My wanderings for the rest of the month take me to Florida and Japan, including one public talk:

On Friday, I fly Rome - New York - Tampa, and spend the weekend with my parents in Englewood, Florida. My sister will be down from New Jersey as well, so it will be a fun mini-family reunion. I am sure we'll connect via iChat with my brother in da U. P. (That's the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for those on the list who don't speak Yooper.)

Monday I catch a 6 am flight to Dallas and then a very long flight from there to Tokyo, followed by a three hour train ride to Niigata. I'll be attending the Asteroids-Comets-Meteors meeting that was supposed to have been held last year but got canceled due to the earthquake. The following Monday, the 21st, I return to Tokyo and stay overnight with the Jesuits at Sophia University. 

Tuesday I am back in Florida, after another very long flight. 

Wednesday, May 23, at 6:00 pm I am speaking in Ocala at the Institute for Human - Machine Cognition; the topic is "Discarded Worlds -- Astronomical Ideas that were almost correct..."

The weekend finds me with friends in Ovieto, then returning to Englewood to catch up some more with my parents. I get back to Rome on the 30th.

It's not often that one gets mentioned in the same breath, or at least the same paragraph, as Isaac Asimov.

This did, indeed, happen to me today in an article in the MIT News about the MITSFS.

Slow News Day, I suspect. Still, it's good to seen that the MITSFS maintains the tradition of carrying on traditions that they don't know why they maintain...

... in Arabic (The Heavens Proclaim... I presume my name in Arabic is at the bottom of the book):

Day five of our hiking trip in the Lake District (no, I haven't posted about days one to four), we walked into Troutbeck and stopped for the lunch at the Mortal Man. Ordering our Real Ales, madtechie2718 says to me, "Look, there's a copy of Turn Left." The woman behind the bar says, "Yes, it just arrived today. About fifteen minutes ago."

"You realize, the author is right here..."

Like much of the Christian world, I spent this morning rediscovering how to remove candle wax from trouser legs. (The old hot-iron-and-newspaper trick works like a charm, thank heavens.)

I hear from the noise out my window (we're right next to the helipad) that the Landlord has arrived for a few days' rest, after what must be his busiest time of the year. (There was a pause in the rain, just long enough for him to land and get in his car for the drive across the Gardens.)

Meanwhile, I am off on Wednesday on a two week trip -- to the US, the UK, and Switzerland.

I am scheduled for two public talks, one about meteorites at Catholic University, Washington DC, on April 12, and the other the English version (translations provided) of the talk I gave in Verona two weeks ago about cosmology in Fribourg on April 23. (I hope the after-talk dinner will be as much fun!) In between I will be spending a week hiking in the Lake District with various old friends, many of whom are on LJ. (Hi there!)

At the end of the month, over the course of two days I hope to be meeting up with a couple of more recent friends who, by coincidence, I found out today have both been nominated for Hugos this year. Forty years ago, when I first got involved with science fiction fandom, I would never have expected to be able to say that. It's not because I didn't have the ambition to meet famous and wonderful people; certainly I hoped to be famous and wonderful myself, by the time I was 60! But rather, I think I would have been surprised to learn that I was still involved in fandom, something that at that time I dismissed as a passing fancy of youth. Shows what kids know.

I would probably also have been baffled, back then, by how my ideas of what constitutes "famous and wonderful" have changed.

When I was a post-doc at the Center for Astrophysics, 34 years ago, I taught one graduate level class, to about five students, in Harvard's astronomy department and as a result had the official title of lecturer for one semester. Likewise, in my second postdoc at MIT, I taught a general astronomy class that no one else wanted to teach, and again got the title lecturer. Never mind that postdocs are like marriages, more is not necessarily better... and that being a lecturer is the lowest of the low when it comes to academic ranks, in the US. I did indeed teach at both of these schools.

In a couple of weeks I will be giving a lecture at a Francophone university in Switzerland. (My lecture will be in English). The announcement on their web page reads "astronome à l'Observatoire du Vatican. Ancien professeur à la Harvard University et au Massachusets Institute of Technology." (Yes, that's how they spelled Massachusetts.)

I like the sound of "ancient professor" -- it invests my turning 60 this year, and my graying beard, with a certain dignity. I suspect that's not what the French actually means, however...

So I looked it up:
In English, we have Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego fighting King Nebuchadnezzar.
In Italian, we have Sadrac, Mesac, e Abdénego responding to re Nabucodónosor.

I can handle the appearing - disappearing "sh" sounds. But to switch between "bed" and "bde" is just not fair! 

And, of course, it turns out that the English version is the one that is cooked. According to an online version of the Septuagint, the original Greek would read:

Sedrach, Misach, Abdenago (where the "ch" is a "chi" i.e. more or less a hard "c" sound).

σεδραχ μισαχ αβδεναγω

and Nabouchodonosor:

ναβουχοδονοσορ

Since my return from Verona I have had the unusual luxury of several weeks without anything "unusual" -- which is, itself, unusual. It's 8 pm tonight, a Wednesday, and while I am waiting for Gabriele to finish watching the news before going out for a pizza, I thought I would record another typical day of a Jesuit astronomer.

We went on Legal Time this week (DST) and so waking up has been a challenge... I lay in bed at 7 am, listening to the podcast version of the sports program Pardon the Interruption. Following American sports is my way of keeping in touch, at least a little bit, with the popular culture "back home." Besides, it's a fun show. And one of the hosts is a product of our Jesuit high school in Chicago, while another regular is a Fordham University product; gotta support our Jesuit schools, right?

I did eventually drag myself out of bed, into the kitchen for a caffe lungo and three of those little hard round Italian pastries that go well dunked in coffee. That's breakfast. Then the long commute, one flight downstairs, to my office and lab.

The first order of business was charging my dewar with liquid nitrogen for today's run of heat capacity experiments. While waiting for it to cool off, I answered emails. A colleague in Louisiana has made contact with folks who can do heat capacity measurements the expensive, tedious, material-consuming, but accurate way. (My method is not expensive, not tedious, not material consuming... and alas, not very accurate.) So I sent her my suggestion of which samples were our top priority to measure, and what level of precision I would hope to get. More emails to folks whom I will be visiting in April and May. 

The other task this week is preparing a short movie on the history of the Observatory, and a short guide to our offices, for a group of about 300 VIPs who are scheduled to come through here in May. Since they will be of various language groups, the film must be without narration; the guide must be prepared soon so we can translate it into various languages. First task was the movie, where I have spent the last week learning all the things nobody tells you about iMovie on the Mac. I do wish I had the "missing manual" that David Pogue wrote.

At 9:20, the first sample gets dropped into the liquid nitrogen; samples follow at 20 minute intervals. Ten am is coffee with the whole group, and after coffee I show the first version of the movie and collect suggestions for improvements. By 11:30, the last of the samples has been measured and I port the data on a stick from the un-networked PC to my Mac, for later reduction and analysis. A little work as well on a possible talk for a history of astronomy conference, in September in Flagstaff, where I might review Secchi's contribution to studying stellar spectra and its connection to Slipher's first measurements of the radial velocity of the Andromeda Galaxy.

Community prayer at 1:20; pranzo at 1:30. The first course today was gnochetti, second course fried chicken and roast rosemary potatoes. Then to bed for a nap (and a bit of a crossword puzzle). I slept later than usual today, didn't get up until 5 pm. I emptied the dishwasher -- one of my community jobs -- had an espresso, and then went for an hour walk/prayer in the gardens. By 6:30 I was back at work, reducing this morning's data and trying (unsuccessfully) to find a simple relation for the shape of the curve of heat capacity as a function of temperature, relying on literature data and what little real data my colleagues have gotten so far for meteorites. Work continues.

At 7:30 pm, I went up for community Mass. Today's reading was from Daniel...  Shadrak, Medzek, and Abed -- Abned -- what's-his-name... which is apparently pronounced and maybe even written completely different in Italian than in English. As is Nebedga...mumble mumble. That king, you know, with the fiery furnace. Sigh. I can't pronounce those names in English much less Italian...

Our rector, Paul, has just returned today from the US, and is feeling a bit peckish; there's not much food in the kitchen so we're going out for pizza. Gabriele wants to watch the news so we're waiting for him. As he is a Neapolitan, and very fussy about pizza, we won't go to my normal place (which is friendly and nearby) but to another place where the pizza is admittedly better but the people who work there are surly. I will let Gabriele deal with them!

The conference "Infinita-mente" (an Italian pun on "infinitely" and "infinite mind") opened on Sunday with a pair of absolutely wonderful talks.

Marco Bersanelli, who works on the Planck satellite, talking about the origin of the universe, was spectacular. He was so clear that even though he spoke in Italian I could follow everything he said. At the end of the talk, he got a trick question from someone about Hawking's Grand Design and I wanted to say, "ooh, ooh, call on me, I know that one!" (having just given the Nash Lecture on that very topic) but in fact he handled it perfectly. 

Gian Francesco Giudice, another local physicist, gave a delightful talk about "Time between Science and Science Fiction" that was also very well done, illustrated with appropriate movie clips; again, a great job of covering material I have covered in the past, doing it all better than I could have done, and in Italian to boot! (He also had a lot of topical Italian jokes, which of course I could never have pulled off.)

The last talk of the evening, however, was tedious, pedantic, and presented by a guy whose Italian was just dreadful. I know. I recorded it. I never realized that my accent was that awful. Many people walked out about halfway through; I would have, too, except that I was the one giving the talk.

But then... after the talk, as I was attempting to slink away, a local amateur astronomer showed up with a copy of every book I have ever written, for me to sign. And a bunch of his friends. And an invitation to join them for a pizza... at the home of friends of theirs, about a quarter of an hour outside Verona. They have a wood-burning oven in their basement. It turned into a party of a number of local families (all the "kids", now in their thirties, were childhood friends), including friends who had moved there from Liverpool and France, the best pizza I have ever had, a dessert called a "chocolate salami", and conversation that went all over the place and which I now can't remember what was in Italian, and what was in English. Oh, and the family who were making the pizza also make their own olive oil. And their own wine.

That is what I will always remember about Verona. What a wonderful evening!

Since about 2 am Rome time, my mail on the Mac cloud system has been unreachable. Every device I use (laptop, desktop, iPhone) tells me that it is rejecting my password. When I go on-line at iCloud.com with the same password, I can reach all my other iCloud options just fine... by Mail just gives me an error message. No idea what the deal is, but it means if someone is trying to reach me they'd be better off this Live Journal address... or "gjc@specola.va" where I have turned off the "forward to mac.com" address for the moment.

Added as of 2:30 pm, in Verona...

This morning I was able to download some mail, but nothing that arrived after early morning yesterday. As of now, it has gone back on the blink. I am very mad and don't even know whom to complain to -- applecare service in Italy was useless.