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unmotivated http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con
So it seems like the dragnet is slowly closing on Rove. Let's see how he tries to squirm out of this one. Maybe he'll claim that he can't read! Anyway does anyone else find it disconcerting that they're just circulating Top Secret memos willy nilly around the White House about the wives of their political "enemies?" Richard Nixon is grinning ear to ear in his grave.
Second, I'm not really feeling motivated to do anything today. I guess the summer heat is starting to get to me. Summer isn't a good season for working anyway, what with all the sunshine and nice weather. Summer is for sipping mint julips in your rocking chair on the back porch. *mmmm mint julips***
I guess part of it is that we passed the revised Helium II emission paper back to the journal yesterday so it's like that's done and here comes the let-down. Not like I don't have other things to do. I suppose I should update yall on that as a form of procrastination.
-The paper on Helium II Emission in Eta Car received a somewhat favorable review from the referee. (This is that sixty page semi-book that KD and I have been working on for the past year almost.) Somewhat favorable means that there were only a few complaints and those complaints could easily be dismissed by citing already published literature (not our own). One could interpret this whole thing as a conspiracy to keep us from publishing this work but I prefer not to think that the whole world is out to get me.
-The paper on the Unknown Emission in Eta Car is kaput... for now. After the first irritable referee's report the journal editor agreed with us and sent it to a second referee for review (taking the unusual step of not sharing the first referee's report with the second referee). The consensus between the second referee and the editor was that what we had wasn't important enough to publish in the ApJ. So we withdrew the paper. The plan is to beef up the paper a little and send that heavily revised manuscript to the PASP.
-I've got the second paper based on my PhD dissertation in the pipes. That is coming along well. I hope that REL is still willing to pay the page charges for it like he offered to do two years ago. This work has kept me sane as: 1. it has nothing to do with Eta Carinae and 2. it's mine and all mine and I'm in complete control of it, at least for the time being. I wouldn't suggest to anyone that they should let their PhD dissertation sit for two years before they write the papers on it, but I have to admit that those two years have given me perspective and I think the paper may be better than if I had written it right away.
-Michael and I are starting to outline another Eta Carinae paper. For those that don't know, Eta Car is surrounded by a beautiful nebula which is basically the expanding shell of debris from and explosion/eruption. If we measure the motions in that nebula, we can trace them backward in time to reconstruct the explosion that created it... not much unlike the forensic work that gets done to put together what happened in an explosion here on Earth. Michael has been tracing the motions using pictures and I've been doing it using spectra. Some of it was on my poster at the June 2005 AAS meeting. Dinking around with that stuff has been fun but we seriously need to stop dinking around and write the paper.
-RMH is talking about starting the summary paper for the Treasury Project. Which will be an overview of all the spectroscopic data we got from the Hubble Space Telescope. I'd really like to see this done so that we can close the book on several things at once.
-Bish still needs to get back to me about the extraction height correction calibration. Yes, we're still working on calibrating our data but thankfully on this project, I have the excuse of waiting for Bish to finish something before I do my part.
Hmmm. I guess I should stop procrastinating and get back to work.
Solider on brave space-cadets.
