The Universe Is Expanding

I think my feelings regarding the past week's Astronomy classes can be summed up with this clip from Annie Hall: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U1-OmAICpU

I would say that this certainly is an exciting time to be involved in astronomy, but that's only because I'm such a naturally enthusiastic individual. My peers tell me that my zest for education is exceeded only by that of life in general. Still, despite the wonderful times in which we live and the advances in modern telescopy which enable us to view galaxies and star-stuff many unfathomable fathoms distant, one can't help but wonder if astronomers weren't a bit more boss a few decades ago. To help prove the point of the bossness of these astronomers, I submit to you the following five photographs of Edwin Hubble, namesake of the Hubble telescope, proposer of a theory of universal expansion.

First, we see a humble Hubble sitting over his desk, surely after a long day's astronomizing, having a smoke while examining a photographic plate of the stars:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2012/08/30/hubble-at-work/

 

 Nothing so unusual about that. Until you realize that Hubble didn't put the pipe down for anyone. He couldn't be bothered.

Here's Hubble at the telescope, observing and chilling out. (Courtesy NASA)

Here's Hubble with his cat, Nicholas Copernicus:

http://content.answcdn.com/main/content/img/scitech/HSedwinp.jpg

 

Here's Einstein observing something astronomical, while Hubble hangs back to learn from the master. Astronomer Walter Sydney Adams appears on the right:

http://www.interactions.org/quantumuniverse/qu2006/images/discovering_image_05.jpg

And just so everybody knew he wasn't an egg-head, 6'2" Hubble also broke records on his high-school basketball team:

http://chicagomaroon.com/2009/04/10/before-revolutionizing-astronomy-hubble-helped-rewrite-record-books/

Here's an article about Hubble's cat (who apparently didn't like Aldous Huxley: http://huntingtonblogs.org/2012/11/hubble-and-copernicus/

Meanwhile, back in Astronomy class... Professor Les Blatt explained different astronomers' calculations for the age of the universe as being between 13.6 and 13.7 billion years, "but what's 100,000 years between friends?"

Also, check out CMT's production of "Spring Awakening" in Atwood Hall tonight at 2PM and 7PM. It will rock your world like no other musical has ever before.

# 33 on the list of Places One Would Rather Not Get Snowed-In: A Theatre

Last week, Worcester was hit with some nasty weather of the hurricane/tropical storm variety. Not as bad as that which struck New York and other more coastal locales, but the administration still cancelled classes over it. Two days ago we were hit with some inches of snow. This was nothing over which to cancel classes. It only merited the sending out of snow-plows across campus at 5 AM to the chagrin of, I daresay, nearly every student who resided within earshot. After having watched a video on GLOBAL WARMING for Astronomy, I'm convinced that, as Alanis Morissette told me, "This isn't your grandma's climate." Unless your grandma grew up, alternately, in the Bahamas and Alaska, in which case, it might be exactly the same.

In the past week I've spent about 30 hours in a theatre, so it's difficult for me to consider other classes as being more relevant than that which is called Technical Theatre. As I alluded to last week, my life has successfully meshed the course proper with the play's production. (I use the term "play" in this instance to refer to "Miss Julie," a 19th century Swedish play by August Strindberg.) Though the class has moved into the area of stage management this week, I'm still in audio central. Last night was the show's opening and, despite a number of technical glitches from more than one area, it was pretty good. At this point, having mixed all the sounds and music needed, and having gotten rid of the bits that weren't along the way (a lot), and having set all the correct cues in the computer, all there is to do during the next performances is press a button on the assumption that the actors will do the same thing they did the night before. They usually do.

But stage management, right? Last class I took, like, four pages of notes which essentially boil down to how to structure one's time and get everything done. I think I'll incorporate the basic structure into my next book, "How to Say Yes: Getting Everything Done with Positivity," and then work the opposite angle with the sequel, "How to Say No: Getting More Things Done After You Don't Have Time for Anything Anymore" It's a working title.

Basically, what you need to know is that, 1) to get everything done that you want to, you need to attend to items that are at once important and not urgent before they become important and urgent, and they will, and 2) You can only affect what's within your sphere of influence, and nothing else. Worrying about things that you can't immediately influence will only cause you stress, make your hair fall out, and lead to unhealthy eating habits. As you work on those things that you can easily influence, your sphere will grow and you'll become more powerful than you could ever imagine. Like Godzilla with a clipboard.

Sounds of Loudness

There comes a time in every student's life when he or she just doesn't feel the same enthusiasm for class as at the beginning. This is what we call the end of the honeymoon phase. In the beginning, everything's new and exciting. What'll the course be like? Will I be challenged to my full potential? Is this the class to take me into a glorious future of bioinformatics or, dare I dream, education? It happens sometime after the middle of the term when the weight of the work becomes tangible and real. "But wait," I hear you cry, "You're a theatre major; surely there isn't that much work to be had with such a relaxed course of study!" Attend a moment and I shall reverse this notion while deftly weaving together a tale of academia and extracurricula.

Scene opens on a computer lab containing the students of the TECHNICAL THEATER class. They've been given an assignment involving the manipulation and distortion of sound effects to create a scene from a production of "H.M.S. Pinafore vs. the Pirates of Penzance from Space." The scene begins with the two ships firing upon each other, one with traditional canons, the other with lasers. Also, the Pinafore is crewed by barnyard animals, while the Pirates are robots. Pretty standard.

One of the more important elements of sound manipulation I've learned while working on this project is that of panning, which is the placement of the sound from right to left, or center. The point isn't just to find sound effects on the internet and place them one after the other in the program Garageband. There're all these little bits that need to be taken care of -- fine points that you don't notice when you're watching a movie, for example, but which make the scene completely believable movie magic.

I've had some experience working with sound for high school and college theatre productions, but usually with live microphones, so sound editing is a sort of brave new world. Add to that the radio programme on which I appear every week (for which many a sound effect and manipulation are needed every show), I find myself surrounded by sound.

Move forward, now, into Clark's upcoming production of "Miss Julie." (Three guesses for the technical capacity in which I find myself engaged regarding this show.) Last night, at a rehearsal which took the typical too long length of time for a show a week away, I offered up some song mixes for a scene of dancing, revelry, and debauchery. Imagine a bunch of drunk servants tipping over furniture and chanting a German drinking song for about two minutes, highlighted with a creepy Stravinsky track plus pre-recorded audio of that same drinking song playing as loud as possible and you might get a bit of an idea of where the scene is going. But that's just two minutes of the thing. That's just the part I had finished before the rehearsal yesterday.

A couple hours in, the director tells me that he wants some ambient noise throughout a different scene, so my technical theater professor and I mix about thirty seconds of background ambience characteristic of a drunken summer's night (this took about an hour and a half -- too long). The director takes a listen and proclaims that he thinks it'd be a good idea to have this sort of ambience play throughout the entire show. After a half-hearted attempt at convincing him that this is a bad idea, and that there shouldn't be ambient noise on stage for almost two hours, I consulted with my tech theater professor and left with directions to loop a lot of sound. Come tomorrow's rehearsal, there may not even be need for the sound I'm going to work out tonight, but I enjoy the work and do it for the love of the theatre, and if anyone ever needs two hours of ambient summer sounds, I can hook you up.

The point is, though the honeymoon phase is over for such classes as those which I've above described, this is the time when one can really learn what the class is all about, and find those hidden aspects that make the whole course of study meaningful and worthwhile, for now and for the future.

Thinker as Actor as Thinker as Actor as...

In a play an actor must always play multiple characters. A character isn't (shouldn't be) 2-dimensional. In day-to-day life a person must put on all kinds of masks, use various sorts of voices to match prior schema -- pre-determined actions for certain social situations. Exempli gratia, consider you're having a conversation in a public place, say, a popular study spot (any study spot that is also popular probably isn't very apt for the task of study, but that's beside the point). Your friend is very concerned about his relationship with somebody, so that's what's at hand. Eventually, some other person comes over and joins the conversation. Woah! What just happened? Was there a noticeable shift in how you continued conversing? Hint: there was.

When you and your friend were talking alone, you were both more or less natural with your speech and manner. Here's the kicker: if interaction is observed, it becomes performance. And the great thing is, there doesn't even have to be a physical audience for such performance to begin; the performer merely has to imagine one. In psychology, we call this the imaginary audience (quel suprise). It's what happens to teenagers when they're worried about looking cool and fearing embarrassment around every turn. There's also something psychologists call the spotlight effect, which is almost the same thing.

A quote from my Statistics textbook: "The spotlight effect refers to overestimating the extent to which others notice your appearance or behavior, especially when you commit a faux pas. Effectively, you feel as if you are suddenly standing in a spotlight with everyone watching. In one demonstration of this phenomenon, Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky (2000) asked college students to put on a Barry Manilow T-shirt that fellow students had previously judged to be embarrassing. The participants were then led into a room in which other students were already participating in an experiment. After a few minutes, the participant was led back out of the room and was allowed to remove the shirt [thank goodness]. Later, each participant was asked to estimate how many people in the room had noticed the shirt. The individuals in the room were also asked whether they noticed the shirt. In the study, the participants significantly overestimated the actual number of people who had noticed." (From "Essentials of Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences," by Frederick J. Gravetter and Larry B. Wallnau, 2011)

I'm going to write a self-help book with a title that I know will sell a million copies. I'll call it, "Nobody Cares: Empowering Yourself by Eliminating the Imaginary Audience." Half Joking. Give it ten years.

Part of what the class Actor as Thinker is about is how to internalize cognitive processes so that you're actually thinking as your character would, and not as someone standing on the stage worrying about what the audience is thinking. Forgetting the audience is difficult; to do so one must interact with the other characters onstage and have a vested interest in what they have to say. You have to listen to them, otherwise your next line has no motivation. The chemistry and emotional interactions of the actors is just as important as the script. Sure, you can have one without the other, but you'd end up with either a book on tape or a silent film (both are reasonable pastimes, but they're not theatre).

The mind is complex, and getting in touch with it onstage takes some time. I'll leave you with a dramatic exercise of the mind: emotional scales. Close your eyes and think of a time in your life when you were neutral -- no sadness, not really happy -- just content. This is 5. Now think of a time when you were a little miffed about something. You were just less than content. This is 4. Think of individual memories to take the places of 3 down to 0, with 0 being incredibly depressed and angry. Come back up to 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, becoming less angry and more okay with things. The next memory, for 6, is one where you were just a little happier than content. 7 is happier, and so on to 10, which is the happiest moment you can remember. Come back down one step at a time until you're again resting at 5. Checking in with emotional memories from time to time can give you the necessary tools to feel what your character's supposed to feel in the scene, because your character has as many characters inside him/her as you do. Spooky.

Homework, Social Life, Sleep: Choose Two

Let's talk Psychology, homework, and sleep.

Though the events of last Wednesday are hazy at best, I think it went something like this:

7:12 PM -- A member of the cast of my radio show had to skip that evening due to excessive homework. This was problematic because another member had already declined the day before.

7:35 PM -- While having an emergency production meeting with my co-producer I call the last cast member, aside from ourselves, to say not to bother coming to the show that evening because "Dexter and I are going to find something to do by ourselves."

8:15 PM -- With less than an hour before showtime (and after my first idea to do Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" is shot down) we decide to do Stephen King's short story "1408" because we figured there was enough dialogue between the two characters to pass it off as a radio drama ). Then again, there was an awful lot of narration, so we decided that one of the two of us needed to be the narrator -- me, because Dexter wanted to be John Cusack. Fine, but now we need someone to play Samuel L. Jackson's part. (For those not in the know, these were the actors who played the two main characters in the movie adaptation of the same title.) "I have an idea: can Samuel L. Jackson be a woman?" The answer was yes and, thanks to a persuasive 30-second conversation, the cast was made.

The show went a bit longer than usual and, remember, we only had three cast members. By the end, my voice was having difficulties and there are some unfortunate sounds of water being gulped at the end of the recording.

I know what you're thinking, where does Psychology fit in here? It doesn't, that's why I was up 'till 6 AM doing a homework assignment that usually would've been completed over the course of two days.

11:30 PM -- Statistics homework

Now, I'm not sure whether my method of doing statistics homework is unusual, but I don't think it's typical. After about a decade of struggling with mathematics classes I finally decided to change part of the way in which I do the homework. Before I begin working through any calculations I write (type) the entire problem out. While this may be a time-consuming method of doing things, it helps in a way I attribute to cognitive momentum (a phrase which I just made up, but which has probably already been coined by psychologists the world over). The idea is that you do something easy -- transcription -- and while reading over the problem a couple of times you can start to get vague notions of where it's going and of what kind of answer to expect. Additionally, it's extremely helpful when checking my work after it's been graded. If there's just a bunch of numbers and symbols on the page I find it difficult to find where my errors lie. If, however, everything is typed and worked out line by line, it's easier to find the faults. Usually, for me, it's an error in transcribing from the book where I do something like write a 3 where there should be a 2 and have the whole problem get messed up at step one.

Continuing on with what I mentioned in my last post, I've decided that it'd be a capital idea to write an entire statistics text book using zombies for all the examples. Throughout the book there'd be a natural progression from Chapter One's discussion of outbreak to Chapter 12's on the complete annihilation of humanity.

Try this: To evaluate the effect of a zombie virus antidote, a sample is obtained from a population with a mean of μ = 80 and the treatment is administered to the individuals in the sample. After treatment, the sample has a mean of M = 95 and a standard deviation of s = 13. If the sample is n = 16, using a two-tailed test at 5% significance, are the data significant to conclude that the antidote has a significant effect? Remember, the future of humanity depends on it.

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Bonus Class Update

In Technical Theatre the class became Foley artists. A Foley artist is someone who makes sound effects for movies with whatever's lying around. Named after Jack Foley, a guy who used to do the sound effects for silent movies, Foley is in virtually every modern movie because the same microphones that pick up actors' voices can't always pick up the needed sound effects. Foley becomes especially necessary in epic motion pictures with explosions or arrows whizzing by or sword fights. Pictures like "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," a scene from which we watched in class and for which we proceeded to make sound effects using whatever was lying around. You want the sound of castle walls exploding and chunks of stone falling to the ground? Try large plastic bowls falling accompanied by blocks of wood. The sound of armor-clad orcs marching? Try two people marching on hollow steps while jangling chains. It went better than I make it out to have.
Bonus list: the five measurable qualities of sound: Duration, Pitch, Location, Volume, and Timbre.

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Make sure to get thyself to CMT's Cabaret this evening in the Grind to hear some great show tunes sung by your colleagues.

Statistics for Zombies

I have a confession to make. Lately I’ve been avoiding writing about Statistics (PSYCH 105), though it is one of the courses in which I’m enrolled. It seemed a difficult subject about which to write in any sort of, shall we say, non-boring fashion. The thing is, though, statistics is a massively important part of psychology. Without proper, standardized, evaluative measures any sort of “experiment” could only be written up in the form of anecdote, and any shocking advances in the subject would needlessly be relegated to the realm of urban legend, because how would we know if the experimenter weren’t engaging in some serious confirmation bias? For the following example, I will attempt to veer from the beaten path for the sake of education.

 

Consider a sample of n = 36 zombie hunters who’ve taken a zombie survival class for one year prior to the zombocalypse. They average a kill-count of M = 5 zombies a day, with the added benefit of not getting eaten. The entire rest of the population from which this sample is taken may or may not have taken such a class and has a mean kill-count of μ = 3 per day, and probably get eaten. Assume a standard deviation of σ = 1 and standard level of significance of α = 0.05 with a two-tailed test. Finding the z-score (or, here, zombie score) is now a simple matter of formula.

z = (M - μ) / (σ / √ n)

(5 - 3) / √36 = 0.333 = z

 

Such a low z-score cannot possibly recommend the course as being statistically more significant. The null hypothesis cannot be rejected, so one must assume that those who took the course are equally as likely to be eaten as those who didn’t take the course.

 

Thank goodness I took statistics before the world blew up.

Space Rocks (pun intended): Why It’s Not the End of the World

Dr. Tim Spahr is the Director of the Minor Planets Center, funded by the Smithsonian, funded by NASA. He’s in charge of recording all the near Earth objects (NEOs) floating around in space, and the guy to whom the government turns when there’s question of one of these space rocks colliding with our little planet. Last Thursday he gave a lecture to my Astronomy 001 class insisting that, though 1 in 2000 asteroids come close enough to the Earth to pose threat of collision (and there are hundreds of asteroids regularly posed to do so), 96% of all the large near-Earth objects have been discovered (that is, those objects which would actually pose a threat if they crashed into the Earth -- not small rocks which routinely fall to Earth and which people don’t always notice). Ergo the Minor Planets Center would be in the know if there were a major threat on the scale of, say, mass-extinction event-causing space rock.

The point he was trying to make was that there’s little conceivable threat of any sort of asteroid extinguishing life on Earth. Whew. Now I can use my energy to worry about real problems like what kind of cereal to have. And then, suppose there’s no milk of the 1 or 2% varieties? Do I go with whole or fat-free? I can only imagine what sort of chaos would break loose should such an event transpire. All I can say is that I’m not going to be caught unawares when the rabble pours into the streets for a nice night of dinner and looting. As I learned from the classic treatise on the subject of post-apocalyptic life, Max Brooks’s “The Zombie Survival Guide,” should access to a crossbow be unreasonable, a hot air balloon will do nicely.
 

Which acts as a good segue to this next paragraph. Recently Clark has been host to a sort of symposium on “The End of Things,” a film and lecture series about… the end of things. Last night I caught a lecture by K. David Harrison of Swarthmore College on the extinction (and preservation) of language in an increasingly globalized world. Which is interesting, but so are zombies. I heard on the grapevine (which, admittedly, is a bit wilted now considering how October it is) that associate dean Jason Zelesky“The Walking Dead” on the 15^th. Perhaps it’s time to consider what all this end of the world hullabaloo (pardon my French) is actually doing for society. For those of us almost old enough to properly remember Y2K there’s a sort of apathy for any theory that the world’s about to end. It’s just run of the mill disappointment. It’s like, hey, media, you said that the world was going to end in 2000, but it didn’t, so I’m just going to stand here with my arms crossed and head tilted slightly to one side and say, “Really? Again with this apocalypse business?” But most people don’t really believe the world’s going to end in the near future. Or, if they do, they keep calm and carry on because what if the world’s not over tomorrow? It’s going to awfully inconvenient, and probably awkward to come into work on Monday and pretend like you weren’t recently chanting on a mountain to get beamed up before the Judgment. “Hey, Steve, how was your weekend?” “Uneventful.”
 

Luckily, says Dr. Spahr, the military has various plans for what to do should impending doom by space rock be staring humanity in the face. One such is a gravity tractor, which isn’t as complicated as you’d think. It’s like a big object launched to hang out next to the asteroid and convince it to pull to one side of the Earth instead of crashing into it.
 

“Hey, asteroid, what’s up?”

“Oh, you, know, just goin’ to fall into that planet over there.”

“Yeah, that’s cool, but I hear there’s this great party off in deep space just to the side of that planet.”

“Oh, man, I’m in!”
 

And that’s how science works.
 

Another option is the nuclear strategy. Apparently, every time there’s word of an asteroid near Earth the military’s just like, let’s nuke it! Even if there isn’t a threat, people sometimes want to do it just to see what happens. (As far as I’m aware, as of this writing, there haven’t been any nuclear devices launched outside of our atmosphere.) Scientists are usually the voices of reason to say, no, no; that’s a bad idea. Let’s not.
 

The concept of the end of the world is an interesting and pervasive thing in our culture, and even I’m not immune to its influence, having just read the first of six parts of Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on ROCU, in which the World gets destroyed by aliens to make room for a hyperspace expressway. Listen in next Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern to find out what happens and to, maybe, pick up some tips for your own survival. Do you know where your towel is?