 Today, there was free candy and free pumpkin. Oh, good morning. We're already midway through November, and I haven't posted much. November is traditionally a time when you try to do a lot of writing. If you participate in like, nano-Rymo, then you're trying to write a novel in a month. I've been trying to do Astro-Rymo, where I'm trying to write every single day and get as much content as I can, astronomically speaking. So last week, I finished a big grant proposal, which went to the National Science Foundation. I'll talk about that more maybe in my next video when I talk about my latest paper. Last week, I did something really fun, which was I did an Instagram live chat. And I've never used Instagram's live feature, so it was really cool to get to try that out, to set up a ladder and like strap my phone to it and plug it in so that I could have like a steady shot. So Jonathan Wax, who runs the Instagram account, spacefactswax. He reached out to me online and asked if I would be interested in doing a live chat about Kepler and about being an astronomer in my background. And it was really fun, we had lots of people watch it. So he sent me the screen capture of that video. So I'll include a few clips of that here. Without further ado, here's my chat with spacefactswax. That rig you put together for your phone is amazing. I'm gonna let you tell people who you are and we'll go from there. Okay, my name's James Davenport. I am an astronomer in Seattle. So I have a PhD in astronomy from the University of Washington. Just, yeah, okay, to get a little more detail. So I did five years in college, just because I took my time and was really bad at like math, had to reduce the math classes. And then I did a master's for two years, which is a little unusual in astronomy. In the US, usually you just go straight to PhD, but those math classes, that GPA wasn't so high. And so I did a standalone master's to kind of figure out if I was serious about this life as a scientist thing. And then I went and did six years for a PhD, and I graduated. I got that about three or four years ago. So I've had my PhD now for almost four years. Awesome. I mean, I guess how important is the math? I mean, is it something that's super crucial to what you do? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's important. Like, it's definitely important, right? Like, I have a lot of fond memories. I had a really lucky experience with a math teacher in high school who, like, it really clicked with, right? One of the themes you hear when you talk to scientists or academics or historians or whatever is like, I had this one teacher and they blew my mind. And that made the difference, right? And the role of mentors and inspiration is super, super critical. And for me, I had a math teacher, I was lucky enough to have him. I grew up in a small town, like 400 people in my high school. So I grew up, I went to a high school called Natchee's Valley High School, GoRangers. Yeah, so it's about three hours east of Seattle, kind of in the foothills of Mount Rainier. And it's just like a rural agricultural community. And like, two of us from that high school class went to University of Washington. So, you know, it was a small town. I was so lucky to have one great math teacher who was able to teach calculus and say the things in a way that like stuck in my brain. You know what I mean? Right. That was the key. There was, I mean, I didn't, there was no physics. There was no astronomy. There was like very basic science in my high school. I was just like a nerd who went to space camp and like watched Star Trek. But I got enough educational footing that I was able to actually get into university. So I was very lucky in that way. Sure. And so now you're on the path where you're doing all this research and specifically you've been working a lot with Kepler, right? So when did that start? When did you start digging into Kepler? Yeah, so Kepler mission launched in 2009. Yeah, so it launched right after I started my PhD and like in the first like six months, my PhD, a friend of mine came back to to UW and gave a talk seminar saying like, check out the hot new data office the telescope, which I had barely heard of. I was working through other stuff. I was a young student and she came back. This is Lucia and walk with she came back and gave an amazing talk just saying like, look, Kepler, it lives, it's in space and it's doing cool stuff. And it was just like a show and tell. And I was just like, sign me up. Oh, my God. And I was like, I got to be involved now. I got to join that on some level. And so I kind of like dip my toe in. I still was working for my PhD. Hey, greetings from Brazil. What's up? I'd like to check out the messages that they come by. And so like in the middle of my PhD, I still sort of progressing on so the project was for me and my advisor thought we were going. And and then I just found myself spending all my time working on Kepler. Like it was like the side thing that just consumed me. And I was like, nobody cares about this other stuff I'm doing. I got to work on Kepler. It's just so hot and it was blowing up in the news. And so halfway through my PhD, I dropped my thesis project entirely because I realized that it wasn't hot. It wasn't happening. I wasn't excited about it and no one else was either. And so I said, I got to go for it. I have to I have to just follow my nose because being an astronomer, being a scientist and academic, it's a life full of like failures and challenges. It's a hard gig. You're always hustling. You're always working something for years and never see results from it. Right. I mean, that's right. That's right. Yes. You can't make nature do what you want. You can't make the math do what you want. Computers are fast, but not infinitely fast. You know, like there's just challenges all the time. You know, if you're good at it, it's hard, right? Even if you're good at it, if you're not, then good luck. If it's not hard, you're probably not doing something right. So, so I, you know, I was like, I got I got to go where my heart is. I have to go and work with Kepler data because I'm way more stoked about this. Knowing that a ton of people were also excited about it. And so it'd be OK to be second at something as long as I care about what I was doing is what I decided. The Elon Musk, you know, wanted to get to Mars, you know, it's it's it's basically making a duplicate hard drive of Earth on another planet. You know, the fact that we're all here on this one, you know, place where, you know, anything can happen, you know, and it's kind of like expanding humanity before it's too late. That that to me is why I feel like the continued funding of NASA or, you know, and all their affiliate SpaceX and, you know, is so is so crucial just to expand, you know, humanity and getting here. Human spaceflight is super critical to part of this. And a lot of like pure scientists are like that human spaceflight just in telescopes, they're more interesting. But like I grew up like loving human spaceflight, too. Like a huge Apollo nerd and moon mission nerd. Like I went to space camp on my own dime after working at a burger shop for a summer as a 16 year old. Like like it was like it's important and it resonates with the soul. And that that's not to be ignored, right? The inspiration benefit is like humongous. So let's turn this around. I am all about like mission to Mars, mission to the moon. I applied to the astronaut corps during the last call last year ago. That was not selected, but I'll apply again. You're doing it. But but let us remember that until we make rockets cheap and like the U.S. is enterprise reality, like we're stuck here, you know, so there's a whole bunch of science that it's important and we make sure we don't mess this earth up and life up here. Like I'm all about and OK, like Elon Musk knows this and he's also working on stuff here, too. But like, you know, like it's important to remember, like we got to be driven by both what's out there and what's right here, too. Some more fun questions, I guess, you know, you know, favorite science fiction or not science fiction or science, you know, nonfiction, book, movie, podcast, yeah, OK, book. My favorite, like the sci-fi book that got me excited about reading again. It's OK. It's not the greatest book in the world, but it got me excited about reading again was Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein. It's, you know, like 1960s style sci-fi. Some aspects of Heinlein and that kind of that era sci-fi don't hold up super well, like in the in our progressive present. But it's a great sci-fi. I really like that. That's my best, my favorite book. I really like the Martian, but I really like the Martian on audio book, the performance that like whatever you can get on Amazon, I got it on CD. That performance is like, I think it's better than the movie. And I think it's better than the book. So that I don't know that audio book kicked whole. But go go buy that. That was a huge audible person, by the way. I have all my books I listened to on audible. Go listen to the Martian on audible or whatever. Like it was it was top notch. I really enjoyed that. And then my favorite sci-fi movie, that's hard. I got a bunch of like DVDs, but I got to give the love to Apollo 13, Apollo 13. I went and saw Apollo 13 when I was like in the fourth grade or whatever, or fifth grade with my dad. And it was like, you know, they said a few more bad words and whatever. It was a little more exciting than I was normally used to seeing it. But like, it was one of those like, this is amazing as like a little kid, you know, had my mind blown as a little kid. And Apollo 13 is still like, that's the movie. Like the composer is, you know, everything about it. It's it's it's an off look thing. It's a great story. I was actually just watching something with Ron Howard, who was talking about it. And he was saying, you know, when he was doing like the showing it in previews, I guess one of the one of the feedback from one of the viewers was like, this movie sucks because there's no way this could have happened. It's it's not it's not possible. It's like, no, it literally happened. It happened. No, it was a true story. Yeah, I love. OK, what I love about Apollo 13, too, is like a movie nerd is they did the zero gravity shots for real. It's the only movie with the light or would they dropped it? That's what they did. They did the vomit comet, right, where it does the parabolic flights and you get like 30 seconds of zero G. They built Apollo command and landing module inside of the vomit comet, the KC 135 vomit comet, and they sat there and did this. I had no idea. So all the zero G shots in Apollo 13 are the real deal. Tom Hanks, O.P. Tom Hanks, right there. I did that, too. You went up in that plane and he did that all the actors when they were like when they're that first scene when they like get into zero G and they're like opening their gloves and they're laughing is just like straight out of camera. Like they were just like having fun during that first take or whatever. It's amazing. They must have gotten sick, though, too, right? I mean, yeah, I mean, they called the vomit comet for a reason. Right. But like that that's me like you're never going to beat that. No CG. Yeah. I mean, there's CG in the movie, but like all those zero G scenes, all that enthusiasm, like puffiness in their eyes as they're floating around their hair, like wafting, all those tiny things. Awesome. Thank you so much. And is there anything you want to leave us with with 25 seconds left to go? 25 seconds left. Science is something for everybody. It belongs to everybody. So go look up and look down and be curious because you can understand the world around you. That's what science is. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for this.