Mountain Views News, Sierra Madre Edition [Pasadena] Saturday, October 20, 2018

8

FOOD & DRINK

Mountain Views-News Saturday, October 20, 2018 

TABLE FOR TWO by Peter Dills

thechefknows@yahoo.com


SPLIT THE BILL

This week’s adventure is something that we can all relate to, holiday 
parties and going out with friends and family, which means 
worrying about the dreaded bill! Dining out is certainly one of 
the delights of life, but disagreeing over how to split a check can 
be frustrating and awkward. It happened to me recently. We had 
a great time and were done with the meal when a tablemate 
mentioned he was picking up the tab of another s portion of the 
bill because they treated him another time. That was fine but 
what happened next was, ‘Thanks, I am glad you remembered. 
Let me order after-dinner drinks on us. On us?’ Sure enough I 
was stuck with the portion of the additional bottle of wine. Did I 
mention it was $130? What to do?

Here are a few suggestions I have learned that might lessen the 
burden: 

1. Keep track of what you order and pay your share. 

2. While waiters may cringe, tell the server from the beginning that you want a separate bill

3. Be up front: “I love that restaurant, but this is my budget.”

4. Traditionally the person who made the invite paid for the bill. We all know that is long gone, though my 
feeling is that the person who made the invite can and should be in charge of the accounting. We know 
that some of us are more generous than others. If you are the one ordering, you might offer to pay for the 
entire tip once the bill is evenly split.

All in all, it usually evens out in the end. If it’s a few dollars here and there don’t worry about it. Your 
friends are likely worth it. If not, skip their invitations.

If the high roller keeps ordering the Patrón shots, tell him ‘thanks for the shots. I’ll have a bottle waiting 
for you at my house for the next party.’ 

If you aren’t invited to the next dinner party, it might be for the best!!!

Dining with Dills Radio KLAA AM 830 TV this Sunday at 12 Noon


NASA’S FERMI MISSION ENERGIZES THE SKY WITH GAMMA-RAY CONSTELLATIONS

Long ago, sky watchers linked the brightest stars 
into patterns reflecting animals, heroes, monsters 
and even scientific instruments into what is now an 
official collection of 88 constellations. Now scientists 
with NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have 
devised a set of modern constellations constructed 
from sources in the gamma-ray sky to celebrate the 
mission’s 10th year of operations.

 The new constellations include a few characters 
from modern myths. They include the Little Prince, 
the time-warping TARDIS from “Doctor Who,” 
Godzilla and his heat ray, the antimatter-powered 
U.S.S. Enterprise from “Star Trek: The Original 
Series” and the Hulk, the product of a gamma-ray 
experiment gone awry.

 “Developing these unofficial constellations 
was a fun way to highlight a decade of Fermi’s 
accomplishments,” said Julie McEnery, the Fermi 
project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight 
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “One way or 
another, all of the gamma-ray constellations have a 
tie-in to Fermi science.”

 Since July 2008, Fermi’s Large Area Telescope 
(LAT) has been scanning the entire sky each day, 
mapping and measuring sources of gamma rays, the 
highest-energy light in the universe. The emission 
may come from pulsars, nova outbursts, the debris of 
supernova explosions and giant gamma-ray bubbles 
located in our own galaxy, or supermassive black 
holes and gamma-ray bursts—the most powerful 
explosions in the cosmos—in others. 

 “By 2015, the number of different sources 
mapped by Fermi’s LAT had expanded to about 
3,000—10 times the number known before the 
mission,” said Goddard’s Elizabeth Ferrara, who 
led the constellation project. “For the first time 
ever, the number of known gamma-ray sources was 
comparable to the number of bright stars, so we 
thought a new set of constellations was a great way 
to illustrate the point.”

 The 21 gamma-ray constellations include famous 
landmarks—such as Sweden’s recovered warship, 
Vasa, the Washington Monument and Mount Fuji in 
Japan—in countries contributing to Fermi science. 
Others represent scientific ideas or tools, from 
Schrodinger’s Cat—both alive and dead, thanks 
to quantum physics—to Albert Einstein, Radio 
Telescope, and Black Widow Spider, the namesake 
of a class of pulsars that evaporate their unfortunate 
companion stars.

 Ferrara and Daniel Kocevski, an astrophysicist 
now at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in 
Huntsville, Alabama, developed a web-based 
interactive to showcase the constellations, with 
artwork from Aurore Simonnet, an illustrator at 
Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California, 
and a map of the whole gamma-ray sky from Fermi. 
Clicking on a constellation turns on its artwork and 
name, which includes a link to a page with more 
information. Other controls switch on the visible sky 
and selected traditional constellations.

 “Fermi is still going strong, and we are now 
preparing a new all-sky LAT catalog,” said Jean 
Ballet, a Fermi team member at the French Atomic 
Energy Commission in Saclay. “This will add about 
2,000 sources, many varying greatly in brightness, 
further enriching these constellations and enlivening 
the high-energy sky!”

 Additional graphics: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.
gov/13097

The interactive itself is here: https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.
gov/science/constellations/

 NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is 
an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, 
developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department 
of Energy and with important contributions from 
academic institutions and partners in France, 
Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United 
States.

 To explore Fermi’s Gamma-ray Constellations, 
visit:

https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/constellations/ 

 For more about NASA’s Fermi mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/fermi 

 

 You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@
MtnViewsNews.com.

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