Sunday, July 26, 2020
By:
[All views are my own.]
We are eight weeks into this internship and it is almost August!
This week, I ran a bunch more code and might have found something interesting! We’re still looking at seasonal trends in wind speeds, and there seems to be a decreasing trend in horizontal wind speeds over the summer. This decrease could be related to how shorter EPEs have decreasing propagations in the summer. Weather science is cool! I also went back and edited some codes, and I’m hoping to find some more trends next week. Oh, and I wrote up an abstract because we only have two weeks left and I need to get started on a presentation.
This week’s webinars included some cool talks about space telescopes, namely the HST and its new friend the JWST. Jim Jeletic gave a great talk about Hubble’s history and successes. If you didn’t know, Hubble’s been up there getting data for over 30 years! That’s longer than I’ve been alive. I’d never really thought about how surreal and impressive it is that we have a literal telescope in space. And next year (hopefully) we’ll have another, even more surreal telescope in space! Our friend John Mather gave us NASA interns a talk about the JWST, for which he is the Senior Project Scientist. It’s a really exciting and impressive project, and I look forward to the data!
Outside of this internship and inside my apartment, I got to vote this week! Although the process is still pretty complicated, I’m glad that Tennessee is allowing absentee voting for everyone this election season. Caveat to that statement: not everyone can vote! I recently learned that most prisoners can’t vote, which is absurd. To learn about that and more, I highly recommend Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis. In happier news, I’m very excited about my oxalis plant growing! I bought this little oxalis triangularis from a friend earlier this summer, and it’s finally sprouting these adorable shoots. The leaves close up at night, which is incredibly endearing. Maybe I’ll post a photo next week!
Till then,
Anna Murphree