I’ve written before about my husband’s affection, or rather, obsession with Apple. Like all good converts, he feels compelled to proselytize, particularly about my perceived need for an iPhone. “But honey, you can check your email!” “Hey look! Google Maps knows where you are!”. I remain unconvinced.

However, the other day, he nearly got me:

“Did you know it can emulate the HP-15C?”

Be. Still. My. Heart.

The HP-15C is simply the finest piece of handheld computing technology ever. (Take that Steve Jobs). I got my first 15C back in high school, and it was the only calculator I used for the next couple of decades. I could operate it in the dark. I lost it in an airplane seat back pocket and have never gotten over it.

I suppose in the intervening years we’ve gotten used to irrational devotion to electronic gadgets, but the 15C had to have been one of the first targets, at least in geeky circles. If you mention the 15C to a nerds of a certain age, our eyes grow misty at the utter perfection of it. It was a calculator that simply got everything right.

The genius of the 15C is multifold. First is the form factor. It’s essentially the same as an iPhone, held in landscape mode, with a nice weight that fits well in the hand. The buttons are large and well separated, and there are no more or no fewer than you could want. (In comparison, modern HP calculators are crammed with a thicket of unusable little buttons. Ick.) Second is the glory of reverse polish notation. The 15C operates with a memory stack, which when operating with RPN allows you to perform complex calculations with no need for parentheses. Third is the 15C’s unnatural durability. A former dog of mine literally mangled a friend’s 15C, and it continued to work in spite of the large teeth marks denting the keys. Fourth (and most critical for getting me through years of physics labs and observing runs) was that it’s programmable. That’s no big deal these days, but huge in the early 80’s. Spreadsheets were hardly widespread, and when one timed balls going down ramps or any other such repeated trial, doing repetitive calculations was a breeze on the 15C.

Now, am I alone if my love for the 15C? No, indeed. On Ebay, a 15C in good shape can go for hundreds of dollars. (And if you buy one, it’ll still work. I’m guessing one will not say the same about the iPod in 30 years.). There’s an on-line petition begging HP to bring the 15C back.

And, there are people out there writing emulators for it to run on the iPhone. If you ever see me with an iPhone, this will be why.

In honor of the holiday, I offer you a Muppet-ized version of “Danny Boy”:

Over at Steinn’s place, we’re all a twitter anticipating the number of Hubble Space Telescope proposals submitted this Cycle. Fancy new instruments and shiny bad-ass spectrographs coming to the telescope, so interest should be high. Based on comments, here’s proposal number versus time until deadline. I’ll add any late breaking data to the plot — post submission times (PST, preferrably, because math iz hard) in comments here or at Steinn’s, and I’ll add them as I can.

Apparently this is a nice exponential, so my prediction is that we’ll have an infinite number of proposals this round.

Update: No! Flattening off! We may not even break 1000, which is a shock! Highest number so far is 928 at 10 minutes until the deadline. Extrapolated fit uses the most recent decade in time. Any procrastinators out there have something higher?

Post-Mortem: While cracking some beers with my group at 5:05 PST, we talked with a student who had submitted a STIS proposal. Apparently the spectroscopic ETC (exposure time calculator) was all kinds of crazy, so I’m betting that cut down on the number of proposals one could just whip out for COS or STIS. The imaging ETC worked just great (or at least, it lied convincingly). I also agree with Steinn that a lot of people decided to sit this one out, since there were of course going to be 2000 proposals (the same way that the number of proposals went up after the ACS failure, since of course no one was going to be asking for time on WFPC2 and NICMOS). Apparently you’d make a killing placing short sales on HST proposal betting.

Researchers at University of Arizona’s Lunar & Planetary Laboratory have just released images of major rockslides on Mars in progress.

That’s just plain cool. Phil at Bad Astronomy has more, as expected!

Spotted in the Google Ads sidebar of a news article:

So there’s snow in Chicago, and I’m stuck on the tarmac in Baltimore, on the phone to United Airlines, trying to reschedule my connection. But alas, the chipper recorded gentleman has not offered me the option “If you are currently trapped in an airplane, please say ‘Trapped’”. I take the best of the available options, but that man on the phone keeps prodding me for more information, none of which seems to be leading me closer to dealing with the “trapped on an airplane” issue. In increasing frustration, I start muttering “Operator. Operator. Operator”. After which I hear:

Infinitely patient phone guy: “I heard that you want an agent. Is this correct?”

Me: “Y.e.s.”

Infinitely patient phone guy: “Thank you! Before I transfer you, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Me (muttering): “oh fuck you.”

Infinitely patient phone guy: “I’ll transfer you to an agent immediately!”

Apparently, the voice recognition system has an escape hatch.

Rediscovering this ancient Sesame Street skit has been my one source of joy while I slog through the writing of an immense, tedious, but necessary data paper.

Former UW grad student Jason Steffen got a wee bit irked on a flight a few years ago. Which led to this:

arXiv:0802:0733

Using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo optimization algorithm and a computer simulation, I find the passenger ordering which minimizes the time required to board the passengers onto an airplane. The model that I employ assumes that the time that a passenger requires to load his or her luggage is the dominant contribution to the time needed to completely fill the aircraft. The optimal boarding strategy may reduce the time required to board and airplane by over a factor of four and possibly more depending upon the dimensions of the aircraft. I explore some features of the optimal boarding method and discuss practical modifications to the optimal. Finally, I mention some of the benefits that could come from implementing an improved passenger boarding scheme.

While you will not find the article in Phys Rev, it will hopefully be found in a future issue of the Journal of Air Transportation Management.

One of my postdocs has turned me on to blackle.com. The simple idea behind Blackle is that it’s identical to Google, except for the energy efficient black background:

It’s a cute idea, though they should have chosen dark blue and gone for “Bloogle”.

Now that late January is upon us, a wave of graduate school admissions letters is soon to come crashing down upon undergraduates throughout the land. The process can be immensely frustrating to a student, as one often has little idea as to what magic ingredient is determining whether one is admitted or rejected from different schools. Having been involved in graduate admissions decisions for much of the last decade, I therefore thought I’d give a summary of how it’s done at UW Astronomy, so students can get a sense of where in the process their application might potentially go astray. My take will be different from other schools and other departments whose admissions committees may emphasize different strengths, but at least it’s one data point where few are available.

Details below the fold. Enter if you dare!
Continue reading ‘The Other Side of Graduate Admissions’