Lots of news about the economy recently. After getting out of class today, I learned Wachovia had tanked as well as several European banks. There is a Wachovia down the street from the Astronomy Department, so several of us decided to take a walk and see if anything exciting was going on. As we expected, there wasn”t much of note. Just this relatively amusing sign:
I”m currently in the middle of reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It was an interesting book before the current Bank crisis, but now it”s hitting a bit closer to home. It”s interesting to note the parallels between the book and the current state of things, especially the push towards government intervention that is coming from some groups of people.
This last week has been a stereotypical grad student week. I’ve graded 400 tests, turned in 3 homework assignments, ran one lab, assembled 8 telescopes, and started one telescope proposal. And worked an average of 10 hours/day for the last 7 days (including one day which was only 6 hours!) It’s been a pretty busy week.
The next week is shaping up to be similar, although a bit shorter. Homeworks due M,T,R, and a telescope proposal for the NRAO due Wed. I’m flying to Chicago to spend the weekend with my family though, so that’ll be a nice break. Hopefully Notre Dame can pull out a win over Standford. Especially since I’m missing a pig roast! ND better have a good showing! 
From Black Diamond (via their new Ice Climbing catalog), comes a wild picture and story of an ice climb that half-collapsed while two climbers were attempting the first ascent. Fortunately, they were on the half that didn’t collapse. The picture alone is worth seeing.
Leichtfried & Bendler attempting “Furope No Taki.”
As usual, things are rather busy here. Classes are in full swing, and I’m trying to get research done as well. I had an observing run last week using the NIR spectrograph built here at UVa. Sadly, it was pouring rain all night and we never opened the dome.
I’ve also been working with some data from the Spitzer Space Telescope to supplement some near-infrared data on an interesting Seyfert Galaxy. It’s an interesting project, so we’ll see what comes of it.
I finally went climbing with the UVa Outing club. We went bouldering just outside of town. It was a good time, and I’m looking forward to doing more stuff with them. I’ve put a few pictures online here: Moorman Bouldering on Flickr.
Several of the astro grads and myself went hiking a week and a half ago. We did Old Rag, which is a well known hike in the Shenandoah. We had a great time. Pictures are online here: Old Rag Hiking on Flickr
Anyways.. more soon hopefully..
Classes have now been in session for a little over a week. We’re still (mostly) doing introductory material, but some things have started ramping up. On Monday we started doing some calculations regarding high energy cosmic rays in the High Energy Astrophysics class. I’m already working on the first homework…
The other two classes are still doing introductory stuff. The extragalactic class is providing an overview of the course topics, so some of the ideas are new, but they’ll be explored in more detail later. The radio class just started covering radiative transfer, which is likely new to the first year graduate students. However, we had covered this last year in our stellar atmospheres class. But a bit of review is always nice.
All three of the courses have notes online:
In addition to the coursework, labs started this week. I’ve only done an orientation for my undergraduate observing course. Things will ramp up next week, with the first constellation lab for the course. And, I’m giving a lecture for the class! I’ll be going over the night sky and the constellations. It’ll be my first lecture for a college class. 2 hours long. What a way to start!
