Holiday Skits 1997

Yellowstone picture with voiceover: "Are you searching for the meaning of life?" 
Chris Chyba recites definitions of life

Rachel: "I'm new here, how do I get one of those advisors?"
Andy: pops into scene Try new Instant Advisor Crystals. Just add water! 
*poof* Bob Brown appears
Chris Schaller talks about new product and applications, like when your advisor is on sabatical, in Antarctica, or just face-down in a gutter s omewhere. 
Barb: shows graph to pile of crystals on Tim's desk. 
Voice offscreen: "Barb, you need to add water!" 
Nancy and Windy: But we don't have any water. What if we use beer? 
*poof* Mike Drake appears. "Vesta is the eucrite parent body!" 

Party scene in atrium
Students: Here's the caterer! 
Jay : gleefully pegs students with donuts from 5th floor
Voiceover : From the publisher of the bestseller Dyanamics comes the new book, Impact Catering! 
Jay : drops eggs off the gantry, eggs land in frying pan Cooking with potential energy! 
Jay: in lab stirring with wooden spoon Acoustic Fluidization! 
Voiceover: Bake Jay's famous KT cake--the secret ingredient is iridium! To order, call GRADCO at 1-800-U-FAKE-IT! 

Scene of atrium, faculty member walks into classroom, army of grad students charges classroom
Closeups of Grad Students

• I'm learning to program in Fortran!
• I'm learning magnetohydrodynamics!
• I'm learning leadership skills!
• I was drafted!

Voiceover: Grad School: It's not just a job, it's an indenture.

Alfred: is painted blue with plaid material on. Lots of students in PIRL. 
Alfred: walks into PIRL. 
Students: whispering It's Alfred McEwen! No, he's not tall enough. I heard Alfred McEwen has seven spacecraft! Wow! etc.
Alfred: Children of Pirl, I am Alfred McEwen of clan McEwen!. As you know, Robert the Strom has a competing proposal in the current Discovery cycle. There can be only one successful proposal! Are you willing to fight for your funding?!?! 
Ralph: But Robert the Strom has too many images! How can we compete? 
Alfred: An' what would ye do wi'out funding? Sure, s ome of you may die, maybe even most of you. But years from now, when you're working at Burger King, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they can take our lives, but they'll never take our funding!! 
Students: get up and yell, pull weapons out from under seats, storm the Imagery Center, with Bob and Mary inside.

by Andy Rivkin

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

Galileo Galilei

• Ptolemy (147) proposed a cosmogony whereby the planets and Sun all revolve in circular orbits around the Earth. This work has been largely accepted ever since
• However, recent theoretical work in Poland has suggested instead that the planets, including the Earth, all revolve around the Sun (Copernicus, 1543). This finding, if confirmed, has deep, meaningful, and profound philisophical and intellectual ramifications destined to change the way Western civilization considers its environment
• Recent observations at Hveen Observatory (Brahe and Kepler, 1598; Kepler and Brahe 1601) seem to bear out the difficulty of fitting the positions of Mars to circular orbits. Naked-eye planetary astrometry, however, seems to have been pushed to its limits

   

My Research

• Invention of the telescope
• Discovery of the phases of Venus
• Discovery of satellites of Jupiter
• Discovery of sunspots
• Discovery that falling bodies move independent of their weights
• Discovery of craters on the Moon

Some Implications and Questions

• The results of my observations show that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, and that the planets revolve around the Sun, except for those which orbit Jupiter. According to recent numberical modelling by Kepler (1609), these orbits are ellipses, not circles.
• The surface of the Moon is not a smooth, perfect sphere. Neither is the surface of the Sun.
• The planets are held in their orbits by some force, similar to the force that moves falling bodies, and not by crystalline spheres.
• Larger telescopes will help revolutionize astronomy
• The Enlightenment has begun

Questions from the audience

• Uwe Fink: Where are your error bars? These observations are notoriously difficult. Are you certain that you aren't being deluded by Satan?
• Galileo: I'm sorry Dr. Fink. Statistical methods haven't yet been invented, so I cannot give you a precise estimate of uncertainties. I do not believe I was deluded by Satan.

   

• Mike Drake: As someone who studied the Moon as a graduate student, I have a serious problem with your comment about craters. Guy Consalmagno and I showed that geochemically the Moon must be a perfect sphere, and that craters are impossible.
• Galileo: I'm sorry Dr. Drake, but geochemistry hasn't been invented yet, either. In fact, neither geology or chemistry have been invented yet.

   

• Alex Dessler: Look, this whole geocentric/heliocentric thing is a dead horse that people would come up with every few years to make the papers. When I was editor of GRL, we did a whole series of papers about the subject, and in the end, noone was happy. These Copernican results are always published in books, not in peer-reviewed literature. Why should I believe this now?
• Galileo: I'm sorry you feel that way, Dr. Dessler. I can assure you that the higher spatial resolution of the telescope will allow convincing data to be obtained.

   

• Don Hunten: You claim you discovered the telescope, but I was the chair of a session at the Amsterdam DPS in 1605 where a Dutch group previously claimed that they invented it...
• Galileo: Well, I wasn't expecting a kind of Inquisition!

(People run in, grab Galileo)
Inquisition: Noone expects the Spanish Inquisition! Off to jail with you!

Occult Studies

• Bill Hubbard playing Tarot cards, "I thought I was successfully funded to continue my occultation research, but due to a typo, I'm actually funded for occult research."

Mars Observer Observer (MOO)

• Alfred McEwen maps the debris pattern of Mars Observer.

Far-Away Asteroid Rendezvous (FAAR)

• Tom Gehrels interprets one bright pixel.

Really Impractical Tethering Zystem (RITZ)

• Bill Boynton demonstrates, once and for all, that 5-km tethers do not work, anywhere in the zolar zystem.

Lunar Fast Flythrough

• Jay Melosh explains the use of lithobraking.

Returning Angular Momentum (RAM)

• Carolyn Porco is concerned about stealing momentum from other planets by using them for gravity assists. This mission will orbit planets in the opposite way and give it all back, because a solar system without Jupiter is one not worth living in.

Pluto Local

• Bob Brown explains the multiple (28) gravity assists, it's already done 5 or 6, it will arrive in 2138.

We're Going To Mercury and We're Going to Map the Whole Planet, Dammit! (WGMWGMWPD)

• Bob Strom

Commentators mention Randy Jokipii's Solar Windbreaker and Tim Swindle's proposal to Search for Meteorites in a Bar in New Orleans During Mardi Gras.

Hi. I'm Peter Smith, and I'll be giving some of the preliminary science gleaned from the Faculty Pan on the Hairfinder mission. I'm very proud to be associated with this mission. It's been great for meeting people-- the vice president, the vice pope, the vice dalai-lama, you know. In fact, it's even inspired me to write this poem:

i am no poet
if i were would i spend time
writing bad haiku?

Now, one of the first things we've done here is take a super-resolution shot of one of the formations you saw earlier today. We've been calling it Elmer Fudd. Or Boo-boo. I forget.

Kind of reminds me of something I'd see in Arizona.

Anyhow, morphologically, you can see some hints of hair in this true-color image, but no real firm evidence. It's just a big, bulbous mass of rock, mostly. Near the back of the mass, you can see some areas that seem to show hair, but the rover was unable to approach, so we have no images from that direction. Right now, we tend to think that that area is actually covered by some sort of crust masquerading as hair. However, the jury is still out. Some people believe they see evidence for some sub-surface hair still present. I can say that we have found evidence in the Faculty Pan that there was once an epoch when there was much more hair among the faculty.

This reminds me of the time I sat sipping tea in Constantinople with Auguste Rodan and Alexander the Great. I had come to the Ottoman Empire for... Oh. I'm told I have to hurry up.

We were able to extract some three-color spectra from different points on this body-- what we're calling the "head", the "nose", and the "ear". All of these are very consistent, and are evidence that this object is not of this world. In fact, the extreme redness seen is evidence that it originates on Mars. We also have a very preliminary spectral match, to desert varnish. This also implies that some sort of film may be present on the surface.

Thank you for your time.

We surveyed Hal Larson's 105 class:
NAME A PLANET

1. Helium 80
2. Vulcan 9
3. Krypton 7
4. Planet of the Apes 3
5. Cleveland 1

We surveyed 100 LPL workers:
WHAT IS THAT HANGING IN THE ATRIUM?

1. It symbolizes Man's desire to discover new worlds, not just beyond the earth, but also within his own heart 43
2. I have no idea 22
3. Mir 14
4. the air handler 12
5. Mars Observer 5
6. The Kring? 3
7. some weird kind of modern art 1

Written and sung by the LPL Grad Students

On the first day of Field Trip, we all woke up to see

• Jay.

On the second day of Field Trip, we all woke up to see

• two flat tires
• and Jay.

On the third day of Field Trip, we all woke up to see

• three wrong turns
• two flat tires
• and Jay.

On the fourth day of Field Trip, we all woke up to see

• four-wheel drive
• three wrong turns
• two flat tires
• and Jay.

On the fifth day of field trip, we all woke up to see

• five golden beers!
• four-wheel drive
• three wrong turns
• two flat tires
• and Jay, in a tree.