past few days and I’m on a roll. I’ve learned to do several things that I’ve been wanting to learn for years. It would be nice to be able to keep up the pace, but I have to be a TA for labs so I can pay for rent, utilities, and food…

We had our TA kick-off meeting for the first summer session today. I’ll have to perform two labs and write two lab reports per week, then guide 20 students through the two labs, and grade 40 lab reports each week for the next 4.5 weeks. In addition to that, I have to grade quizzes and possibly proctor an exam. In short, the next few weeks are going to be very unpleasant and I won’t be able to work on my research very much at all. Once that is over, I have to head to Santa Cruz for the three-week summer school program. Shortly after that, Melissa and I will go to VA for about a week for a vacation.

I’ll spend September finishing my current project and making arrangements for a qualifying exam. Hopefully I can submit a paper in the fall describing my current work. That should improve my chance of getting funding in case the pending NASA proposal is rejected.

The tomatoes in the balcony garden have been ripening at an even faster pace now. Yesterday Melissa made spaghetti sauce out of some of them. We used rice noodles rather than traditional spaghetti….yum!

This is the first blog entry that I’m writing using the GNOME blog panel applet. It’s very convenient as long as I’m not posting photos.

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…it isn’t easy.

Across the Universe is now over a year old.  I’ve decided to write a little rant about something that has been bugging me more and more as time progresses:  The difficulty of trying to be healthy in the United States without having a high income.  This isn’t about “health care” insurance, the high cost of medical procedures, or prescription drugs.  It’s about nutrition, culture, and environment.  I could go into great detail and cite things, but I’ll try to keep this short and simple.  First, I’ll address our food…

Upon entering a grocery store, Americans are primarily presented with products containing wheat, cow’s milk, refined sugars, omega 6 fatty acids, and/or hydrogenated oils.  Even when shopping at many stores which claim to specialize “health food”, a large portion of the foods available contain wheat, cow’s milk, or added sugar!  It is well-known that these ingredients cause inflammation, suppress the absorption of essential nutrients, and/or suppress the immune system.  Unfortunately, they are also inexpensive and ubiquitous.  Fresh fruits and vegetables are reasonably priced and easy to find, but many other anti-inflammatory, nutrient-rich foods are sold at a premium over their counterparts which contain harmful ingredients–even in cases when the healthier version of the product is less expensive to produce!  To top if off, many food companies produce foods which are labeled as “low carb” or “no added sugar”, but upon reading the label, we discover that, in most cases, artificial sweeteners have been added.

Then, there’s the crazy sleep schedule….

Many American organizations evidently believe that there is something sacred about starting work between 6:30 and 9:00 AM.  American workers and students are essentially forced into an unnatural sleep cycle as a result.  Lack of sleep decreases productivity, creativity, and the ability to concentrate and learn. It also negatively impacts our health.  The artificial sleep schedule prompts us to use stimulant drugs such as caffeine which further decreases our insulin sensitivity–exacerbating the effects of our poor diets.  Waking up this early only really makes sense for people in a few select professions.

Finally there’s air conditioning and lack of exercise….

Many Americans, having grown a thick layer of insulating fat, tend to use air conditioning excessively in order to cool themselves down.  Being in a cool environment reduces the need to sweat, which means that our kidneys are forced to handle nearly all of the excess salt that we consume in our processed foods.  We become more susceptible to heat and eventually become dependent on the AC. The cool environment also irritates arthritis and prompts our bodies to store extra fat.  Couple this with the sedentary nature of most jobs and you have a recipe for an unhealthy, unproductive workforce.

There are also many other complicating factors such as the environmental toxins from cigarette smoke, industrial pollutants, and agricultural pollutants, but these touch people of all income levels and occupations.  My focus in this little rant was mainly on the factors which can be controlled when one has enough control over one’s own life.  It seems unfair that people with very low incomes are practically stuck where they are because they can’t afford to get the nourishment needed to think clearly and be upwardly mobile.  To complicate things even further, these are the same people to whom many drugs (legal and illegal) are directly marketed.  Television and popular culture certainly don’t help either.

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The spring quarter has finally come to an end and the summer begins soon.  A lot has happened in the last few weeks. Here are a few highlights:

• On Saturday, May 29th, Melissa’s brother  graduated from The University of Redlands.  I drove Melissa and her mom to the graduation and took a few photos.
• I finished writing another proposal for NASA.
• Gaby and I have a new collaborator who has a lot of experience with the specific tools that I’ll be using for my PhD project.
• Melissa and I hiked up to the “C” on Box Springs Mountain.  It was Melissa’s first hike.
• We finally installed light-blocking curtains in the bedroom so it’s not bright in the room anymore!  The curtains also help block some of the noise from outside and they help keep the bedroom from getting as hot.  Thus the curtains have improved my quality of sleep in multiple ways!
• The tomatoes have started ripening at a steady pace.  In the past two days I’ve picked six tomatoes.  They’re delicious!
• I’ve begun writing code in GNU Octave to prototype some of the algorithms that I’ll use for my research.  I should be able to finish the prototyping in another week or two, then I’ll write C or C++ code using OMP to take full advantage of my quad-core processor.  I should be able to present this little project as part of my oral examination in roughly September.  By the end of this year, I will have taken my last required course and advanced to candidacy.
• I got my TA assignment for the summer.  I will teach the 2LB lab during the first summer session.  I’ll have to teach two labs per week, which means I’ll have to grade 40 lab reports per week….this is not going to be fun.
• Melissa had a show in Suzy’s Bar in Hermosa Beach on June 6th.  The owner of the bar bought one of her CDs–pretty cool!
• I won my first physics award on Friday.  It was the “Robert T. Poe Memorial Graduate Scholarship Award for Outstanding Graduate Research by a Second-Year Graduate Student”.  There was a nice monetary prize associated with the award.  The prize will cover the ridiculous Victorville traffic fine if I’m forced to pay.
• Almost all of the equipment and software is configured so that I can begin making high fidelity YouTube videos of Melissa performing here in the apartment.  I just have to buy one more cable.  I hope we can record frequently enough so that she can post one video each week.
• I figured out that the plant that was making me sick is some sort of jasmine.
• Tuesday will be the one-year anniversary of Across The Universe.

Some photos from the last few weeks:

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On Mother’s day, I drove Melissa to her mom’s place in Victorville.  We had a pretty nice day there.  Unfortunately, it seems that the town of Victorville is desperate for money.  I received an automated notice in the mail which informed me that I had some sort of  ”traffic violation”.  The letter included a URL to a video of the “violation”. After reviewing the video, I see what they are talking about, but they are being ridiculously nit-picky.  I simply made a right turn while a stop light was red without completely “stopping”.  Victorville is charging me for “failure to stop at a red light”.  I have to appear in court in July.  The requested bail/fee is $456.00.  This might be understandable if I had gone straight through a red light at high speed, but…

1. I was making a right turn.
2. I slowed down in preparation to stop while I assessed the situation (I obviously couldn’t have been moving very fast if I was able to make a sharp right turn)
3. There was no sign prohibiting right turns while the light was red.
4. The oncoming traffic (from my left) had a red light as well. (The cars in the lane were stationary, waiting for the light to turn green.)
5. There were no pedestrians in the cross-walk.
6. There was no-one waiting to make a U-turn.

Other than the frivolous traffic notice, there haven’t been many note-worthy events lately other than…

• I finished the computational astrophysics lectures for Gaby’s class.
• I was accepted to the computational astrophysics summer school in Santa Cruz.
• Two of the proposals were rejected, so I will indeed have to teach for part of the summer.
• I’ve upgraded all of my computers to Ubuntu 10.04.
• I’ve made some progress in the most fundamental pieces of my research project.  It’s still in the early stages, but things are falling into place.
• Nathan Goldbaum, a UCSC grad student who I met at the Lick Observatory, gave me some code for constructing galaxies. That was very nice of him!
• Several tomatoes have ripened in the garden!
• There’s a type of plant blooming on campus and at the apartment that I’m allergic to. I’ve been having allergy problems for the last 3 days.
• I started a little “store” at Skreened.com/idius to potentially earn a few extra dollars…if I can design something that people would want to buy.
• I’m reading an introduction to the standard model of particle physics.

Some photos…

Melissa and I made pizzas using gluten-free flour, goat cheese, and mostly raw ingredients.  We also visited her brother, sister-in-law, and niece in Hermosa beach:

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A lot of things have changed lately and I’ve been busy…

In addition to my normal teaching duties, I’ve been working on the presentation file and writing the homework problems and solutions for my computational astrophysics lectures.  The first two lectures are now complete and they went rather well, as far as I can tell.  The nearly-finished presentation document can be found here: N-body-methods.pdf.  I’ve learned a lot in the process of preparing the lectures–exactly as planned. The Beamer class has really helped with things.

Melissa got a job at a private college in Moreno Valley.  It’s a court reporting / paralegal studies school.  Her job is mainly to help recruit new students and answer questions from prospective students.  She officially changed her address now that she has a job.  She’s been living here for a while, but now this is her official home. She’s going to help with the rent!

Speaking of rent…some other financial updates:

My stocks finally recovered last week.  It was the first time in more than two years that the closing price for the day was more than the price I paid.  They dropped a slightly again, but as long as the economy and the market continue to recover, I should be in a pretty good position by the time I graduate.

I now have an American Express card through Costco, which means that I can earn rewards points at Costco now rather than just using my debit card.

I have enough points on my Amazon Visa card to cover half the price of the new camera lens that I’ve been planning to buy.

Now that my struts and strut mounts have been fixed, I’ve been driving more.  Melissa and I went to the San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park and went into their “butterfly jungle”. I was able to get a few decent photos of butterflies and birds (see photos below).  Apparently people who grow up in the suburbs and city around here don’t see butterflies up close very often…and they freak out when they see them. It’s very strange.

I’ve been trying a lot of new & different foods over the last few weeks and months–mostly because Melissa and I have been going to Goodwins, Sprouts, and other places.  For example, I’ve become a fan of steel-cut oats, goat cheese, goat milk, coconut milk, gluten-free crackers, dairy-free coconut-based ice cream, and unsweetened 100% dark chocolate. We’ve also been cooking with herbs from the balcony garden….delicious! I bought a pizza stone from Target and some gluten-free flour from Goodwins. We’re planning on making a wheat-free pizza using goat cheese rather than cow cheese.  Melissa is also going to make some gluten-free, low sugar, chocolate chip cookies.  They’ll be sweetened with maple syrup.  The chocolate chips will be made from a 100% chocolate bar with a little maple syrup added.  Oh …and I made an amazing salmon burger wraps a few days ago….yummm!

I figured out how to get my Linux recording software to simultaneously record more than one track while monitoring the mix with headphones. I also learned more about editing video with KdenLive now that it’s finally stable. The plan is to record audio and video of Melissa, sync the audio and video, and upload the videos to YouTube, so that she’ll be better-represented online.

Speaking of Linux, the newest version of Ubuntu was officially released yesterday!  Version 10.04 is a long-term support release.  I’ll soon upgrade my workstation from 8.04 to 10.04.  I’ve had the development versions of 10.04 on my laptop for a while now….it’s very fast.

Because of my lectures, I ended up teaching Gaby’s graduate level classes this week.  Next week she will be out of the country, so I’ll be teaching her graduate class and helping cover her undergraduate class in addition to my regular teaching duties.  Once that’s all over, I should be able to start working on research again, finally….I should also have time to exercise and sleep more.

The balcony garden is full of blooms at the moment and things have been growing amazingly fast. The tomato plants almost reach to the top of the banister and they are packed with fruit. There are some photos from the garden below.

I used the reverse lens technique to do some macro photography. I was able to get a close-up of an aphid and a flower on the Irish moss as well as some other things…

Between 5:00 and 6:00 AM the Sun is positioned such that light shines through the peep hole on my door and projects a circle onto the wall.  The chromatic aberration from the lens is pretty cool, so I took a photo of it.  Next I want to try to get some photos of bubbles.  I’ve already bought the supplies to make soap bubbles….I just need the right light and wind conditions.

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Since my last entry, I started using the Beamer class to create the presentation document for my lectures.  It’s so much less time-consuming than something like PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress for the same reasons the system is better than a word processor;  the software does the layout and navigation hyperlinks for you and math is extremely easy to enter.  I also found a set of five lectures by Volker Springel that will help me with a lot of the illustrations as well as some of the details.

Today I talked to Hooshang for over an hour.  I gave him a quick (30 min) overview of my lectures.  He seemed to find some of the things interesting.  I take that as a good sign.

I staked the tomatoes using bamboo stakes from Walmart.  In lieu of some sort of disaster, the two plants should easily produce > 40 tomatoes this year.

I bought an electronic soil pH meter from Lowe’s to test the pH of the azalea soil.  The pH needs to be quite a bit lower, so I need to buy some iron sulfate or something.  The azalea fertilizer that I bought a few weeks ago would burn the roots if I applied enough to lower the pH sufficiently.  I read that coffee grounds will also reduce the pH of the soil, but I’m not so sure I want to try that.

Melissa’s show at the Plum House went well except for the smokers.  The owner of the Plum House smokes and he puts ashtrays on all of the tables outside…so he basically drives non-smokers away.  There were several people smoking during the show and I had to leave for some fresh air.  At one point, a random Riverside teen walking by on the street and bought a CD! That was pretty cool.  Here are a few photos from the show:

And here’s a YouTube video of one of my favorite songs: “She Gets What She Wants”

For videos of some of the other songs from the show, check out her YouTube channel.

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