2010 Volunteer Appreciation Dinner

I'm one of over 200 Mauna Kea volunteers, who together voluntered over 12,000 hours last fiscal year. Here are a bunch of us after the annual Volunteer Appreciation Dinner last night.

Pondering

 Which flights to take to my parents' house?  Oh, and how to pay for them...

Web Seer

Thanks to Raquel Romano for pointing out http://hint.fm/seer - looks like Republican administrations need to fund history education better, so people will remember what party Ronald Reagan was from. :) 

Radioactive mountain lions?

I took  an online radiation-safety refresher for Berkeley Lab the other night,  and have now gotten email warning scientists there to "Avoid being outside and  alone during dawn or dusk hours, when lions are most active."

Okay,  who's the wise guy who decided to "scale up" Dr. Schrödinger's famous  cat experiment?

Today's pondering

Research in Motion's "PlayBook" tablet (competes with iPad) and Nintendo's 3DS handheld 3-D gaming system (competes with iPod Touch/iPhone) will both launch in time for your... Easter shopping.  By which time Apple will sell another eleventy-gazillion iThings.  What are RIM and Nintendo thinking?

Mazlan Othman

I photographed Dr. Mazlan Othman, head of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, at the 16th Commission on Sustainable Development in 2008, for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.

A year later, she visited Hawaii and Mauna Kea, and more photos were taken, with one contributed to her Wikipedia entry.

So if you see a picture of her in the media speaking at the UN with a translation earpiece on, or a picture of her wearing a blue and white checked shirt and holding a folder - you know where they came from.

Here's a less-commonly-seen picture of her with me in May 2009, after we saw the reboot of the "Star Trek" franchise.  It seemed like an appropriate movie to take someone to basically leads the predecessor of the Federation of Planets.

MKOOC

Hanging out at the monthly Mauna Kea Observatories Outreach Committee meeting. It's... well, it's a committee meeting. But it's about Mauna Kea outreach. Those two things kind of balance out.