(no subject)

I ventured up to LBL today in search of a job, and I think I was pretty successful. Then Aviva, Haley, and I enjoyed a yummy dinner at Long Life Chinese, and I discovered that I might be able to take one of my courses at Vista Community College. Now I am sitting on the floor in my new room, writing this on my computer while Jamie sleeps nearby. For some reason Jason is sleeping downstairs.

They've tightened up security at LBL a bit. I didn't show my ID as I got on the bus and the driver started yelling at me. Gosh. Luckily I still have my badge from when I worked there (as a "Guest") before. After I successfully got on the bus I immediately recognized Willy from the lab where I worked, and we had a nice chat. He seemed pretty optimistic about finding work for me. I visited CPerkins in his lab and chatted for awhile with Athena and Vanessa. It was fun to meet Vanessa and she turns out to be extremely cool. In the Smoot lab I had a long catch-up chat with Azriel about the AMANDA Project and Israel and all that, and he introduced me to the new guy who is working there on a very cool sounding astronomy project. Finally Smoot himself showed up, in good spirits as always.

This new astronomy project is quite interesting. I don't fully understand it but the gist is that it will be looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation as a means of detecting galaxies which are very far away, and thus very early in the universe's life. They will do this by measuring the spectra across the sky. "Empty" space will exhibit the characteristic blackbody spectrum of the background radiation (at four kelvins) while if there is something (eg a galaxy) in the way, the spectrum will be attenuated in some way. It's quite a cool project and the guy working on it is quite enthusiastic about it, which is a definite plus. The first incarnation (?) will be sent up on a high-altitude baloon this June, and then a year from now a ground-based instrument will be installed in the mountains of Chile. And then a while later, at the south pole. So it sounds like a fantastic project to work on. I need to send them a resume.

Re: Vista community college. I might be able to take my techncial communications (E190) class through Vista where they have "English 53: Technical Writing." It's a bit of a stretch, but who knows, maybe the COE would go for it. Vista costs $11/unit while UC Berkeley Extension is somewhere around $150/unit. They also have a beginning Spanish class that I might take, as opposed to just auditing the UCB class.

(no subject)

Just had my first conversation in Esperanto via the lernu.net chatroom, with an Esperanto-speaking Swede in Serbia! Here's the transcript!.

in the news

With all the discussion of using ultrasophisticated technology to protect the united states from perceived threats -- missile defense systems, sophisticated airport scanners, etc, etc -- it should be particularly disheartening to realise that the same powers that propose such measures can't even get something as simple as a slide projector to work:

Comments from the remote sites were not carried at Pace because of technical problems. Even at the main site, microphones did not work as planned and a computerized slide show, designed to accompany a presentation of further details of the new plans by Alexander Garvin, the development corporation's lead planner, did not work. -- NY Times article about rebuilding the tradecenter

Segue now to my good friend Hunter S. Thompson, who, thriving on political absurdity, was heard to remark, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Have times caught up with HST? NYTimes reports on his new book:

Reality has finally caught up with Hunter S. Thompson's ravings. In "Kingdom of Fear" he writes, "We have Anthrax, we have smallpox, we have very real fears of being blasted into jelly in the privacy of our own homes by bombs from an unseen enemy, or by nerve gas sprayed into our drinking water, or even ripped apart with no warning by our neighbor's Rottweiler dogs." When the Gonzo Granddad was in his prime, these were the kinds of things he liked to make up.

But even this charter member of what he calls the "too much fun club" is ready to acknowledge changing times. "The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now," he writes in this new book-length test of his fans' loyalty. "The party's over, folks." This is what it's like to be the last guy to leave.