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: