Oh, huzzah.

[notmatt]

I finally got my Enceladus paper submitted. Yay. I'd hoped to be done with it in June. I remember being antsy as far back as October that I wasn't getting results fast enough. I really needed to get it out the door before the Boulder meeting, which is the week after next, so it looks like I managed that at least. Now it gets to go through the review process, which I hope is less painful than the last paper.

If I don't sound enthusiastic about this it's because now I'm worrying about what all I forgot to consider and what I did wrong. It's like final exams all over again. I need to stop second-guessing myself. I wasted several hours this week trying to track down errors in my results only to find out they were correct after all. "Wait this isn't right!" Two hours later: "Oh, yeah, it's all handled in the post-processing". Or "Fsck me, I forgot to include this factor in the models! I have to re-run everything!" An hour later: "No, it's all fine. I didn't include it because its effect is tiny. I even wrote that down in my notes a month ago. In fact here's that line in the code commented out." I have been better at maintaining older versions of my codes, so I'm able to diagnose these things more quickly now.

I suppose I need to prepare my talks before I head off to the meeting. I still don't know how long my timeslot is for the EFG meeting, which makes it difficult.

Comments

[salzara-tirwen.livejournal.com]

So... in layman's terms, what is Enceladus doing that's interesting?

[jameshroberts.livejournal.com]

There's a whole bunch of heat and vapor coming out of the south polar region and the ehat may mean there's an ocean under the ice. Enceladus is tiny (about the size of Great Britain), so by all rights it should have cooled off long ago. It's got an elliptical orbit about Saturn, and that means it can get heated from tidal deformation. The tidal heating can only be significant if there is an ocean, and the ocean can only exist if there's enough heating. If it freezes, it's frozen for good. My paper claims that under current conditions you can't get enough heating in the ice to keep the ocean from freezing