Friday, November 30, 2007

Comet 17P/Holmes

I went outside tonight and checked out Comet 17P/Holmes. I found it just a little south of α Persei. With my 7×35 binoculars I observed a dimly glowing ball roughly a half degree in diameter. I reckon I just wanted to be able to say I saw it.

I also observed Comet Kohoutek back in 1973; but I needed a much larger instrument to see that since it was partially lost in the evening twilight. Using an 8 inch richest field telescope I was able to clearly make out the tail; so I knew with certainty that it was indeed the comet. Kohoutek was so spectacularly unimpressive compared to expectations that I didn’t dare miss it. And yes, over the years I have had many people ask me if I saw Comet Kohoutek.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

My First Telescope

Science has been a major part of my life since around 1962 when I bought my first telescope through the mail. I paid $3.95 or so to Criterion Manufacturing Company for a 26mm diameter objective, an eyepiece to give maybe 40× of magnification, and a series of concentric tubes that slide over one another to focus.

I spent the first hours after receiving my telescope examining everything that I could see from my bedroom window. I checked out the surrounding houses, birds, the IPI water tower, the railcars sitting on the nearby tracks, the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in Newark, and even the stones in the driveway next door.

By nightfall I was a practiced observer and trained my telescope on any and all celestial objects that looked interesting. Naturally, the moon was my first target and I was lucky to have nearly half a moon to look at. I had seen the craters before using my dad’s binoculars but now they looked so big, but less sharp. My dad pointed to a bright object in the sky and said, “That may be Saturn”.

Balancing the telescope on the porch railing I quickly discovered the advantage of a solid telescope mounting. Despite my best efforts the tiny image of Saturn danced constantly around the center of the field. Nevertheless, there was Saturn with its rings. That was all it took to wet my appetite for more.

At the time it didn’t occur to me to ask my dad how he knew this was Saturn. Since then I figured it out. He knew the stars reasonably well and simply knew that the bright object he was pointing out to me was not a star and had about the right brightness and color to be Saturn. Now, even I can do this easily.

As the weeks and months passed I learned about many aspects of observing that can only be appreciated by another observer. For example you learn to dislike the full moon. Not only does the full moon look relatively featureless through a telescope, but its presence in the sky pretty much destroys your chances of being able to see dim objects like nebulae or galaxies. I also began to suspect that telescopes are cloud magnets.

My original Criterion telescope is long gone but a few years ago I saw a slightly earlier version of this telescope for sale on eBay. I could not resist the temptation to buy it. It is almost an exact duplicate of the telescope I had and even has the odor of phenolic resin like my original one had. I have this telescope in front of me right now as a reminder of that life changing event.
I could probably think of more to say about this but I need to end now. I see something out the window and want to take a closer look.

Friday, November 9, 2007

Fatal System Error

Mature people understand that automobiles can divine the existence of extra money in your wallet or bank account, even a secret Swiss account. Squirrel away five hundred dollars and the transmission breaks. Similarly, homes can detect the existence of free time. Plan to take an evening off relaxing with a good book and the spring for the garage door breaks, not a major job but time intensive enough to guarantee that you will just finish before bedtime.

Computers are neither motivated by money nor time. Computers strive to frustrate. Futhermore, computers seem to know when they have the upper hand and thus show no mercy.

After spending a day at work and teaching a class in the evening I came home to relax only to encounter an agitated wife directing me towards her computer where I faced a blue screen with the following message:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system terminated unexpectedly with
a status f 0x00000407 (0x00000000 0x00000000)
The system has been shut down

Attempts at rebooting only confirmed the same message:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system terminated unexpectedly with
a status f 0x00000407 (0x00000000 0x00000000)
The system has been shut down

I have a tendency to attribute most if not all computer problems to either a faulty operating system or else a defective hard drive. I used to ignore the operating system as a suspect but then SP2 came along for Windows XP; but that is a whole different story.

A part of me believed that this time it wouldn’t be the hard drive since I had recently backed up all of the computer’s files. Hard drives only quit when you don’t back them up, right?

It is in my nature to try the simple things first despite low probabilities of success. Therefore I used the F8 key and tried booting up in safe mode. I wonder why they call it safe? Is there a hidden command that boots the system up in unsafe or dangerous mode? There is also the option of booting up the system in safe mode with a command prompt, obviously a means of switching rapidly to dangerous mode if it is needed to fry incoming viruses. Neither of these options offered any relief for my wife’s digital habit. In my next experiment I tried to restore the system to the last good configuration. Good for who? This is a clever feature developed by Microsoft so that people experiencing problems similar to ours can restore their systems back to a point where the message on the screen will read:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system terminated unexpectedly with
a status f 0x00000407 (0x00000000 0x00000000)
The system has been shut down

At this point I went to bed and offered my system for use in the meantime.

After coming home from work, eating, and preparing for the next night’s class I tackled the computer problem again. This time I pulled out the box of disks and books that came with the system and actually read them. I swear there are people out there who think these books and packages of disks are a part of the packing material and throw them out with the cartons. From my manual I learned that Dell furnishes a neat little feature on the back of their systems where four small lights come on when you power up the system and tells you that your hardware is functioning provided all the lights are green. Any combination containing one or more yellow lights means you have hardware problems. Our system only showed green lights, a good sign.

Next I tried the Dell diagnostics CD which provides some means of testing various parts of the system. I was pleased to see this work and I soon began running a bunch of tests that might explain the blue screen. Finally on the diagnostic testing of the hard drive we looked at the screen and saw:

IDE Disk Read Test
Error Code 0F00:0244
Msg. Block 93188711
Uncorrectable data error or media is write protected

and

IDE Disk Read Test
Error Code 0F00:0244
Msg. Block 93193861
Uncorrectable data error or media is write protected

Identical information was obtained during the IDE Disk Verify Test except the Error code is 0F00:1A44.

For whatever reason some small sector of the hard drive became corrupted and needed to be fixed. I figured this would be a good place to try out the Windows XP recovery console which can be reached by booting from the operating system CD. That was my next try.

Did I mention that while all this is going on my wife is sitting behind me asking, “Are we there yet?” or maybe it was “Will I have my computer tonight?”. Using the CD the system booted up and loaded drivers and whatnot until I reached the screen where you are given the choice of aborting, reloading the operating system, or hitting R to repair the operating system. I hit R and though expecting to see the recovery console, I was presented with a command prompt that asked which operating system I wanted to repair even though there was only one choice. I typed 1 and hit the enter key. The command prompt came back with something like:

C:\WINDOWS Administrator Password? or some such thing. I never entered a password on this system and my wife claimed she didn’t either. This made me suspect that a hacker might have figured out a way to get though our maze of firewalls and discovering a lack of any password put one in themselves effectively locking us out of our own computer. I tried hitting enter without typing any password and followed this up with a few educated guesses for a password. Microsoft only gives you three tries and then you are out.

Desperate, I organized all of the information I had and attempted to get into a real-time chat with a Dell representative. No luck. I then put everything into an email since they responded so quickly the last time I had used this service. I hoped that maybe Dell put some sort of default password into the system but I would have to wait until they replied the next day.

Wednesday started as any other morning and a check of my email indicated that Dell had not yet responded. After work and school I checked again and still no message from Dell. Lucky thing I found a copy of PC Disaster and Recovery at the college library. Here I learned that XP Professional has to have a password for the administrator account. Since I knew I didn’t enter one it had to be my wife who entered it, except she didn’t know she was entering the most important password of the system and didn’t keep a record of it. Is there a patron saint of lost passwords?

Anyway I decided to try some various passwords that might work especially since this password had to be entered before my wife discovered the importance of secure passwords. Now she comes up with passwords that might look like:

&tF89#b5N+

or some similar jumble of characters. I knew I only had three guesses per CD boot cycle so they had to be good guesses. My fourth guess was correct. I still can’t get over this!
Now at the command prompt I typed Chkdsk /r and hit enter. After about thirty minutes the display indicates that two repairs had been attempted. There is a temptation to fiddle with the boot section of the hard drive but as a scientist I know you should never make two changes at once. So I attempt with suppressed excitement to reboot the system normally. The seconds ticked and the old familiar desktop photo popped into view. From the cheering coming from over my shoulder I assume I did a good thing.

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Writer's Block

I suffer from writer's block.  I refer not to that malady where weeks pass and not a word gets written; but of one so great that years go by without a single sentence surviving long enough to be read by anyone other than the author.  Why is this?
Reflecting upon my early schooling I treated reading as merely a means of acquiring information about science, particularly astronomy, rather than for entertainment.  I loved science, mathematics, and geography.  English, history, and art failed to excite me at this point in my life.  If I wrote anything prior to entering high school I don't recall any of it which is probably fortunate.
My tenth grade English teacher once asked me what I intended to do with my life and was astounded to learn that my plans did not include a writing career. This may have boosted my ego but I never seriously thought of myself as having anything even close to superior writing abilities. During my senior year at high school the junior and senior classes were required to write a major term paper worth one-third of the last marking period’s grade. When the papers were returned the teacher explained with some fanfare that out of a couple of hundred papers only two were deemed worthy of an A and one of them was in our class. When she announced that it was me I could hear the muted, “him?” that seemed to come from all directions at once. I am not sure but there might have even been a muted, “me?” buried in there somewhere. I still scratch my head over that one. Once in college things changed. My first paper was returned with a C+ and several critical comments. The only one I remember is, “You’re putting me on”. I had never been graded on something so subjective and wasn’t sure how to proceed. I read the paper a few times and discovered one of its major failings. It was as boring as an insurance seminar. As the semester progressed I struggled to satisfy my professor and put additional effort into writing my assignments. I gradually improved my writing and soon saw an A on each and every paper I produced. Once or twice he gave me an A+ along with some very complimentary comments. After that I had little difficulty writing, simply assuming it was good. The following semester I breezed through another English class where my writing skills were complemented by aligned ideology with the professor.  Finding someone in academia committed to free markets feels like finding a parking place in Manhattan. I eventually took a course allowing me to try my hand at science fiction. The course required quite a bit of reading and even though it was sprinkled with some of what I call science fantasy, I enjoyed it. Understanding science and possessing a vivid imagination gave me a distinct advantage when the time came to write essays. While others wrote essays containing ideas even more lame than those found in an old Lost in Space episode I merrily composed short stories that frequently poked fun at others’ ignorance of science. Compared to the rest of the class I must have shined like a beacon of hope to the professor who suffered through long hours of boring and pointless stories by people whose only exposure to science came in the form of TV programs like Star Trek. After college I concentrated on chemistry and physics letting creative writing fall by the wayside. Employed as an industrial chemist, little opportunity presented itself for creative writing though some might dispute that. It is very tempting to employ creative writing to de-emphasize poor or incomplete data. I prefer to maintain intellectual honesty both because it is the right thing to do and because it is often soon discovered. Maybe someday I will write about some of the more blatant intellectual dishonesty I have witnessed. Now more than forty years since my tenth grade English teacher asked me about my career plans I tried to play with creative writing again. I attempted to present chemistry in a new and refreshing manner but found I couldn’t even get the first paragraph completed. My vocabulary had evaporated and everything I wrote looked amateurish. Even now as I read what I have written so far, I have a profound sense of disappointment. I am embarrassed to admit that after comparing technical reports I wrote over a decade ago to recent ones I can detect a significant degradation in quality. Am I getting lazier or more careless as I age or am I observing the ravishes of age on my mind? More importantly, can I reverse the trend? So dear reader I hereby give myself a C+ and hope you do not feel I am putting you on. I’ll try to do better the next time.