Beach Trip Plans!

Hello!  As you heard in class, we’re going to the beach this Friday, September  30^thfor the first lab.  Santa Monica is a great beach, relatively close by, and has an awesome pier for anyone willing to stay longer.  There are also a bunch of really cool rings/ropes for anyone dying to feed their inner gymnast.

According to the magical powers of Google search, the sun will set at 6:40pm.  The weather is expected to have a high of 73°F (23°C) and a low of 62°F (17°C).  For anyone interested, the wave forecast is 3ft in height with a period of 11 seconds. 

I thought we could plan on arriving at the beach around 6:00pm to be safe.  Santa Monica is about 30 minutes away without traffic. However, the 110 freeway can be jam packed on a Friday evening,  so we could plan on meeting at 5:00pm in Cahill. This should give us enough time to group up, get to our respective cars, and account for traffic/getting lost. 

The directions  to the Santa Monica Pier can be found  here:

 A great place to meet is just south of the pier (by the rings)

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Hello! Let me just start out by saying that this is my first real blog, and I'm not really used to writing so much.  At the same time, I'm really excited to try it out!

I thought I'd start out with a blast from the past. The last week of my summer break, I decided to spend some time at home (which for me, is in San Jose, CA). While I was there, my mom decided to use that as an opportunity for me to sort out all of my old school work that she had been storing for years.  As I was sifting through some papers from elementary school, I cam across an essay I had written in fourth grade entitled "When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Scientist."  It listed all of the reasons for why I loved math and science, and I was thrilled to be reminded of them.

I also came across an old astronomy textbook that I once bought at a garage sale for fifty cents. The most important page (the one talking about black holes) had been book marked. I still remember reading about them for the first time. I was so completely blown away by the fact that black holes were so dense, that it was comparable to the mass of the Earth being compressed into a tiny sphere with a radius of one centimeter!

Black holes are still my favorite objects in space. I love that they're such a mystery, and I really want to do research with them in the future.