From two days ago, mostly on campus. Plus some other things.

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Inspired by mellawyrden's photos, here's the view out my back window.

Via mellawyrden

. . . . .

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
6. Tag five other people to do the same.

. . . . .

The closest book is Yotsuba &!, Volume 1, by Kiyohiko Azuma. Page 56 doesn't have five sentences.

The next closest is Quantum Field Theory, by Mark Srednicki (equations omitted, since I'm too lazy to type them up):

We can continue in this way to compute the ground-state expectation value of the time-ordered product of more φs. If the number of φs is odd, then there is always a left-over J in the prefactor, and so the result is zero. If the number of φs is even, then we must pair up the functional derivatives in an appropriate way to get a nonzero result. Thus, for example, (equation omitted). More generally (equation omitted). This result is known as Wick's theorem.

The page and chapter end there.

As for the tagging, do it if you're sufficiently bored.


By an interesting coincidence I've spent most of the weekend with this book and have just passed this point. I'm still not sure I understand a lick of it.

Several weeks ago I embedded a youtube video using lj-embed with id="1". Yesterday I embedded another video using the same id. This caused the old entry to embed the new video. I then fixed the old entry, causing both entries to embed the old video. In other words, it seems like ids are global per-journal. Which prompts the questions

• Does it work this way for everyone?
• Is this as stupid and wrong as it seems to me?
• Is there any justifiable reason for the lj-embed tag to exist at all?

Also, why are porn sites linking to my image? It's not that I doubt the existence of a fetish for chibi characters painted on drugstore windows, but these sites seem to be catering to more generic interests.

For the most part my life is confined to my apartment, the physics building, and the streets along the shortest path between the two. But a few weeks ago I managed to do a little bit of exploring a few blocks off my usual path where I came across a drugstore, the window of which had a ( Haruhi Suzumiya reference exactly where I didn't expect to find one... )

Although maybe it's not a Haruhi Suzumiya reference, since the whole Churuya-san thing has taken on a life of its own. Haruhi reference once-removed, perhaps?

I have no idea who the guy on the right window is. Any suggestions?

On the topic, does anyone know enough Japanese to be able to translate ( this? )All I can get is スモーク　チーズ.

Baring any surprises the first circulating beam at the Large Hadron Collider will take place on September 10th at 8:30 am CERN time (GMT +2 hours). They'll be running a live webcast during the occasion, there's also a news page covering the lead-up.

Can I have a do-over on today? I spent it feeling overwhelmed and undermotivated, I accomplished none of the many many things I have to do and didn't even look at any of the things I might have wanted to do.

Instead I blew the day on various pointless procrastinations. For example, I tried Mail.app and Safari. Speaking of which, is it just my imagination or are these both pretty awful? I also gave Camino a try, and while it started off OK it seemed to slow down to unusability after a few hours. So I'm back on Thundirbird and Mozilla.

I read Jhonen Vasquez' twitters (along with Johnny C's), and was entertained.

I took some garbage out. I guess that counts as an accomplishment.

I didn't have one. Instead, I taught and did research and got entirely too little sleep.

I taught the qualifier preparation course, the real purpose of which is to give the students some structure and a schedule so they don't become either overwhelmed or undermotivated. In practice this involves giving a few review lectures, running through some example problems at the board, and giving lots and lots of other practice problems as homework.

Constructing, or even selecting, good problems at the right level of difficulty that illustrate the keys principles was a good deal harder and more time consuming than I had expected. Plus, of course, I had to make sure that I understood the material well enough to solve these problems and explain the solutions.

Everyone who took the quals passed, so I guess I did something right. Or at least I managed not to do anything so wrong that it got in the way of the students doing the real work.

On the research front, I've been continuing my work with the gravitational wave group and enjoying it a great deal. I've been working on data-analysis related problems, in particular on improving the way we look for gravitational waves produced when two black holes collide in the LIGO data. Fun!

There hasn't been time for much else, but I have watched a little anime. I was watching Cartoon Network's run of Death Note, which for the most part I liked a great deal. It flounders a bit in the second half, but that's more than made up for by the brilliant first half and the last episode. The last episode bothered me deeply, for reasons I still can't quite put my finger on. It's certainly not because I was rooting for Light.

On the other end of the spectrum (although I'm not sure exactly what spectrum that would be) I also watched Azumanga Daioh. I utterly and unreservedly adored this. I laughed, I cried, I suspect that like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya this is a series I will keep coming back to.

Speaking of Haruhi, I also read the last few light novels. The translations read a bit awkwardly, but the stories work. I'm now waiting for the tenth novel and/or second season, neither of which seems likely to happen any time soon.

As for the more immediate future: this term I'm on research money and don't need to teach, so I'm just taking one class (Quantum Field Theory II) and continuing to do research, and hopefully getting enough sleep. There's also a few non-school-related things I'd like to do, but I can't quite bring myself to believe I'll have time to do them.

I also can't quite bring myself to believe that I'll update this thing any more regularly than I have been. But hey, sometimes life surprises us. Although more often it doesn't.

Case in point, this perfectly innocent figure from the texbook used in the course I'm teaching:

So far I have spent 90% of my vacation tied to my computer, analyzing gravitational waveforms. Nifty? Sure. But it means not only have I gotten no rest, I have also not had time to start next week's homework, or the end-of-term report for one of the classes, or get my taxes done, or go shopping, or...

In other words, at the end of this week "off" I'm going to be more tired and further behind than I started.

The only other thing I've accomplished, and I use that term extremely loosely, has been to extract the cell phone sounds from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei for use in my email client.

(Update, 3:21 am: The programs finally finished running, the plots are finally plotted, and I'm going to bed. Unless I decide that's too much effort and I just fall asleep in the desk chair).

Happy Birthday, _akenokoru! Here's to the start of a better year.

Although all that means is that I won't be taking or teaching any classes this week, and no new work will be coming in. I still have ample accumulated work to do, however.

The most notable aspect of this semester (apart from how insanely busy its been) is that my research plans have changed. It turned out the cosmology group wasn't able to take on any new students, so I'm now working with the gravitational wave group. It's a direction in which I wouldn't have initially expected to go, but I'm finding it very much to my liking. A couple of weeks ago I helped assemble our new supercomputer!

Physics. Eh? Physics. Phyyyyyyyysics. Physics! Physics. Physics, physics, physics, physics, physics, physics, physics.

I hope one of you is getting all this down.

( Here's the plasma I've been working on for the last six weeks. )

It looks impressive, but I may in fact be further behind than when I started. I discovered today that in the process of getting the electronics to work I punctured a bit of the vacuum system. I can get pressures low enough for this Argon plasma, but not nearly low enough for the actual experiment. I'm not sure yet how much effort it will take to fix, or if that piece will need to be replaced ("Sometimes a thing gets broke can't be fixed." - Kaylee)

Were you to look at my ass (which I strongly advise against) you would see a large purple bruise that, if you were able to overcome your nausea long enough, you would identify as a boot print. Had you not yet recoiled in disgust you could examine the print more closely and would eventually discover markings left by raised letters on the boot reading "property of the Fall 2007 term."

I'm doing so many things this term and all of them take lots of time and some of them happen early in the morning which would leave me exhausted even if there weren't so many others. I'm beginning to find myself thinking things like "I'm going to try to make next term more reasonable but if it turns out to be as bad as this one then it will be my last." I probably don't mean that, but it's there in my brain nonetheless.

Quick roundup of things:

Teaching is kind of fun. Running labs is not. Grading is very much not.

Doing graduate laboratory is also, for the most part, very much not. I will admit that getting my first plasma to go yesterday after six weeks of trying was kind of a thrill. However, most of that six weeks was spent doing things like disassembling large pieces of equipment meant to contain and direct mighty energies and looking for a gorram half-centimeter washer that wasn't making good contact with some tiny screw. Much of the next eight weeks is likely to be more of the same, since getting the plasma going was not the experiment but just the first step in getting the equipment ready for the experiment.

Relativistic quantum mechanics is a very beautiful subject. Pity that I don't have time to actually learn much about it beyond the bare minimum needed to keep up with the weekly homework.

I'm making some good progress on the CMB-analysis project and learning a bunch of interesting things about the early Universe and how it is studied. Maybe I'll say more about this at some point (although more likely I won't).

I'm glad I'm auditing the general relativity course, it's been a good refresher of the stuff I did in the independent study last year. But I'm also glad I'm not taking it officially, since I would need to somehow create at least one more day a week in order to do the homework (or give up on sleep entirely, but that never works out well in the long run, where by "not working out well" I mean "at some point they'd find me naked on the table in the conference room writing christoffel symbols on my flesh with dry-erase markers and giggling").

It hasn't been all work. Just before the term started I finished watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and fell deeply, and perhaps a little obsessively, in love with it. I've very slowly been reading the novels, kindly translated here and while the translations often read a little awkwardly they are nonetheless quite wonderful. I'm looking forward to the fansubs of the upcoming second season.

I've also been slowly going through the box set of the first season of the new Doctor Who. I'd seen through The Empty Child around the time the series first aired, thanks to a long weekend and a friend with bittorrent, but decided to start again at the beginning. I'm up to Dalek which I may watch tonight. I don't have enough words of praise to heap onto this series.

I have a new computer, a 20-inch iMac. It feels good to be back on a desktop after 5 years of laptops.

It's gotten chilly. Yay!

Ok friends, see you in December.

The quals (or, as _akenokoru called them, the chuunin exams) are over. I don't like speculating on how I did on tests, so I won't. I'll know within two weeks, probably sooner.

Afterwards I was in the mood to not think about anything for a while, so I took a bus to the (yuch) mall and caught The Simpsons Movie. I really enjoyed it! Perhaps that's due in part to the euphoria of having put the quals behind me, but mostly I think it's because it's actually good. There's nothing profound in it, nor even anything particularly new, but I found it solidly funny and fun in a way the series itself largely isn't lately.

That was the entirety of my break, as the semester started today. And this semester looks like it's going to be even more insanely busy than last year:

• I'm TAing Physics 101, the huge 300+ person intro course. I'll be running three two-hour "studios" (a combination of recitation and lab) per week, each with about 18 students, and grading their weekly homework and lab reports. Plus I'll run the physics "clinic" (a room where students can come for help in any course at any time) two hours a week.
• I'm taking Quantum Mechanics III. Relativistic QM, fun!
• I'm also taking graduate laboratory. Although I'm beginning to think that I should put it off for next term.
• I'm auditing the General Relativity course. I did a GR reading course/independent study with this professor last semester, but it's an important and beautiful subject that I'd like to spend more time with.
• Finally, the most exciting news, I'm starting research! Well, sort of. I'll be working with a professor in the cosmology group on his studies of the cosmic microwave background, but officially I'm doing it as a one-semester independent study and not "research" in the this-will-turn-into-my-thesis sense. However, this did happen as a result of my asking to join the cosmology group officially, so I suspect, or at least hope, that this will evolve into something larger.

So if none of you hear from me for the next 15 weeks, this is why.

Today's run of Software Update brought me a new version of iTunes, described as:

With iTunes 7.3, you can now activate iPhone service and sync it with your music, TV shows, movies and more. Also, you can now wirelessly share and enjoy your favorite digital photos from any computer in your home

The temperature here have been climbing back up. I spent much of yesterday morning trying to get climate control working in my living room, unsuccessfully. Consequently I spent the whole day hot and angry and stupid.

Today I gave up on the living room, purchased a small $40 computer desk from the local Rite Aid and moved into my bedroom, where the AC works fine. The difference was amazing, I was happy and able to focus on my studies and make some really good progress.

The conclusion is obvious: I'm part troll, in the Pratchettian sense¹.

This bit from Men at Arms is particularly applicable

The rising temperature hit his thoughts like a flame-thrower caressing a snowflake.

---

¹For those who haven't read any of the Discworld novels, Pratchett's trolls are silicon-based lifeforms whose brains work something like computers. They naturally count in binary. In warmer temperatures they overheat, degrade in performance, and eventually stop altogether. However when sufficiently cooled they go into overclocked mode and become capable of things like this.