The Event That Will Live in Infamy

As if a musical wasn't enough, we've now been contacted by a budding author about the prospect of writing a novel based on the idea of the Time Traveler's Convention. It amazes me how, three years later, people are still interested in what was originally just a kooky party idea.

I expect Hollywood next. And I want Ellen Page to play me.

Bobby McFerrin

If you only know Bobby McFerrin from "Don't Worry Be Happy," then you don't know enough about Bobby McFerrin. However, you'll still be able to appreciate this as you discover just how awesomely talented this man is.

On a related note, my cello-playing housemate Mark and I have found the music from the Andante movement of Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Mandolins and will be attempting to recreate a track from McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma's CD, Hush. I'm sure it won't compare to the original, but it'll be fun to learn nonetheless.

When the moon is in the seventh sun...

The "star balls" at the University of Michigan Planetarium (technical term, according to Nathan Crockett) courtesy of Arnab Nandi

One of my housemates, Nate, is an astronomy PhD student and the GSI (i.e. TA) for Astronomy 101. As such, he has been trained to run the planetarium in Angell Hall, which quite frankly I didn't know existed until he told us about it. Last night he treated a bunch of us to a free show after hours.

It's a small planetarium (seats 32), but that doesn't mean it's not awesome. For starters, before Nate got the appropriate software loaded, we were all highly entertained by the LED light arrays that lit up the screen with varying colors. Being that a high concentration of us were EECS nerds, we of course inspected the arrays and discovered that they were made by Color Kinetics! (Okay, I was the only one in the room who was excited by that, but I did call Johnston to let him know that we were using his company's lights.)

Once things were up and running, Nate very professionally led us through the constellations as seen from various locations and time -- I learned quite a bit. And he had to put up with a lot of backseat planetarium navigation: "Nate, move us up 10 degrees," "Nate, show us an eclipse!" "Nate, can we see what it's like in Alaska," "Nate, show us an eclipse!" "Nate, we want to see the planets," "Nate, show us an eclipse!" "Nate, back up a few days -- no, no, other way!" (For what it's worth, despite the fact that he insisted it couldn't be done, he sort of managed a solar eclipse.) My personal favorites were seeing the planets in retrograde and making sound effects when the moon would zip around us.

Oh, and because I said I'd blog this... "This one time, I was trying to impress a girl with my three-inch refractive telescope..."

What I do

If anyone has ever wondered what I do, I made a poster. It's for the prospective student visit day tomorrow and for the CRA-W conference (i.e. let's give female CS PhD students a free trip) next week. The poster is pretty basic and contains no results because we're working on getting them published and don't want to be scooped (i.e. I've already considered and figured out all of the "Issues to Consider"). But at the very least, you can see the graph theory problem I spend my days thinking about. (And thanks to asarwate for the LaTeX poster template... and to my advisor for the comped copy of Omnigraffle.)