Sunday, July 10, 2011
Moving to wordpress
I seem to be switching from blogger to wordpress. Look for the same old blog at http://toevening.wordpress.com/
Thursday, April 28, 2011
A tree in a heavy wind
A late night and a stormy morning. Aborted 5:30 alarm in favor of sleep. In retrospect its not clear how wise this was.
The weather inside mirrors the weather outside. As waves of rain sweep through the city crowding radar maps with bright colors, I find my own sensitive instruments periodically overwhelmed.
Blood filled with adrenaline has a battery acid feel to it. Skin and heart and lungs charged to the sparking point like a 9-volt on the tongue.
Acute sense of impending doom but no clear sense of direction. There is something here; something wants to be heard, but the message is unfocused. Where does this ill wind blow from? From what depths has this unnamed animal passion bubbled up from to break noxiously at the surface?
Don’t know.
Fear? Longing? Injury? What is this?
Don’t know.
Roots reach out looking for ground.
The weather inside mirrors the weather outside. As waves of rain sweep through the city crowding radar maps with bright colors, I find my own sensitive instruments periodically overwhelmed.
Blood filled with adrenaline has a battery acid feel to it. Skin and heart and lungs charged to the sparking point like a 9-volt on the tongue.
Acute sense of impending doom but no clear sense of direction. There is something here; something wants to be heard, but the message is unfocused. Where does this ill wind blow from? From what depths has this unnamed animal passion bubbled up from to break noxiously at the surface?
Don’t know.
Fear? Longing? Injury? What is this?
Don’t know.
Roots reach out looking for ground.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Mind the Gap
“Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Way out in the water, see it swimming.” – The Pixies
“You ask. That’s your mind. I answer. That’s my mind. If I had no mind, how could I answer? If you had no mind, how could you ask? That which asks is your mind. Through endless kalpas without beginning, whatever you do, wherever you are, that’s your real mind, that’s your real buddha.... To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible.... Your mind is nirvana.” – Bodhidharma
“And remember, no matter where you go, there you are” – Confucius
“Come as you are / as you were / as I want you to be / as a friend / as a friend / as an old enemy” – Nirvana
“I was basically trying to rip off The Pixies” – Kurt Cobain
“You ask. That’s your mind. I answer. That’s my mind. If I had no mind, how could I answer? If you had no mind, how could you ask? That which asks is your mind. Through endless kalpas without beginning, whatever you do, wherever you are, that’s your real mind, that’s your real buddha.... To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible.... Your mind is nirvana.” – Bodhidharma
“And remember, no matter where you go, there you are” – Confucius
“Come as you are / as you were / as I want you to be / as a friend / as a friend / as an old enemy” – Nirvana
“I was basically trying to rip off The Pixies” – Kurt Cobain
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
My Dinner with Avalokitesvara
All day trying to climb the ridge of an iceberg but sliding into sleep instead. Finding some purchase by stepping into the weave and weft of the tapestry, the grid of Albert’s spacetime. Breathe in and step up into the moment. Breathe out and reflect. A clean bowl ready to receive.
But then again asleep.
An ancient message from an old master:
The swordsman uses skillful means to rescue the family, but they do not see the gravity of the situation. Bathed in awe and gratitude they invite disaster. Is this me? Faith, doubt, and determination. Two out of three can perhaps be accounted for, but the other is in question.
A teacher in another time asks the question: “why do you practice?” I don’t know. A beloved metaphor of old: an immovable tree in a heavy wind. But rooted to what?
A gift:
Why do I practice? What am I looking for? I have been here before and dropped it. Will this be different?
The first motive was curiosity. But then a skillful means sparked a taste and curiosity became desire. Practice was beautiful and I fell in love with the world like one falls in love with a pretty girl. But this was not enough to sustain when practice became inconvenient. Practice born of desire felt selfish and could not be tolerated. Bright spark faded, the tide came in, and the beach became just an echo of memory.
Now I’ve returned to the waters at this rocky shore and wade right in up to my neck. I do not think the same desire moves me. The time between brought storms both slow and sudden, and my roots could find no purchase. I could not bend enough to ride the wind and so I broke. And in that snap instinct or memory brought me back to this old practice. Perhaps it was to look for solace, but I suspect that even broken I knew that none was to be found on these shores. But arriving here and stepping back into the sea I find that I can hear the waves more clearly. I am a part of this world, and what I do has consequence. For good or ill there are many who are tied to me, and if I break and founder I may take them down with me. But now I can hear the message sent down through the millennia: This vehicle has a flawed design, but the recall notice has been sent and I can make repairs.
Silent tears in a darkened room. Speared through the chest by loving arms steeped in woe. In over my head off of unfamiliar shoreline I am moved by tides beyond my fathom. Sensitive instrument, open and unshielded, the faintest twinkle a blinding light. The sky is full of stars.
But then again asleep.
An ancient message from an old master:
"I beg to urge everyone:An ancient message from The Flaming Lips:
Great is the matter of birth and death.
Time waits for no one.
Wake up, Wake up
Don’t waste a moment."
“Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?”
The swordsman uses skillful means to rescue the family, but they do not see the gravity of the situation. Bathed in awe and gratitude they invite disaster. Is this me? Faith, doubt, and determination. Two out of three can perhaps be accounted for, but the other is in question.
A teacher in another time asks the question: “why do you practice?” I don’t know. A beloved metaphor of old: an immovable tree in a heavy wind. But rooted to what?
A gift:
“The root
of all things
is not far
or close
Above, sky
Below, ground
Between, Chris”
Why do I practice? What am I looking for? I have been here before and dropped it. Will this be different?
The first motive was curiosity. But then a skillful means sparked a taste and curiosity became desire. Practice was beautiful and I fell in love with the world like one falls in love with a pretty girl. But this was not enough to sustain when practice became inconvenient. Practice born of desire felt selfish and could not be tolerated. Bright spark faded, the tide came in, and the beach became just an echo of memory.
Now I’ve returned to the waters at this rocky shore and wade right in up to my neck. I do not think the same desire moves me. The time between brought storms both slow and sudden, and my roots could find no purchase. I could not bend enough to ride the wind and so I broke. And in that snap instinct or memory brought me back to this old practice. Perhaps it was to look for solace, but I suspect that even broken I knew that none was to be found on these shores. But arriving here and stepping back into the sea I find that I can hear the waves more clearly. I am a part of this world, and what I do has consequence. For good or ill there are many who are tied to me, and if I break and founder I may take them down with me. But now I can hear the message sent down through the millennia: This vehicle has a flawed design, but the recall notice has been sent and I can make repairs.
Silent tears in a darkened room. Speared through the chest by loving arms steeped in woe. In over my head off of unfamiliar shoreline I am moved by tides beyond my fathom. Sensitive instrument, open and unshielded, the faintest twinkle a blinding light. The sky is full of stars.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Desperately Seeking Oblique Strategies
I think i grok Brian Eno. Or actually, I grok what I imagine is Brian Eno, which I guess is probably a much less profound statement. Anyway, the Brian Eno of my mind’s eye looks to me a bit like the landscape in my I’s mind. Weeviling around in circles thinking too much about the process of thinking. Trying to manufacture intellectual devices to spur on creativity.
Bus error. Core Dumped. Sick scream of grinding gears and the smell of burning transmission fluid.
“What would you give for your kid fears?”
Not actually certain really. I don’t think I can extrapolate back to my youthful self anymore. Even the blooming kidult of 19-20 seems pretty alien to me at the moment. I’ve no idea what my 20-year old self would make of my life at the moment. Too many sea changes have come and gone in the meantime. Looking at the archeological evidence I think he was something of a romantic wrapped under the security blanket of cynicism. Not sure how much of that is left. If I think about it there is probably still at least an echo there somewhere. A ghost in the machine, perhaps more obvious as absent from the places it used to hang. Forced out by various waves of emergency pragmatism probably. Like a massive HVAC unit installed in the corner of a victorian drawing room. Mechanical pump playing tricks with thermodynamics where a tortured poet’s heart might once have bled.
Interesting to look at the works of that poet that have traversed the changes and strike home still, albeit perhaps in unexpected ways. Denouement, arguably my first wholly successful piece of songwriting, strikes me now as remarkably post-romantic. A meditation not on heroic feats and hearts aflame, but on consequence and carrying on. An ode to echos. The strangely prescient Dark Matter, written back when the metaphor left the outcome in question, but which took on new meaning in December of 1998 when high-redshift supernovae shed new light on very old questions. It’s companion piece, the still unfinished sketch Caroline and the New Cosmology, started as a potential album title and developed to a tiny snippet of music and the final couplet of a chorus before stalling for well over a decade now. The image though still stings true, arguably more apt now than then. Sleeping there is something that wants to be said, but having poked at it the other evening I can say that, for now at least, it is not ready to stand up and be heard. I have not the words to build on it’s haiku perfection as a broken fragment.
Besides, post-romantic me has begun to wonder about the wisdom and generosity of “truth”. Part of me suspects that Bono is right that good artists tend to be dickheads. (Bono, being one, said it better).
Hmm... Robyn Hitchcock is going to end me here. “A happy bird is a filthy bird”.
End of line.
Bus error. Core Dumped. Sick scream of grinding gears and the smell of burning transmission fluid.
“What would you give for your kid fears?”
Not actually certain really. I don’t think I can extrapolate back to my youthful self anymore. Even the blooming kidult of 19-20 seems pretty alien to me at the moment. I’ve no idea what my 20-year old self would make of my life at the moment. Too many sea changes have come and gone in the meantime. Looking at the archeological evidence I think he was something of a romantic wrapped under the security blanket of cynicism. Not sure how much of that is left. If I think about it there is probably still at least an echo there somewhere. A ghost in the machine, perhaps more obvious as absent from the places it used to hang. Forced out by various waves of emergency pragmatism probably. Like a massive HVAC unit installed in the corner of a victorian drawing room. Mechanical pump playing tricks with thermodynamics where a tortured poet’s heart might once have bled.
Interesting to look at the works of that poet that have traversed the changes and strike home still, albeit perhaps in unexpected ways. Denouement, arguably my first wholly successful piece of songwriting, strikes me now as remarkably post-romantic. A meditation not on heroic feats and hearts aflame, but on consequence and carrying on. An ode to echos. The strangely prescient Dark Matter, written back when the metaphor left the outcome in question, but which took on new meaning in December of 1998 when high-redshift supernovae shed new light on very old questions. It’s companion piece, the still unfinished sketch Caroline and the New Cosmology, started as a potential album title and developed to a tiny snippet of music and the final couplet of a chorus before stalling for well over a decade now. The image though still stings true, arguably more apt now than then. Sleeping there is something that wants to be said, but having poked at it the other evening I can say that, for now at least, it is not ready to stand up and be heard. I have not the words to build on it’s haiku perfection as a broken fragment.
Besides, post-romantic me has begun to wonder about the wisdom and generosity of “truth”. Part of me suspects that Bono is right that good artists tend to be dickheads. (Bono, being one, said it better).
Hmm... Robyn Hitchcock is going to end me here. “A happy bird is a filthy bird”.
End of line.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Flawed Bodhisattva Blues
Life happens. Does seem to be a life happens sort of day today. So yes, life happens, even when I’m not looking for it and maybe not even ready for it. Life still happens and so it goes. A circumstance arose and somewhere I found a transcendent me to respond with kindness and make a leap of faith.
Well, sort of. Actually I don’t think the word faith is really that appropriate in this situation. Manifesting as I was, there was no faith necessary. I was infinite and inexhaustable. However, I was not without my faculties and I knew that there was risk involved and I knowingly made the leap anyway. It wasn’t a leap of faith however, because I recall no sense, either then or now, that there was any sort of safety net at all. There was surely a leap, but it was, I think, a leap of lovingkindness (to borrow the buddhist phrase) and not really one of faith. I felt the need for the action, not the sense that my kindness would be repaid or the comforting sense that it would all somehow work out just fine.
Sunshine asked me if I believe in fate, and I responded with a philosophical discussion about the nature of physical causality and the skepticism slowly creeping into the back of my head about the naive treatment of causality and the arrow of time in modern physics. (Not to mention the weird creepy stuff coming out of entangled quantum states which really is beginning to make me wonder if Danny’s time machine might not really work).. But all this aside, I think the truth is that I don’t really draw any faith from the notion of fate. I don’t think I’ve ever really felt that there was someone or something pulling strings for me or anyone else. Life happens, and other stuff happens too, and I don’t see any global sense of meaning to it all. I see lots of patterns and influence, but no intelligence or hand of kindness conducting the dance. I can recognize what seems like fantastic synchronicity, but I also recognize that there is a survival bonus in recognizing patterns and that, as an offspring of millions of generations of survivors, there is a tremendous anthropic selection effect at work which makes it very likely for me to be susceptible to seeing such patterns in the turbulence of life. The reason Zen Buddhism works for me where other western spiritual paths do not is that it does not require any faith in faith or fate. Surprisingly, despite it’s image of being about nonsensical paradox, I find Zen eminently sensible and logical, and while it can be wonderful and a source of great strength, it is also sometimes cold comfort precisely because of this lack of faith. There are no safety nets, only life and the transcendent which are not two.
So here I am, mid-leap, off the map and suspended in white vacuum. Launched from the platform of Big Heart incarnate, I find myself without landmarks or anything to guide me but my own internal compass. Keenly aware that I’m off the map I consciously work to banish dragons by act of will. I am open and things are fine not through the guiding kind hand of fate but rather by virtue of my own consciously maintained internal balance. Through continued effort I try to maintain the bodhisattva dance and continue to try and channel lovingkindness through a heart at least intermittently in touch with the transcendent.
When manifesting, of course, this is effortless. But I have not the depth of training to manifest continually, and I don’t think it is wise to try anyway. The transcendent is only half the story and one has to live in the world as well as being divine. Yesterday, I was in-the-zone. The dance continued and all was fine. Today, I’m still mostly fine, but awoke just slightly off and that’s where the concern comes in. Cause I’m not Kanzeon. I’m not a saint, and there are flaws in the gemstone through which the laser-light of lovingkindness flows. Thus far my heart has been able to weather the flow but the status quo is an unstable equilibrium. This is the top of the mountain and I’m not sure of the surrounding territory. I have half-formed picture postcard ideas of what the stable equilibrium would look like, but I’ve no map from here to there and I’ve no idea if there’s a great big mountain in the way. Somehow I need keep dancing on the head of this pin until I find a path or quantum tunnel to the stable point. I have more strength than I would have thought, and I’m not completely alone, but this high-wire act is not being performed with the safety net of faith, but rather over a mine-field of buried fear and despair (and perhaps non-existant dragons).
Well, sort of. Actually I don’t think the word faith is really that appropriate in this situation. Manifesting as I was, there was no faith necessary. I was infinite and inexhaustable. However, I was not without my faculties and I knew that there was risk involved and I knowingly made the leap anyway. It wasn’t a leap of faith however, because I recall no sense, either then or now, that there was any sort of safety net at all. There was surely a leap, but it was, I think, a leap of lovingkindness (to borrow the buddhist phrase) and not really one of faith. I felt the need for the action, not the sense that my kindness would be repaid or the comforting sense that it would all somehow work out just fine.
Sunshine asked me if I believe in fate, and I responded with a philosophical discussion about the nature of physical causality and the skepticism slowly creeping into the back of my head about the naive treatment of causality and the arrow of time in modern physics. (Not to mention the weird creepy stuff coming out of entangled quantum states which really is beginning to make me wonder if Danny’s time machine might not really work).. But all this aside, I think the truth is that I don’t really draw any faith from the notion of fate. I don’t think I’ve ever really felt that there was someone or something pulling strings for me or anyone else. Life happens, and other stuff happens too, and I don’t see any global sense of meaning to it all. I see lots of patterns and influence, but no intelligence or hand of kindness conducting the dance. I can recognize what seems like fantastic synchronicity, but I also recognize that there is a survival bonus in recognizing patterns and that, as an offspring of millions of generations of survivors, there is a tremendous anthropic selection effect at work which makes it very likely for me to be susceptible to seeing such patterns in the turbulence of life. The reason Zen Buddhism works for me where other western spiritual paths do not is that it does not require any faith in faith or fate. Surprisingly, despite it’s image of being about nonsensical paradox, I find Zen eminently sensible and logical, and while it can be wonderful and a source of great strength, it is also sometimes cold comfort precisely because of this lack of faith. There are no safety nets, only life and the transcendent which are not two.
So here I am, mid-leap, off the map and suspended in white vacuum. Launched from the platform of Big Heart incarnate, I find myself without landmarks or anything to guide me but my own internal compass. Keenly aware that I’m off the map I consciously work to banish dragons by act of will. I am open and things are fine not through the guiding kind hand of fate but rather by virtue of my own consciously maintained internal balance. Through continued effort I try to maintain the bodhisattva dance and continue to try and channel lovingkindness through a heart at least intermittently in touch with the transcendent.
When manifesting, of course, this is effortless. But I have not the depth of training to manifest continually, and I don’t think it is wise to try anyway. The transcendent is only half the story and one has to live in the world as well as being divine. Yesterday, I was in-the-zone. The dance continued and all was fine. Today, I’m still mostly fine, but awoke just slightly off and that’s where the concern comes in. Cause I’m not Kanzeon. I’m not a saint, and there are flaws in the gemstone through which the laser-light of lovingkindness flows. Thus far my heart has been able to weather the flow but the status quo is an unstable equilibrium. This is the top of the mountain and I’m not sure of the surrounding territory. I have half-formed picture postcard ideas of what the stable equilibrium would look like, but I’ve no map from here to there and I’ve no idea if there’s a great big mountain in the way. Somehow I need keep dancing on the head of this pin until I find a path or quantum tunnel to the stable point. I have more strength than I would have thought, and I’m not completely alone, but this high-wire act is not being performed with the safety net of faith, but rather over a mine-field of buried fear and despair (and perhaps non-existant dragons).
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Ice-cube tray people
Where did we get this notion that ones “private” life should not overlap with ones “professional” life? I mean, I can certainly understand the reasoning motivating such a principle. Employers want predictable, reliable employees, and personal lives, fraught as they are with emotions and other messy complications tend to make people act unpredictably. But the notion that such a compartmentalized ideal is actually achievable seems to me to forget that professionals are, in fact, still human beings. The only way to reliably keep your personal life from affecting your professional one is not to have a personal life at all. The fact that we are reminded of this in scandal after scandal after scandal, and still look at them as scandals is a sobering reminder of how dehumanized our society has become. (Our unforgivably failed social norms about the proper care of children is another). I’m beginning to think that the true citizens in our society are not human beings any more, but corporations and other similar collective entities, and this is a thought that is beginning to scare me.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
How come everybody wanna keep it like the kaiser?
Here’s an unusual perspective you don’t hear much about. It is possible to love someone you’ve never met, never even spoken a word to. It’s possible to love them completely and totally unreservedly, with no strings and no expectations. In fact, i daresay its quite common. I’ve loved my son since well before I met him. He never had to earn such affection. It was given freely and without hesitation without merit. With no guarantee for my own return I tied my heart to his and have never counted the (not inconsiderable) cost of doing so.
And yet it seems as a people we don’t apply such notions beyond the parent/child relationship. For love between peers we look for some sort of quid pro quo. There are probably many reasons for this and some of them may even be valid and true. To be sure you need to be secure in your own situation first. You must have faith your own needs will be met to be open. Indeed, the drunken idiocy of fresh romantic love might even be a biological adaptation which catalyzes pair-bonding. In our stupid twitterpated state we never ask the tough questions of quid pro quo which we worry so much about the rest of our lives. Buzzed and horny we just take a leap of faith and hope it all works out. Then, when the buzz wears off, we start keeping score again and start getting divorced.
But ponder for a moment how much it diminishes us. This planet is full of so many lonely Eleanor Rigby’s, so many broken hearted souls freezing in the cold indifference of the world. Fear and loneliness make us so terribly small. But imagine the bliss of opening our hearts to others without need of return. Imagine the limitless, meritless love of new-minted parenthood writ large on the canvas of life. Imagine being not small, but limitless and inexhaustible. Imagine being big heart. Or better yet, don’t imagine, manifest. You are big heart. We all are. We just tend to forget.
I did. I’d even found it again for a while, and amazingly forgot it anew. And then, out of nowhere, amid a most disorienting and chaotic emotional tempest, a crisis which threatened to plunge me deep into dark places forgotten for 20 years, it was there. Open. Like someone switched a light on in me. Big heart incarnate, flooding the world with life. Still blissing on it as I write. I’ve missed this.
Welcome home.
Namaste
Monday, March 09, 2009
The furniture in the child-mind's playroom
In 1975, Carole King wrote songs for an animated musical movie with children’s writer Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are, etc..). The album from Really Rosie is actually one of Carole Kings stronger releases and is one of those things thats literally been in my life longer than I can remember. I’d have been
2 or 3 when this music appeared in my house, earlier than my earliest long-term memories and so I literally cannot recall my initial reaction to it. It just one of those things that’s always been there.
Now I can remember listening to the album (rather a lot) as a child, and so it is strongly embedded in my permanent memory. Perhaps in a similar vein, I can’t really remember seeing Star Wars for the first time, but I’m so familiar with it that I can actually listen to the John Williams score and quote about 80% of the dialog in perfect timing. Useless and geeky, I know, but this is what’s embedded in the foundations of my brain.
Anyway, back to Really Rosie. It’s only really recently however that I’ve actually stopped to take notice of the contents. We bought a bunch of Scholastic DVDs for Laz, and one of these includes excerpts from Really Rosie. Now I grew up with the album, which came with a booklet of pictures, but I don’t think I’d ever actually seen the movie. (Of if I have, it’s lost in the mists of my pre-memory). Seeing this as an adult, I’m struck by the oddness of the content. There’s a song about a boy who gets eaten by a lion and then befriends him (in that order). There’s a song about a boy obsessed with Chicken Soup, (and dies eating it according to one of the songs on the album). There’s a counting song about a boy who want’s to be left alone and threatens to eat all his unwanted guests. There’s a lot about eating. Weird.
Anyway the thing that struck me this morning is not that it never occurred to me that these things were weird, but that I’d never even noticed them before. They were just there as part of the landscape of my existence from my haziest early memories. Just an example of a large class of things that I “knew” long before I’d “understood”. When and where did I learn the concept of mortality? Or the idea of “God”?
The latter is a particularly interesting question since my family was never particularly religious. They weren’t militant atheists raging against religion. Rather it was just largely absent. So in what context did I discover that people believed in a God or Gods or the like? I have no memory of learning this rather astonishing piece of information. To this day I have a significant discomfort engaging with deeply religious people. It’s not that I’m afraid they are going to despise me or attack me or whatever. Its a much more fundamental hind-brian feeling. It’s xenophobia pure and simple. It’s a version of the same chill up the spine you get when confronted with a snake or an insect or a spider. The recognition of being in the presence of the alien. Somehow the landscape of my child-mind included both the knowledge of religious belief and the understanding that it was not I, well before I was ever able to consciously discern and evaluate these things. I can only assume that the reverse must be true of many of those brought up in strong religious traditions.
Watching the interaction of this phobia with my burgeoning interest in zen has been interesting to say the least. It’s probably no accident that the kind of spirituality that speaks most directly to me is the kind that is least personified. Spirit in 3rd person is easy to accept: God is everything. Great. I can even just about get with Spirit in 1st person: God is me. But the concept of Spirit in 2nd person: a conscious personal God which is external and other stings like a 9-volt battery on the tongue. Creeps me out like a Ridley Scott movie, and yet that very surrender seems to provide great comfort to others.
All of which seems miles away from where this started.
Hmm...
End of line
2 or 3 when this music appeared in my house, earlier than my earliest long-term memories and so I literally cannot recall my initial reaction to it. It just one of those things that’s always been there.
Now I can remember listening to the album (rather a lot) as a child, and so it is strongly embedded in my permanent memory. Perhaps in a similar vein, I can’t really remember seeing Star Wars for the first time, but I’m so familiar with it that I can actually listen to the John Williams score and quote about 80% of the dialog in perfect timing. Useless and geeky, I know, but this is what’s embedded in the foundations of my brain.
Anyway, back to Really Rosie. It’s only really recently however that I’ve actually stopped to take notice of the contents. We bought a bunch of Scholastic DVDs for Laz, and one of these includes excerpts from Really Rosie. Now I grew up with the album, which came with a booklet of pictures, but I don’t think I’d ever actually seen the movie. (Of if I have, it’s lost in the mists of my pre-memory). Seeing this as an adult, I’m struck by the oddness of the content. There’s a song about a boy who gets eaten by a lion and then befriends him (in that order). There’s a song about a boy obsessed with Chicken Soup, (and dies eating it according to one of the songs on the album). There’s a counting song about a boy who want’s to be left alone and threatens to eat all his unwanted guests. There’s a lot about eating. Weird.
Anyway the thing that struck me this morning is not that it never occurred to me that these things were weird, but that I’d never even noticed them before. They were just there as part of the landscape of my existence from my haziest early memories. Just an example of a large class of things that I “knew” long before I’d “understood”. When and where did I learn the concept of mortality? Or the idea of “God”?
The latter is a particularly interesting question since my family was never particularly religious. They weren’t militant atheists raging against religion. Rather it was just largely absent. So in what context did I discover that people believed in a God or Gods or the like? I have no memory of learning this rather astonishing piece of information. To this day I have a significant discomfort engaging with deeply religious people. It’s not that I’m afraid they are going to despise me or attack me or whatever. Its a much more fundamental hind-brian feeling. It’s xenophobia pure and simple. It’s a version of the same chill up the spine you get when confronted with a snake or an insect or a spider. The recognition of being in the presence of the alien. Somehow the landscape of my child-mind included both the knowledge of religious belief and the understanding that it was not I, well before I was ever able to consciously discern and evaluate these things. I can only assume that the reverse must be true of many of those brought up in strong religious traditions.
Watching the interaction of this phobia with my burgeoning interest in zen has been interesting to say the least. It’s probably no accident that the kind of spirituality that speaks most directly to me is the kind that is least personified. Spirit in 3rd person is easy to accept: God is everything. Great. I can even just about get with Spirit in 1st person: God is me. But the concept of Spirit in 2nd person: a conscious personal God which is external and other stings like a 9-volt battery on the tongue. Creeps me out like a Ridley Scott movie, and yet that very surrender seems to provide great comfort to others.
All of which seems miles away from where this started.
Hmm...
End of line
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Astronomy: not American enough for John McCain?
So apparently John McCain doesn’t see my profession as a worthwhile occupation for good wholesome Americans. In one of his rabid rants about spending he views as wasteful came the following tweet:
#2. $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii - because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy
1:56 PM Feb 27th from web
Now, I don’t know anything about that particular appropriation, but if it’s anything like most astronomy grants it is probably money that would indeed mostly be spent employing people. Certainly the ~$300k grant that I submitted to the NSF last November to study exploding stars is exactly the kind of thing that he seems to be raving about in his top-10 lists on twitter. This sounds like a lot, but mostly it goes to pay for salary, etc, for graduate students. True a great big chunk gets siphoned off by the university, but even that pretty much ends up paying for salaries somewhere.
The implication here seems to be that investing in Astronomy isn’t investing in people. Apparently employing astronomers isn’t employing people. Granted, not many people make a living in astronomy, but I fail to see why it should be discounted as a profession. It certainly pays my bills and has for some dozen years or so. Indeed, many of the things he complains about sound like legitimate proposals for basic research, most of which will ultimately pay for salaries because that’s usually the cost of doing science. Even expensive equipment purchases ultimately boil down to paying someone down the line for their time. Either McCain doesn’t understand this, or he discounts this because research is the activity of “The Elite”. It takes training and education to be a researcher, and so perhaps this isn’t the work of “real Americans”? Are we seeing the classic Republican ploy of conflating elite (i.e. educated) with elitist (the belief that I’m better than all of you).
In either case, to borrow a phrase from a certain 31st century average American: John McCain can bite my shiny metal ass.
#2. $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii - because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy
1:56 PM Feb 27th from web
Now, I don’t know anything about that particular appropriation, but if it’s anything like most astronomy grants it is probably money that would indeed mostly be spent employing people. Certainly the ~$300k grant that I submitted to the NSF last November to study exploding stars is exactly the kind of thing that he seems to be raving about in his top-10 lists on twitter. This sounds like a lot, but mostly it goes to pay for salary, etc, for graduate students. True a great big chunk gets siphoned off by the university, but even that pretty much ends up paying for salaries somewhere.
The implication here seems to be that investing in Astronomy isn’t investing in people. Apparently employing astronomers isn’t employing people. Granted, not many people make a living in astronomy, but I fail to see why it should be discounted as a profession. It certainly pays my bills and has for some dozen years or so. Indeed, many of the things he complains about sound like legitimate proposals for basic research, most of which will ultimately pay for salaries because that’s usually the cost of doing science. Even expensive equipment purchases ultimately boil down to paying someone down the line for their time. Either McCain doesn’t understand this, or he discounts this because research is the activity of “The Elite”. It takes training and education to be a researcher, and so perhaps this isn’t the work of “real Americans”? Are we seeing the classic Republican ploy of conflating elite (i.e. educated) with elitist (the belief that I’m better than all of you).
In either case, to borrow a phrase from a certain 31st century average American: John McCain can bite my shiny metal ass.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Heliotrope on the Beach (with Einstein)
It is nice to feel the sun in February. It is good to feel the warmth and see the colors. I naturally want to turn and face it. To embrace the moment and be and celebrate the sensory now between the ticks of the clock. To stop and smell the roses and be, in that pause, the all that is both rose and nose, sensor and scent. To be the face on both sides of the Daddy-Laz nose-to-nose-to-nose-to-nose game.
This is perhaps one aspect of the meditative experience. Certainly it is suggested by phrases such as “being in the moment” which often get batted around in new-agey circles. But I think perhaps that this is also a bit of a trap, or at least it’s a pleasant truth might hide another one. A false minimum which is not a destination but only a philosophical rest stop and scenic vista. Snap a picture, breathe the air, stretch your legs, grab a snack and move on again.
The thing about being in the moment is that it puts a lot of emphasis on “the moment”. That delta-function pixel point, the little frame marker that ticks across the bottom of the You-Tube window. And the thing about moments is they are always fleeting. To be in the moment is to be alive, but always dying. The moment passes, the clouds roll in and you step on a small green wooden triangle left upright on the living-room floor. Ouch.
In my more lucid moments I can just about wrap my head around relativity and see time as space, force and movement as geometry. As Ford Prefect told Arthur Dent, “Time is an illusion and lunch time doubly so.” We experience time as a sequence of moments, irrevocably dripping from the past to the future but physics, (at least some physics) seems to suggest that this is at least partially a matter of perspective. The moment is the interaction of the stimulus and the sensor, but even that is not quite true. Like a general behind the lines my news is always late. I am never in the moment but always behind it, and the information is never pure. I experience not the warmth of the sun (or the son) but only the electrochemistry of the wetware connecting sensors to sentience. And who or what, pray tell, is the I-I that is receiving these messages transmitted through meat and cabling and imagining a world full of sunshine?
In my really lucid moments I can hold these ideas and get a sense of the path as a whole. Of life not as a series of discrete nows but as a 4D holism. A shape without hard edges, but which, while seeming coherent in the middle, is interwoven with the rest of creation like roots in soil. If I concentrate, method actor me can experience June sun in February and February sun in June. If I pay attention, I am not a creature falling through moments, but a me made of moments. The timeless thus of all the nows. This at least is a sort of description of the incomplete glimmer I get of Big Mind like a tesseract shadow projected down to flatland and uploaded to memeland and propagating now inside your own self dear reader.
Nice day for it.
This is perhaps one aspect of the meditative experience. Certainly it is suggested by phrases such as “being in the moment” which often get batted around in new-agey circles. But I think perhaps that this is also a bit of a trap, or at least it’s a pleasant truth might hide another one. A false minimum which is not a destination but only a philosophical rest stop and scenic vista. Snap a picture, breathe the air, stretch your legs, grab a snack and move on again.
The thing about being in the moment is that it puts a lot of emphasis on “the moment”. That delta-function pixel point, the little frame marker that ticks across the bottom of the You-Tube window. And the thing about moments is they are always fleeting. To be in the moment is to be alive, but always dying. The moment passes, the clouds roll in and you step on a small green wooden triangle left upright on the living-room floor. Ouch.
In my more lucid moments I can just about wrap my head around relativity and see time as space, force and movement as geometry. As Ford Prefect told Arthur Dent, “Time is an illusion and lunch time doubly so.” We experience time as a sequence of moments, irrevocably dripping from the past to the future but physics, (at least some physics) seems to suggest that this is at least partially a matter of perspective. The moment is the interaction of the stimulus and the sensor, but even that is not quite true. Like a general behind the lines my news is always late. I am never in the moment but always behind it, and the information is never pure. I experience not the warmth of the sun (or the son) but only the electrochemistry of the wetware connecting sensors to sentience. And who or what, pray tell, is the I-I that is receiving these messages transmitted through meat and cabling and imagining a world full of sunshine?
In my really lucid moments I can hold these ideas and get a sense of the path as a whole. Of life not as a series of discrete nows but as a 4D holism. A shape without hard edges, but which, while seeming coherent in the middle, is interwoven with the rest of creation like roots in soil. If I concentrate, method actor me can experience June sun in February and February sun in June. If I pay attention, I am not a creature falling through moments, but a me made of moments. The timeless thus of all the nows. This at least is a sort of description of the incomplete glimmer I get of Big Mind like a tesseract shadow projected down to flatland and uploaded to memeland and propagating now inside your own self dear reader.
Nice day for it.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Metaphysical Flywheel (A Clockwork Marmalade?)
Inevitably, I find that my metaphorical imagery is full of physics. It is only natural, I suppose, given the amount of time that I inhabit that noospace. I suppose it might seem kinda nerdy, or perhaps even sterile depending on the context. Regardless, it is what comes naturally to me, and so there it is.
I suspect it’s not even that uncommon a phenomenon. I dimly recall discussing the dynamics (thermodynamics?) of the “dating” environment with Tara freshman year using a chemistry metaphor. (As I recall, increased environmental pressure and “the ratio” tended to lead to distorted equilibria. And there was something about electronegativity, though the specifics escape me now.) In any case, the point remains: we use the metaphorical structures that come readily to mind, and inevitably those structures are well populated by the language and ideas of our everyday experience.
Thus I tend to use physics metaphors to describe lots of things. Apologies.
Now, as a massive particle I have become keenly aware of inertia of late. Indeed, I seem to battle it on a daily basis. My own mostly. I’ve found it takes a lot of effort to get things rolling, particularly in my head. My headspace has been rather swampy lately: difficult to traverse, far too full of undergrowth and liable to be full of unpleasant smells, quicksand, or alligators. (Not all of my metaphors are physics, apparently.)
Getting things moving in this quagmire has been a difficult task of late, though once I build up some steam, then I can get some things accomplished. On the other hand, I usually get distracted and derailed pretty quickly. Indeed, my life is pretty much divided up into lots of little chunks most of the time. (Thank you academia). So this is perhaps something of a problem. What I need here is a sort of flywheel of the mind. A way to store momentum when I get distracted so that I can get a bit of a rolling start.
Unfortunately, this is where the momentum metaphor seems to break down. The cool flow of samadhi, the laser focus of being “in the zone,” it’s not really about movement. At least not in the Newtonian sense. It’s a gestalt. It’s an eigenstate, or perhaps even an ensemble. A clockwork jammed can sometimes be relieved by a short, sharp shock. But a frazzled self may need more than a boot to the head.
I am out of balance.
The feeling is all too familiar. The fear lurks below the surface of consciousness, a leviathan below mist covered waters. I react too much. I respond too little. I pinball from to to fro without a plan or a clue, and the razor cut of sorrow and regret comes all too easily.
I need centering.
I’ve been here before. There are methods, paths, a way perhaps. But I worry about the cost and second guess the diagnosis. Is this just a selfish desire? A homesick yearning to return to a soothing distraction? Is it selfish to take the time to find an anchor when the storm is raging in all directions and there is water on the deck and in the hold? Is this a luxury I can afford?
Entirely too much Synchronicity II. Time to change the tune I think.
I suspect it’s not even that uncommon a phenomenon. I dimly recall discussing the dynamics (thermodynamics?) of the “dating” environment with Tara freshman year using a chemistry metaphor. (As I recall, increased environmental pressure and “the ratio” tended to lead to distorted equilibria. And there was something about electronegativity, though the specifics escape me now.) In any case, the point remains: we use the metaphorical structures that come readily to mind, and inevitably those structures are well populated by the language and ideas of our everyday experience.
Thus I tend to use physics metaphors to describe lots of things. Apologies.
Now, as a massive particle I have become keenly aware of inertia of late. Indeed, I seem to battle it on a daily basis. My own mostly. I’ve found it takes a lot of effort to get things rolling, particularly in my head. My headspace has been rather swampy lately: difficult to traverse, far too full of undergrowth and liable to be full of unpleasant smells, quicksand, or alligators. (Not all of my metaphors are physics, apparently.)
Getting things moving in this quagmire has been a difficult task of late, though once I build up some steam, then I can get some things accomplished. On the other hand, I usually get distracted and derailed pretty quickly. Indeed, my life is pretty much divided up into lots of little chunks most of the time. (Thank you academia). So this is perhaps something of a problem. What I need here is a sort of flywheel of the mind. A way to store momentum when I get distracted so that I can get a bit of a rolling start.
Unfortunately, this is where the momentum metaphor seems to break down. The cool flow of samadhi, the laser focus of being “in the zone,” it’s not really about movement. At least not in the Newtonian sense. It’s a gestalt. It’s an eigenstate, or perhaps even an ensemble. A clockwork jammed can sometimes be relieved by a short, sharp shock. But a frazzled self may need more than a boot to the head.
I am out of balance.
The feeling is all too familiar. The fear lurks below the surface of consciousness, a leviathan below mist covered waters. I react too much. I respond too little. I pinball from to to fro without a plan or a clue, and the razor cut of sorrow and regret comes all too easily.
I need centering.
I’ve been here before. There are methods, paths, a way perhaps. But I worry about the cost and second guess the diagnosis. Is this just a selfish desire? A homesick yearning to return to a soothing distraction? Is it selfish to take the time to find an anchor when the storm is raging in all directions and there is water on the deck and in the hold? Is this a luxury I can afford?
Entirely too much Synchronicity II. Time to change the tune I think.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
The bridges that can't be burned
It seems a somewhat forgotten thing in our society that there are some connections which cannot be severed; some relationships which cannot be ended; some lines of communion which cannot be eclipsed. Certainly we can throw up walls and create obstructions, but these do not cut the cord. We can shut people out and cut them off, but we can’t undo the connection.
We tend to look down on codependency as if it is somehow a poor lifestyle choice; as if it were possible to isolate oneself from the other. But here’s the thing: crazy can’t be isolated. It isn’t localized to one person, any more than any other aspect of personality. We do not end sharply at the surface of our skin. Selves are non Newtonian particles. We do not exist in isolation. We are inherently shaped by our environments: physical, biological, social. Like quantum reality we are the single selves that are not single, the localities that are not local. And we are not immune to phase mixing. Our chocolate mixes with our peanut butter and we cannot save our selves or others from ourselves or others.
We pretend that this is not true. We pretend that we can somehow walk away but the severed limb still aches, and entropy still wins in the end. The bridge cannot be burned because it is our self, and we burn our self in trying.
“Hand of kindness, come gather me in like a rainstorm” – Tift Merritt
We tend to look down on codependency as if it is somehow a poor lifestyle choice; as if it were possible to isolate oneself from the other. But here’s the thing: crazy can’t be isolated. It isn’t localized to one person, any more than any other aspect of personality. We do not end sharply at the surface of our skin. Selves are non Newtonian particles. We do not exist in isolation. We are inherently shaped by our environments: physical, biological, social. Like quantum reality we are the single selves that are not single, the localities that are not local. And we are not immune to phase mixing. Our chocolate mixes with our peanut butter and we cannot save our selves or others from ourselves or others.
We pretend that this is not true. We pretend that we can somehow walk away but the severed limb still aches, and entropy still wins in the end. The bridge cannot be burned because it is our self, and we burn our self in trying.
“Hand of kindness, come gather me in like a rainstorm” – Tift Merritt
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Committing the Inevitable Educator Betrayal.
My job has a conflict of interest with my job. Actually, if I think about it, there may be more than one. In any case there is at least one very clear pair roles which I’m supposed to simultaneously fill in the classroom, and I’m not sure these roles are easily reconciled with one another.
On the one hand, I’m supposed to be a facilitator. My role is that of a tour-guide, guru, translator and generally experienced dude. Ultimately the student needs to do the work to learn something, but I’m there to try and clear the weeds out of the path. In order to be effective in this role it is very helpful if I can gain the student’s trust. It’s a difficult thing to admit you’re clueless, but if a student isn’t able to be open with me about that then I can’t help. Failure is an important part of the learning process. If I can engender enough trust that the student’s feel free to try something difficult, fail at it, and try again, then I’m doing well in my job as a facilitator.
On the other hand, the system in which I teach is not set up in isolation. Students don’t, for the most part, go to school just for the joy of learning. We live in a world where knowledge and understanding is a commodity which is bought and sold on a daily basis. Indeed, the other role I’m supposed to fulfill is one of assessor. I’m supposed to assess the student’s understanding of the subject and, effectively, provide the student with the capital they have to play in the knowledge economy. (In reality, this capital is pretty short lived, usually only lasting as long as the next job/school application process, but it’s important to that extent.)
Now student’s aren’t stupid. They know that the grade they get out of a course has a tangible affect on their future and well-being. This tends to make them a bit touchy about their grades and leads to a distortion of the learning process. Students tend to view the grade as the result of taking a course and classes take on a kind of sports metaphor. You play the game until there’s a result, and then you forget about it and look to the next challenge. Educators tend to use a architectural metaphor, focussing on understanding as the desired result, and expecting students to build on that understanding in the next course. Thus the clash becomes visible.
If I’m acting as an assessor, that tends to put me in an adversarial position, not an enabling one. It undermines the trust and safety of the classroom because futures are on the line. As an assessor I’m expected to punish failure while at the same time as a facilitator I’m trying to encourage risk taking. As an educator, I’d like to assign really challenging problems which really push students to make cognitive leaps. If I then turn around and coldly assess their failure, then I’ve undermined the very process I was trying to encourage.
In other words, I hate grades.
At the same time, I’m not certain what could be done about it. Ultimately, knowledge and understanding do have value, but it’s damned hard to assess. Proper assessment takes time and as the classroom instructor I’m probably most qualified to make that assessment. If we take grades out of the school system then it needs to be replaced by something else, because eventually the student needs to participate in the knowledge economy. If I’m not assessing, then potential employers or grad schools etc will be doing the same. But likely they will be doing it with less information then I have. Of course, I throw a lot of that information away when I just boil a student’s progress with a subject down to a single number.
So generally I practice the art of deception. I try my best to downplay grades, and then quietly betray them to the registrar at the end of the semester.
On the one hand, I’m supposed to be a facilitator. My role is that of a tour-guide, guru, translator and generally experienced dude. Ultimately the student needs to do the work to learn something, but I’m there to try and clear the weeds out of the path. In order to be effective in this role it is very helpful if I can gain the student’s trust. It’s a difficult thing to admit you’re clueless, but if a student isn’t able to be open with me about that then I can’t help. Failure is an important part of the learning process. If I can engender enough trust that the student’s feel free to try something difficult, fail at it, and try again, then I’m doing well in my job as a facilitator.
On the other hand, the system in which I teach is not set up in isolation. Students don’t, for the most part, go to school just for the joy of learning. We live in a world where knowledge and understanding is a commodity which is bought and sold on a daily basis. Indeed, the other role I’m supposed to fulfill is one of assessor. I’m supposed to assess the student’s understanding of the subject and, effectively, provide the student with the capital they have to play in the knowledge economy. (In reality, this capital is pretty short lived, usually only lasting as long as the next job/school application process, but it’s important to that extent.)
Now student’s aren’t stupid. They know that the grade they get out of a course has a tangible affect on their future and well-being. This tends to make them a bit touchy about their grades and leads to a distortion of the learning process. Students tend to view the grade as the result of taking a course and classes take on a kind of sports metaphor. You play the game until there’s a result, and then you forget about it and look to the next challenge. Educators tend to use a architectural metaphor, focussing on understanding as the desired result, and expecting students to build on that understanding in the next course. Thus the clash becomes visible.
If I’m acting as an assessor, that tends to put me in an adversarial position, not an enabling one. It undermines the trust and safety of the classroom because futures are on the line. As an assessor I’m expected to punish failure while at the same time as a facilitator I’m trying to encourage risk taking. As an educator, I’d like to assign really challenging problems which really push students to make cognitive leaps. If I then turn around and coldly assess their failure, then I’ve undermined the very process I was trying to encourage.
In other words, I hate grades.
At the same time, I’m not certain what could be done about it. Ultimately, knowledge and understanding do have value, but it’s damned hard to assess. Proper assessment takes time and as the classroom instructor I’m probably most qualified to make that assessment. If we take grades out of the school system then it needs to be replaced by something else, because eventually the student needs to participate in the knowledge economy. If I’m not assessing, then potential employers or grad schools etc will be doing the same. But likely they will be doing it with less information then I have. Of course, I throw a lot of that information away when I just boil a student’s progress with a subject down to a single number.
So generally I practice the art of deception. I try my best to downplay grades, and then quietly betray them to the registrar at the end of the semester.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Self-Referential Webs of Interconnectedness
So, if you look over to the right-hand side of this blog, there are a couple of new links, one pointing to my Twitter stream and the other pointing to my new Facebook profile. If you’re the kind of person who is interested in pursuing that sort of thing, feel free to chase down my ever thinning supply of worthwhile thoughts as they spread out in my increasingly deluded attempt to stay hip by belatedly jumping on long overworked netgen trends. (Yikes that’s a long sentence!)
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Begging for Photons Part II: Finding the limit
So some poking about on websites has yielded some results... First, getting information out of NASA is definitely a “wheat from the chaff” kinda operation. NASA documentation is a bewildering blizzard of information presented in a format that probably made sense to the instrument designers, but is not end-user friendly. Eventually I managed to random-walk my way to an exposure-time calculator.
And this is where I typically meet my second challenge. The late-time spectra of supernovae are weird. They are dominated by line emission, but the lines are actually quite wide, something like about 1/10th of the spectral width of broad band photometric filters in the NIR. (Roughly 600 Angstroms or so for a line near 1.64 microns for the gear-heads out there). Now for several years I’ve been estimating the strength of the late-time emission lines in SNe Ia by extrapolating Peter Meikle’s absolute IR light curves from 100 days post max to the epoch of observation at around 1 year. For the extrapolation I assume that the late-time light curve fades at a rate consistent with the 77 day half-life of Cobalt-56, which is the dominant energy source in the ejecta. This gives me a rough H-band magnitude for the late-time epoch, and has been OK at predicting the strength of the emission, though I haven’t rigorously tested how accurate this is. (Probably not that accurate, I’d guess, but I don’t really have any other method).
Since this method gives me a broad-band magnitude, I then have to convert this to a line flux. Now flux points for broadband magnitudes are actually tabulated as flux densities (ie flux per unit wavelength rather than the actual integrated flux in the band pass). Thus I first have to convert the flux point to a total integrated band flux. If the flux calculation requires a total line flux, then I’m home and dry, but if it wants a flux density, then I have to divide the integrated flux by the width of the line before trying to go on with the calculation. I’ve run into both situations for different instruments, but for the NICMOS calculator it’s just integrated line flux, which is easier.
Then its a matter of choosing settings, clicking on radio buttons and filling in web-forms and after a bit of tweaking it appears that a 900 second exposure would detect my emission line at a S/N of about 1 for a supernova with a broad-band H-magnitude of about 23. That’s pretty good actually. It means I can probably go about 2-3 magnitudes fainter than my ground-based observations and still have some hope of getting enough of a detection to measure a Doppler shift. Hooray.
Now the next question: are there enough targets to make this an interesting program to run in the spring?
And this is where I typically meet my second challenge. The late-time spectra of supernovae are weird. They are dominated by line emission, but the lines are actually quite wide, something like about 1/10th of the spectral width of broad band photometric filters in the NIR. (Roughly 600 Angstroms or so for a line near 1.64 microns for the gear-heads out there). Now for several years I’ve been estimating the strength of the late-time emission lines in SNe Ia by extrapolating Peter Meikle’s absolute IR light curves from 100 days post max to the epoch of observation at around 1 year. For the extrapolation I assume that the late-time light curve fades at a rate consistent with the 77 day half-life of Cobalt-56, which is the dominant energy source in the ejecta. This gives me a rough H-band magnitude for the late-time epoch, and has been OK at predicting the strength of the emission, though I haven’t rigorously tested how accurate this is. (Probably not that accurate, I’d guess, but I don’t really have any other method).
Since this method gives me a broad-band magnitude, I then have to convert this to a line flux. Now flux points for broadband magnitudes are actually tabulated as flux densities (ie flux per unit wavelength rather than the actual integrated flux in the band pass). Thus I first have to convert the flux point to a total integrated band flux. If the flux calculation requires a total line flux, then I’m home and dry, but if it wants a flux density, then I have to divide the integrated flux by the width of the line before trying to go on with the calculation. I’ve run into both situations for different instruments, but for the NICMOS calculator it’s just integrated line flux, which is easier.
Then its a matter of choosing settings, clicking on radio buttons and filling in web-forms and after a bit of tweaking it appears that a 900 second exposure would detect my emission line at a S/N of about 1 for a supernova with a broad-band H-magnitude of about 23. That’s pretty good actually. It means I can probably go about 2-3 magnitudes fainter than my ground-based observations and still have some hope of getting enough of a detection to measure a Doppler shift. Hooray.
Now the next question: are there enough targets to make this an interesting program to run in the spring?
Begging for Photons
If you’re the type interested in peeking behind the curtains, read on:
In late September, the Hubble Space Telescope freaked out. The computer system responsible for transmitting data to the ground crashed. Thankfully, the telescope didn’t completely stop talking to the ground, but it took quite a while for the systems to come back on line. Now, thanks to NASA’s long held religious belief in redundancy, the telescope is once again taking data and transmitting the information back to hungry astronomers on the ground.
Now this failure happened just as NASA was making final preparations for the final servicing mission to HST. Since it wasn’t clear if they’d have to replace the communications electronics, NASA decided to delay the servicing mission again. (For reference, this servicing mission was originally scheduled to happen in 2003 and got sidelined in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster, so HST has been waiting for this visit for a *long* time!) Currently they’re guessing that the servicing mission will be sometime next spring.
Meanwhile, the last round of HST proposals for “Cycle 17” took place last winter and was explicitly expecting to use the new and refurbished instruments after the servicing mission. But that was assuming that the mission was going to be this last spring. It’s now been delayed at least a further year, and the observing queue for approved programs using the existing instruments is running dry. So they’ve put out an emergency call for proposals to fill in the time until the servicing mission. They are specifically looking for proposals which will either use a lot of time (>100 orbits) or “High risk/high gain” type proposals. So the gold rush is on to collect those photons which are about to “fall off the back of a truck,” and it’s time to dig up semi-crazy ideas for what to do with aging HST instruments.
Now one of the side effects of specializing in infrared observations of supernovae, is that while I’ve been able to come up with good uses for the large ground-based telescopes, it’s been much harder to come up with good HST programs. HST has an infrared instrument, but it’s frankly something of an underwhelming instrument. Its design was locked on the wrong side of the rapid development of infrared instrumentation in the 90s and by the time it was deployed, the detectors were well behind the standard for ground-based instrumentation. The field of view is pathetic, the detectors are tiny and noisy, and the sensitivity is nothing to write home about. It does have the advantage of being above the stupendous IR airglow, but even the image quality isn’t that much better than you can achieve with ground-based instruments and the new generation of laser-guide-star adaptive optics. Plus, my particular specialty has been largely spectroscopic science, and the spectroscopic capabilities of NICMOS are poor indeed. So, to date, I’ve largely dismissed NICMOS as useless, at least to me.
But now I’ve run into a different wall. It turns out that Type Ia supernovae have some very interesting behavior in the infrared at late times (roughly a year after the explosion). In particular, the late-time iron features show both a hollow (flat-topped) emission profile and are kinematically offset from the center of the explosion by several thousand kilometers per second. Unfortunately, observing these properties really pushes the sensitivity limits of the biggest telescopes on the planet. Even for supernovae in the nearest galaxies, I need to obtain spectra of objects which are several magnitudes fainter than the sky. These are observations so difficult it even impresses the guys trying to take spectra of type Ia supernovae halfway across the visible universe.
That’s all well and good, if it was easy it would already have been done, but now we’ve reached a point where it’s difficult to build on our successes. We have observed a small handful of objects using a fair bit of time on Subaru and Gemini. But now what we really need are observations of a couple of dozen objects to start looking at how these effects vary and broaden our results to the context of the general population of Type Ia supernovae. However, being limited to the nearest objects, we are stuck with asking for these observations an object or two at a time, and asking for a night or two of 8m time for each. And the TACs are understandably coming back with “what is one more spectrum going to do for you?.” So we’re trying to investigate other avenues. I’ve got a pilot proposal in with Rob Fesen & students to try and use optical data to get at the same science, which might help.
But while pondering these troubles at the SN meeting last week in Japan, I received the e-mail from SCScI announcing the new HST opportunity. So now the question is, can I use HST to learn something about more SNe Ia? My first crazy thought was to try and use the strange filter set on NICMOS to get “photometric redshifts”, using the flux ratios in neighboring filters to estimate the kinematic offsets of the iron lines. Fortunately, after a long night of sushi and sake (including the famously poisonous Fugu... it was a pretty fantastic meeting banquet), I came to my senses and remembered that NICMOS does have a rudimentary spectroscopic capability. The spectral resolution is pathetically low (about 1000 km/s) but in this case that’s actually a plus because it means I will be concentrating the faint emission into just a few pixels. So now it’s down to quantitative questions: (1) is NICMOS even sensitive enough to do this kind of observation, and (2) will I be able to push the observations out sufficiently far to measure an interesting number of supernovae?
To be continued....
In late September, the Hubble Space Telescope freaked out. The computer system responsible for transmitting data to the ground crashed. Thankfully, the telescope didn’t completely stop talking to the ground, but it took quite a while for the systems to come back on line. Now, thanks to NASA’s long held religious belief in redundancy, the telescope is once again taking data and transmitting the information back to hungry astronomers on the ground.
Now this failure happened just as NASA was making final preparations for the final servicing mission to HST. Since it wasn’t clear if they’d have to replace the communications electronics, NASA decided to delay the servicing mission again. (For reference, this servicing mission was originally scheduled to happen in 2003 and got sidelined in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster, so HST has been waiting for this visit for a *long* time!) Currently they’re guessing that the servicing mission will be sometime next spring.
Meanwhile, the last round of HST proposals for “Cycle 17” took place last winter and was explicitly expecting to use the new and refurbished instruments after the servicing mission. But that was assuming that the mission was going to be this last spring. It’s now been delayed at least a further year, and the observing queue for approved programs using the existing instruments is running dry. So they’ve put out an emergency call for proposals to fill in the time until the servicing mission. They are specifically looking for proposals which will either use a lot of time (>100 orbits) or “High risk/high gain” type proposals. So the gold rush is on to collect those photons which are about to “fall off the back of a truck,” and it’s time to dig up semi-crazy ideas for what to do with aging HST instruments.
Now one of the side effects of specializing in infrared observations of supernovae, is that while I’ve been able to come up with good uses for the large ground-based telescopes, it’s been much harder to come up with good HST programs. HST has an infrared instrument, but it’s frankly something of an underwhelming instrument. Its design was locked on the wrong side of the rapid development of infrared instrumentation in the 90s and by the time it was deployed, the detectors were well behind the standard for ground-based instrumentation. The field of view is pathetic, the detectors are tiny and noisy, and the sensitivity is nothing to write home about. It does have the advantage of being above the stupendous IR airglow, but even the image quality isn’t that much better than you can achieve with ground-based instruments and the new generation of laser-guide-star adaptive optics. Plus, my particular specialty has been largely spectroscopic science, and the spectroscopic capabilities of NICMOS are poor indeed. So, to date, I’ve largely dismissed NICMOS as useless, at least to me.
But now I’ve run into a different wall. It turns out that Type Ia supernovae have some very interesting behavior in the infrared at late times (roughly a year after the explosion). In particular, the late-time iron features show both a hollow (flat-topped) emission profile and are kinematically offset from the center of the explosion by several thousand kilometers per second. Unfortunately, observing these properties really pushes the sensitivity limits of the biggest telescopes on the planet. Even for supernovae in the nearest galaxies, I need to obtain spectra of objects which are several magnitudes fainter than the sky. These are observations so difficult it even impresses the guys trying to take spectra of type Ia supernovae halfway across the visible universe.
That’s all well and good, if it was easy it would already have been done, but now we’ve reached a point where it’s difficult to build on our successes. We have observed a small handful of objects using a fair bit of time on Subaru and Gemini. But now what we really need are observations of a couple of dozen objects to start looking at how these effects vary and broaden our results to the context of the general population of Type Ia supernovae. However, being limited to the nearest objects, we are stuck with asking for these observations an object or two at a time, and asking for a night or two of 8m time for each. And the TACs are understandably coming back with “what is one more spectrum going to do for you?.” So we’re trying to investigate other avenues. I’ve got a pilot proposal in with Rob Fesen & students to try and use optical data to get at the same science, which might help.
But while pondering these troubles at the SN meeting last week in Japan, I received the e-mail from SCScI announcing the new HST opportunity. So now the question is, can I use HST to learn something about more SNe Ia? My first crazy thought was to try and use the strange filter set on NICMOS to get “photometric redshifts”, using the flux ratios in neighboring filters to estimate the kinematic offsets of the iron lines. Fortunately, after a long night of sushi and sake (including the famously poisonous Fugu... it was a pretty fantastic meeting banquet), I came to my senses and remembered that NICMOS does have a rudimentary spectroscopic capability. The spectral resolution is pathetically low (about 1000 km/s) but in this case that’s actually a plus because it means I will be concentrating the faint emission into just a few pixels. So now it’s down to quantitative questions: (1) is NICMOS even sensitive enough to do this kind of observation, and (2) will I be able to push the observations out sufficiently far to measure an interesting number of supernovae?
To be continued....
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Back in the Hurly Burly
Well, I’m newly back from Japan and in less time than it takes to shake off 14 hours of jet lag I’m back in the thick of being faculty. This time of year is really kind of a mess. The triple-whammy of Veterans day, Thanksgiving and finals really makes the last month of the semester something of a jumbled affair. Add to this the chaos of extra end-of-the-semester things like student thesis proposals, teaching evaluation forms, last-minutes committee meetings, and a bonus HST proposal (or two?) and it begins to look like a tasty soup indeed.
Ah well, with all this going on it’s obviously the ideal time to try and discover new ways to spend non-existent free time on the ‘net right? So, just before leaving for Tokyo, I got tagged by a voice from the past (Hi Keith :) ) who’d hunted me down and, among other things, told me that there’s a whole bunch of people that I used to know lurking on Facebook. And indeed, some quick poking around does seem to bear this out. So it seems that I may be sticking my toes into those waters as well.
Meanwhile I need to grade the last month of cosmology homework, invent next weeks last cosmology homework, invent some test questions for the astro seminar quiz, and other sundry teacher stuff. And perhaps write an HST proposal for the Cycle 16 extension using everyones least favorite infrared detector NICMOS. Oh and Tom Maccarone wrote me an email this morning (well morning my time, not his) asking me if I’d like to join him on an HST proposal based on a conversation we had like 2 years ago in Southampton. Sure... why not. Tom’s on facebook too... It’s a funny old world...
Ah well, with all this going on it’s obviously the ideal time to try and discover new ways to spend non-existent free time on the ‘net right? So, just before leaving for Tokyo, I got tagged by a voice from the past (Hi Keith :) ) who’d hunted me down and, among other things, told me that there’s a whole bunch of people that I used to know lurking on Facebook. And indeed, some quick poking around does seem to bear this out. So it seems that I may be sticking my toes into those waters as well.
Meanwhile I need to grade the last month of cosmology homework, invent next weeks last cosmology homework, invent some test questions for the astro seminar quiz, and other sundry teacher stuff. And perhaps write an HST proposal for the Cycle 16 extension using everyones least favorite infrared detector NICMOS. Oh and Tom Maccarone wrote me an email this morning (well morning my time, not his) asking me if I’d like to join him on an HST proposal based on a conversation we had like 2 years ago in Southampton. Sure... why not. Tom’s on facebook too... It’s a funny old world...
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Not so live from Kashiwa anymore
So the great live blogging experiment hit a couple of predictable roadblocks this afternoon. First, of course, I had to give my own talk, and then I got distracted by a very interesting talk about the Cygnus Loop, and then another interesting discussion about Super-Chandrasekhar-mass Type Ia supernovae. Tomorrow morning I’m chairing the session, so that’s probably not a good time to be doing other things... Ah well. This is the way of experiments...
Had a lovely dinner with the overseas visitors at Ken’s apartment in Kashiwa with some lively conversation, and also had a nice chat earlier with Sergei Blinnikov. All in all a good day. Indeed, this trip has been a nice reminder that it would be nice to get back to being a scientist. I should try and make that happen somehow.
Had a lovely dinner with the overseas visitors at Ken’s apartment in Kashiwa with some lively conversation, and also had a nice chat earlier with Sergei Blinnikov. All in all a good day. Indeed, this trip has been a nice reminder that it would be nice to get back to being a scientist. I should try and make that happen somehow.
Monday, November 17, 2008
LiveBlogging the IPMU supernova workshop: Mamoru Doi
Distant SN Observations with Subaru
Planning to build a 6.5 m IR/Optical telescope in Atacama.
12 IAU SNe in one image! Doi et al. 2002.
Subaru XMM/Newton Deep Survey. Suprime-Cam BVRi’z’ Plus Xrays and NIR (UKIRT). 540 AGN, 400 SNe, 170 Variables, in 1 sq deg.
Delay time distribution. Totani et al 2008 (astro-ph) t^-0.5=-0.2 ... inconclusive so far.
Coming up... Hyper Suprime: 1.5 deg FOV to chase Dark Energy with weak lensing. 2011?
Sullivan et al 2007. Difference between reddening line and BDR in type Ias?
Some discussion here of low Rv again...
30 micron imaging with a 1 m from the ground?
15 Band imaging with dichroics... That’s a kinda crazy instrument, but sorta cool.
Planning to build a 6.5 m IR/Optical telescope in Atacama.
12 IAU SNe in one image! Doi et al. 2002.
Subaru XMM/Newton Deep Survey. Suprime-Cam BVRi’z’ Plus Xrays and NIR (UKIRT). 540 AGN, 400 SNe, 170 Variables, in 1 sq deg.
Delay time distribution. Totani et al 2008 (astro-ph) t^-0.5=-0.2 ... inconclusive so far.
Coming up... Hyper Suprime: 1.5 deg FOV to chase Dark Energy with weak lensing. 2011?
Sullivan et al 2007. Difference between reddening line and BDR in type Ias?
Some discussion here of low Rv again...
30 micron imaging with a 1 m from the ground?
15 Band imaging with dichroics... That’s a kinda crazy instrument, but sorta cool.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
