First day at nursery



[Image of Humuhumu in khaki trousers and a stripey jumper, being held by a pretty blonde nursery staff member in a red t-shirt.]

On her first day at nursery, Humuhumu had a fabulous time. She’s quite sociable, plays on her own for long stretches of time and will happily eat most things. The big culinary discovery this week was custard. I think she’s wondering why we’d never given it to her previously. She’s even managed to pick up a new trick over the course of her first three days. She now knows how to throw a toy out of her reach and then wait for us to pick it up. It is even more tedious than I had previously imagined.

On Humuhumu’s first day at nursery, her mummy went to the campus cafe to hide behind dark glasses and a large cappucino and pretend not to be crying. She did manage to do a bit of work and to have a long walk, but she went to pick up Humuhumu fifteen minutes early because she couldn’t stand it any longer.

First day at work



[Image of me with shiny salon hair and dark sunglasses in front of the Floozie in the Jacuzzi, central Birmingham.]

My first day back at work was last Friday. On Thursday, I got my first non-self-inflicted haircut in 18 months, pictured above. On Friday, I got up at 5:30 am to breastfeed Humuhumu and was out the door by 6. I ended up missing the 18:15 on the way back and had to take a later, slower train, so I didn’t get home until 10 pm. However, I had good briefings with colleagues and a tasty pub lunch and I moved my desk to a new office.

Additionally, I took part in the following exchange.

Me, re an ex-colleague: He’s gone to work on software interfaces for a Russian moon lander.
Labmate: In Soviet Russia, moon lands on you!

This is why I missed my work.

Viennese shop windows

I've been going through the photos I took in Vienna and these made a little series.



Image of a little stone angel with her tilted head resting on her hands.

( +3 )

And in conclusion, BABY.


[Image of a shirtless Humuhumu laughing at her daddy, reflected in the mirror of the wardrobe behind her.]

It’s Friday and it’s time for the debut episode of Awesome Things My Friends Have Made! First on my list is kake and bob’s Randomness Guide to London. When I want to find a pub that serves decent ale or a restaurant that serves delicious non-standard-British fare in a neighbourhood I don’t know, the RGL is my first stop, and it always delivers an excellent recommendation. The creators and contributors make an effort to provide the kind of detail that you might not know you wanted, such as exact prices paid on the dates of their visit, child-friendliness, music volume, and layout of the venue. They also give accessibility information, both at entrances and (crucially for London) to the loos.

If you live in London and want to contribute to the RGL, I can highly recommend going with kake and/or bob on a scouting trip for the guide. Both make a delightful accompaniment to a good pint or a plate of delicious food.

You can track the evolution of the RGL on Dreamwidth at rglondon, which is updated weekly.

[Image: My daughter in a new black ThinkGeek onesie with "n00b" printed on the front.]

Yesterday was Humuhumu's first big adventure. We went to London on the train and then to my work. She & the bloke then wandered off to the museums while I worked frantically for about three hours. Well, I say the museums. I found them in the pub, so I rather suspect much of the time was spent having lunch with the bloke's friend and charming the bar staff with her big-eyed wonder at the bright lights of the big city.

It was our first time changing her nappy in public, too. I was happy to discover that Marylebone station, in addition to being beautiful, has nice unisex changing facilities so the bloke & I could take our time fumbling around with the change bag.

She was quietly curious, feeding or sleeping for 90% of the trip. The one exception was the bus. Bus journeys with an infant in a pram are a bad idea. Even if the bus isn't rammed, you can't remove the baby from the pram while you're on it - it lurches around too much. Humuhumu is accustomed to being picked up when she cries, which was possible on the train because we had time to get settled in and put the pram away before the train started moving. It wasn't possible on the bus, and the betrayed looks she was giving me as she voiced her disapproval at being left strapped in were as painful to me as the oppressive weight of other passenger's judgment. (I'd forgotten how many miserable gits there are in London.) Future bus journeys, I conclude, will be made with her in her sling. Train journeys, on the other hand, are a golden opportunity for her to make the commuters go all gooey, even large and forbidding-looking gentlemen in suits.

Since Curiosity is soon to make its necessarily complicated landing on the surface of Mars, I thought I’d share the lecture notes I made when I went with three of my work colleagues to the Royal Aeronautical Society (not to be confused with the Royal Astronomical Society) in London a couple of weeks ago. The lecture was given by Matt Wallace, Lead Systems Engineer for Curiosity at NASA-JPL. It was therefore tech-focused rather than science-focused. I imagine this is mostly information that can be found in various places on the interwebs, but it was fun hearing it put together from the engineering perspective. I enjoyed the lecture immensely.

He began briefly reminding us that rover-based exploration of Mars is pretty modern. 1997 saw the landing of Sojourner, which lasted for 90 days and carried about 5 lbs of science instrumentation. 2003 saw the landings of Spirit and Opportunity, which carried about 11 lbs. Curiosity is a big step forward, carrying 185 lbs of science instrumentation and weighing about a ton. Opportunity saw sedimentary rock near its landing crater, which indicated that surface water must have been on Mars. It’s hoped that Curiosity will be able to measure whether or not another key ingredient for the evolution of life as we know it, carbon, is present in sufficient quantities to have potentially existed on Mars.

Curiosity will land on the surface of Mars on 6 August 2012. It lies flat in its 4.5 metre diameter entry capsule, which looks a bit like it might contain an oversized Pokemon. Or a Mini Cooper. (A photo of the entry capsule sitting over a Mini Cooper may have been shown.) The landing process looks straightforward at first. The cruise stage releases the capsule, spinning at 2 rev/minute. The entry capsule, doing 17000 miles per hour during descent, deploys its parachute after firing thrusters to correct its trajectory. It splits in half and lets the bottom shell drift away as it slows to 200 miles per hour. Then the top half of the shell detaches to allow the descent stage and rover to slow to 2 miles per hour.

Now comes the weird bit. The descent stage - the SkyCrane - lowers the rover on a bridle (which is controlled by the rover) and ever so gently releases it onto the surface of Mars. It then expends its remaining fuel and flies off and crashes 150 to 200 metres away from the rover. [The animation linked below makes it look like it lands miles away, for some reason!] The SkyCrane is the really unique piece of kit involved in Curiosity. Such a large, heavy rover needed a very controlled delivery mechanism. The Doppler accuracy on the descent stage has to be accurate to within a few metres when it and the rover are still 11 km above the planet’s surface.

Mr Wallace showed several interesting touchdown testing clips on both rough and smooth terrain, as well as the deployment testing in a wind tunnel of the disk-gap band parachute. The parachute is the biggest of these NASA has built - capable of withstanding 6000 lbs of impulse. It was also field-tested with an F-18. Curiosity has 17 cameras. Some are for practical purposes, like hazard avoidance, and others for science.

Curiosity will not be all that much faster than Spirit and Opportunity. It will travel up to 6 cm/s (less than 0.1 mph), meaning it can go about 100 metres a day. However, it has one major advantage over them because it’s nuclear rather than solar powered. It uses radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). This is unusual for a non-outer-planetary mission, but it was deemed necessary to achieve the science objectives of the rover. It means it can be operational whenever it likes, instead of being restricted by its battery capacity and view of the Sun.

Thermal testing was pretty extreme. The 25-foot test chamber was raised to daytime temperatures (+20 degrees Celsius), then pumped out and flooded with liquid nitrogen to simulate night conditions (-130 degrees Celsius). Curiosity will be subjected to this thermal cycle on a daily basis, so the electronics needed to be very robust.

The landing site is at the base of Mount Sharp, near what looks like alluvial flow. The site combines a crater with a mountain in the middle of it, where the crater had filled in with sedimentary material that subsequently eroded away. All this makes it quite a rich science target. Curiosity will spend its two-year prime mission traversing up the lower slopes. The landing ellipse (19 km by 7 km) is much reduced from what Spirit and Opportunity had, since it’s quite a hazardous location.

Landing will be completely autonomous, as the landing phase takes 7 minutes, while communication time from Earth to Mars is about 13 minutes. That will be fun for the mission engineers after waiting through Curiosity’s eight-month journey.

Here’s hoping all goes well on 6 August!



JPL’s animation of descent and landing (first 4 minutes), and rover operations. Curiosity pootles along the edge of the crater, checks out several different rocks until it finds one that’s interesting enough to “taste” and then samples it. YouTube video, 11:20, no narration.

lapswood was kind enough to send me a few photos he took at Eastercon last month. I thought this one made a nice illustration of some points that were made about PoCs and the (lack of) diversity at science fiction conventions.

This is from the panel I was on. Myself, the gentleman next to me and the man on the opposite end from me are all working scientists. The other man is the moderator - I'm not sure whether or not he is a scientist.



When I look at this picture, the first thing that pops into my head is the Sesame Street song: "One of these things is not like the others/One of these things just doesn't belong."

Visually, the thing that doesn't belong is me. And that makes me sad. What does it make you think?