The Blog - The Archive

Post-Christmas Roundup of things that are nifty...

I'm back at home now, no more house-sitting. But I've sadly caught a cold somehow and feel like death warmed up.

I think I'm in love with the "proofreader" function in Pages. Calling me on using the word "Headmaster" because it's gender-specific? Rock on, proofreader, rock on!

Going through the yuletide archive and picking out my favourites for future reference. I love all of these, and if you know the fandom you probably will enjoy them too.

• xkcd: The Amazing Adventures of Hat Guy and the Girl Who Stole His Hat
  OMG VELOCIRAPTORS!
• Portal: Pre-test Diagnostic Log #045216/F/4
• Pern: The Free of Pern

In other stuff I've found around the internet, we've apparently discovered that people who skip breakfast are likely to have sex at an earlier age than those who don't. I skip breakfast all the time, but I guess I'm doing it wrong or something.

Labels: cake, fanfiction, I am a fanfic whore, iCatherine, yuletide

 Yay!...

All the stories for the mini fanfiction exchange I was running with the kids at uni are now online! It only took all day, oops. But still, fun stories, go read! There's something for everyone, provided you like the West Wing or fandoms that start with "S"... We're going to announce the writers on New Year's Day, or you can guess in the comments if you feel you know my style well enough to guess which I'm responsible for.

In other news, Merry Christmas! Hope you're all having a wonderful time, filled with nice people and wonderful gifts, and religion if that's your thing too!

ETA: Yuletide's up!!!!! I got a Battle Royale fic!!! It's called Plenty of Paper and anyone who has seen the movie or read the book should read it because it's awesome and sad and the characters are so real it hurts and I'm crying.

Labels: battle royale, christmas, fanfiction, hoofball, physics, writing, yuletide

So tired...

I have entirely too many stories to write before Christmas. Well, at least two, and maybe a few more if I can't sleep. They'll be up here come Christmas day, although they'll be anonymous until new years. Feel free to post guesses as to which are mine here.

Am currently housesitting for my Aunt, and am responsible for three squawking birds, two bloody snakes and a rottweiler in the back yard. It's kinda fun, but a little stressful. I don't like being responsible for quite so many other living things, I have enough trouble remembering to feed myself.

Went into the city at lunchtime for the first test of the emergency sirens they've put in there. Despite the complaining I heard on the news tonight, they really were quite loud, so much so that James and I had to duck out of a direct path to enjoy the clamour better. It was pretty exciting, actually. But if I'd known they were going to test them regularly I wouldn't have gone to so much trouble today. Ah well, he might blog more info since I think he's less exhausted than me.

So, before bed then, two links:

• A review of the DDR Musical - She didn't like it so much, which is sad.
• My Little Princess Leia - Yes, I'm a fan of custom MLPs. Some of them are awesome. Deal.

Labels: christmas, DDR, e-vac-u-ate, house-sitting, losing sleep, ponies, writing

Safari on Windows is Not Crap...

Made it! With 15 hours to go.

And today's random classic links:

• Man's £5 debt repaid 39 years on - This is why I have the "nice people are nice" tag. What a nice story. *grins*
• Flying Penguins! - Okay, I seem to be having a touchy feely day today, but really, a plane full of penguins!
• The Cepheid Galactic Internet - Variable stars as a way of communicating between solar systems. Very cool stuff (hardish science).
• Don't Call Me Dude - a fun thrash song from the very early 90s.

Labels: music, nice people are nice, science, science fiction, writing, yuletide

 Trying to Post Regularly...

I had a train of thought, but then I lost it...

I ordered the final set of the CLAMP in 3-D land toys this morning. They might arrive before Christmas if I'm lucky: one more present to open. :) I might even catch up on photographing them then.

I've got a draft of my yuletide fic, but I really dislike it and will be either scrapping it or doing a full rewrite tonight. I've only got three days to go, eep!

I've also realised I have entirely too many "draft" posts in blogger, usually consisting of a link that I intend but never manage to post at a later moment. So I'm going through the vault to see what can be rescued and posted over the next couple of days.

• "I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek" - a terrible song by The Go Go's, who apparently never grasped the finer points of grammar. One wonders if that was any influence on their "success". (Also, it means I get to use my 'daleks' tag again. I don't even remember why I have that.)
• DDR: The Musical - I love the idea of this so very much, even if the reviews say it's crap and the pictures are pretty WTF, because shitty Japanese techno makes me happy.
  (Curiously, the thought of an actual revolution through dance brings back bad memories from reading "The Worst Band in the in Universe"--GBase, I love everything you do, but that book was lame.)
• Bee Gees keep you Stayin' Alive - Heh, it turns out the song is just right for CPR, and you're more likely to save someone if you sing along in your head.

Labels: christmas, daleks, damn you CLAMP, DDR, Graeme Base, long live the revolution, miscellany, music, random, yuletide

As promised, the text of one speech...

My name is Catherine Braiding and I'm a theoretical astrophysicist. It's a great line to use at parties and school reunions, because what can anyone say that could top "theoretical astrophysicist"? Everyone thinks rocket scientists are cool, even if they don't actually get to work with rockets. Unfortunately, doing astronomy also meant that I got a reputation among my old school friends for being "the girl who took the ad astra thing too far". It's a bad pun, and I'm sorry for that, but it's certainly true.

An astrophysicist is a great thing to be, it's why they invited me here to speak to you today, but it's not what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, I had a list as long as my arm, and more often than not I thought I'd rather end up studying English, maybe with a focus on journalism, or perhaps even music or media studies. As I said, it was a bit of a long list. Nowhere on that list was a science degree, much to the disgust of Mr Clark, my Chemistry teacher, and Mr Dunn, my 3 unit Maths teacher in years eleven and twelve.

Three days before the deadline for changing our uni preferences, while sitting under a tree in the top quad at recess, one of my friends flicked to a different page in the UAC guide, the big list of all the different university degrees offered in Australia, and there was the Bachelor of Science in Astronomy and Astrophysics. And I thought, "what the heck, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, maybe it will be fun", and I put it at the top of my wishlist.

But my then-vague interest in science dated back to long before I was considering career choices. It just took a while for me to remember it.

In 1994, I was invited along on one of the Bankstown to Broken Hill Youth Exchanges, and I got to spend a week in the outback city with some of my friends and our host families. The trip culminated in a bush dance in an old barn in the nearby ghost town of Silverton. My friends and I skipped out on the dancing part of things and instead went out to play on the swings.

It was a very cold winter night, the sort you only really get in the desert where there's no water in the atmosphere to keep in the heat, and we lay down on the ground to look up at a sky filled with more stars than a city kid like me had ever seen before. A bright white haze hung in a line across the sky like an oddly-shaped cloud, and the more I looked at it, the more I realised that it wasn't a cloud at all, but some part of that starry sky that I had never been able to see, coming from Sydney where we have so very much light pollution.

I know now that it's the combined light of the hundred billion stars that make up the disk of our Milky Way galaxy, tilted at such an angle that throughout the Southern winter it's high up in the sky, and that on the coldest of nights in Sydney, when you'd much rather be inside with a cup of hot chocolate, you will be able to make it out faintly passing through the constellations of Scorpius and the Southern Cross. But at that time all I knew was that it was beautiful and that some day, when I didn't have to stress quite so much about school, I would find out what it was.

We all have moments like that: of beauty; of awe; moments when we just look up at the sky and wonder "what is that?" and when that happens you should act on it. Take the inspiration and the chances that are given to you and run with them. Do science if it appeals to you in a moment of wonder. Form a rock band if you can't get a tune out of your head and you want to share it with someone else. Look something up on wikipedia if you just want an answer.

Eventually I was able to follow up on that moment in Silverton, though it took me four years to realise that I wanted to study astronomy. Ten years ago I had just finished my HSC exams, and was being rejected by McDonalds for a summer job, and I made the decision to study at Macquarie University, first doing that Bachelor of Science in Astronomy and Astrophysics, and then my Honours year, which was an extra year of coursework and my first taste of scientific research, and then the PhD, which has taken me five years but I wouldn't trade that time for anything. Well, I might be tempted in return for an actual salary, but most days I'd say it's worth it and we can't have everything.

In the December of 2002, when I was trying to decide what to do with my newly completed undergraduate degree, my best friends and I packed up some tents and made our way to Ceduna in South Australia, where for thirty seconds we got to see the Moon completely block out the Sun. It was late afternoon, we were sitting on a perfect sandy beach looking out at the ocean, and there were stars visible in the darkened sky. Of course, there was also a little cloud that blocked the Moon blocking the Sun, but that's both life and science for you: as often as it is beautiful and awe-inspiring, and full of the potential for discovery, sometimes things get clouded out. Despite that disappointment, it was on that trip that I decided to go on with further research and here I am today.

One of the things that was suggested as a topic when the school invited me to speak to you was how wonderful it was that a young woman from Sydney's South West had (almost) earned a PhD in Astrophysics. And I was surprised to realise that it was that big a deal.

Yes, I'm a woman from Yagoona, who has spent two and a half nights driving the Parkes Radio telescope, which shakes like an elevator every time one moves the dish and continues to work even in the driving rain; I've spent a few days observing on the Australia Telescope Compact Array, which is a series of six radio dishes spaced along a set of train tracks a kilometre long, and I used to regularly run Macquarie University's Observatory for the general public on Friday nights.

Yes, I went to Birrong Girls High School, and I've travelled around the world on the university's budget, attending summer schools in Japan and Germany on star and planet formation, and a conference in Hawaii, and my only disappointment with all of that was that I only got one afternoon for sightseeing and snorkling on the Big Island. I've organised the Astronomical Society of Australia's Annual Scientific Meeting, a week long series of talks and discussions on all the research in astronomy being done at all the observatories and the universities in Australia. I've met both famous scientists and obscure ones, and they've all been fascinating people that I could learn from.

I've taught both High School and University students; I've written one thesis--a novel-length essay--on the light that we see when the remnant of an exploded star, a supernova, interacts with a cloud that is forming new stars, and large sections of a second thesis describing the results of a computer model that I've built, which shows that the magnetic field in those star-forming clouds causes stars to form efficiently and may even show that planets naturally build as a part of the star formation process. This is all work that no one has done before, and in the ten years since I left school I've become one of only about six people on Earth who truly understand the complexity and importance of this project.

While I was doing all that, the fact that I was from Sydney's South West never really came up except as a point of personal pride. Yes, the university had to pay for my trips upfront, while the policy usually says that they reimburse a person afterwards, and yes, I took packed lunches to uni while my north shore friends bought takeaway food, and yes, I bought second-hand textbooks when money was tight. But my background as coming from this side of town never had any influence on me academically, and only ever came up when everyone swapped stories from High School.

Birrong Girls has great teachers who do care about you and your education, and the extra lessons you have learned about multiculturalism and inclusion, and leadership, and standing up for what you believe in and not letting anyone hold you back, and all the things from the powerpoint presentation earlier are more important than anything anyone may say to you about where you have come from, or what you might achieve as a woman in this world. For despite it being a cliché line, you can achieve anything you set your minds to, and in science, that's all that matters. More than in any other career path I've heard about; in science gender, social status, cultural background and upbringing don't matter as much as people may tell you they do, all that anyone needs to succeed is a mind that is willing to search for the answers to life's mysteries.

As you go out to your summer vacation, your time away from reading assigned texts and maths homework (except for the new year twelve students), your time for swimming and bludging and doing as little as possible for as long as possible, keep your eyes open. Somewhere in amongst all those celebrations of new-found freedom may be the inspiration to do something truly special with your life.

Find your dreams, work as hard as you need to at school to achieve them, and if you can't figure out what you want to be when you grow up that's okay too. Some of us are still trying to figure it out, even if we are currently theoretical astrophysicists.

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today, and congratulations to all of you, and your parents and teachers, for making it through another school year.

Labels: birrong, high school, public speaking makes me ill, published, snacky's law

Well then...

I have 1,600 words written on being a scientist, why I chose to take that path in life and how being from the western suburbs really doesn't matter in academia.

If I'm not completely mortified at my performance I'll post it here tomorrow night.

Labels: birrong, high school, public speaking makes me ill, snacky's law

Fanfiction Update...

Since the reveal happened over at x2009, I can finally link to the story I wrote. I'm told that it's readable even if you don't know X (X/1999) since I was my usual vague self in not giving character names or really explaining what's going on.

Title: From Whence We Have Fallen
Rating: PG

Characters/Pairing: Subaru Sumeragi

Warnings: Descriptions of the nuclear blast at Hiroshima and recollections of canon violence.

Author's note: Thanks to Drew for betaing this.
Summary: The Japanese built to withstand earthquakes. Subaru reflects on those things that remain.

( And in Babylon was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth. )

Labels: damn you CLAMP, fanfiction, from whence we have fallen, japan, Tokyo, writing, X

Some Good News...

After all those doctors appointments, and being poked and prodded all over, they've concluded that:

• I don't get enough Vitamin D
• I'm stressed
• Everything else is normal (at least in 20% of women).

So that's all good and I am not actually dying.

Working on a big web project at uni (what PhD?) so have little time to blog, but will try to catch everyone up soon.

Labels: phd, sickly-Cat, university politics have got me down, vitamins, web stuff