purplecthulhu

As I go into full scale teaching, this blog will become default friends-locked.

This post will remain open to all. If you want to be added to the flist, please introduce yourself here and I'll see what I can do.

ETA: Comments to this entry screened

My partner A's mum has just passed away. She had been unwell for the last month or so, but things came to a head yesterday when A and their brother did a dash to the hospital in Hereford. I'm back in Brum looking after the house & cats.

Prompted by a (now past) PhD student saying 'I'd like to do some polarisation observations with the SMA', we ended up with some rather interesting results which are reported today in a press release by the Royal Astronomical Society:

https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/clever-trick-cook-stars-christmas-puds-detected-first-time

I'm not sure if the analogy of a magnetic field holding gas together against the expansion pressure of hot young stars acting like the weights on a pressure cooker is that good, but it earned us a spot in the Christmas season press briefings.

Another empty cat box back from the vet day.

That's 3 cats we've lost in less than 12 months :-(

Today is going to an empty cat basket back from the vet's day. A and G are distraught.

A lot of today has been spent delving into the innards of dead and very old MacBook Pros. The aim is to retrieve what I can from the hard drives of these machines before they go to be recycled.

I've not done much delving inside such machines before, beyond adding RAM and changing batteries which was all done through the easily accessible hatches. To get at the hard drive in one, and the RAM in both of the machines I was working on, meant I had to consult IFixIt for instructions.

It actually all went very well, and I have to commend IFixIt on the quality of their instructions. The fiddlyness of the machines innards benefitted from a magnifying glass at times, especially given my crap eyes.

One of the drives, sadly, seems dead - it takes power but won't spin - but I think all I was after was on the other drive, copied across from the other, even older, machine.

RAM boards also recovered for the spares box, if they're ever needed.

These machines can now be safely sent for recycling.

The pandemic has not been good for my writing - at least fiction writing. I have completed a couple of non-fiction projects during the pandemic, both related to Venus phosphine, and both leading to published paid for pieces, and of course I'm still writing scientific papers. But my fiction writing has suffered.

I completed one piece earlier this year (a slightly fantastical London story tied to London's history) which immediately bounced from Interzone, but that's about it in terms of new material for the last several years, though I have occasionally been editing older, unpublished pieces.

But today I've started something new, and trying to use a new style or story telling which I've often admired but never actually tried before. This is the Dos Pasos style used for example by Brunner and Haldeman that mixes conventional narrative with documentary notes, quotes, transcripts etc. to build the story and background.

No idea how this is going to go but it felt good to start exercising writer brain again.

Our wobbly cat Pip! has passed on. She was with us for 12 years, and was 3 when she came to us from a shelter. Her back legs never quite worked properly but that did not slow her down. Far from it - she taught us lots about determination, never giving up, and being grumpy, but also about enjoying the sunniest spots. Struck down in the end by antibiotic resistant UT/kidney infection.

We'll miss you lots.

After a fairly long (pandemic related) delay, I've started submitting fiction again.

I've submitted the current novel to several agents and yesterday submitted a short story to Interzone.

I can't fault Interzone on their response time - the no sale email arrived this morning :-(

This afternoon (UK time, morning EST) I'll be speaking at, and participating in, a discussion about an addition to NASA's Venus DAVINCI probe's sensor suite. I'll be arguing that this should be an additional channel to trace phosphine, PH3, levels in the atmosphere. Other molecules that are up for discussion include ammonia, NH3 (like phosphine a possible biomarker), as well as HCl, HF and some oxygen isotopes, which are more related to tectonic activity and chemical activity.

It's weird for me as an extragalactic astronomer to be doing this, but that's where research sometimes takes you.

It's also weird because this may have an impact on if, and when, humanity could find out that there is life elsewhere in the universe since, while there are other possible explanations for our discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, the astrobiology one is by far the most interesting.

Sometimes I feel as if I've become a character in an SF novel.