Blue Collar Scientist

Well, it has taken almost three weeks, but I finally have some definitive news to post about Jeff, aka the Blue Collar Scientist. When we last checked in on things, it was thought that Jeff had caught some kind of nasty, persistent infection. This hypothesis has since been disproven, and now we know for sure what is going on.

The bad news is that Jeff has liver cancer. He’s got two tumors in the liver; one is small, one is quite large, almost 10cm in size.

The good news is that Jeff has no risk factors for cancer or liver disease; he’s never been a drinker, he’s hepatitis-free, doesn’t have HIV, etc. (In fact, the etiology of his condition remains unknown.) He’s healthy in every other way, with no cardiac, metabolic, or other diseases to complicate treatment. He’s very physically fit, although he’s gradually lost much of his stamina over the last several weeks. He’s had a full-body MRI and thoracic and abdominal CTs that establish he has no tumors outside the liver. All of this is good news for someone who has a disease that normally kills 90% of the people who are diagnosed with it within six months.

Another piece of good news - he’s being seen mid next week by the University of Washington Liver Center, one of the best liver clinics in the world, to receive treatment recommendations and come up with a plan.

Jeff’s still working on several projects - he’s got some political activism going on in Alaska, he’s still working on some curriculum materials for astronomy and physics education for some of his area school districts, and he’s still working on adapting a couple of his lectures into study guides. He’s been polishing his talk about how anyone can help make the science education crisis better.

What isn’t clear is whether he’s going to have the energy to blog very often - he certainly hasn’t during the last couple weeks of daily tests and doctors appointments. What are your thoughts on this - should we try to keep the blog going? Should we bring on a staff of regular contributors to keep fresh content between his occasional posts? Should this turn into an all-hepatic-cancer, all-the-time blog? Should it just be retired? Your feedback is needed.

BTW, you can feel free to e-mail or Skype Jeff (see the “BCS Esewhere” sidebar on the home page), and he’ll see your comments to the blog as well.

Hello everyone! I am “nebulous,” the newest contributor to Blue Collar Scientist. I’m an astronomer at the University of Arizona, and an old, old friend of the BCS’s from before either of us were astronomers. I was brought onto the BCS team mainly to make this one posting, as I don’t have time to contribute to a blog properly. I’m sad to report that Blue Collar Scientist must take a (hopefully brief) blogging vacation.

Jeff has fallen ill. He’s been working on getting sick in earnest for a couple weeks, as his Twitter followers might have noticed, but late last week and over the weekend, things took a turn for the worse. The doctors are still trying to sort things, and I’m no medical guru, but the best sense I can make of what I know is that he contracted a gastrointestinal infection a few weeks ago which became systemic, attacked his lungs, and and has caused pneumonia. But that story could be a little off, because they are still trying to pin down the bug and figure out what all the other symptoms mean. He will be down for the count for at the very least some days, and maybe as much as a few weeks.

My own theory is that he angered the gods of the bronchi with his posting about asthma last week, but don’t worry about the BCS himself, because he believes in real medicine and thinks that some completely disinterested microbe is causing the problems. He’s taking a close interest in the tests that they are doing and the treatments they are proposing, and he’s keeping the homeopaths and therapeutic touch people well out of the way. Given his smarts, and the good shape he is in, if anyone is in a position to make quick work of this problem, it’s him. So please keep Blue Collar Scientist subscribed, and we’ll make a big to-do when he’s back!

Now that I’m back from Arizona and have a smidge more time to pay attention to the blog, I thought I’d bring back the highly popular¹ Comment of the Week awards. Winners earn our high opinion, and pretty much nothing else.

This week, Glendon Mellow of The Flying Trilobite knocks one out of the ballpark in response to my suggestion that the three of us - Zach at When Pigs Fly Returns being the other - liberate the thoracically-challenged:

Vive le revolucion!

We must free our wheeze-imprisoned brethren!

To the bronchiomobile!

Glendon wins mainly because of the way I laughed my ass off at the moniker for our official superhero car. I think I’m going to name my beloved Honda minivan after this suggestion.

Running a very close second, however, is a comment left by Spiv on the posting about my apathetic response to NASA’s big news this week, which did indeed lift me out of the doldrums a bit and made me feel more positively about the discovery and the hype. Spiv rightly points out:

It’s a serious research opportunity. There’s not a lot of supers that are within our range and young enough to study at such great detail. When you study them going off halfway across the universe you get to study a handfull of effects from it.

When you get to study one in your own backyard you can see all kinds of details regarding expansion, collisions with gas clouds, etc, etc.

That’s my feeling anyway. I’m not terribly excited about what’s been done (finding it), I’m excited about what will done now that we have something to look at.

The last paragraph really hits the nail on the head. The news isn’t really that big, and maybe that’s where my reaction is coming from. But the opportunities moving forward are tremendous. Thanks for pointing that out!

1. This is called “humor.” [↩]

My good fortune in getting a few small fossils in Arizona to use in my guest teaching brought to my attention the startling lack of magnifying optics that I own.

Well, that’s not entirely true - I have two astronomical telescopes, a spotting scope for birds and other Alaskan wildlife, and a good pair of binoculars. But all this requires the subject to be a considerable distance away, and when you want to look at some hadrosaur teeth up close, it just doesn’t work out¹. I realized that my first step in adding magnification to my arsenal should be a decent loupe.

I did a little internet research, and decided to make a slightly risky purchase - a Belomo 10x loupe from CR Scientific. The internet pundits - who I trust only a little, because I’m pretty sure I know more about optics than most of them - all spoke very highly of the loupe. So I decided if it didn’t work out, it was no big thing - I’d have a crappy loupe for harsh field use, and I’d go get a nice Nikon or Zeiss loupe at ten times the price for when I wanted to see something really well.

Well, the loupe arrived yesterday and I have to say my initial impressions are very positive. It is a small loupe, with the housing not much over an inch across. The eye lens is 19mm in diameter. It is held in a folding metal enclosure done up with a nice pebbly finish - not the best enclosure I’ve seen (it doesn’t lock, for example, and it isn’t dustproof), but it is hardly bad. The instruction sheet is in the Cyrillic alphabet, and I have no idea what it says.

The optics work for me. The field is flat, so you can focus everything at once; there is no noticeable chromatic aberration anywhere in the field; and the images are sharp and contrasty. The optics are knocking my socks off, actually - they’ve dispelled any kind of reservation I might have had about the enclosure. The two subjects that I consider acid tests for a hand-held magnifier - bird feathers viewed in backlighting, and rocks with shiny specks viewed in sunlight - look real good in this loupe. And I’ve been looking at everything - the seed pods the cottonwoods are dropping around here, little rocks, my MacBook screen, an old scar from a shrapnel wound on my leg…. The fun goes on and on. New toy!

Oh, by the way, the really dominant reason to get one of these is this: it costs $21.95. I seriously doubt anything can beat the price/performance ratio that this modest unit offers, unless perhaps you are looking for something that is resilient . And the company isn’t stupid about shipping it to Alaska - they simply threw it in the mail, and it arrived in great shape. So, if you need a loupe, and you don’t want to spend a bundle….

1. I came home from the trip wanting a stereo microscope, but that’s mainly to support some teaching activities that I’m expanding into at the beginning of the upcoming school year, and I’m not sure I want to drop money into that just yet. [↩]

Well, it just seemed like some kind of warning was in order.

I’ve been gone for just over a week to southern Arizona to do some observatory work, but I got back into Anchorage Wednesday night, and I can now say that I’m mostly almost recovered from the experience, at least in superficial ways.

I have one more video to put up relating to the trip - all the footage was made in Arizona, but I didn’t have time to get it edited and posted before I left. I’m expecting that to appear sometime Friday, but it will probably be late. There will also be new posts to this blog starting at about 8:00 AM EDT, just a few hours from now.

I will also be editing some pictures of Rebeccawatson and sending them to Rebecca Watson, and to a newspaper that keeps bugging me about them; and I think I’ve uncovered the discovery images of Philplait; Phil has patiently been waiting for them for more than a month. I’ll be posting those here in due time.

Other than that, I have unpacking, laundry, photo tripod assembly, the editing of an all-sky, all-night time lapse movie that I made while I was on the trip, and a number of household chores to catch up on. And even though the time difference is only an hour, I have to admit that the big honking travel day that it takes to get here exhausts me. I think I’ll be soundly and long for a few nights.

The trip was highly productive. I installed a new high-level control system with a number of new features and nearly 10,000 lines of new code, and saw it perform flawlessly while I was there. This is in part due to the ability to test the code while running the ASCOM suite under Windows XP on my MacBook under VMWare, whilst doing the actual development on the MacBook using native Mac OSX text editors, which - get this - are better development editors even for Microsoft proprietary languages like Visual Basic. I’m mainly talking about BBEdit, which frankly is so superior to any other text editor I’ve used that I consider it useless to look any further.

And yes, I’m even editing compiled Visual Basic (6 and .net) code modules with this editor. Of course I’m still designing VB interfaces¹ with Visual Studio under Windows, but otherwise, there’s no point to this that I can see. (Disclaimer: Intellisense has never worked in my IDE under six different platforms, so maybe if it did work, I would be singing a different tune.)

I also installed an AppleTV in the observatory’s entertainment room, updated some old networking stuff, evaluated the telescope for proper collimation (it was fine, requiring no adjustment), advised on the reproduction of some century-old photographs, and visited Tom Kaye’s observatory and paleo lab, an experience that is likely to affect me for a long time. I also smashed bugs and deployed new versions of two other programs that I write - a simple utility for adding targets to the scheduler, and a little gadget that is part of the image analysis pipeline that makes sure everything is formatted just-so for the Minor Planet Center. Basically, I was busy practically every moment of the trip. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I’ve also taken a new commission: Automating milli-magnitude photometry - both image acquisition and reduction - from the 32″ at the observatory. This shall be an interesting project. Interesting project indeed. If this works out, gents, I expect my name on some of the exoplanet papers you guys are going to publish. Just so we’re clear. :-)

<gross>

While I was in southern Arizona, the humidity dipped most days to around 12%, which leads to nosebleeds and rock-hard bloody snot stuck in both the near and far reaches of the sinus areas. This is of course profoundly uncomfortable, and it seems I’m especially prone to the problem for some reason. I’m pleased to report that 30 hours back in Anchorage has worked that problem out.

</gross>

So anyway, I’m back in AK. And it is nice to be getting back to the routine.

1. When I have to design an interface, that is - most of my software are black boxes with no user interfaces, just .net or COM+ programmatic interfaces. [↩]

I just thought I’d mention, for anyone going through Tucson in the near future, that if you sit out in front of the Delta ticketing counter and select the “linksys” ssid, you might well find that you can reach the intertubes.

After posting the video tour of Junk Bond Observatory the other day, I made a mental note to add that video to YouTube, and now I’ve done so. You can see my YouTube Channel here, and if you go over there quick, you can be the very first person to watch a video from me on YouTube. If that dubious distinction does anything for you, anyway.

I’ll be working today on more video content, and will get the questions asked after the first video answered, so look for new video content tomorrow!

I’ve made it to Junk Bond Observatory, and spent today doing a bunch of housekeeping tasks, mostly relating to the computers and network around here. It is all part of a concerted effort to get ahead of schedule so I can complete six days work in four. We’re now ready to begin installing the new control system, which I’ve been working hard on for the last six weeks, and will probably bring it into use tomorrow night.

I’ve also re-acquainted myself with the observatory compound cats, who are all valuable assistants when crawling around on the floor looking for the correct jack to plug a cable into.

I should be in a position to post something interesting about this trip tomorrow, so even though we’re having a pretty light couple of days, stick with it - I think I can get a video guided tour going once the new control system is in place.

Right now, if all is going well, I’m getting on an airplane in Seattle, and not worrying about the blog at all. But through the magic of queuing posts for future publication, I can properly welcome today’s guest blogger, Sumen Rai.

She’s got a blog of her own, …and say we did, where she posts thoughtful and well-written skeptical postings on a variety of subjects. I’ve asked her to tackle an issue that is currently news in Australia, one that she’s in a better position to research and comment upon than I am. Her post should appear in about five or ten minutes.

So everyone welcome Sumen Rai, leave lots of comments on her post, and make her feel at home!

Today has been a light bog day¹, because I’ve been packing to prepare for a business trip to Arizona (Tucson and Sierra Vista areas, if there are any readers in those localities who might want to speak up).

Business trips for me involve going to warm climates, then driving up to cold mountaintops, where there is unending natural beauty, and dark skies affording me glorious views of the night sky. This time I will only be spending one night on a mountaintop, and a week at a quaintly-named privately-owned research facility: Junk Bond Observatory (see here, here, here - this last one is very out of date). It isn’t on a mountaintop and the nighttime lows should be tolerably in the 40’s F, instead of unpleasantly cold at altitude.

The place is owned by David Healy, the Grand Master of astro-imaging, having been doing the sport since the early 1970’s. Some of his images are published in the seminal Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, and today he’s a Contributing Editor at Astronomy magazine, and runs two to three telescopes on the facility mainly for research purposes (he has quite a lot of peer reviewed research published).

I supply some of the software that makes this all possible, and this week, JBO gets a major upgrade in capability. I also have to do a little mechanical work on the telescope and the dome. If you all are real good, I might post some video while I’m down there, maybe show you around the place and look at what it is like behind the scenes at a privately-funded, state of the art (mostly) research observatory.

One of my goals while I’m down there is doing a repeat of last year’s attempt at an all-sky, all-night time lapse, this time including the rise of the summer milky way at the end of the night, and featuring an absence, I hope, of early-morning clouds to rain on my Canon camera and fisheye lens. So I’ll be pursuing some personal projects while I’m down there as well, and if they work out, I’ll post about it here.

But first I have to fly down there, which takes all night and half a day, hence all the packing and preparation. So there simply won’t be any more blogging today, and probably nothing from me tomorrow until late in the day. But there will be one very special guest post tomorrow, so do check in anyway.

1. Although pretty heavy in terms of traffic, thanks to Pharyngula and StumbleUpon. [↩]