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Cosmic Variance
« IPMU in Tokyo Needs Support
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Wechsler’s Index

by Risa Wechsler

My last 10 days (posted after a recovery weekend), by the numbers:

Shuttle launches witnessed: 1
Shuttle launches since 1981: 129
Shuttle launches remaining: 5
“Shuttle Experience” rides experienced: 1

Cost of Space Shuttle Atlantis [dollars]: 1.7 billion
Total cost of the International Space Station [dollars]: 157 billion
Science publications resulting from research by the International Space Station: ~200
Total cost of the Hubble Space Telescope [dollars]: ~4-6 billion
Science publications resulting from Hubble Space Telescope data: >8500

Years between first trans-Atlantic air passenger and first man walking on Moon: 42
Years since last human walked on moon: 37
Moons of earth where water was found: 1

Cities visited, where snow was visible: 2
Cities visited, where it has never snowed: 2
Cities visited with a “Disney Land/World”: 2
Mickeys seen: 0
Alligators seen: 2
Geckos seen: 1
Astronauts met: 1
Space geeks met: ~ 40

Tweets sent at first “tweetup”: 24
Tweets sent in lifetime: 24
Number of distinct words heard starting with an extraneous “tw”: >15
Days after my first tweet that Palin decided to resume tweeting: 4
Books released by Sarah Palin: 1
Stewardesses I saw that were the spitting image of Sarah Palin: 1

Oceans swum in: 1
Oceans I was close enough to swim in: 2
Places visited that are the Holiest site of a religion: 1
People met that are writing a book about escaping that religion: 1
Points bowled: 67
Team place out of nine teams of bowling scientists: 1st

Flights taken: 7
Amount of carbon emitted by those flights [lbs]: 2240
Net amount of energy generated by my solar panels [kW/hrs]: ~100
Equivalent amount of carbon not emitted [lbs]: 100
Cost of offsetting that 2240 lbs of carbon [dollars]: 12.63

Talks given on completely different topics: 3
Talks listened to: 41
Talks listened to without my laptop open: 15
Non-astrophysics talks I heard that mentioned dark matter: 10

NSF proposals submitted (as Co-PI): 2
HST Multi-Cycle Treasury proposals submitted (as Co-I): 2
Total number of HST MCT proposals submitted by the community: 39
Total number of HST orbits requested by those 39 proposals: 26801
Interviews given: 3
Days with at least 3 nearly identical deadlines: 2

Emails received @ work address: 768
Emails sent: 253
Emails still in my inbox: 361

Average number of hours slept per night: 5
Brain cells lost by multi-tasking: Uncountable.

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November 22nd, 2009 7:56 PM
in Miscellany, Personal, Science, Space, Travel | 4 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

4 Responses to “Wechsler’s Index”

  1. 1.   Jacob Wintersmith Says:
    November 22nd, 2009 at 9:06 pm

    That’s a lot of email. Any plans to go Knuth?

  2. 2.   Sili Says:
    November 22nd, 2009 at 9:07 pm

    Well, after the last fact, I won’t complaining about your using the wrong ppP of “to swim”.

    Welcome home?

  3. 3.   daniel Says:
    November 23rd, 2009 at 9:43 am

    And I thought I had a busy 10 days. Ooof. At least my index starts out the same way!

    The carbon calculations are somewhat depressing. But I guess over ten years the panels will save well over 10,000 lbs of carbon, which is a substantial amount. Especially if everyone were doing it. Note: units should be kW hrs, not kW/hrs.

  4. 4.   Phillip Helbig Says:
    November 23rd, 2009 at 10:03 am

    “That’s a lot of email. Any plans to go Knuth?”

    This refers to a statement by Don Knuth explaining why he doesn’t have email: Email is great for staying on top of things, but I want to get to the bottom of things.





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