Around the Department
- (While spinning cell phone on the table) I like spinning things. Goes back to my pulsar days.
- Remind me of what I know. This is what you told me before. Doesn't mean I know it.
- How to take complete failure and turn it into an optimal result... that's what astronomy is.
- Trusting IRAF is probably the first thing you did wrong.
- I used to think that [dealing with travel] was annoying. Then F-2 showed up $332,000 short, and that's much more annoying.
- Things can look like garbage in an infinite number of ways.
- Jeff has forgotten more about making nitrogen dewar cans than I ever knew.
- I assumed a model that would be simple to calculate rather than one that was physically true.
- Wait until you get old and bitter like me. Then you can sell your soul if you want.
- I'm screwed with a capital 'F'!
- You have **** syndrome. He was absolutely allergic to pulling the trigger. (Name has been deleted to protect the innocent)
- If they give us grief over 2+2=4, what happens when we start differential calculus?!
- There's an Italian-X-ray mafia that's known for irreproducable results.
- You have to assume that the universe is out to get you.
- The Eddington Luminosity is like the Pirate Code... it's more of a guideline than an actual rule.
- You can cure everything with a good velocity kick.
- Why don't you check and make sure it's not a sign error. Otherwise we have to invent new physics and I hate doing that. It takes so much time.
- (w.r.t. QPOs being quasiperiodic vs. aperiodic) It's like the Princess Bride when the guy is only mostly dead.
- (paraphrased from a High Energy talk)
Reba: Can you date a supernova remnant?
Steve: ... Only the young ones -
Michelle (laughing): Did you say 'only the young ones'?
Jonathan (confused): Is this some sort of inside joke?
Reba: Can you date a supernova remnant?
Steve: ... Only the young ones -
Michelle (laughing): Did you say 'only the young ones'?
Jonathan (confused): Is this some sort of inside joke?
In Class: Compact Objects
- Miguel: Where do I buy books?
Steve: At the bookstore.
Miguel: evil look clearly saying 'Smartass'
Steve: (reacting to the evil glare) He didn't say it, but he thought it very loudly. - You could put your tongue on the end of a PMT and you can tell when a photon hits! GAH!
- (w.r.t. the pulsar model) I have a picture I'll show you in a minute. It's a lie, but it's the lie we tell everyone so don't feel bad. Kinda like politics.
- Whoever made the universe really liked Fourier transforms. That and beetles. There are lots of beetles.
- (in response to barycentering) So the earth is a really lousy place to build an observatory.
- (of pulsar rotation) It's faster than your blender, but it's like a billion times the mass of the sun. That's a blender you don't want your finger stuck in.
- The great thing about gamma rays is you can basically name the photons. That one is Fred, this one is Ralph. There's Joey. Little Joey came to us in January.
- (on buried B-fields) The physics of this... it's not fantasy really, it's just imaginative.
- (on magnetar populations) This all holds together at the hand-wavy level.
- Magnetic fields are suseptible to Enron accounting.
- (on magnetar field evolution) It's at that level of freaky.
- This is sort of our zeroth level introduction.
- This is linear. I like linear. It's easy.
- Let me live in my make believe world a little longer, then I will pull away the curtain and let you see the little man.
- The reason I was confused for the last five minutes is because I was confused... I was wrong.
- It's not a shell game. It really is true.
- From now until the last ten minutes of class, accretion disks are thin. Then I'll show you why they're not really.
- Just because we know almost nothing about what we're trying to study never stops us. We're astrophysicists after all.
- Everybody who turned it in got a thumbs up. It's the Eikenberry binary grading system. 'Turned in' (motions thumbs up), 'Didn't turn in' (motions thumbs down).