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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
An entry about my actual day
Wednesday. 3.14.07 12:07 am
Today turned out to be a pretty good day for me. I went down just on time to leave for the conference, Lillian had picked up a blueberry muffin for me before they ran out so that I wouldn't starve and fall asleep during morning session (and it worked!--- plus morning session was actually interesting...) It was about the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, which is our sort of newest Mars orbiter. It has a really amazing camera which gets down to like 30 centimeter resolution. That means that if you were to lie out like you were making a snow angel on the surface of Mars, we'd be able to see you in our images (from ORBIT!). We've been targeting it at different places and finding little pieces of spacecraft all over the place (the Voyager landers, Mars Pathfinder, the two MER rovers Spirit and Opportunity, all of their heat shields and air balloons). We still can't find the lost European rover the Beagle, poor dear, but the Europeans insist that we aren't looking in the right place.

Then I got an email! yay! For lunch we ate mexican for the third time in three days, then we went to the afternoon session. Here my advisor was going to present some pretty gutsy interpretations and we didn't know how the community was going to react. He finished his talk and he always talks for too long so there wasn't any time for questions but there were tons of people lined up to ask questions because everyone was really riled up about the talk. My friend Joe had the talk immediately after, and his was short enough so that people could ask questions, so people addressed one question to him and then this really respected Caltech modeler got up to the mic and we didn't know what he'd say, and he said he had not really a question but a comment, and we waited in suspense and then he said that he was absolutely so impressed with Joe's talk and my advisor's talk and that the results were stunning and our interpretations were great and that he'd been looking high and low for a good Earth analog for these features on Mars and he'd asked everyone he knew and that these were the most amazing and persuasive analogs he'd seen and that we should be proud. And we were accordingly very proud.
Then I got another email! :D

After that we were riding high on a cushion of beaming praise and some of us went and ate ice cream for dinner and I had double dark chocolate with crushed oreos and then we went back for the poster session. At first I wandered around, meeting some people and looking for a spot out of the way where I could read my book, but then I got distracted talking to this charming old British modeler guy whom I'm hoping to collaborate with on some Mars volcanism stuff. We talked about jet engines and various kinds of turbulently convecting plumes. I'd sent him some comments and questions about the draft of his paper and he'd corrected his paper to include some of my suggestions (MY suggestions! someone cares what I suggest!!?). He said that at one of my questions he'd been puzzled because he could have sworn that the answer to my question was already in the paper. Turns out he'd done the whole calculation and written it out, but he'd put it in a folder in December and forgotten to type it into the paper at the last minute! I guess not even the reviewers had mentioned that, eh? So he put it in and he and my advisor acknowledged me at the end for my "valuable input" or something (I haven't read exactly what they said yet, my advisor just told me that they'd put it in).

Then I went around, talking to people, feeling smug because I was part of "my advisor's group" who knew all about the crazy martian features when everyone else was just trying to collect themselves off the floor after the implications of my advisor's talk had been realized. Sometimes I purposefully turned my nametag around so that they would tell me how they were sure the problem hadn't been solved and that my advisor couldn't possibly have the answer, without knowing that secretly I was like, "but ohO! What if he does?! What if I have been talking about this for weeks?!!"

I also ran into my planetary hero: B. Lucchitta, who is this amazing Italian woman who discovered every single thing like 20 years before everyone else did. I mean, everything. She mapped Ganymede, she talked about wrinkle ridges on the moon, she invented lineated valley fill on Mars from extremely coarse resolution viking data... she's amazing. I agree whole-heartedly with pretty much everything she ever wrote. Whenever I think to myself, "Man, this person really knows what they're talking about" then it always turns out to be her. And I met her!! Yay! I told her that I admired her work and how I kept reading these papers that people did in the 80s saying exactly what she did in the 60s only acting like they figured it out first. She told me that that was exactly what happened, and the fact that I knew that meant that I was a good researcher and that it meant that I actually read books and went to libraries instead of trying to find everything online. She said recently she'd reviewed a paper and told the person a bunch of references and they had the audacity to write back and ask her to send them all the reference-links online. She was like, "GO TO THE LIBRARY!!!! AGHHHH!!!" Wow. So cool. She's a real person!!

Then I talked to Debra and Sylvan for a really really long time, especially Debra because she's thinking about coming here and working with my advisor. My advisor kept drifting over to hear what we were saying and then putting his hands up and saying, "Oh! don't mind me I won't interrupt, I don't want to stop your conversation!" and then he would drrrift away. He wants Debra to come and work for him. She's scared to hell of him of course, as anyone would be, seeing as he's rather famous and also a little famous for being a character. She said that he seemed so nice and down to Earth and didn't seem at all like people made him out to be. I remember when he made me nervous. I wonder if people like that are aware at how nervous they can make prospective students. I also got to see my old undergrad advisor who was a former student of my current advisor, and the current advisor of Debra.
Then I came home and I'd gotten another email!! :D

Tomorrow we're getting doughnuts for breakfast and getting there early so we can get good seats for the Mars Exploration Rover talks which start at 8:30. Can't wait to see what kind of interesting data those crazy martian rovers have collected! I think they might have another session on Saturn's moon, Titan, too. Titan is pretty amazing because it is the only planet besides Earth (and maybe Mars in the distant past) that has active fluvial processes. It appears that Titan has a whole mess of lakes that are full of liquid... and rivers, and seas, and clouds and rain... but the liquid would be methane-nitrogen instead of water!! All the rocks on Titan are made from water ice and hydrocarbons (which could run your car for a month!) instead of silicates like all the rocks on the Earth!!!

Anyway, all together a pretty amazing day. I only almost fell asleep in lecture once, and I saved myself by leaving the room and checking my email. :D
Cheerio!
1 Comments.


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