UPDATE: welcome to book club
Hello all.

The format of official Book Club posts is going to be updated starting with The Picture of Dorian Gray. Thanks to Mark's suggestion, I am going to be writing several posts per book, each about only certain sections (eg several chapters). My aim will be to write about 3-4 posts per book, and they will all be linked to in the sidebar under their respective book titles. This is all an attempt to make this seem more like a real book club in which you can follow along with what I'm reading (or have read) as it happens.

Let me know your feelings...

3.21.2008

moth hunting with a rubber band

The last post I did seemed to have broken from my typical introspective type, but I thought it was entertaining to write nonetheless. Nothing important enough is happening in my life right now to write about (yet here I am!), so I decided to write about some one else's life. I could make excuses by saying music is very important to me and that I have very strong opinions surrounding the issue or whatever, but the real reason I talked about Ms. Johansson was because it's enormously more entertaining than anything I'd have to say about myself. So as an effort to keep my oh-so-large fan base pleased, I'll occasionally diverge from my thoughts and readings from time to time.

I actually gave this a lot of thought last night. I almost felt like I was getting a little tabloidy by talking about celeb gossip. I realized that several times a day potential blog topics pop into my head, and I always forget them by the time I get here. So starting today, I'm going to start carrying around a little pocket moleskine notebook to write these topics in. I've also found that it's really useful for when I'm reading my book. Sometimes it takes me a few weeks to finish a book, and by that time, I've forgotten half of the opinions I had developed throughout.

So I'm sure you all are dying to know what I wrote down today. Sit down, get ready for this:

"moth hunting with a rubber band"

Wow. Today must have been a slow day. It's not even a good topic to write about, I just thought it was funny at the time. But I might as well let you know what it means.

Today is the Friday before spring break and my only class was Astrophysics at 10 o'clock. The teacher, Jason Glenn, has a very interesting and nerdy sense of humor. I mean he's an astronomer...enough said. Well he decided a while ago that he's going to have a short storytelling at the beginning of every Friday class. These stories are generally based around his experiences when doing observational research. They always take place in a different state/country, some wacky (and equally nerdy) scientists are always present, and expensive equipment is always involved. When things go wrong, this combination makes for a good story.

Today's observing story was about when Glenn was doing research at a 10 meter diameter submillimeter radio telescope in Arizona...unfortunately I didn't write down the name. I remember thinking "I don't need to write down the name, I'll be able to find it online," but alas, the name eludes even my proficient Google-Fu. To make a long story short, some guy was dangling from a crane scrubbing off plastic that had melted to the surface of the telescope and his chemical suit pants caught on fire. I guess Arizona gets kind of warm and the telescope was kind of reflective.

So one of the wacky scientists that Glenn worked with there was this hardcore southern manly-man that lived to hunt. When he was stuck at the laboratory doing observations all night, occasionally his desire to kill something would flare up and he'd grab a handful of rubber bands and hunt all of the moths in the observatory (since these telescopes have to be open to the sky, their buildings usually stay exposed to the outside). I was going to use this to open up some sort of dialog about how pointless hunting is and crap like that, but frankly this post has gone on too long already.

Glenn said that you always had to watch your step because so many dead moths constantly littered the floor.

1 comment:

Michael said...

Photomoto said...

oh professor Glen...
3/22/08 2:03 PM