Uh yeah, I do solar system astronomy, so as soon as they hear asteroids and comets, they immediately launch into hearing about "some asteroid" that's gonna kill us all. And then I get the "how do you have a job, I mean NASA's dead right?". That makes me want to pull a Picard facepalm.

Oh in my case, I can't get any decent sleep from oxygen deprivation and everything being so damned dry! Last summer was probably my worst run ever- first time they had us run our particular telescope with no operator, so lots of running up and down stairs filling dewars etc. I had so many nights on the mountain that…

I had not heard about that one! And oh oxygen. . .the telescope I use on Kitt Peak has had an empty oxygen tank at least since I was in grad school (I'm at the end of my first postdoc, so it's been awhile).

Oh, but ALMA has worse things. . .we should talk about the electrical incident could have killed some staff (combo of locking doors for fire alarm, plus putting the control room in a room originally designed for the servers with a gas fire suppression system). Husband works for ALMA so I've heard...things.

Oh, they blew up the Paranal hotel in Quantum of Solace. *waves to a fellow astronomer*

Goddamn it, Kitt Peak is never that entertaining.

I'm tempted to give her a out as she posted early last week that the dress design they were going for fell apart, so she was getting another dress made in a color people generally liked on her. Given that she's probably got designers cranky about modifying for modesty, I can see being pressed for time and style in…

You're actually forgetting another item here in terms of cost: time spent at the gym means less time a person has at a job making money. While you think the initial membership might be cheap, if you add up the amount of time needed at the gym vs hourly wage, it may well be cheaper to buy diet pills that don't require…

*sips my peppermint mocha frapp in secret* Oops, maybe I shouldn't have said that ;-)

You can do that anytime of the year, Peppermint is a standard Starbucks syrup flavor year-round. They just don't advertise it until Christmas time. I've been drinking my Peppermint Java Chip Frapps all summer.

Actually listening to her tell him to stop, and given his comment afterwards, I'm guessing that was a sentence for another word in the competition. Reading the sentence would spoil the word, because then the kids would have however long to think about how to spell it.

Dear people of Twitter: just because I'm an astronomer does not mean I need to sit on Twitter all my Sunday night watching Cosmos. Up until this episode they effectively taught everyone that to do science you need to be smuggling a sausage in your pants- the leaving out of Caroline Herschel when going on and on about…

"It was safer than bringing along 2 bickering little bitches."

Half their models are "PhD Candidates", so yeah, ABDs.

To be honest, Jake already had a soft spot in my heart, but him telling Liv off cemented it for me :-)

Oh, I think I love Jake now for yelling at Liv about stocking the fridge with beer and real food if he's supposed to play her boyfriend properly.

You forgot the "at the State Fair" part of the prize to be won yelling :-)

As a Charlottesville resident, I'd beg to differ on the "quite liberal" thing. Charlottesville has a metric shit ton of racial interaction problems. One only needs to watch the many crapstorms over people on the downtown mall to see that. Perhaps it's more obvious to me living where I do within the city and seeing…

Interesting that she seemed to have a change of heart, because she was in the process from the reports on NBC at the end of the mens. I'm curious if she'll try and bail to the Japanese team then since she's a dual citizen and US Figure Skating has been pulling crap with her anyways.

At the end of the men's yesterday, the commentators were talking about how Mirai was filing an appeal but would be told tough shit because she had no coach. I personally wonder if this is a form of punishment for her since she fired one of the US's most famous coaches in the last year (Frank Caroll).