I shall dedicate this post to my colleagues, the fellow summer program interns at the Space Telescope Science Institute for 2004. Until now, they have been part of the background of my blog, so to make up for this, I shall devote an entire post to just describing them!

The first group of interns I met were Scott, Marie, Tom and Bonnie, the first Sunday after I arrived.

Scott is an American from Massachusetts, but he studies in Vassar College in the state of New York. He's TALL, and he towers above all of us. He usually wears a blank expression on his bespectacled face, but will suddenly break into quips now and then. As he was in the summer program here last year as well, he's the guy everyone turns to when there's a questions to be asked, whether it's about the finer points of working in the Institute, or about places to visit in Baltimore. I found him rather alarming at work, because from day one he was sitting down at his computer and hammering away at it (he's continuing his project from last year, that's why). He's the resident computer whiz, and if whenever I'm stuck at something, he's the one I turn to.

Bonnie is a typical American girl, with a taste for Long Island Ice Tea. She's just finished her astronomy degree at Case Western Reserve Uni at Cleveland, Ohio, but she's from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unlike most of us she isn't based at the S215 office, instead being domiciled at the 4th floor at a vacant office to herself! Still, she makes it a point to hang out with us as much as possible.

Marie, or Lu Xiwei, shall we say? She was born in Beijing, but her family moved over to the States when she was 5 (she says she was actually at Tiananmen Sq. during the demos in 1989, but she left before the tanks started rolling in), and her parents are currently in Houston, Texas, but she's studying political science and biology double major at University of Southern California. What the heck is she doing in the Space Telescope Science Institute then? She's actually working in the Office of Public Outreach rather than in the Science Division like the rest of us, so she actually spends a lot of her time photoshopping Hubble images rather than hard astronomy or astrophysics. She's the shortest of us, and she has this wonderful smile, filled with her braces! She's Esteban's favorite target for teasing...

Tom is probably the funniest among us all, or to be precise he's the one we seem to laugh at the most, because he's just so wound up. As I mentioned before, he looks and behaves almost exactly like Niles from Frasier. He walks around with a huge SLR digital camera when we go out, so I have the habit of letting him take the pictures and then stealing them off him. He studies at St. Andrew's University in Scotland, but he lives in France. His mother is British though, so he actually speaks with more of a British accent with a tinge of French.

I think this would take a long time, so I'd leave the rest of the interns to some other post. As for the past week, it's been a BIT easier to get things done because I've started the habit of writing myself notes on the scientific papers I read, and somehow this helps me focus much better. During lunchtime, it can take me more than an hour, because I tend to be one of the first to get to lunch, and as the other guys start to file in, I feel it's not polite to leave the table, so I tend to sit there chatting for ages!

Today, we went to Inner Harbour for the benefit of a few of our newly-arrived colleagues, Raquel, Miguel and Gara. There are some sailing ships from other countries docked at Inner Harbour, which will be taking part in the Independence Day celebrations at Washington DC tommorow. One of the first ships we saw had a Brazillian flag, and Raquel dragged us all on board, as it was open to the public. Raquel is an ethnic Japanese girl(her surname is Shida), and she looks exactly like a Japanese, but she's Brazillian, and can hardly speak any Japanese. We went around the sailing ship (called 'Cisne Branco', or 'White Swan'), and we hung out there for quite a while. After that, rationalising that if you've seen one sailing ship you've seen 'em all (other sailing ships in the harbour flew Romanian, Mexican, Portuguese flags), we decided to adjourn to a restaurant so that the Spaniards and Colombians can have their lunch (it was about 4pm by then, but these guys have their meals about 3 hours later compared with most other people). I was challenged to eat a double fudge chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream by myself (naturally, my colleagues have long ago caught on to the size of my appetite), but I shared with Tom instead. I didn't really enjoy it...I don't seem to perform well when it comes to desserts.

After lunch, we went to Federal Hill again for the benefit of the newcomers, and when Bess saw the swings at the playground, she went ape and ran straight for them. However, she quickly realised that the swings were rather high up (too high for her legs to get her moving), and she was just hanging there until a couple of young kids came along and showed her how to get swinging. Soon enough, she was swinging merrily, but more drama came when she had to get off...we were goading her to jump off, and it was a while before she managed to get off. However, she managed to retain her dignity unlike Rafael, who went on it after her, and when he jumped off he ended up face down in the grass (Scott: 'I give you 10 marks for the jump and zero marks for the landing!').

We chilled out at Federal Hill, enjoying the view and watching the world go by. Miguel, one of my Spanish flatmates, was taking the chance to call his girlfriend on his mobile phone...while roaming! The fellow has already impressed me with his ability to talk nonstop on the phone with his girlfriend, and this time he was just sitting there in the grass chatting away for half an hour.

When we decided to leave, it was about 6.30pm. Some of the guys wanted to carry on sightseeing, but me and the others went home to recuperate for tommorow's trip to Washington DC to see the 4th of July festivities....

The latest pictures are here, just to whet your appetite before my big trip to the capital!

I just came back from watching Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 with the other interns. Our complement of summer interns is now complete, and the latest additions are my new flatmates Gara and Miguel from Spain, and Matthias from Germany.

As for the documentary itself, it's the first time that I've actually watched Michael Moore's productions, even though I've heard of him for quite some time. His films have never made it to Malaysia...is it simply because the subject matter is of no interest to the Malaysian audience, or because is it for some other reason?

The documentary starts of focusing on the Bush family's connections with Saudi business, including the Bin Ladin family, from George W. Bush's business days it the 80s and 90s, up to 10 September 2001. Then, there is a very powerful video clip, which shows President Bush visiting a primary school in Florida, AFTER the first plane had crashed into the WTC (he knew, but decided to go ahead anyway). When an aide whispers into his ear that the second plane had crashed in, the documentary shows him sitting in the classroom with the children, with a blank expression on his face, for a full seven minutes.

The angle of the documentary then moves to the Iraq war, and there are a lot of images which are rather unsettling. I thought this part of the film was rather contradictory, because on one hand it portrayed the US forces as insolent brutes committing atrocities against the Iraqis, on the other hand it tried to show the US soldiers as unwilling participants. The rest of the show tells the personal story of a mother who lost a son fighting in Iraq.

As far as I'm concerned, the movie was preaching to the converted: I already feel that Bush is an incompetent idiot, representating big business interests, and a threat to the world at large. However, I personally felt that the documentary smacked more than a little as propaganda. Nevertheless, so long as it gets Bush out of power, I have no complaints.

On another note, something like this would never come out in my own country. As many problems and flaws as there is about America, the people have a voice. I wish my own people could have just a chance to do more than be sycophants to the powers-that-be.

Then

A couple of weeks into my internship, I may finally have a clear idea of what I am doing! Previously, a query as to what my project was on would have elicited a brief mumble including the words 'protoplanetary disk' and 'theoretical modelling'. However, after a couple of weeks learning up the background knowledge and learning about the field, I now have a far better picture of my project.

Basically, there is a lot of gunk out there in space, gas and dust filling the vast emptiness in outer space (called the interstellar medium), as well as surrounding stars (circumstellar dust). My mentor has co-written a program called 2dust, which helps models the way light and energy from a star transfers through a cloud of dust surrounding it. The past few days have been taken up with reading up on a couple of young stars about 300 light years away which are interesting to study, because they have disk like dust clouds around them called protoplanetary disks, which are believe to form planets. I will need to figure out the parameters to input into the 2dust program, i.e. the shape and size of the dust cloud, the types of gas and dust in it etc, and try to make it match the observations made by telescopes. It's not too complicated, yet it will challenge my research skills and scientific ability. Even though there is a lot of stuff to learn, papers to read, and reams of information to think about, at least I'm finding this project more and more interesting. Of course, the fact that there are pretty pictures of the dust cloud (the spiky things are just to block out the star so that the dust disk can be seen) makes it more inspiring to work on.

The people I work with make things interesting also. Dr. Meixner is the leader of my research group, but under her there are a few more people, who are mostly graduate students. However, the person who stands out most is Dr. Ben Sugerman, who (I presume) is a fresh PhD. He is incredibly knowledgable, and has answers for almost all the problems groups members bring up at meetings. He's also incredibly passionate about learning in general, and he's always trying to teach us something new. Listening to the discussions at research group meetings is something that I anticipate every week.

Work aside, last Sunday I went to a baseball game with the guys (none of the girls could make, for some reason). The local team is the Baltimore Orioles, which was the team of Babe Ruth, if that rings any bells. The visiting team was the Atlanta Braves, which I have never heard of before. The game was held in the afternoon, and the game was quite well attended, with a bit less than 40,000 people in the crowd. The atmosphere was a bit more family-centred than the typical Premiership football match, there were a lot of housewives and young children. The game itself was rather boring, partly because I didn't understand the rules, but still it was rather slow-moving. The audience seemed to be there for the occasion rather than the game itself...they even had to rouse the audience through messages on the video screens saying 'Make more noise!!'. The game was three hours long, and we were stuck in seats without shade in the summer sun...by the time the game was over, all of us were sunburnt to a shade of lobster red.