Working as a University of Texas parking enforcement officer since 11 September has allowed me easy access to the libraries that I use most often, even though I have not been able to pry away time to visit more. (I did see the Gutenberg Bible at the Harry Ransom Center.) The morning drive to work takes one hour (40-50 minutes) and the commute home can take two (45 to 90 minutes). I am working tomorrow’s football game against Texas Tech from 6:30 AM to 7:30 PM. (The pay is great: with game day overtime and event bonus, it comes to the same as being a technical writer.)
Some Saturdays have been devoted to the City of Kyle Public Library Astronomy Club and others to the Austin Astronomical Society and I still edit (and sometimes write) a monthly column for the Historical Astronomy Division of the AAS (here: https://had.aas.org/resources/astro-history). Something had to give.
I try to find whatever personal rewards that I can for self-actualization and transcendence (from Maslow’s Hierarchy). It has been a very long time since I watched the clock and looked forward to Friday. The advantages include UT healthcare insurance, as much walking as I choose to do (and I love walking), along with the light physical challenges of wrestling 22 lbs. of iron around an SUV’s tires to immobilize a scofflaw.
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| I also have the opportunity engage in philosophical discussions about semantics. |
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| At the snack bar here, the food is not labeled correctly and they do not give out receipts for purchases. |
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| This is still my favorite. |
Waiting to be written are these researches.
Like the problem of the tree that falls in a forest when no one is around, the fact is that there is sound in space. Stellar events create shock waves that cause compressions and rarefactions in the particles that comprise what we too easily call empty space.
NGC 6231 is easy to see in the lower body of the Scorpion. It has not been easy for professionals to sort out which stars are bound in the open cluster, which are background and which are foreground. I sketched it several times.
IC 1296 is a barred spiral galaxy that often appears in amateur photographs of the more famous M57 Ring Nebula in Lyra. In fact, I believe that it is an easy claim that amateurs have produced more photographs than professionals. I ran a literature search on the Harvard NASA database of articles and found some references.
Messier 30 appeared here in October. I would like to recast those as a single magazine article. The cluster is moving opposite to the inertial frame of the Milky Way. So, professional astronomers believe that it was captured in a collision with another galaxy.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops
Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science
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