My first 10K

February 12, 2011

So, my first half marathon turned into my first 10K race: The Death Valley Borax 10K. A few other friends I talked into running came with me and in the end Stephanie and Jeff raced and completed the half marathon, while Kelsey kindly ran the 10K with me. Death Valley is a beautiful place — [...]

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IDL print header to a file

February 2, 2011

Here is a snippet to grab the headers of fits files and print them into a real format like ascii. openw, 1, ‘Headers/2011.0101.header’ printf, 1, headfits(’Raw/hires0101.fits.gz’) close, 1

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Vaccines, Autism and Paying More

January 23, 2011

Image via Wikipedia I gladly found the article on cnn.com by Rahul Parikh: Make anti-vaccine parents pay higher premiums. It it written by a physician who advocates making parents who are anti-vaccine pay higher insurance premiums. The reasons he give are compelling. First of all, not vaccinating your children is not just a danger to [...]

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My keyboard will do until I get a real piano

December 18, 2010

I’ve played classical piano since I was 5 years old. The piano that I love playing the most is at my parent’s house — it’s a Mason & Hamlin grand piano. When I did my undergrad at Vanderbilt, I lived about 150 yards from the music building and had card access 24 hours a day. [...]

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Review of The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel

December 18, 2010

I just finished reading The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel by Diane Setterfield. I think it was a fine book (not great), but I probably wasn’t the intended audience. The book is about a young “bookish” woman who works in her father’s bookstore and occasionally writes obscure historical biographies. A famous and reclusive writer, Vida Winter, [...]

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Clever Internet Comments

December 16, 2010

Image via Wikipedia On the website reddit.com, there are lots of comments that truly make me happy to be alive. For example, I was reading through the comments on a thread about people being sick of all the attention the Wikileaks story is receiving, and I thought I’d share a few of my favorites. Sometimes [...]

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If you like dancing…

December 14, 2010

How about hand-dancing? Don’t know what I’m talking about? Watch the following, it’ll brighten your day:

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Suggestions Wanted — How to create a Physics Problem Database?

December 12, 2010

Image via Wikipedia Physics graduate students at UCSD (and many other schools) have to pass a PhD qualifying exam. At UCSD, this exam is taken across 2 days. Taking and preparing for that exam (called The Qual) is often a stressful time of life. One of the most useful ways to study for the Qual [...]

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Dumb things Sometimes get Published and Cited a Bunch

December 12, 2010

Image via Wikipedia The world of peer-reviewed journal publishing can be a tough place. Reviewers can delay and reject even the best papers. Occasionally, it’s the opposite. My friend shared a link to a journal article abstract that he came across the other day. Apparently, it derives a basic calculus concept — that’s it. The [...]

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My First Half-Marathon

December 2, 2010

Image via Wikipedia I signed up for the Death Valley Borax Half Marathon this week. It sounds bad-ass to run in Death Valley, but the race takes place in February (9 weeks from now), so it won’t be hot. If you want to join me feel free to register for it here. I’ve been running [...]

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