Michelle Dolan’s blog

So the summer has been very productive and we’ve all worked very hard on the Institutes.  The Astro Institute was a success and we’ve already had one teacher come back with a class to see the DVT.  Classes have started again and I’ve made my first two appearances at Bremen already.  I’ll be teaching the class for one week on Stellar Evolution, but we haven’t decided which week.  It will be fun.  I should start making the Power Point slides now.  I can actually use some from the Astro Institute since that was my presentation. 

Last night we had a party and the Mooney’s to celebrate all our successes at NDeRC this year.  Michael and I  brought the kids and my mom and we all had a great time.  It was nice to see the other fellows, teachers and their families.  The food was great and the cheesecake we brought was gone in no time.  Kate made an NDeRC cake with fondant.  We’ll all have tons of cavities at our next dental visits, for sure.  It was a fun relaxing end to the summer.

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So the summer is gearing up now and there’s so much to do.  We have to get our patookuses in gear!  Here is the Short Short List:

1. Get the Astro Institute organized and the material decided

2. Get the project decided (pretty much done really) and prepare for the student(s)

3. Organize with Tom Guthrie to see if we have what we need to start running models of binaries

4. Pick out binaries to model, then model them.

I’m not sure what to do about the Summer Institutes.  I have some ideas, as I’m sure the others do, and Tom has made some suggestions.  The experimental runs with the students this Spring were helpful, by showing me we need to either get very specific about one thing or do a survey and make it entertaining.  The Black Hole topic I did with the students was well received, but I had to narrow it down to what Black Holes were instead of talking about the accretion disc.  I did mention it, but the students seems to need more information on what Blacks Holes were, how they were formed, and they were detected.  I’d need more feedback about Kate’s experience to know if perhaps doing a more general survey would have a bigger impact on students willingness and desire to learn science.  Both possibilities have benefits and drawbacks

So, we have a great idea for the summer work with the students.  Aaron McNeely found a project where real people can try to find asteriods and submit them to a database.  There’s a lot of data available and it’s all very recent and waiting to be analyzed.  It’s not that hard to do, but not trivial by any means.  And it doesn’t require any night time observations.  As a theorist with young children, I’m particularly appreciative of not having to be up all night on a regular basis.  We’ll include some observing, I’m sure, but that won’t be the bulk of it.  Plus that saves us from being at the mercy of the weather which was a huge problem last summer.  Although, last year my then-newborn (who’s first birthday is tomorrow) slept like a champ until well after I got home, whereas now she wakes up twice (only twice! Yay!) and won’t sleep again without me.  So she was actually easier to leave as a newborn than she is now.  Such is life.  Anyway.  Back to the work ahead.

I’ve met with Tom once already, and we’ve emailed a few times.  We just need to make sure he has a computer he can run the simulations on then I can show him how it works and we can pick some stars to model.    I’d also like to analyze the code to explore the customizability of it.

Oh, and I need to finish this paper I’m writing.  And go to the Lightwave Workshop.  I don’t have any DVT shows scheduled right now, which is good.  That one day with 4 shows was really hard, so I’m happy to have a break, but it was still fun.  Kids love the DVT and finding new ways to make if go crazy is always fun.

At today’s meeting with the whole crew, after giving my presentation on some of the tools of my trade, and interesting observation was made.  Lemme splain.  No.  There is too much.  Lemme sum up.  (10 points to the first person to guess where that’s from.)  I was talking about stellar evolution and how stars respond to internal changes and how this relates to the HR diagram.  The Hertzprung-Russell (HR) diagram is the log/log plot of luminosity versus surface temperature of a star.  Anyway, the observation was made that I talked about stars like they were living things.  For example, one thing I said was, “A star responds to an increase in temperature by expanding to cool itself.”  (Hydrostatic equilibrium.)  I hadn’t really thought about it that way before, but there is a tendency to talk about stars like they are living things because they do change over time, and parts of a star will change in response to input (energy) from another part of the star.  It’s not sentient, but it is a system that attempts to self regulate and does change according to rules we are trying to understand.  And a star does get born, it does age, and it does die.  This is the language of stellar astrophysics.  It’s pretty cool.  Which would make it red. 

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I’ve been thinking about community lately.  We all have our own communities.  Some big and some small.  Even in the same geographic location two people will have vastly different communities.  Communities are constantly changing.  In particular, it’s who’s in your community and how you relate and communicate that changes most.  Most of my friends now live far away.  I moved or they moved or both.  So while we once talked and saw each other daily, we now rely on phone calls, texts, IM’s, tweets, and social networking sites.  And this seems quite natural.  We communicate how we can because we have a relationship to maintain and the desire to do so however possible.  Even 20 years ago we would have relied on letters sent by snail mail.  But now we rely on technology.  Friends made in one place, face to face, continue to be friends over the airwaves and internet.  But there’s another group of friends.  I’ve made friends with a group of women.  We all had children last summer.  We all ranted and raved and consoled each other through our pregnancies.  All through a forum on the internet.  We all knit and are members of an online knitting community called Ravelry.  And we’ve become friends who confide in each other and console each other and share life tips.  We’ve formed a cyber community.  I talk more often with them than I do with friends I met in real life, and in some cases more often than with friends I still see face to face.  Some people consider this sort of friendship to be contrived and artificial, but that’s absolutely false.  We genuinely care about each other.  Does it matter that we have never met in the flesh?  The influence we have in each other’s lives is real and tangible.  We talk about parenting, knitting, how to be a better wife/mother/grad student/professional.  Yes, some of these women are grad students, just like me.  Some are professors, some are business women.  Some work full time, and some are stay at home moms.  We span several decades in ages, and all races and religions.  And yet we’ve come together to support each other in a way I’m not sure we could have done had we all met face to face.

There’s something about they anonymity of online forums.  You can say what you mean without worrying what someone else thinks.  You don’t have to see them or face negative feedback.  Certainly you still do so respectfully, but you don’t have the inhibitions and the fear of rejection that you do when you’re standing in front of someone telling them your innermost thoughts.  So you do get to know each other’s “real” personalities, and maybe more so than people you know in “real life”.  So, internet is a vehicle for community in a real way.  This cyber community is a community in every sense of the word, even if it’s formation and the vehicle for continuation are modern and unusual.

There was a debate in an undergraduate humanities class about the emergence of and reliance on internet relationships.  The concern was that in forming communities online, we’d forget how to be human and how to relate to people in the flesh.  I was on the fence at the time, and somewhat persuaded by the grave concern for the evolution of humanity.  But now I have a definite opinion.  Online communities only enhance our humanity and our ability to relate to people because we can drop all pretenses.  We can more easily choose who we associate with.  Isn’t that what children are counseled to do?  Choose your friends wisely, for you are judged with them?  We can form relationships with real people who have thoughts and concerns and values just like our own and support each other in emotionally tangible ways.  Sure, you can get conned.  But don’t you get conned by people who are looking you straight in the eye and shaking your hand?  I’m not less likely to help someone I meet on the street just because I have valued relationships online, I’m more likely.  Because my emotional needs are being met by the people in my life (in the flesh and online) I’m more able to step outside myself and reach out to others in need.  I’m less likely to fear losing something by reaching out to someone I meet.

So cyber communities can be a valued part of a personal life.  But what else?  What if classes and lectures were online forums instead of meetings in large rooms?  How much more often would students feel at liberty to ask the “dumb” questions?  How much more readily would a student reach out to another student and study together, or even ask for help when needed?  Cyber communities allow for easy access to resources we need, while removing the stigma of embarassment.  This is a boon for personal interactions, but how much more beneficial would it be for professional and educational purposes?  Food for thought.

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In life, your time is taken up by things that fall into 2 categories: Have-Tos and Want-Tos.  If you only do Have-Tos, then you have lots of stress and no joy in life.  If you only do Want-Tos, then you starve to death.  The first consideration is that we are all mortal beings with physical bodies that must be maintained.  The second is that we have thoughts and feelings.  We Have-To maintain our bodies but we Want-To maintain our minds and hearts.  So we have jobs that allow us to get paid so we can maintain our bodies by providing a way to make money to buy food, clothing, and shelter.  If we’re lucky, we have jobs that we enjoy, but even then the work gets boring and tedious and there are parts we don’t enjoy.  If we’re not lucky, we work at jobs we hate.  In that case it’s even more important to have time for Want-Tos.  And in time away from jobs, there are Have-Tos.  You Have-To clean the bathroom, pay bills, take the baby to the doctor, make dinner, etc.  So what about the time available for Want-Tos that feed the brain and heart?  You Want-To surf the net, read a book, watch tv, knit a sweater, play with your children, etc.  But here comes the rub, we often spend so much time trying to do the fun things that the Have-Tos don’t get done.  We surf the net while at work and the paper doesn’t get written or watch tv when we get home while something grows in the sink.  Not that I have ever done this, of course.  As a society we have this idea that we should do “Work first, play later” which no one I know does.  Except me.  I always wash dishes and clean the bathroom before sitting down to play.  Always.  And you can’t prove otherwise.

But how do we realistically balance out the Have-Tos and Want-Tos?  I try to use a schedule as my main tool for doing this.  But schedules get blown away by sudden Have-Tos.  Like a son with an ear infection.  Like a death in the family.  Like a deadline that you aren’t prepared for.  And if you have a family, you have multiple schedules to balance.  So just balancing work is hard enough, but where do you fit in fun?  It’s in the margins, really.  So what little time you have for fun you have to make the most of.  But most time for Want-Tos ends up being eaten up by surfing the internet or watching tv, while all the other fun things get left behind.  That leads me to my revolutionary plan.  I’m limiting non-work internet time to 2 hours per day.  I’m also going to limit my tv watching time to 3 hours per day.  I can do this!  The black hole that is the internet and tv will be tamed and I think I’ll be a more productive Have-To-Doer and Want-To-Doer.

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In the last week I’ve gone to 2 Science Fairs, piloted a DVT show for school girls, and assisted at the Science Alive.  First it was the Science Fair at Northpoint Elementary School.  We decided on which projects were the top 4 of the school and should go on to Notre Dame for further judging.  There were some really nice projects.  After choosing the top 10, we talked to the students at length.  The project that impressed me the most was not as impressive at first glance as it was after talking to the student.  She was investigating the concept of coefficient of friction which she had not yet learned.  She was rigorous and systematic and clearly came up with the project on her own and did the work herself.  It was a recreation of scientific thought and experimentation leading to the discovery of physical concepts and laws by someone who really was learning it for the first time.

Last Saturday, Kate and I had a DVT show for girls in grades 2-5 from People of Praise.  The girls were very well behaved and asked wonderful questions.  We took them from the night sky as seen from Earth to the edge of the Universe.  If the “oohs” and “aahs” were any indication then we blew their minds.  Perhaps one or more of those young ladies will become scientists when they grow up.

After helping to mould the minds of young girls, we attended Science Alive! and played with manned the experiments and demonstrations.  I demonstrated the thermal camera to children.  They were awed by how ice could mark their faces black as seen by the camera while not seeing anything with their own eyes.  And using a baking sheet as a mirror was absolutely mind blowing.

Then today was the Marian High School Science Fair.  This time we didn’t decide any one’s fate but instead gave them feedback.  I was surprised by how much writing they had on their posters.  It was almost like they printed out a paper and pasted it on poster board accompanied by photos of them in the lab.  The projects were certainly ambitious, and some were very impressive.  It was a lot more difficult to assess these projects since we talked to each student at length.  I wouldn’t be surprised if several of the students took their projects to college and build marketable technology based on them.

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Research Forum III was in December.  We all got together to show off our toys and games and try to convince teachers that we need to come play in their classrooms.  I think we did a good job.  Lots of people signed up for more information and we had a large crowd at our Astro presentation.  We summarized our accomplishments of the summer and fall thusly:

Pretty, huh?  We had them from the get-go, but of course we wanted to appeal to their rational sides as well by making promises about what we want to do.  Like this:

Then we wanted to arm them with information on the tools we use so they could go to their schools and justify asking to have us come to them and have so much fun.  Like this:

Oh, yeah.  We’re good.  We convinced them that they could access some very user-friendly tools that their schools could get FOR FREE and that students could also access FOR FREE at home on their personal computers if they have them.  And we convinced them that the students would be blown away by all the pretty lights and captivated enough to learn.

And then we manned our table getting lots of signatures on the blue papers:

Like the slide show on my computer?  They’re all images we took over the summer.  Yeah, we’re cool like that.

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Hello.  We’ve been working on doing some observations, but the weather has not been cooperative here or in New Mexico.  But we’ll keep trying.  We do have a few good images of M51 and M57.  We’ll keep trying for the rest.

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