Saturday, October 20, 2018

Oh Canada

This week I visited just about every University in Canada. It was a trip! Some initial issues were encountered (did you know you need a visum? that you pay for online? Like Australia and Disneyland, it's better to order online well before going... I hadn't). So some stress getting to the plane. No bourbon brought along for my Canadian friends.

Monday

I forgot Queen's University isn't in Toronto. Google lady tells me with great authority that it is downtown and so I am late to my own talk. Swell. My host, Stephane Courteau is gracious and improvises a very nice visit. Beautiful place. Fun group and astronomers. I talked about overlapping galaxies. Stephane egged me on to publish the dang results already. The place comes highly recommended. Next time he organizes a conference, I should go. Back to Toronto I drive (2.5 hrs...)


Tuesday

York suffered a catastrophic electrical failure. I blame squirrels. The black ones that are everywhere. So there was some more improv and a giant generator truck and I managed to give a talk anyway.
Adam Muzzin was a solicitous and entertaining host. Wonderful visit. Interesting discussions (mostly with Adam, some reminiscing of Leiden times). My talk was about super-8s and M-dwarfs.


Wednesday

University of Toronto. The Dunlap institute. Clearly one of the flagship places of Canadian Astronomy. Renee Hloszek was my host and in between a clearly very hectic schedule she managed to get me where I needed to go and I got to talk about LADUMA.
I managed to chat to Brian Gaensler (score!) and I had a wonderful lunch. One of the other astronomers pointed out that Margaret Atwood was sitting right behind me. Sure. ok. NBD.
Then came the drive to LONDON (Ontario). Canada is built to a different scale people.
There I met up with Pauline Barmby and her charming family. She has a whole teenager now. Tried to learn something about managing that while at dinner (poutine! I have heard much about it).

sidebar: I had heard so much about poutine that it had been built up in my imagination. There is also a brown sauce Dutch people put on fries, the Thai Sateh sauce. Yep fries and spicy peanut sauce.
I may be biased but I like Dutch brown sauce much much better than poutine. I may never be able to enter Canada again after posting this.


Thursday

Talk at Western University. So many people to talk to. So much interesting science ideas to kick around. We chatted about the UGC 2885 project with Hubble. Plan to write All Teh Papers. I talked about Super-8s and M-dwarfs but considering how many people worked on nearby galaxies, I should have given a talk about overlapping galaxies. Ah well. Next time.
I chatted with Els Peeters, who I know from her Groningen Days. Her postdoc was working on something with PAHs (surprise! no surprise) and I may have a science idea there too. Hotel was a 1925 venerable building with lots of quirks. Like another power outage. Fun.
Chatted to several of the students. The astronomy and physics building is a lovely renovated old building with a cover courtyard. Very nice.


Friday

And on Friday, I drove to Waterloo, parked, walked 15 min to the Perimeter institute (why did they tell me to park here?) and then walk right back after I realized the talk was at the physics department. Part of the physics department had been burned down. And now they are getting a new building.
Maybe something to suggest to my physics colleagues. How inflammable are their experiment anyway?

Gave my talk about overlapping galaxies. Donna Strickland wasn't there but I think I spotted her at the Perimeter institute. Chatted to Brian McNamara who had been a postdoc in Groningen. And he informed me that Prof Strickland is now a full professor. All done with proper paperwork. Should have been a short discussion with the Nobel Prize in Physics and whatnot.

Then it was on to a quick maple syrup purchasing stop and Toronto airport, drop off car, navigate the check-in/customs/etc fly to Atlanta, sprint across Atlanta airport to make the connection in 20min, fly to Louisville and sleeeeeeep. Oh and I managed to write up three science cases for CASTOR.


This was a hectic week. Talk to someone, think up new stuff, talk to another person, try to be interesting and engaging, keep logistics in check, not forget power brick etc, move to the next topic.
It was fun and exhausting. Very happy to have visited and very happy to be home.


Saturday, October 6, 2018

DotAstronony Thoughts

This year it finally happened! I was accepted into dot astronomy. The cool kids club. dot astronomy always seemed like the mysterious, creative, interesting gettogether where the thinking was free and the surroundings...well...cool.

Like all middle age people I crave to be a little cool? Plus I desperately need to update. Or so it felt. I cannot in good conscience teach people tools of the last generation (IRAF? C’mon). The face of astronomy is changing. Rapidly. And I - the perennial late-adopter- wanted to be part of it.

There were many topics and the organization is quite...free-flowing. I understand that is part of the appeal. To not be constrained by a strict format. But it also becomes a bit disorienting and tricky to contribute to. I wonder if i was the only one suffering from the “did i just miss that?” Feeling.

it started with day 0: introductions and stating goals. Everyone stand up (eek!) and say what you’re here for. There were several mentions of now finally being with “the cool kids”. And some pushback against that perception etc. But that is pretty on the mark. This was organized by a select group and this “brain trust” is a little social circle that is hard to follow and interact with. I totally get it. This is the one time these people get to see their friends and most important peers. But have a day -1 or +1 for the brain trust. The space (stsci) would have allowed a much larger crowd rather than the ~50 people present. Add to that there were lots of stsci people (that kept disappearing to their day job) this was a much smaller gathering than I thought it would be. I heard about the selection code. It is a small randomizer to ensure a mix of new and returning participants, early and late career. And worryingly, weighs your abstract using a text analysis. That seems like a great way to inadvertently select for native english speakers. I would like to test that worry.

The focus I had was on building class material, not tutorials. I noticed the focus of .astro is very much on research and outreach, and much less on education. And yet, training the next generation is absolutely key. Want to change astronomy and how it’s practiced? Teach it that way in thr classroom. Proper attention to contributions by women, start everyone off on Python 3 and Jupyter Notebooks from their first day. etc etc.

An exchange that stuck with me was about attaching Jupyter notebooks to publications (great idea) and how referees should referee this as well. The comment was that “everyone should just be able to read Python” which resonated with me because that’s the anglocentric argument that “everyone should just be able to write English”. Every non-native English speaker has stories about how referees scolded them for improper English (not their job) and people equating poor grammar to poor science. This could add a whole other layer of snobbery. No thank you.

But most of the time I really was there to learn new and interesting things. Jarita Holbrook gave an enlightning talk about how students of color perceive their interactions with Faculty. In both the US and South Africa. And having participated as a WMW (Well Meaning White) in both these places it was interesting to see her take on this. Another highlight was Lauren Chambers’ talk. Funny and informative. No need for me to talk. Go look at her thesis for more: http://www.stsci.edu/~lchambers/Chambers_ADifferentKindOfDarkEnergy.pdf

A big emotional moment was when there was a talk about the gender balance in science at the same time as the testinonies were before the senate. The overall feeling of things heading the wrong way at speed was pretty prevalent and maybe that colored my view of the week a bit too.

Oh and I needed to finish and submit ESO proposals and a SWIFT proposal. Didnt manage the SWIFT proposal. Ah well.

But I made some interesting new acquaintances. Some useful chats with people and I was encouraged to hear people liked my idea of a 100lvl coding, 500lvl astro class. That verbage was from Kelle Cruz. Her idea was to have a repository of different astronomy code repositories. That is the most tangible project for the future. I want to build a 100/200 level and 100/500 level classes.
And I ended up with a whole pile of ideas.

So I am calling my DotAstronomy a success. Didn’t get any cooler. Hardly talked to the Cool Kids[tm]. Not sure what to expect going in but I am calling this a win.

We all need a win.