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Galactic Interactions

Rob Knop's Blog -- ramblings and rants about astronomy, cosmology, science education, general nerdism, and anything else.

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Rob Knop earned a PhD in Physics from Caltech in 1997, and did a 5-year post-doc with the Supernova Cosmology Project, and contributed to the discovery of the accelerating Universe. He was an assistant professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt for 6 years before scattering out of academia. He now works for Linden Lab, the producers of Second LIfe. (Note: this is not an official site of Linden Lab! Although I work for Linden Lab, all content in this blog is posted without the review or approval of Linden Lab. All statements and opinions expressed here are my own.)

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« Second Life | Main | Blogging at Lawyerpoint : Intellectual Property Maximalism is Bad for Science »

Too much travel!

Category: Rant
Posted on: April 25, 2007 6:55 AM, by Rob Knop

Truth to be told, I'm not a gigantic fan of traveling. It can be entertaining and enriching sometimes, but too much travel all at once leaves me pining for home....

At the beginning of April, I went on a 3-day trip to the University of Missouri at Rolla, where I gave a Shapley lecture. Then, for 10 days, I made a trip to CTIO in Chile for a 7-day observing run. (It takes 10 days because of the travel time involved.) Currently, I'm in Greenville, NC, where I'm giving another Shapley lecture (including talks to three high schools, a departmental colloquium, and a public talk). I get back, and then in the middle of next week I leave for Tucson, AZ, for the meeting of the NOAO Time Allocation Committee.

Whew!

Don't get me wrong, the Shapley lectures can be very rewarding, and I had a good run in Chile (5/7 clear nights, lots of should-be-good data). I've always gotten a particular charge out of giving public lectures, which is why I jumped at the opportunity of becoming a Shapley lecturer when it was offered to me. However, I feel like I've barely been home in April, and after a while it starts to wear one out. Indeed, even before all of it started, I was busy making sure all my ducks were in a row getting ready for all of the travel.

Hopefully, come May, I'll be keeping up a somewhat more regular blogging schedule!

Comments

While you're in Tuscon I highly recommend spending a few hours at the PIMA Air and Space museum or the Titan Missile Museum. http://pimaair.org

Posted by: C. Taylor | April 25, 2007 11:08 AM

Shapeley lecture?

Posted by: mollishka | April 25, 2007 11:42 AM

'Too much travel' is exactly what I thought when I read about the recently discovered extra-solar planet with earth-like lower bound on mass. (I think first of its sort found around a main sequence star).

Posted by: llewelly | April 25, 2007 7:12 PM

I've been to the Titan Missile Museum before -- years ago, even before "Star Trek: First Contact" came out. This was when the AAS meeting was in Tucson -- summer 1995 or thereabouts.

Mollishka: nothing I do is shapely :) The Shapley lectures are described here:

http://www.aas.org/shapley/

-Rob

Posted by: Rob Knop | April 25, 2007 10:03 PM

That sounds like a fantastic idea.

Posted by: mollishka | April 26, 2007 12:15 AM

As much as I like to travel, you have my sympathies on this point. I just got home from a conference (in Puerto Rico, which was fun, but very wet), and I'm on a plane on Saturday for another trip. It gets to be a bit much after a while.

Posted by: David Williamson | April 26, 2007 11:46 AM

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