Your Camera Has a Shutter? How Quaint.

In the course of my duties as a faithful minion of the mad scientists I'm apprenticing under, I've been privileged to learn about a few things hands-on. A year ago this post would have been about adapting boat radar about as strong as an iPhone to track aircraft. (As you might guess, this endeavor failed.) Now it gets to be about something way cooler: cameras with no shutter.

First, some quick background on why I'm using this bizarre contraption. I'm currently tasked with analyzing data from the Air Force's CCD/Transit Instrument (CTI); it sounds cutting edge, but the data I'm working with was taken when I was 4. It was cutting edge at the time, however - the first shutterless telescope ever. Usually with a telescope you want a deep (long exposure) image of a single patch of sky. Not so with this. The CTI was meant to be an unblinking eye gathering a continuous image of a particular declination (latitude) of sky. It would operate the whole night, just looking up, unmoving, and produce a continuous strip a couple degrees high and a whole night wide. Watching without interruption, night after night, gave unparalleled data on variability of stars. (Why this is so important would take a whole blog post of its own).

The very high-tech CTI

Keep in mind, these continuous exposures aren't a video; they're stacked to form one still image of the whole stretch of sky observed. So how the hell do you do this? A nifty trick called time-delayed integration (TDI).

The exact details of what happens on the chip aren't important. Just picture it like this: on the right you have a single column of pixels that's exposed to the sky; that's where you get your image. But next to it you have a bunch of columns not exposed - here's why. Each time the chip's clock cycles, it kicks all the electrons (light values in CCDs) accumulated to the left, from the exposed column to the first unexposed column. The electron count in that imaging column is reset to zero then - it's blank and free to record another image. The unexposed columns can then be used to read out the pixel values without mucking up the exposure itself. So what you get is a single column of pixels taking a constant exposure, but the exposure gets reset and read out every n milliseconds.

(Alas, I can't seem to find a good image illustrating this on the interwebz.)

The individual images I'm looking at are in some ways single exposures, the exposure is just broken up into bite-sized strips a tiny fraction of a degree wide. Of course, it's more complicated than just pulling up the image and looking at it. Right now what I'm focused on doing if fixing errors in the calibration of these images. Probably errors. Well, we think there's something wrong but can't prove it yet. At least, it looks suspicious.

Naturally, this means put the new girl on it. Whatever, I get to science with really cool data from really cool hardware. For science!

Why I'm keeping my gender unchanged on Facebook

In case you don't use Facebook (in which case, drop into comments and tell me how you found this) and have been living under an internet-rock, Facebook now has 58 gender options, not just male and female. These include a lot of terms that could refer to your bloghostess - transwoman, transfemale, MtF, and others. But I'm sticking to plain old "female."

Facebook made this change to accommodate people like me and to better capture the nuances of gender. And to people who choose to utilize these new options, because they feel something other than male or female better identifies them, I say great - I'm glad you have that option. (Admittedly, the only uses I've seen of the new gender and pronoun options "in the wild" are strictly novelty. But I know people who use them in earnest exist.) But I am not one of them, even if I'm in the target demographic. Here's why:

"Transwoman," (to pick an example) is a perfectly accurate description of me. I wouldn't bristle in the slightest if someone referred to me that way. However, the way I see it, I am only a transwoman by circumstance. I am not transitioning because I identify as a transwoman; I am a transwoman because I have to transition to be fully female. That is, I desire to be, and choose to define myself as, female; the trans- modifier simply specifies that I wasn't always that way.

I do not want an intrinsically trans femininity for myself. I'm trans and I'm not ashamed of that. But by defining my gender in terms of being trans, I feel I'd be preemptively alienating myself from my femininity. I'd be defining myself as a non-native female, in terms that anchor my identity to my past and set me apart from other women.

I choose to be a woman, and only an accident of birth makes me specifically a transwoman.

Annals of Puberty 2.0

I've been on hormones a little over a month now, and though I'm naturally impatient for round two of puberty to get going full force, there have already been some adjustments.

• This spironolactone is making me thirsty. Constantly thirsty. I shouldn't be surprised -- though I take spiro as an anti-androgen (anti-testosterone drug), it's primarily a diuretic. It's still a bit of an adjustment, considering how bad I was about staying hydrated before, even on a medication that gives me the shakes if I don't stay hydrated. 
• My nipples are getting a little nipply. By which I mean, they've gotten quite sensitive, including below the surface, and are erect a large fraction of the time. I'd like to think this means some growth around there is right around the corner, but I know that's still months off. Not complaining in the least, though.
•  ED. I don't get erections anymore, hallelujah. At all. It was very confusing at first and tricked me into thinking I'd lost my libido. One of the things about living my life as a guy is that arousal was inextricably linked to erections and the two weren't fully separate in my mind. So with no physiological aspect to it, it felt cold and abstract, like I was thinking about it without actually thinking or feeling it. Fortunately, my body found a replacement, of a sort.
• I literally drool instead now. I'm not even joking. I salivate until it drips out the corners of my mouth. I don't know how this started happening. I don't know why drooling specifically. But now I actually drool over women I'm attracted to instead of the previous physiological response. It manages to be awkward, amusing, reassuring, and a little guilty all at the same time.
• I can get choked up now. That was previously, outside particularly vulnerable mental states, impossible for me. I'm actually looking forward to more effect in this direction; my near-absolute inability to cry normally kinda sucked.

I've also learned a couple interesting things about how this may affect my eyes, of all things:

• Hormone therapy can alter your retinas. This can cause subtle changes in how colors and depth perception are experienced.
• Hormone therapy can alter eye lens shape (!). So there's a chance my vision won't be 20/15 anymore. I'm fine with that, even if I end up needing mild glasses.

So where does that all put me now? Taking my estrogen and spiro religiously. [actual pre-editing stop to take estrogen and spiro] Also working on including more girl mode features (like voice) when I have to be in boy mode. Though I skipped it this past month due to progress on this front being as slow as expected, #nipsoffreedom will continue as scheduled on April 26th (2 months in), and I'll start doing some photos to document my facial changes.