Flagstaff!

Woo! So, I've been in Flagstaff, AZ for 2 days now. Traveling started Sunday with a plane ride to Chicago, then another to Phoenix. I even got searched after using one of the new full body scanners in Indy! Flights and everything went really well, in fact everything was early and I even got to Flagstaff 3 hours early due to happening to get an early shuttle ride from Phoenix to Flagstaff!

What I fell asleep to on the flight from Chicago to Phoenix...

What I woke up to! Nice.

The ride from Phoenix to Flagstaff was really nice. It started with cacti and flowering bushes and palm trees and eventually evolved into pine trees as we started ascending. Flagstaff is at an elevation of 7000 feet!

Mountains!

My apartment is really nice! It's pretty new, and has two other bedrooms. I've already met one of my roommates, Sarah. She's from Cornell and pretty cool. Teresa, a friend from IU will be my other roommate, but she doesn't arrive until the 10th.

The view from my apartment! The San Francisco Peaks. From left, Humphreys, Agassiz, and Doyle.

Sunday night I did some rudimentary shopping and basically passed out I was so tired. Monday morning I woke up at 7 (still on Eastern time... Arizona is 3 hours behind), and went to Lowell Observatory, up Mars Hill. I'll be working at Lowell through the summer, so I wanted to see what it was like.

The view as I hiked up a back trail!

Some mountains and the city below.

A telescope at the observatory

The San Francisco Peaks again.

The weather in Flagstaff is fantastic! It's not too hot, usually in the 70's, and is dry and clear (I got sunburned my first day in Arizona- It was almost 100 in Phoenix though!). Today we had some clouds come in and it cooled down some. The people here are pretty nice, and there are a lot of Mexican restaurants.

Today I started my REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) work. This morning we did paperwork and got ID's, etc. Then the program director and a couple of prof's took us out for lunch to a local pizza place. It was lots of fun to meet the professors and the other interns! They all seem pretty cool so far.

Afterwards, myself and two other students who will be working at Lowell drove up to meet our advisors and get started on our research! I am working with Phil Massey on spectroscopy of yellow supergiant stars. I'm going to be looking for a specific Oxygen line that may be a luminosity indicator and be able to tell us if a star is a yellow supergiant in galaxies with low radial velocities. I also get to write some programs for analyzing spectra. Fun stuff!

I'll post whenever I have anything else to say! I didn't bring a computer so am at the mercy of library hours. Until then!

Organic > All Natural

Today I ate a bite of All Natural granola, then I had some organic granola. Thus I came up with a food hierarchy:

1. Run of the mill food
2. All Natural
3. Organic
4. Local

Each level increases in hippie-friendliness.
Man, I should start writing books, or something. Ask me about my joke about the porpoise.

I have not looked at this blog for quite some time, and when I glanced at it today, I noticed that the subheading is no longer correct. I have written 'I wish I could like tea...'. Guess what? I do like tea now! It seemed like it just sprang up on me all of a sudden. My gateway tea was Lemon Ginger and from there it was all downhill.

It's funny how our tastes change as we age. I used to dislike many types of food until recently (also becoming a vegetarian made me like more vegetables...). I still haven't warmed up to tomatoes (GASP! I know), but I'm getting over my black bean fear more and more.

In two weeks the physics club (including myself) is going to Chicago to visit Fermilab, the home of the Tevatron, a particle accelerator.

Recent accomplishments in my life:
-I ran the IU Mini Marathon in 1:58:37.0.
-I got accepted into an Astronomy REU (research internship) in Flagstaff Arizona for the summer.
-.... Obviously, I haven't accomplished too much recently

Galaxyrise

One of my friends once said 'The more you know, the more you don't', and at the time I thought it was a very pessimistic outlook on life. The more I think about it though, the more I appreciate what it means. I feel like every day I'm learning all sorts of neat and exciting new things. And every time I learn something new, it opens up new doors with new questions I can ask, now that I'm equipped with more knowledge. It's not a bad feeling to know that you don't know everything (that sentence was a bit redundant...). Gaining knowledge gives you the tools to learn more and more and more!

Yesterday, we watched Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' (go ahead and laugh, we all know it's the cheesiest thing since Swiss). While I was watching Carl talk about if he could go anywhere backwards in time, he would go the library of Alexandria, I started thinking what would happen if I went back in time. I was suddenly struck with a terrible thought that if I was the sole representative of some civilization, I could never communicate all the knowledge we've accumulated. I was thinking I would tell the Greeks or whoever how their astronomy was so terrible and such, and I kind of had a pseudo-conversation in my head where I tried to tell them how they could measure quantities of stars and I couldn't even remember how to find the mass of a star... I think I learned this (and it was drilled into my head...) less then 6 months ago, but I can't for the life of me remember.

Wow, that entire paragraph was the most pointless anecdote I've come up with yet. But after I thought of that, I tried to think how I would tell them how to make electricity and build machines, but I don't know how to do either of those, really!!! That was when I decided that if the human race ever sent anyone back in time, or to another planet, they should never, never, ever pick me to represent our collective knowledge.

This has been a semi-intellectual post... I'm quite proud of myself! I think I shall now frolic and learn about quantum mechanics, thank you very much!

Flava Sava

The first week of school is almost coming to a close.
It's been pretty good- my new classes are very exciting (although they look like they have the potential to be really hard...).
Right now, being a student in a college that has 40,000+ students constantly reminds me how insignificant I am. It's a little sad at times. I really want to do something with my life. I want to make a real difference in the world, but doing anything other than school seems a lifetime away. Not that I don't enjoy it- I love my new classes and whatnot, but it's easy to get excited about the future and want it here now! I guess I just have to be patient... :)

In other news: The truth is there isn't much other news. I don't have much to say on any front. How disappointing and boring this is turning out to be, right?!