Coffee shops and cocktail parties

My office is too distracting and accessible, my apartment too cozy (except for my desk chair), the library too isolated.  I have officially become a coffee shop nomad.  Diesel, Mr. Crepe, Starbucks (once and no more), Simon's, 1369, Andala (well, that one was for a date).

It's actually a great environment to work, especially when there is no internet access.  There's always quite a bit of hubbub going on around you, but none of it is specific to you, which means you can tune it out quite easily to work but then tune back in when you need a distraction or a new sensory perception.  Also, having coffee/tea/food/bathroom so easily accessible is really nice.  The only downside is that, being there alone, you have to guard your computer and your location when you decide to get up and wander around at busy times.


On Saturday night, a couple friends of mine hosted a fantastic cocktail party (drink, not dress).  They purchased an impressive array of liquors and mixers that enabled one to create a healthy variety of quality cocktails.  Of course, the night ended, as it always does nowadays, with a 3am pilgrimage to the Tasty Burger.  It turns out that having an activity option that stays open til 4am has the effect of significantly extending the night.  Makes for good fun, but also makes sleeping til noon a much more regular and desirable choice (if you can call it that).

Asteroids, meteors, apocalypses

On Friday, I headed out to the MIT Haystack Observatory with a few EAPS folks to join the astrophysicists and astronomers excited to witness asteroid 2012 DA14, the approximately 50-m diameter object that reached 27,700 km from the Earth's surface before heading back out into the great unknown.  For the scientists here, this was the equivalent of last week's blizzard -- a rare, awesome event of great scientific interest.  Though, of course, it lacked in the more tangible wonder that accompanied the falling of snow and the gridlock it imposed upon modern society.

That is, until earlier in the morning, when a meteor exploded over the Russian skies, its shockwave shattering thousands of windows and injuring at least 1200 people.  Amazingly, though, no one died, thereby helping to illuminate the true news story that accompanied it, courtesy of the Onion: "More Than 1,000 Russians Injured In Freaking Coolest Event Ever".

The result of the meteor was a heightened sense of confusion and wonder, one that only rarely manifests itself in the modern age.  We feel that we have a good grip on most "natural" hazards, not in the sense that we can necessarily mitigate them, but rather in the sense that they do not come as a surprise.  More broadly, they are easily explicated, and blame for consequent damages is easy to assign (rightly or wrongly) -- for example, no one who lives inland is surprised when a hurricane destroys a coastal property, because that was an obvious risk.

But the combination of meteor and approaching asteroid brought forth a new hazard, one that has long been sensationalized, yet has never emerged as a true concern, perhaps due to its statistical infrequency or perhaps due to the lack of sense of control that can be imposed on the problem (we couldn't see the Russian meteor before it arrived anyways).

And this sense was not too different from that of the blizzard here in Boston, in that life was so ground to a halt -- the only distance one could hope to travel was whatever distance your feet could take you -- that it felt as if one were in a bit of a surreal dream landscape, as if the world were jolted from the procession of regular, every day life, and reminded of the context in which our societies exist.

Thus, Haystack was an exciting experience.  I know almost nothing about astronomy besides the Big Dipper, a relic of my childhood fears of aliens that appears to subconsciously persist today.  Following a long and rather dense introduction to asteroids and Haystack in general (it was, after all, a bit of a sales pitch), we headed down to mission control, where the mammoth satellite dish radar was set to track the asteroid as soon as it crossed over our horizon from the North, at around 4:40pm.  We then witnessed as the scientists looked at the signals from the returning radar beams, attempting to interpret in very short time what the data were saying and how closely it matched up to predictions of its speed and rotation rate.  It was quite an intense atmosphere.

In the evening, we headed over to a set of observational computerized telescopes to look at the night sky and attempt to track the asteroid optically.  After 1-2 hours of effort, the technician and one other planetary science student successfully located the object in the telescope's field of vision -- an admittedly impressive feat.  We were officially one of only a handful of folks around the world watching with our very eyes as this space rock departed Earth's neighborhood.  Once spotted, we simply watched the screen in wonder, tracking an apparent intergalactic amoeba -- a moving object shows up a small white streak on a largely red/black background -- as it makes its escape.

Very cool.

Blizzard of Feb 8-9 2013!

What a fun past 72 hours*.

* I began writing this on Sunday night.  this is way overdue.

Friday: Boston effectively shuts down pre-emptively before the Blizzard sweeps in.  Snow picks up around 8pm.  Earlier in the day housemates gather to make beignets on our stovetop and we hang out in eager anticipation.  We gather for a potluck-type dinner at 745pm and drink our way into a massive, raucous game of Pit.  At 1130pm, the blizzard is now in full force and snow is accumulating at perhaps 2"/hr.  We all get appropriately dressed -- read: ski goggles -- and venture out into the streets, singing and jumping and wrestling our way down an abandoned Holland Ave towards Davis Square.  We arrive at the Burren (word had spread that it remained open), which is pretty decently packed.  We end up on stage dancing the night away with our snowpants around our ankles.

Saturday: I get up around 9am to the tail end of the storm, gusty winds, and over 2' of snow on the ground.  In front of nearly every house, one or more people are busy shoveling or snowblowing... slowly.  Our neighbors across the street spend 15 minutes attempting to access their car to retrieve their cross-country skis.  My roommate and I shovel out the sidewalk and driveway, in the process creating a massive snowpile in front of our front deck.  My roommate is the first to climb up and jump down onto its peak, sinking in about 5 feet before coming to a stop... awesome.  Afterwards, we all go for a walk around the neighborhood, surveying the blanket of snow that has buried cars and blocked entryways.  Some cross-country skiers are hitting the roads, actually somewhat dismayed by the incredible speed at which Somerville plows are capable of clearing the roads.  Davis Square is abound with folks wandering in awe, not only at the sheer volume of snow on the ground but also at the wonder and joy of our neighborhood center completely car-free (oh the potential!).  Ultimately, we end up at Amsterdam Falafel for a bite (they stayed open the night before too, since the drunk folks from the Burren needed to eat too, obviously).  On the way home we swing up to Powderhouse Sq and then down Broadway, where the cars were apparently parked on the downwind side of the street such that many of them were rendered nothing but soft undulations in the gentle rolling white hills that lined the edge of the road.  Truly remarkable.


Overall, this was an amazing experience, as much for the snow itself -- I'll never forget dropping our measuring tape from inside our back door into the snow on our back deck and watching the numbers disappear, truly in disbelief when the 24" mark was passed on the way to 27" -- as for the community experience of an event that is all by measures extreme and even catastrophic yet wholly non-life-threatening.  The result is that of pure joy, knowing that no one has anywhere to get to because no one is expected to be able to get there; that the folks you see around you are none other than your very-nearby neighbors, as neighborhoods that were once only a few minutes away are rendered as far apart as two islands on opposite ends of the Earth.

It's a rare thing for an entire major city to be shut down, and even rarer for its cause to be something so tranquil and serene, as if a city-wide shutdown was placed in effect for a 48-hour, no-holds-barred pillow fight.  In a world that is ever more inter-connected and increasingly extricated from the archaic notions of day and night, it's a remarkable opportunity when everything is forced to stop -- and you have no choice but to sit back, look around, and enjoy it.  Truly, it was a communal breath of fresh air.

Oscar nominated shorts

On Tuesday night, I headed over for a pseudo-date to the Kendall Square theatre, the local artsy theatre in town, which every year offers the awesome deal to watch all 5 Oscar-nominated short films as a package for the price of a single movie.  This is done both for live-action and for animated.

I went to check out the live-action set, finally making it after 4 years of hearing about this but never actually making it out.  The 5 films were:
1) A funky french/russian (?) fantasy film in which a man, to repay some sort of debt to save his own life (we walked in a couple minutes late), must use a magical camera to capture photos of the silhouettes of 10,000 individuals at the moment they die.  These shadow images are then displayed on canvases lining the walls of a mysterious mansion.  At the end, he could resurrect his own life in the real world.
2) An old french man gradually becomes conscious of the loss of his own memory, and has to come to terms with it in the context of a world growing increasingly confusing.
3) While attempting to commit suicide in his bathtub, a young man in NYC is called by his troubled sister to watch her young but fearless daughter for an evening.  Her pugnacity incites intrigue in him, leading to a confession to his sister of how important she is to him despite their troubled past.
4) A young blacksmith boy and his adventurous beggar friend in Kabul, Afghanistan, venture out through an old palace and to a Buzkashi match (men on horses trying playing capture the flag with a goat), exploring the internal competition between pursuing dreams and maintaining loyalty to father and tradition.
5) A young, intelligent, and courageous boy in a coastal village in Somalia encounters greedy soldiers from Mogadishu, whose attack on the local wise fisherman send the boy out on his first solo fishing adventure, which leads him hilariously to a small yacht and the "white lion-fish" (a dog) that he brings home as his sea bounty.

I love shorts.  So much fun and imagination in such a short period of time.  My vote goes (barely) to the first film, with #5 a close 2nd and #3 an even closer 3rd.

Another busy few days, now with some optimism

The past few days have seen a small breakthrough for me in my research, as I now have a new framework perspective for my whole problem that helps to make much better sense of what I've been doing.

I also spent several hours this week preparing a post-doctoral fellowship application on the dreadfully poorly organized website of the host institution.  I am now officially done with post-doc fellowship applications (unless I don't get any of them), which is a relief, though I can't say that I really gave my best effort into this final one.

In more exciting news, this week I had the pleasure to read John Steinbeck's "The Pearl", which was a delightful little story about Kino, Juana, and their young son Coyotito, a poor family from La Paz, who have the fortune of finding a great pearl only to discover the misfortune that accompanies both the perceptions and reality of acquiring an object of tremendous value in a greedy society.  One of my favorite aspects of the entire story is the fact that, in most instances, it's not actually obvious whether the "evil" that pursues Kino and his pearl is real or merely a figment of Kino's paranoid imagination.

I also love Steinbeck's literary style, which is vividly descriptive yet concise, always focused on conveying the emotion and tension that surrounds a simple yet masterful storyline.  I read Cannery Row and Grapes of Wrath in grade/high school but don't remember them really, but now I think it's time I pick up (for the first or second time) his other classics.