Summer Projects

[asterroc]

My current list of Summer Projects. Enumerated for convenience, not priority.

1. Organize photos. My high school photography instructor told me the secret to good photography is to take many photos and only show the best ones. With the advent of digital photography I have perfected the former, but need to work on the latter. My goal is to take the best photos from my anonymyzed Flickr account and upload them into my personally identifiable account (for those of you who know my real name, that Flickr username is first initial last name, no spaces or punctuation).


2. Record singing - I have enjoyed singing since at least 5th grade, which makes it 20 years now. My singing voice is somewhat soft, but I have good relative pitch. I also play guitar though a bit crappily. My goal here is to record guitar and vocals for a few covers (Indigo Girls, Dar Williams, possibly Sarah McLachlan) and one or two of my own, using Garage Band. I will need to get something to plug in my guitar (it's got a jack) to a USB port (kelsin, got anything like this I could borrow, or that you could recommend I buy?). I am not adverse to collaborations.


3. Road trip to Philly - one of the two surviving Galileo telescopes is out of Italy for the first time ever and is on exhibit through Sept 7 at the Franklin Institute. Along with this I may visit nerdcamp.


4. Visit the crater photography exhibit at CLAMPART in NYC; open through July 6.


5. Learn programming


6. Inbox 0 - a lifestyle change in which I treat my email Inbox as a To-Do list, and remove everything I've completed, so that my Inbox stays perpetually close to 0 items.

More items may be added in the future, but generally 3-5 items is a good goal and I achieve 2-3 of them.

Edit: Added programming, I knew I was missing something.

Comments

[sildra.livejournal.com]

The reason a lot of astronomers and physicists use IDL is because 1) it has a lot of plotting and other numerical visualization stuff built in, and 2) it's vectorized, i.e., it's designed around working with arrays. This means it's much easier/faster to do calculations relating to a large number of objects (simulated physical objects, not "objects" of object-oriented programming), or a large number of points in some coordinate-space, than it would be in other languages. The people I know who use it range from astrophysicists to... umm... neurophysicists.

Personally, I've only ever used it for a math methods class in undergrad (we had a "lab" portion of the class that was in IDL). No one runs equipment using IDL, so it isn't a universal language for all physicists. For equipment, people typically use C (well, usually people use Labview, but that's a separate issue...), but that only matters to the type of astrophysicist who build detectors.

The only situation in which I've ever encountered Python was a professor who used it to make toy examples for class in undergrad. I've never heard of someone actually using it for real simulations, though.

If there's legacy software, it's in C or Fortran (if it's actually old, it's in Fortran). Those are nice because they're relatively fast even if you have a complicated program (faster than IDL, I think, unless you're doing one of the things IDL is specifically built for). Brand new stuff that doesn't have to worry about complicated calculations over large arrays is often done in Matlab (Matlab is to C as IDL is to Fortran insofar as they have the same syntax but have been reworked specifically for scientific applications and graphing data; Matlab in particular has nice GUI interfaces). Matlab has nice things like built-in programs for calculating Fourier transforms or correlations. It's slow, though, so it wouldn't be good for a real calculation done over a large parameter space.

I've never heard of a physicist using Java.