This category of the blog is dedicated to science & technology topics that I think may interest my fellow nerds.
(Note: Original post: 2012. A few updates were made during site reorganization in January, 2021.)
For starters, I’ll be posting in the blog regularly under Astronomy & Astrophysics. (In some of these older posts the category is tagged Pixel Gravity.) To jump straight to those posts, visit the PG Archive–readily accessible in the menu. For some time now, I’ve been running the social-media support for the program that made the picture you see here. I’ve been posting about robots, space exploration, astronomy, big steps in physics, and so on. Sometimes, the space available for a posting on Facebook is too restrictive. So those kinds of discussions will move here.
What qualifies me to write about this stuff? Well, I’ve admitted elsewhere that we are a family of hypernerds. That’s not my term. It was invented and applied by one of our charming (adult) offspring. It’s not a misnomer As a family, we are 40% engineers and 60% scientists.
I’m a power systems engineer, which in my case means I’ve made a career out of simulating how power plants and electric and gas networks operate.
My husband is a computational physicist, specializing in solar physics. Want to know what’s going on inside the sun? He’s your guy.
Our youngest son is too busy for now, building catapults and robots on his way to a mechanical-engineering degree at UC Santa Barbara. (Update: graduated, with honors. Currently open to job offers.)
After two summer internships in NASA’s astrobiology group, our middle son is working on an honors thesis project on metabolic processes of microbes in deep serpentine wells, attracted by the prospect of doing biology fieldwork in extreme ecosystems right here on planet Earth. (Update: he’s now nearly done with his Ph.D.)
And the oldest escaped from UC Berkeley’s astrophysics program with a degree and a desire to never return to academia. He built Pixel Gravity instead.
What’s “Pixel Gravity“? It’s a detailed, graphical astrophysics simulator with real-time controls. It looks sort of like a game, and it’s fun to play with, but it’s also a serious science tool As an ānābodyā simulator, it lets users model complex groups of many objects, from the solar system to galaxies. Most of the other easy-to-use programs available online limit the number of objects or lack physical accuracy, so (for example) relativistic effects on motion near a black hole are not handled properly, if at all. University researchers have access to extremely-detailed models, but those require supercomputers. Pixel Gravity provides accurate modeling on personal computers and is priced low so that even students can explore gravity in action. In addition to Newtonian gravity, Pixel Gravity models the additional effects of atmospheric drag, general relativity, and dark-matter, as well as user-defined forces. Plus, the software package includes helpful tools for curriculum development such as a tutorial-builder and video-production capability. (Update: Pixel Gravity is at present a retired product–contact us if you’d like a copy to play with.)
So, in short, the topics under this heading are just the kind of things we talk about at our house. So if you come to dinner, you don’t need to bring a foodie specialty. But you might scan the latest issue of Scientific American.
One of my writing groups (the one that isnāt a critique circle) has set a blog-post prompt of āHow do you measure success as an author?ā Weāre supposed to introspect, come up with wise words to inspire and console others. I donāt know about yāall, but the past two years have been a low-rising roller coaster, beginning with a brief burst of elation that my first book (my ādebutā if you want to get precious about it) was coming out.
Only then we had a little bit of a pandemic to deal with.
And now itās two years later.
All That Was Asked has never had a book-launch party (it slightly predates online launch parties), a signing session, a reading at a conventionānone of those things. Not uncoincidentally, it hasnāt made much dough for me or for my publisher. At least the print copies are mostly print-on-demand, so no oneās staring at a warehouse full of unsold copies and calling a shredding company.
But is selling a ton of books a success? To stay sane in this business, I think you have to measure success more on the basis of what you are doing than what you have done. If youāre making oodles of money in the publishing industry, thatās mostly a matter of luck, so is that success? Iād call it good fortune. Itās very much a lottery. Iāve read absolutely stunning work in critique circles, listened to mind-blowing readings by little-known writers, and Iāve even had people tell me after a reading āwow, that was awesome!ā
What makes sense is to measure how this workāwritingāimpacts your life. Is this what you live for? Not in a rosy-eyed, dreamy way, not āI luv writing <3ā but āwriting is what drags me out of everything elseā and āwriting is my food, drink, and sleepā and āwriting is how I exist in this universe.ā
What Iām doing right now is working on projects that Iāve wanted to tackle for yearsāno, decadesābut never could due to the vicissitudes of child-rearing, day-job workload, personal upheavals, and disability.Ā Iām not whining. These are just facts. I chose to raise kids, and it was satisfying work (and, yes, frustrating, too, but in all the right ways). However, doing the best job possible involved more than dropping them off at our barely-adequate schools. It meant advocating for them, fighting an uncaring administrative system, volunteering, fundraising, and, as a last-resort, homeschooling. At least in the pandemic age, there are more parents out there who understand that homeschoolingāat least not ideallyāisnāt a romp in the garden, itās serious work. And, like most of us, for me that was work that had to take place in parallel with earning a living.
So right now, Iām successful. Every morning (afternoon?) I wake up, and thereās writing to do.
This kind of writing, which is off-the-cuff, barely edited, and hurled into the interweb’s event horizon, never to be seen by human eyes.
Critical writing, where Iām critiquing work by fellow writers, trying to help them make their stories the best they can be.Ā
Social-media writingāmostly Twitterāwhere I practice being concise, kind, and thoughtful.
And, finally, yes, writing my own stories, the ones Iāve been wanting to read.
What I’ve been looking forāand yes, I’ve found some, but far too fewāare stories led by characters who have trouble communicating, who donāt fit in, who think differently than others but find a way through life anyhow. I’m tired of hero’s-journey stories and chosen-one tales that take themselves too seriously. I don’t mind playing with the tropes. For instance, one of my WIPs has a seeming “chosen one” in it, but the whole thing is a crock, a scheme worked up by a person who’s trying to change society and is using an old myth to get buy-in. Not that the “chosen” person isn’t worthy, but there’s no magic in the processāthey’re carefully selected for capability and then trained for the job.
Iām not writing to market. I admit that. So I canāt complain about sales, not too much. It may take time for people like me to find the stories Iām writing for them. Thatās OK. I waited a long time. A little longerāI can deal.
Well, I’m trying to, anyhow.
In the meantime, Iām keeping on. For me, that writers learned to use remote meetings to connect for critiques, discuss craft, conduct conventions, and more has been a compensatory gain during the pandemic. Itās not a benefit of this horrible time; itās a thing we could should have been doing all along, and only just now learned to value. When the pandemicās over, weāll keep connected this way. Thatās a good thing, but we donāt get to pretend itās all right that millions of people died while those of us privileged to live were fumbling our way to this belated discovery.
Iāve leveraged that new learning, because Iām an engineer and tech things come naturally to me. Iāve let myself get roped into volunteering to help others less comfortable with the technologyāand thatās OK, because participating with other writers helps me connect more deeply with my writing community. I value the friendships Iāve formed with people Iāve only met in Zoom rooms. This is not a trivial feelingāI dedicated my Monday afternoons for half this past year to help a Zoom friend whose critique circle had lost their only zoom-capable member. That meant stepping aside from one of my other critique circles, one that needed me less. Iām returning to my prior group as of this month, because my friend’s old zoom-host has returned. Iāll miss the new friends I made in her circle, even though we only ever saw each other in little boxes on our computer screens.
Am I a failure because I had to defer my writing career? Looking back through my drawer of shelved and partly-done stories, one thing is strikingly clearāI was so young, so ignorant, so clueless. Much of what Iām writing now, I couldnāt have done when I was younger. In technique, I’m much better than my younger self; some of that gain I can attribute to years of writing science and engineering reports and papers, working collaboratively with colleagues on phrasing, structure, and word choice … plus coping with deadlines. Beyond the technique, older me is able to imagine more-complex characters, see worlds with more-different people in them. Through personal experience, I know most livesāmost real storiesādon’t have a ācall to adventureā or a āsupreme ordeal.ā Thereās no wise mentor waiting to guide us. We have to muddle through, try to survive in an irrational universe, and deal with the fact we’ll never quite make sense of it all.
Sure, Iām still learning. You have to keep learning. Itās the key to growth in every respect. Even there, though, Iām doing better, working actively to learn more of what I need to continue improving.
In my next posting, Iāll demonstrate my success by sharing a list of what I consider to be my 2021 accomplishments not only as a writer but also as a member of the writing community.
Now that you have all of your supplies ready, it’s time to guide your group through the construction of a model atom.
Start by handing out the marshmallows and ice-cream topping pieces. With younger participants, it can maintain focus if you mention that there are extra supplies for snacking on afterwards.
Start with the marshmallow. Most of an atom is empty space. And most of a marshmallow is nothing but air frothed into sugar. So this marshmallow represents the āemptyā space of an atom. For older participants, you can encourage them to think of the sugar of the marshmallow as representing not only the energy that permeates what we call āemptyā space but also the forces that hold the atom together.
For a very long time, the atom was believed to be more-or-less of uniform density, an amorphous mixture of tiny negative particles called electrons swirling around in a positively-charged “pudding.” In 1911, Ernst Rutherford and his team completed a series of experiments that shocked the physics community by revealing that most of the mass of an atom is concentrated in a tiny, central nucleus containing all of the positive charge. For our model, in honor of Rutherford, we’ll build a helium (He) atom, which has a nucleus containing two protons and two neutrons. (Much of Rutherford’s research focused on the alpha particle–which happens to be exactly the same as a helium nucleus.)
Let your dark-colored candies be protons and your light-colored candies be neutrons. (It doesn’t really matter, but textbooks often draw protons as dark dots and neutrons as white dots.)
Candy Nucleons
2 Neutron, 2 Protons
Using the wooden skewer or toothpick, drill a small hole in the side of the marshmallow. Now use the same toothpick or skewer to push those nucleons (a word which here means “candy pieces representing protons and neutrons”) into the center of the marshmallow.
Pathway for the Nucleus
1 Down, 3 To Go
This is a good time in the activity to stop lecturing and instead gather suggestions from the participants and sketch their ideas on a board if you have one, or to gather around some sketching paper for discussion purposes. You can expect to see pictures that look much like a planetary system, because thatās the way the atom often (still!) is drawn in textbooks. You might have a knowledgeable participant who’ll shout out something like, “Shells! The electrons are in shells!” or “They’re in the Cloud!” Regardless, during the discussion, build on these volunteered suggestions to reach a description of the electrons as whirling around the nucleus in a cloud, going so fast that you canāt really tell exactly where they are, only that you know roughly how far they are from the nucleus.
At this point, we have a positively charged ion, because we havenāt added any electrons yet. A helium atom needs two electrons, negatively-charged particles, to balance out the two positively-charged protons. Once it was established that the positive charge is concentrated in the nucleus, where did researchers decide that the electrons belong?
Our helium atom’s two electrons do indeed share an electron āshellā, a layer of electrons a known distance from the nucleus. So let’s put a very thin, energetic, sparkly shell around our atom.
Before setting up the shell supplies, pause to demonstrate the procedure. If you’re working with younger students, you may need to stress that everyone will get their turn. If the “mess” part of the activity is an issue, set up a protected area where the messy activity is OK and let the participants queue up to build their atoms in assembly-line fashion.
To create the āelectron shellā skewer the marshmallow firmly on the wooden stick, then very briefly dunk it into the water, then tap off any excess water into the water container. Tapping off excess water is important, because otherwise the marshmallow can get soggy, which makes for a less-attractive candy atom.
Dunk
and un-dunk.
Each group needs a container with about a cup of water in it and another container with a packet of dry gelatin mix emptied into it. (For fun, choose a gelatin color in keeping with whatever events are ongoing, or a local sports team’s colors…anything to drive interest.)
Finally, gently swirl the damp marshmallow in the gelatin mix.
Adding the Electron Shell
Set the decorated marshmallows aside on a sheet of waxed paper or a plate.
Two Finished Helium Atoms
As time permits, participants can make other atomsā¦stuffing different numbers of protons or neutrons into marshmallows and adding a shell of electrons.
In my previous post, I tried to explain how all those odd names ended up in my recently-published book and why I think it’s fun to play around with languages in the middle of a story.
So, what if you don’t really care about all that linquistic
nonsense, but just want a guide to pronouncing stuff in this particular story? In what follows, I’m going to share what I’ve
prepared for the person doing our audio book.
On the surface, it may look daunting, but, really, it all hangs together
with a few key elements:
Lots of the names end in a shortened “ay” sound I’ve tagged here as ei. It sounds almost like a long ay, but is cut short like you were going to pronounce a “y” on the end, but stopped yourself just in time, “say” without that teensy “eeya” sound that wraps up that word. Sort of like “sensei” as pronounced in Japan, or at least in anime and Japanese TV shows.
In names ending in e, the final e is always sounded–usually as that shortened “ay” sound.
The exception is “ere”, which is ayr-ee, wherever it happens to fall, so some names end with ayr-ee, while some have that in the middle or at the beginning.
Children (or adults being teased as if they are children) or intimate friends get their names shortened with a bit of a stop in the middle, so Ansegwe becomes An-s-wei, and Kantalare becomes K-a-la-rei
As an example of the “translated words” system: the “aunts” are “awnts”, Brit/Northeast/Southern style, rather than Midwestern style “ants”.
Digression: How come I like weird names? Well, jeepers, I’ve got one of my own, one
that often gets pronounced weird, though I don’t care, really, I’ve heard ’em
all. The “correct” way is
va-‘ness-uh ma-‘cla-ren-‘ray. There are
other pronunciations in use . . . but those are other Vanessas and other MacLarens.
OK, here we go. I’m not using really formal linguistic notation, but sound-shorthand that I think we all can follow. I put a single quote at the front of the stressed syllable in each word.
Our Main Characters
Varayla Ansegwe, Eskenyan Jemenga, Ensense Kantalare,
Varaylas Ansele and Adeleke, and Haillyen.
These all appear frequently, though it takes a while for Kantalare to
show up. See how what we call “last
names” (family names) come first, and “first names” (personal
names) come second.
Wary, indeed. Photo of sketch on wall, by Quinn Dombrowski, Berkeley, CA (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Varayla: Va-‘ray-la This
one’s pretty phonetic, the tricky thing, from listening to auditions for our
audio book, is that some people seem to read the “yla” as
“lya”. This reminds me of how
people read the second half of my last name as “Wary” instead of
“Wray”. Don’t let it worry
you, but if you prefer mispronouncing Varayla, just don’t go to Korlo.
In the bad old days, you could earn a set of cement overshoes for
mispronouncing that name to the wrong person.
Ansegwe: ‘ahn-seg-wei Our hero’s name is most likely to be mispronounced as on-‘seg-way, which is hilarious, as it makes me picture this enormous klutz trying to ride a Segway. The first syllable should be said relatively slowly, so the second two click together fast, so that you almost lose the sound of the “e” in the middle: ahns’gwei. It has a kind of Japanese flavor to it.
Eskenyan: ess-‘ken-yan It
sounds sort of like “a person from Kenya” (at least the way Americans
say it) plus “Ess” in front of it.
Jemenga: ja-‘meng-uh When
Jemenga is particularly pleased with himself, he really hits that middle
syllable, so it’s like Ja-MENG-ah!
The Varayla Syndicate’s above-board operations include space-based solar power satellites. (Not quite like this. This is NASA’s Solar-b satellite)
Ansele: ‘ahn-se-lei Tycoon
aunt #1.
Adeleke: a-‘del-e-kei Tycoon
aunt #2.
Haillyen: ‘hay-ul-lee-yen This is a “foreign” word to Ansegwe, so he’s basically phonetically “translated” it, the ‘y’ in the last syllable is a bridge sound you get when putting ee and en together between the ee and the en. Do ya get it? Yeah? The reader should get it about 100 pages before Ansegwe catches on.
Ensense: en-‘sens-ei You know, like, “sensei” with an “en” at the front.
Kantalare: kahn-tah-‘lahr-ei There’s a secondary stress on the first syllable. Just make it sound pretty in your head. Ansegwe is totally in love with her, so, whatever, hear her as beautiful
2. The people on the expedition
Some of these folks are only mentioned or quoted during the “expedition” chapters.
Tkonle: t-‘kawn-lei
Kulandere: koo-lahn-‘dayr-ee
Tekere: ta-‘kayr-ee
Tereinse: ‘tayr-ee-in-sei
Alekwa: ah-‘leek-wah
Nara: ‘nah-rah
Ensargen: en-‘sahr-gen It’s
a hard g, as in “gun”, not a soft one as in “generation”.
They don’t really use hard “g”
Korton: ‘kor-tun
Alawere: ah-la-‘wayr-ee
Tasegion: tah-‘seg-ee-on
Turame: too-‘rah-mei
3. People at home
Kateseo: ka-‘tay-see-oh
Kinshada: kin-‘shah-dah
Tumbal: ‘toom-bal
Erekulu: ayr-ee-‘koo-loo OK,
this one isn’t a person, he’s a domesticated animal, so his name is a little
goofy, meant to sound cute.
Tokal: toh-‘kahl
Ans’we: ‘ahn-se-wei This is
a nickname for Ansegwe, used mostly by Kantalare, but also used by his
expedition “friends” when they want to get on his case.
K’alare-: kah-‘lahr-ei This
is a nickname for Kantalare, used by Ansegwe.
Az-dyel: ahz-dee-‘ell Note
that this is another “foreign” word that Ansegwe has transcribed this
way, so it’s pretty phonetic, the three syllables have almost equal stress, I
hear just a little more on the last one, but you can feel more free to mess
around with this one–it’s the ONLY word in this language that appears at all.
Eskewere: ess-ke-wayr-ee
Ensense Halense: en-‘sen-sei hah-‘len-sei This is a member of Kantalare’s extended family that they happen to run into at some point.
4. List of authors.
About two-thirds of the way through, someone gives Ansegwe a
reading list, and the authors of the books are a mix of people from his world,
one from outside his culture, and one (the last) he’s going to spend a lot of
time with. I wouldn’t worry about these too much, but have fun with them. Yeah, uh-huh, that’s intentional.
Asvelan Kulumbu: ‘ahs-veh-lahn koo-‘loom-boo
Palawan Vejr: ‘pah-lah-wahn vee-‘yay-zher
Trjia Qwijlian: ‘trr-zhee-ah ‘kwizh-lee-ahn
Tsulander Tkonle: ‘Tzoo-lahn-der T’kawn-lei
5. People in quotes.
Yeah, this is one of those books where each chapter opens
with a quote from someone. I picture
these as remarks that people who know Ansegwe have made when interviewed about
the events in the story. Picture them
sitting across the desk on their version of The Daily Show, chatting with their
Trevor Noah. Most of the quoted
individuals made it into the final. A
few only get mentioned in these quotes.
These ones are mostly government officials. Make them sound stuffy, self-important, and
less-than-competent.
Insake Hailaware: ‘in-sah-kei hai-uh-la-‘wahr-ei (For fussiness, there’s
a secondary stress on first syllable in Hailaware. He will get all huffy if you
miss that and maybe will find some minor infraction to write you up for.)
Elesennen Haileski:
el-es-‘sen-en hai-uh-‘les-kee
Kinsala Tkerelon: kin-‘sah-lah T-‘kayr-ee-lon
6. Other words and place names.
The story takes place in a fairly limited set of
“alien” geographic locations.
But I do have some place names included and there are a few other
“thing” words that appear more than once.
The Kalinidor is something like this. Alexander Fleming’s Nobel Prize (1945) (Jemenga would discover penicillin if someone else hadn’t already.) Source: Science and Society Picture Library, London Museum of Science (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Korlo: ‘kor-low It simply
sounds like “core” “low”.
This is Ansegwe’s country.
Kalinidor: ka-‘lin-ee-dor This
is a person’s name that’s become an object name–sort of like the Nobel Prize, well,
actually, exactly like the Nobel prize.
Jemenga really really wants one of these.
Quazwallade: kwaz-‘wall-ah-dei This is a place name, just a foreign country,
one with some technological and cultural differences from Korlo.
Cignali: sig-‘nah-lee Let’s
say that probably this was originally a person’s name, but now it’s the name of
a famous university, think “Stanford”.
Utumwe: oo-‘tum-wei I told
you there were academics in this story.
This is another university, a medical school actually, one that Jemenga
lectures at, when they can get him.
Terende: ta-‘ren-dei Another place name.
Tule: ‘too-lei Yep, place
name. Doesn’t get much play, but even minor places count, says the writer who
lives in a town that isn’t a proper town, just a collection of farms, houses,
shops, and a gas station, that gets its own post office.
