A Big Hole in the Ground

Well! This has been a busy/crazy last few days!

We had our 'first' day of work last Tuesday, but didn't really do much expect paperwork and university stuff, so really I started Wednesday. My research is pretty good so far. I had to do some boring beginning work for a while, but Friday started getting into the real stuff. I'm writing lots of programs right now, which isn't the most exciting, but it's interesting (and incredibly frustrating when debugging).

This is the office where I work. My desk is the one on the right.

Friday night all of the REU students (there are 7 of us right now) went out to dinner to a Mexican restaurant. Afterward we walked downtown to attend the Flagstaff First Friday Artwalk. It was really neat and fun! First we stopped at the Flagstaff CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) to watch a banjo/guitar duo band. It was nice, and there were a lot of hippie looking people. We all did a cakewalk, and three of us won free baked goods! I had a Mexican Chocolate Snickerdoodle that had cayenne pepper... interesting to say the least.

We then headed to the main drag and to Heritage Square, where a kids movie was playing. There were so many people out and about! There were lots of art and photography exhibits. Downtown is really nice! It has lots of historic buildings and quaint shops. It feels nice and homey and reminds me of New Harmony, IN. After looking around there we went back to the apartments and played a fun and competitive game called Perpetual Commotion, where you have to lunge after cards in a chaotic mess...

Friday night we decided sort of on the fly that we wanted to go to the Grand Canyon on Saturday! So... we woke up and arrived at the South Rim at about 8. After taking photos and getting ready, we started hiking down at about 9. The Canyon was amazing! I have never seen anything quite like it. It was fantastic and an unforgettable sight. I took lots of photos, but will post a few here.

The first photo I took. This is before we got to the trailhead.

We hiked down the South Kaibab Trail, to Cedar Ridge, then to a place called Skeleton Point.

Wow!

The view below, from near the top. If you look closely near the bottom, you can see a lodge. We hiked down there! It was 1.5 miles out of the 3 going down.

Altogether, we hiked 6 miles round-trip: 3 down and 3 up. Woo, I definitely underestimated how hard it would be to come back up... It was harder than I thought, but still fun!

Left: The near south end from Cedar Ridge.

Right: The near north/east end from Cedar Ridge.

It got REALLY hot down in the canyon. It was 85 at the rim, 93 at the halfway point, and 100 at the lowest point we went. As you descended, it was very noticeable that the temperature increased. Going down was, of course, not bad, but coming back up, we had to take lots of water breaks.

Left: The Colorado River below!
Right: The view from Skeleton Point, the lowest point we hiked, 3 miles down.

So yeah, the trip was pretty good :)

Today we went to the Flagstaff farmer's market. Sarah, my housemate, and I got some pasta, apricots and honey. It was a pretty good farmer's market (not as cool as Bloomington's though...). Afterward we went to a couple of garage sales, where everybody seemed to buy random things as tends to happen at garage sales.

Now I'm back here in the library! It has been a fun and busy first weekend!

PS- I forgot to mention that now my muscles in, of all places, my butt are sore! I can only imagine it's from walking up the steep canyon trails.

PPS- Somebody seemed to have a problem with my telescope photo from the previous post. It is the 24-inch Clark Telescope refractor at Lowell Observatory!

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!