Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

So, this is the first week of my "real" vacation. I've been spending some time doing a lit bit in a lot of different areas. I've managed to ride 50 miles on the road each day and even managed to keep up with the fast group through the most of the Pain Train ride last night. I got gapped again due to some poor placement and once again time trialed my way back to the leading three riders. The extra cool thing is that I dropped all the riders who where trying to hang on to my wheel. It was most excellent. The ribs hurt but not as badly as I expected and the endorphins keep everything managable. People wonder why I ride and I think a little of it has to do with the fact that no government can ban endorphins.

Another thing I've been doing is listening to a series of recorded lectures by the Dean Emeritus of St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary, Father Hopko. SVS is the preeminent seminary for the Orthodox Church of America. The lectures are sort of a series of talks Fr. Hopko gave on the Apocalypse, or as we tend to call it here in the States, Revelations. It's been really interesting. I don't agree with some of it but the sereis has explained a lot of practices still done in the churches dating back to earliest times of Christianity (i.e-Orthodoxy and Catholicism). The subject matter has been excellent food for thought.


I've also been working on my classes for this summer. I'm trying to get things more uniformly structured so that the courses are better integrated wtihin themselves. IT also helps me to stay on track when I'm working through the material. As a academic, I have a tendancy to digress (they give you a license to do that when you get your Ph.D. so that it's not a crime) from time to time and I find having a schedule helps to curb the excesses. Also, planning ahead helps me to explicitly establish links throughout the course i'm working on. The class that's farthest along is my Solar System Astronomy course for the June minimester. On a related note, I'm about two-thirds of the way though a great book titled Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos. The book is a history of modern cosmologyfrom the time of Hubble and Shapley through to about 2000. The story centers around the work and career of Alan Sandage but really does a nice job of bringing most of the major contributors work into the light. I recommend the book to all physics and astronomy geeks. One interesting note is that if I trace my "Academic lineage" back through my dissertation committee I find that I'm four generations removed from Einstein and about the same from Hubble. My work in galactic dynamics is a synthesis from both the physical and astronomical lines of cosmology with a hefty dose of numerical analysis thrown in.

Anyways, I've got about 17 days until classes start again and a lot I'd like to do so I'd better get to it.

Thanks for reading.

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