My dad's house

I went to Texas last month to get things moving so I can sell my dad's house. He died at age 85 on October 30, 2005, about a month after he fell in the house. He broke his neck and lay there for some time before he was discovered. My dad didn't have a valid will. I hired a lawyer, chosen pretty much out of the blue, in Kerrville. He discovered that the previous owners of the house, Mr. and Mrs. X, had failed to transfer the deed after the house was paid off. Furthermore, Mr. X had died and Mrs. X had moved to another state. So, even though I'm my dad's sole heir, I had no clear right to the house. I also didn't have much time to deal with it, because Christine, Joey and I were preparing to spend most of 2006 on a sabbatical in London. So the only thing that got done in 2006 was that my cousin Julie and her husband Jesse helped me go through the house, and I drove back to Colorado in my dad's car with stuff that had sentimental or possible financial value. The latter category included some jewelry, a few paintings, and the car itself.
My dad was a doctor and should have been able to retire comfortably, but he was bad with money. Getting divorced from his second wife when he was in his 80s didn't help.

I've been ignoring the house for years because dealing with it involves paying the lawyer, and what I'll get back is not clear. The house is a mobile home that wasn't in great shape when my dad died. In the last year, kids have broken windows on two occasions, and the place is really moldy. There were personal papers in the house that I wanted to go through, but I couldn't stand to be in there for much more than an hour at a time, so in the end I only took a few photo albums. The best thing that happened was that a couple with a store where they sell antiques and junk gave me $600 for the stuff remaining in the house. That includes clearing out everything except trash and a decrepit refrigerator. I'm so grateful to be rid of the house that I almost hope they make a big profit.

How can I force myself to write?

Great thread on Ask Metafilter

October 6 2008

It's Donkey Day. Today in history.

I've taken a couple of days off work since Christine got home on Thursday from the hospital. Her total knee replacement surgery, performed a week ago today, though she still has to take pain meds. She left the house today for the first time since Thursday. I took her to Longmont Clinic to get her blood drawn (she's on warfarin, aka coumadin), then to Lowe's. Our neighbor Ray the Handyman started painting our house today - just in time, as we're expecting our first frost tonight, and possibly our first snow next weekend.

This afternoon I read Planet Migration through a Self-Gravitating Planetesimal Disk, a preprint by a group at the University of Rochester. The main interest of the paper is that they performed N-body simulations on a GPU. We've talked about doing this at SwRI. It sounds like Moore, Quillen, and Edgar have figured out how to do it, using a C development environment from NVIDIA called CUDA. There's no connection with Sarah Palin, so far as I know.

Fixing Climate, Part 2

Phil Orr took Broecker to Pyramid Lake in Nevada, which is a remnant of Lake Lahontan, one of the largest lakes in North America during the last Ice Age. Orr had found human and animal bones in Fishbone Cave on the eastern shore of the dry bed of nearby Lake Winnemucca. Orr believed that man had entered North America during the Ice Age, and suspected that the bones dated to that time. In 1955, "scholars" favored a more recent date. Orr was interested in having Broecker perform carbon-14 dating on the human bones and artifacts that he had found. Broecker also took samples of tufa, a form of calcium carbonate, from Pyramid Lake. Broecker and Orr collaborated for the rest of the 1950s. Orr's intuition proved to be correct, and the rises and falls of the lakes in the Great Basin got Broecker interested in climate.

Fixing Climate, Episode 1

Last weekend I read Fixing Climate, by Wallace S. Broecker and Robert Kunzig. Broecker is a scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who is known for his work on the ocean conveyer belt and rapid climate change. Kunzig is a terrific science writer. I liked the book so much that I’m going to write about it here for a while.

Episode 1 (text from the book is given in italics):

Broecker gave his first scientific talk, as a graduate student, at an archeology meeting in Los Angeles on September 1, 1955. It was the hottest day ever to that point in LA – 110 degrees. He had been asked to give the talk by J. Laurence Kulp, who was a pioneer in the newly developed field of Carbon-14 dating. The archeologists were arguing about when people first arrived in the New World. After Broecker’s talk, Phil Orr of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History came up to him:

Phil Orr … was clearly more of a digger than a scholar; although he smoked a pipe, it had a cigar butt in it. He was a short man with a potbelly stuffed into jeans and cowboy boots. His face was shaped like an interstate highway shield – a wide forehead, uncluttered by hair, narrowing to a pointy, straggly bearded chin. That forehead overhung deep-set eyes that seemed made to squint. Orr eyeballed Broecker.

“Kid,” he said, for he was plenty old to be Broecker’s father. “I can see that you know a lot about physics and math. But I also see that you don’t know a goddamned thing about the earth.”

He paused to let that sink in, and to relight the cigar butt.

“Come with me for three weeks and I’ll change your life.”

Words That Make Me Stop Reading

sheeple
blood and treasure
boots on the ground
speak truth to power
maverick
muscular foreign policy
chattering classes
executive experience
quick study
leverage
world-class

However, I do like the Educational Jargon Generator and the Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator.

2008 DDA meeting, Part 2

Monday, April 28, 2008
Session 2: The Yarkovsky and YORP Effects
Invited Talk: Analytic Theory of the YORP Effect for Near-Spherical Objects

















David Nesvorný, Southwest Research Institute

SwRI's own David gave a nice invited talk on YORP, a thermal effect that changes the spins of small bodies. The YORP effect was confirmed for two Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) in 2007, resulting in fame, fortune, and papers in Nature and Science for two groups. YORP may be the main mechanism that forms binaries among the NEAs. Most modeling of YORP has been done numerically, but David and David derived an expansion of the YORP torque in spherical harmonics that agrees well with numerical results for reasonably round bodies such as 1998 KY26.

In the same session, Steve Chesley of JPL gave a talk describing his work with David on a clever approach to look for the Yarkovsky effect in NEAs by modeling it as a transverse acceleration (a_t), just as he does to model nongravitational forces in comets. The model value of a_t translates into a drift rate in semi-major axis, which is the key effect he's looking for. As I recall, he has tentative detections for over a dozen NEAs. It just goes to show how prescient I was a decade ago when I got a proposal to review on how Yarkovsky might affect the orbits of asteroids. Many years before, I had learned of the Yarkovsky effect in a course taught by Joe Burns while he was on sabbatical in Berkeley. I had Yarkovsky pigeonholed as one of those strange radiation effects like Poynting-Robertson that applies to dust and rocks, but certainly not to mountains in space. Now there's a veritable Yarkovsky industry. If you want to read all about it, here's a review paper by Bill Bottke and the Davids. As Bill likes to say, with two Davids we can Czech and re-Czech our results.

Non-liveblogging the 2008 DDA meeting, part 1

This year's Division on Dynamical Astronomy meeting seems to have been a success. Now that the meeting is over, I'm going to free-associate about one talk each day. We'll see how far I get!

Monday, April 28, 2008
Session 1: Stars and Galaxies
Invited Talk: Telling Tales with Tidal Tails

Kathryn V. Johnston, Columbia University

From Kathryn's abstract: In the last decade, the stellar halos of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies have been mapped in exquisite detail, revealing that they are actually richly substructured in phase-space due to the presence of debris from tidally disrupted satellites.

The Local Group consists of Andromeda, the Milky Way, and at least 33 smaller galaxies, which is appropriate since M33 is the largest of the nieces and nephews. As the eons pass, Andromeda and the Milky Way are engaging in galactic cannibalism, with the Clash of the Titans likely to occur in about 3 billion years. Until that large meal, we must subsist on snacks such as the Sagittarius stream. Streams are produced by tidal disruption of dwarf galaxies; similar tails are seen in simulations of the Moon-forming impact. The structure of the streams provides a sensitive probe of the Galactic potential at large distances. Ultimately, we will be able to compare aspects of the outer Galaxy, such as the shape of the halo, with that predicted by cosmological N-body simulations, some of which now follow over 10¹⁰ particles, i.e., more than one for every man, woman, and child on Earth. One of the key projects of NASA's planned Space Interferometry Mission telescope will be to determine Galactic structure out to hundreds of kiloparsecs, a region containing a number of tidal tails.

astro-ph search for papers about tidal streams and tidal tails