The Outsider's Inside View post#004 - Reverse and Rotate

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Profile KevinDouglasPhD
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Message 516849 - Posted: 12 Feb 2007, 23:35:25 UTC

Things are going fine in my corner of the SETI@home world. I have 83 SETHI cubes completed, leaving 61 more to go to cover the region sampled for the project. I just figured out how to make mpeg movies of my datacubes, so if you want to see something cool then download this HI movie. It's a "mosaic" of about 15 individual datacubes, stitched together to give a wider view of the sky. There's no coordinates but this is looking toward the Galactic Plane, away from the Galactic Center (ie. the anticenter). As the movie plays, you are seeing gas at progressively more positive radial velocities. It took a while to figure out how to give it colour, and IDL tends to write images upside down so it was a bit tricky to vertically "flip" the image. These movies are going to be great for my upcoming seminar down the hill in the astronomy department.

I was late getting to the SETI@home group meeting this afternoon, but I don't think I missed anything crucial. Nothing terribly exciting to report. We talked a bit about being able to accept PayPal donations, the datastream from Arecibo, databases, systems, planned outages and upgrades, the usual. There is an as-yet unsolved mystery with the data in the beta project - something about triplets that shouldn't be there and such. That's why it's in beta, I guess. Dan did tell us a cool story about a very powerful supercomputer being built by SUN in Texas. I can't remember the specifics but it would be a PetaOp machine, something that would be great for the next generation of radio telescopes like the Allen Telescope Array and the Square Kilometre Array.

My prediction for tonight's lone NHL game: Detroit 8, Philadelphia 2. I sure miss Hockey Night in Canada, but NBC and VS aren't doing too bad a job, and locally they show a lot of Sharks games on FSN Bay Area.

What else? The Police looked pretty good at the Grammies last night. I'd probably rather see the reunited Genesis instead, even though they probably won't play enough of their Hackett-era material.
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Message 516874 - Posted: 13 Feb 2007, 2:06:46 UTC

Thank you for sharing that video. It was.... interesting! 8-)

Are the colors any indication of temperature? If so, I saw some white in the very center, so I would presume this is very hot stuff, which is kind of interesting since space itself is so cold.
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Message 517012 - Posted: 13 Feb 2007, 15:35:32 UTC - in response to Message 516849.  

Things are going fine in my corner of the SETI@home world. I have 83 SETHI cubes completed, leaving 61 more to go to cover the region sampled for the project. I just figured out how to make mpeg movies of my datacubes, so if you want to see something cool then download this HI movie. It's a "mosaic" of about 15 individual datacubes, stitched together to give a wider view of the sky. There's no coordinates but this is looking toward the Galactic Plane, away from the Galactic Center (ie. the anticenter). As the movie plays, you are seeing gas at progressively more positive radial velocities. It took a while to figure out how to give it colour, and IDL tends to write images upside down so it was a bit tricky to vertically "flip" the image. These movies are going to be great for my upcoming seminar down the hill in the astronomy department.

I was late getting to the SETI@home group meeting this afternoon, but I don't think I missed anything crucial. Nothing terribly exciting to report. We talked a bit about being able to accept PayPal donations, the datastream from Arecibo, databases, systems, planned outages and upgrades, the usual. There is an as-yet unsolved mystery with the data in the beta project - something about triplets that shouldn't be there and such. That's why it's in beta, I guess. Dan did tell us a cool story about a very powerful supercomputer being built by SUN in Texas. I can't remember the specifics but it would be a PetaOp machine, something that would be great for the next generation of radio telescopes like the Allen Telescope Array and the Square Kilometre Array.

My prediction for tonight's lone NHL game: Detroit 8, Philadelphia 2. I sure miss Hockey Night in Canada, but NBC and VS aren't doing too bad a job, and locally they show a lot of Sharks games on FSN Bay Area.

What else? The Police looked pretty good at the Grammies last night. I'd probably rather see the reunited Genesis instead, even though they probably won't play enough of their Hackett-era material.


@ Kevin - as usual, Sir - You've given a knock-up job of letting everyone knowing 'what's up' - Great Explanation . . . fyi - here's a little bit 4 U


GENESIS ANNOUNCE THEIR 'TURN IT ON AGAIN' TOUR . . .

Kicking off in the Olympic Stadium, Helsinki on 11 June, the tour will hit twelve different European countries,

ending in Rome on 14 July



The powers behind the throne. Promoter John Giddings (left)
and renowned manager Tony Smith (umm, he must be on the right)
about to make you an offer you cannot refuse

Copyrighted 2001-2007 Genesis & Virgin / EMI Records


Copyrighted 2001-2007 Genesis & Virgin / EMI Records


To coincide with the Genesis tour, EMI Records will be re-issuing 14 Genesis studio albums in three stages during 2007.

All the releases will be SACD/DVD double disc sets featuring newly re-mastered 5.1 surround sound and stereo mixes.


The release schedule is as follows:


March 2007: A Trick Of The Tail (1976), Wind & Wuthering (1977), …And Then There Were Three…(1978),

Duke (1980) Abacab (1981)


June/July 2007: Genesis(1983), Invisible Touch(1986), We Can't Dance (1991), Calling All Stations(1997)


Late 2007/Early 2008: Trespass (1970), Nursery Cryme (1971), Foxtrot (1972), Selling England By The Pound (1973),

The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway(1974)



Phil Collins, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford (along with Chester Thompson and Daryl Steurmer) will start the “Turn It On Again” tour on June 11 in Finland


All contents copy; 2001-2007 Genesis & Virgin / EMI Records No unauthorised use permitted
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Message 517189 - Posted: 14 Feb 2007, 1:03:48 UTC - in response to Message 516849.  

What else? The Police looked pretty good at the Grammies last night. I'd probably rather see the reunited Genesis instead, even though they probably won't play enough of their Hackett-era material.

Let alone their Gabriel-era material, I bet … I start to lose interest from the point he left the group, but I’ll listen to Wind and Wuthering happily enough. OTOH Foxtrot is another one of those desert-island albums for me—and there’s even a quite topical song on it, “Watcher of the Skies”.
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Message 517229 - Posted: 14 Feb 2007, 3:31:22 UTC

I got excited for a minute, I thought you meant Gabriel, Banks, and Rutherford. Don't like Phil.
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Message 517258 - Posted: 14 Feb 2007, 4:44:07 UTC - in response to Message 517189.  

What else? The Police looked pretty good at the Grammies last night. I'd probably rather see the reunited Genesis instead, even though they probably won't play enough of their Hackett-era material.

Let alone their Gabriel-era material, I bet … I start to lose interest from the point he left the group, but I’ll listen to Wind and Wuthering happily enough. OTOH Foxtrot is another one of those desert-island albums for me—and there’s even a quite topical song on it, “Watcher of the Skies”.


Yep. The first stanza of that songs was the epigraph in my PhD thesis. I agree it'd be terrific if Gabriel and Hackett could've gotten involved. The only post-Hackett album I can stand any more is Duke. Still, their stage show will be spectacular, no doubt about it.

It's Peter Gabriel's birthday today, by the way. I saw him at Heathrow airport on my way to Ireland just after Christmas this past December.
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Message 517594 - Posted: 14 Feb 2007, 23:57:03 UTC - in response to Message 516874.  

Thank you for sharing that video. It was.... interesting! 8-)

Are the colors any indication of temperature? If so, I saw some white in the very center, so I would presume this is very hot stuff, which is kind of interesting since space itself is so cold.


There's a long-winded answer to this, but I'll try my best to spare you. Basically the colours reflect the intensity scale, which is measured in units of temperature (Kelvin scale). The "warmest" gas, ie. the white pixels in the movie, has a brightness temperature of about 130 K. That's around -240 Celcius, so it's still quite cold gas. But the brightness temperature is also a measure of how much gas is there too, not just its physical temperature. So that's my explanation, without invoking radiative transfer theory.

We had our science meeting this afternoon, and the main issue we talked about was the discovery of some very short "blips" near the center of the band for our multibeam data. For Astropulse and SETI@home work units these blips would lead to overflows and/or lots of misidentified signals, so they'll have to be removed before going into the splitter. So I joked that we "detected" ourselves. We will work with Arecibo staff on determining where along the signal path these blips might arise. Eric has to do a little more to make the multibeam application work for certain processors, but it's progressing well. It was mentioned that the upcoming memory upgrade to ewen is thanks to a donor, so I'm grateful for that, seeing as how I plan to crunch a lot more HI data once ewen's all RAIDed up and ready to go.
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Message 517636 - Posted: 15 Feb 2007, 1:54:31 UTC - in response to Message 517594.  

There's a long-winded answer to this, but I'll try my best to spare you. Basically the colours reflect the intensity scale, which is measured in units of temperature (Kelvin scale). The "warmest" gas, ie. the white pixels in the movie, has a brightness temperature of about 130 K. That's around -240 Celcius, so it's still quite cold gas. But the brightness temperature is also a measure of how much gas is there too, not just its physical temperature. So that's my explanation, without invoking radiative transfer theory.


No problems here, doc! Long winded explanations are how I learn best, especially from people that know what they're talking about. But thank you for explaining that to me. It makes more sense now (or at least a little bit).
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Message 518186 - Posted: 16 Feb 2007, 14:07:04 UTC


@ Kevin - Sir, my Question would be as Follows - "Would you prefer my NOT commenting @ all - in your Threads". I submit - from your Post's - different information's - again, referring to Your Post - and i do not see any Feedback from you (nor anybody else for that matter). Though there is quite a bit of talking going on regarding your Posts - especially regarding Music - and i provide Links to those Comments i see YOU make. I don't ask, nor Request Regular Feedback or Thank You's for the Posts that i make - though some type of Feedback would be warranted - just as you have with others in your Threads.

With Respect and Consideration,

richard w lubrich jr - @ SETI / BOINC since February 29 2000



BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .
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Message 518247 - Posted: 16 Feb 2007, 16:54:16 UTC - in response to Message 518186.  


@ Kevin - Sir, my Question would be as Follows - "Would you prefer my NOT commenting @ all - in your Threads"...
With Respect and Consideration,
richard w lubrich jr - @ SETI / BOINC since February 29 2000


Nothing could be further from what I prefer. I do appreciate your contribution, and I'm sorry (and a little surprised) that I haven't directly answered one of your posts yet. The link you provided to the Koenjihyakkei webspace at Skin Graft records has me even more excited about hopefully seeing them when they come to North America. I've seen their drummer play live before, in a bass-drums duo called Ruins, and he's the most astounding drummer I've ever seen. Their Chicago show is with a band called Cheer Accident, of whom Matt has given his endorsement, and I really like what I've heard of them so far (the album Matt let me borrow).

So please, jump in any time!
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Message 518284 - Posted: 16 Feb 2007, 18:54:39 UTC - in response to Message 518247.  
Last modified: 16 Feb 2007, 18:54:59 UTC

The link you provided to the Koenjihyakkei webspace at Skin Graft records has me even more excited about hopefully seeing them when they come to North America. I've seen their drummer play live before, in a bass-drums duo called Ruins, and he's the most astounding drummer I've ever seen. Their Chicago show is with a band called Cheer Accident, of whom Matt has given his endorsement, and I really like what I've heard of them so far (the album Matt let me borrow).


Cheer Accident is wonderful. I had the great pleasure of sharing a bill with them last time I was in Chicago then going out for some very-late-night diner food and discussing Gentle Giant. I didn't quite see any info about them playing in Chicago with Koenji (who are also wonderful). Is there a tour schedule somewhere?

- Matt
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude
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Message 518293 - Posted: 16 Feb 2007, 19:18:23 UTC - in response to Message 518284.  


Cheer Accident is wonderful. I had the great pleasure of sharing a bill with them last time I was in Chicago then going out for some very-late-night diner food and discussing Gentle Giant. I didn't quite see any info about them playing in Chicago with Koenji (who are also wonderful). Is there a tour schedule somewhere?

- Matt


All I'm aware of is Tatsuya's website for tour info. I found out about Cheer Accident being on the bill for the Chicago show at mP shows. There are a few short clips of Koenji Hyakkei on Youtube (current lineup). Just unbelievable. It would be a crime for them not to stop in the Bay Area on the way home to Japan.
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Message 518900 - Posted: 17 Feb 2007, 21:39:33 UTC - in response to Message 518186.  

It's a gorgeous day in the Bay Area, yet I decided to come in to work and see if I can't help my SETHI jobs on sidious finish before the end of this long weekend. In a couple hours they're going to be launching the THEMIS satellites, so I'm going to tune in to NASA TV to check that out. It's a project led by people here at the Space Sciences Lab, with a large group of partners at the University of Calgary, where I got my PhD. The Canadian project scientist taught me StatMech.

I made quite a bit of progress this past week, I think. I figured out how to combine images from this dataset I have of dust emission (from the IRAS satellite launched way back in 1983), so now I can make equal-size maps of HI and dust emission to do direct comparisons of interstellar gas and dust. This is a good way to investigate whether dust and gas are well-mixed, or if there are regions where one is more prevalent than the other. This will be great for both my SETHI and GALFA-HI projects. I've already started the analysis, so I can't wait to see what kind of results I get. I'll put some pictures up in my post next week - I have to start preparing content for my seminar next month anyway.

I heard Brendan Shanahan got injured in a Rangers game today. Hockey's a rough game sometimes. It's been rough watching San Jose get shut out two games in a row.
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