Things I Love, have Great Interest In, Am Fascinated With

What fascinates me. Things i'll always choose over other things. Things i'd even get up early in the morning for. (Yeesh, i hope that doesn't happen too often...)

Thunderstorms

I love to walk outdoors when a storm approaches - watching the cumulus clouds build up tall and puffy, sunlight and shadow interlaced in the puffs and crevices, their heavy dark gray bottoms looming larger and closer. Rain starts to fall, big fat drops stirring up dust from the road. Time to take cover and watch the lightning, hear the thunder rumble. Deep satisfaction.


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Stars and Other Night Sky Things

Ten thousand particles of light, bright medium and dim, tossed at random on a deep black sky...Very young, I wondered what they were. My dad was a science teacher, so he told me what the scientists of the 1960's knew. That lead me to ask: "If the stars are so far away, how do the scientists know that?" Also, the planets - Mars with a CO2 atmosphere, Venus with thick, thick clouds than no one knew much about, and Saturn with its fantastic rings. My dad didn't know much about the rings - probably they were some sort of fluid or dust or loose rocks orbiting around.

In elementary school, i read many books on astronomy - lots of them - all three, in fact. Not only my parents, but teachers, noticed my interest in astronomy, science, and geeky stuff. (I don't think the work "geek" existed back then.) My third grade teacher gave me an intriguing toy - a Digi-Comp II, but i am getting off topic. In fourth grade, i yacked so much about planets, the teacher had me give a presentation to the class. I made a big paper-mache (?) illustration of the solar system, with Sun, Mercury, Venus and all. I wonder if Oakley Park Elementary kept it, expecting it to be worth a million dollars now that i'm a big celebrity. Hmmm. Anyway, i was a tiny Carl Sagan in my single digit years.

Now i rub elbows and drink beer with a few of the world's top ring scientists. Everyday i write data processing routines, clean cosmic rays, and color correct the images of Saturn and its rings from the Cassini mission. Today, we know 100,000,000(*) times more about the rings than what my dad knew when i was a kid. Apart from professional involvement in planetary science, i check sites like Universe Today, Bad Astronomy, Space Weather, and the various science news sites. By the way, my boss is a saint

Light and Color

My favorite color is "all of them". Love of colors, light, and reflections and refractions is partly why I became an artist and computer graphics geek.

According to my mom, my first word was "light" which i spoke when the family was in the car and approaching a traffic light.

Systems of Symbols

Musical notation, mathematical notation, astrology, electronics and computer programming all involve abstract symbols. Creating and studying systems of symbols fascinates me, and any topic that involves symbols will keep me interested far longer than topics that don't, all else being similar. Do the designers of symbols think about the shapes and their meanings? How is that a horizontal dash and a vertical dash intersecting at their centers came to mean "add"? Is there something right-angle-ish about adding? Why pointing in four directions at one time?

Radio Telescopes

Big dishes, cutting edge electronics designed to tease out faint signals from numerous sources of noise. I have a picture cut out from a magazine showing the big dishes at (IIRC) Socorro NM, with the sunset as backdrop. Nice dramatic view, great colors. Something about that attracts me, and every job hunt i send a resume or two to some radio or optical telescope facility.

More...

Someday, when i'm not wasting time, i'll write a paragraph detailing each of these...

last updated 2007-Feb-17
(*) footnote: this number has not been properly calibrated and should be treated as an approximation.