Building a Cosmic Coffee Table

Posted on March 6, 2022

Now that I finally have a couch (and am living in an apartment big enough to comfortably fit one, unlike when I was in grad school), I decided I also needed a coffee table. Instead of just buying one, I decided to build one instead, with an astrophysics-related theme. To make construction without access to a woodworking shop easier, I sketched out a design based on square birch dowels, after which I selected a Hubble Space Telescope image of the Tarantula Nebula to use for the tabletop, and got to work building the table.

Black wooden coffee table with image of Tarantula Nebula on top and slats on the bottom Continue reading →

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JWST Gingerbread Cookies

Posted on December 22, 2021

To get into the holiday spirit and in anticipation of the long-awaited launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST),1 I decided to bake some gingerbread cookies in the shape of JWST’s primary mirror, which is comprised of 18 gold-plated hexagonal segments. The cookies are 10 cm across, with hexagonal segments are 20 mm flat to flat, making them 1:66 scale replicas of the mirror.

Three gingerbread cookies in the shape of the JWST primary mirror with gold hexagonal segments stenciled on Continue reading →

  1. The launch is scheduled for Christmas Day, as of writing.  ↩

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Square Equal-area Map Projection

Posted on August 30, 2021

Several weeks ago, my paper on a novel square equal-area map projection was published in ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, titled A Square Equal-Area Map Projection with Low Angular Distortion, Minimal Cusps, and Closed-Form Solutions. For mathematical details, the reader is directed to the paper, but I’ll discuss what motivated its development and outline the projection’s benefits here. The projection uses a quincuncial arrangement, which places the north pole at the center and splits the south pole between the four corners of the square, forming a quincunx pattern that resembles the “five” marking on a standard six-sided die. This arrangement has been previously used by the Peirce quincuncial projection, the Collignon quincuncial projection, and the Gringorten projection.1

Map of the world displayed using the new projection Continue reading →

  1. Gringorten, Irving I. “A square equal-area map of the world.” Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology 11, no. 5 (1972): 763–767.  ↩

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Climbing Cerro Zapaleri

Posted on April 17, 2021

Last month, I climbed Cerro Zapaleri, the 5648 m tall summit of which forms the tripoint of the borders of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia.1 Its location is quite remote, ~105 km from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile and >40 km from the nearest paved road, both as the crow flies. After researching previous accounts of ascents and poring over high-resolution satellite imagery to map out routes to get to the mountain and to climb it, it was time to depart. As expected, a high-clearance four-wheel drive vehicle would prove to be necessary.

Cerro Zapaleri Continue reading →

  1. This was at the end of a nine-week trip to Chile for telescope repair and maintenance work. Traveling during the COVID-19 pandemic, even with an N95 mask and PCR tests, was a nightmare, particularly for the flights in the United States, and I would not have done so if the repair work wasn’t necessary.  ↩

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Baking a Sierpiński Carpet Linzer Cookie

Posted on March 30, 2021

As a follow-up to my previous entries for the Ashley Book of Knots and Space-Filling Curves, I decided to enter a submission into this year’s Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries’ (virtual) Edible Book Festival contest for Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature. This raises the questions of which fractal to use and how to make it edible. To this end, I decided to bake a Sierpiński carpet Linzer cookie. The zeroth iteration of the fractal, a square, forms the first layer of the cookie, while the first three iterations of the fractal form three additional layers, for four cookie layers in total.

Photo of a Sierpiński carpet Linzer cookie Continue reading →

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