Questions Answered

[ellarien]

zingerella asked some good questions:



1. You've just discovered a new celestial body, and are given the opportunity to name it (a proper name, not XF-123 or anything like that). What do you call it?


I think I'd name it after my first boss. We had our differences, but he was/is a brilliant scientist.


2. You’ve moved across the Pond and several time zones and into an entirely different culture, landscape, and climate. Is there anything about your new location that makes you feel especially foreign or displaced?


Only one thing? Early on, it was nearly everything: the unfamiliar shapes and sizes and placements of everyday objects like electrical outlets and binder rings and crosswalk buttons; the language; the food; the underlying cultural assumptions; and of course the climate. Now, I think the main thing that still makes me feel that I wasn't meant to live here is the climate -- particularly the pitiless summer heat and the blinding sunlight.


3. What is your preferred blend of tea?

Twining's Earl Grey -- ideally, the variety made for the British market, not the inferior one sold under the same name in the US.


4. What would you recommend as a non-condescending, interesting, non-jargon-laden
introduction to the parts of astronomy that aren’t simply naming constellations for a math-impaired gnoscophile?


That's a hard one. For my own field, Kenneth Lang's Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Sun is pretty good -- not to mention pretty. For the broader subject, maybe a good place to start would be something like Kenneth C. Davis's Don't Know Much About the Universe: Everything You Needed to Know About Outer Space but Never Learned . At least, I'm finding the equivalent one on {American} history quite useful.



5. Not that Astronomy isn’t a completely nifty field, but if you hadn’t done it, what three
other things could you see yourself doing?

Deciphering ancient inscriptions, if I'd stuck with my teenage dreams. Crystallography, if I'd stayed in my PhD field. Something with computers, if I'd wandered off into the real world after my first postdoc stint.