Real work. . .

Reg and I headed out to Julian this past weekend to help the Parker family with the garage they are building. The plot of land used to be the site of Linda's parents' house, which burned down in the Cedar fire of 2003. Now the family is building a new house on the land. They're saving money by building it themselves in their spare time.

It felt good to do some real, physical work. So much of what I do involves reading and computer work.

wOOt!

The internet leads to the invention of a new word. . . sort of.

wOOt!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woot

Ahh. . . summer.

The summer kicked off with the Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) conference in Snowmass, Colorado. I presented a poster on my research, and Regan came along to get some vacation time in, since she's off for the summer. That's one of the huge benefits to being a teacher: summers off.

After the conference we drove through Utah and stopped at Arches, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Parks. Beautiful places.

Also, Regan came with me to one of my volunteer shifts diving at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific last tuesday, and snapped some photos of me in the water.

Pictures of vacation and diving are at my flickr site:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dgalvan/


Here's to a fun and productive summer!

Moons of Saturn

Another cool movie has been released by NASA. This one is of three moons of Saturn as viewed by the Cassini spacecraft.

The center (and largest) moon is Rhea, and it is the closest. Further away is Mimas, the moon on top, and even further away (yet larger in size than the top moon)is Enceladus. Check out the link to see the movie in motion and learn more about it.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07804.html

Fun fact: Enceladus (the bottom moon) has been discovered to have sub-surface liquid water beneath its icy crust. The fact that this water sometimes escapes the surface (cryovolcanism) provides water molecules into the space surrounding the moon, and these water molecules become ionized by sunlight and travel through Saturn's magnetosphere. What an amazing system!

Proofs that God exists

Disclaimer: I don't mean to offend anyone (yeah, all 10 million of you who read my blog).

My friends know (or maybe some of them don't) that I am agnostic when it comes to religion. I used to be a devout and faithful Catholic. Nowadays I'm not convinced by most of the arguments for the veracity of much of the mythology of Christianity or even the existence of God. I agree with many of the take home messages from Christianity (the Golden rule: treat others as you'd like to be treated, etc.), but I just don't subscribe to the stories of how the universe is set up. I prefer to claim ignorance and openly admit there are so many things that we don't understand. I don't need to substitute a God of the gaps in order to make the universe sit right with me, I just admit that I don't know. So I'm not an atheist either, because I think it's impossible to prove categorically that a God doesn't exist, and that wouldn't be scientific either.

All that said, I thought this website was funny:

http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/GodProof.htm