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

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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.

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).

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!

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.

Here is a snapshot of a typical recent day:

• 8:00 am: Wake, plan to jump right into studying for the qual
• Some time later: wonder how much of the decopodean life cycle has been documented on wikipedia
• Some time after that: "Ok, just one quick game of Gunpey."
• 12:00 am: Go to bed, lament having done basically no studying for the qual, promise to do better tomorrow.

Repeat seven or so times. I've been better since Sunday, but it's been a fight to stay focused. No doubt a part of this is whatever has caused students to procrastinate since the first amoeba attended college. But another, more tangible, part is the heat. The horrible horrible heat. As noted earlier my brain basically ceases to function at about 85 degrees, and works best at something like 68. I'll spare you the tedious details, but suffice it to say that all my attempts to cool my living room down have failed. Clearly the next step is "ship this AC back and get an even bigger one."

Now, yes, there are places I can go on campus to escape the heat during much of the day, but it's psychologically important to me that my apartment be a place to which I can escape from the world when I need to, and part of that requires that I be able to be comfortable. If I don't have that I get tetchy and whiny. Like I am now. Obviously.

So, in other words, I really hate summer. I hate its heat and its stickiness, and I also hate its bees.

Which brings me to the bees. Hornets, actually.

This morning when I went to the living room window I saw a hornet between the screen and the window. "Crap," I thought. Then I saw another. Then, like in any horror movie, I raised my eyes in slow motion to the nest in the upper corner of the window.

I'm pretty easy-going when it comes to the little critters of nature but I have my limits, and apparently one of those limits is a nest of hornets on the inside of my screens. Which, morally if not legally, constitutes "in my apartment."

It was a small nest and, again sparing you the details, I was able to kill the hornets, remove the nest and block off the gap in the screen. This was not pleasant.

Then I though to check the other windows and, yup, another even bigger nest in a completely inaccessible corner of another window. As it happens this other window is the one with the AC (the one which does not, as previously noted, work too well) and is already sealed off, so I added another layer or two or eight of sealing tape around the entire window and made a pact with the hornets that so long as they don't enter any further into my apartment I won't have to destroy them all. I don't trust them though, I know even now they're plotting to break in and sting me and eat my miso and sell off all my textbooks on eBay.

Well, okay, they probably want even less to do with me than I want to do with them, but this is just another thing that makes me feel not safe-and-comfortable in my own damn home, and this is the last thing I need when I'm supposed to be studying for the biggest exam of my life and not attending peace summits with bees or blogging about peace summits with bees.

I owe a few of you emails. I'll try to get to them in the next few days.

Once the ridiculous bureaucracy was out of the way the summer job wasn't bad. In fact I might even say it was close to the perfect job: they put me in a quiet dark private office and let me do to the code whatever I thought was the right thing, without a lot of meetings or micromanaging. I made good money, although at some point I found out what other consultants there were making and realized I could have asked for 1.5 times what I did and they wouldn't have blinked. I could even have asked for twice what I did and they would have blinked and then given it to me anyway. Ah well.

The downside is the commute was over two hours door-to-door, so adding those four hours to the hours I worked and the time needed to get ready in the morning and eat dinner and such and subtracting that from the hours in a day left, basically, nothing. I haven't been reading lj anything like regularly, so if I missed the announcement of your engagement/marriage/childbirth/ascension to godhood I apologize.

I wish I could say this would change, but the Ph.D. qualifying exam is only... let me check... 8 weeks away. EIGHT WEEKS? AHHHH! QUICK, SOMEONE HELP ME SHOVE PATHRIA STRAIGHT UP MY NOSE AND INTO MY BRAIN, IT'S THE ONLY WAY! Okay I'm better now.

On a somewhat-related note, since returning to Syracuse two days ago I have determined that the temperature at which I lose the ability to think coherently is about 85 +/- 2 degrees F (not accounting for variations in humidity). I have determined this thanks to highs in the 90s and the fact that my top-floor apartment traps heat so efficiently that even a carefully arranged series of fans can't keep it from being five degrees hotter inside than out.

That's about it for now, but I leave you with this short list of Things That Are Good from the previous month

• Katamari Damacy (and sequels, and soundtracks)
• Recieving lengthy, poetic, incomprehensible equations in the mail (thanks mellawyrden!)
• Sour cream and onion pringles
• Lumines
• Hot tubs in New Hampshire
• Bowling
• Gunpey
• Grilled vegetables
• Grilled Morningstar Farms veggie burgers (other brands turn... strange and disturbing when grilled)
• Pickle rounds!
• Bloomin' onions — in moderation
• Spending time with friends

My first year of graduate school ended yesterday. I think I survived it, but right now my brain is so mushy that I can't be sure whether it's normal post-finals mush or more serious post-mortem zombification mush.

I should be able to relax, but the feeling of constantly having assignments due is so ingrained that I can't shake the sense that I should urgently be working on something right now.

And of course that's in part because I should. The qualifying exam is just 14 weeks away.

Typically students don't start doing research until the second year, so most spend the first half of their first summer TAing to cover their summer expenses and then focus on the qual the rest of the summer. I can make a lot more money in less time consulting, so that's what I'll be doing through the middle of June. In the evenings I'm going to read about various non-qual-related things that I'm interested in, in order to remind myself why I'm doing this.

So, remember how I said I wanted this semester to be calmer than last? Yeah, that didn't happen.

I'd been looking forward to this week off as a chance to catch my breath and get my bearings, but by the time I got here I was so drained that I can't even relax properly, if that makes any sense. Its like I need some kind of ultra-vacation to prepare myself for a regular one.

Not that I actually have a regular one, since I have at least as much work to do this week as I do any other week.

On an unrelated note I also have a mouse in the apartment. It's a very cute little grey thing, but I wish it would go be cute in the park a few blocks from here.

In lieu of vacation I would at least like to go to Albion, get a few vodka/ginger ales into me and dance like a GOTH MONKEY for several hours. Sadly this is impossible, not only because Albion is six hours away, but also because it doesn't exist any more. In fact, if I read the relevant web pages correctly, it seems there are currently no weekly gothic/industrial events in NYC. This stuns and saddens me.

Downtime, the venue that hosted Albion, was recently purchased and the new web site prominently features the words "corporate events."

Here's an interesting thing: if you take a classical field theory in d+1 dimensions and roll one of the dimensions into a tube you get a quantum field theory in d dimensions at a temperature given by the reciprocal of the radius. Apparently doing this with general relativity, starting with deSitter space, gives the Hawking temperature of black holes.

Now I have very little idea what any of that means, but yesterday as I was walking the mile+ to the nearest grocery store to buy veggie dogs and wondering if I really still want to be here I found myself thinking about this, and I took that as an indication that I probably do.

The semester ended last Friday. Since then, with the help of a carefully structured regimen of sleep and cartoons, I've more or less recovered from it.

I'm not quite sure how to summarize the last few months. "Busy" and "satisfying" would be a good start, perhaps to be further refined as "insanely busy" and "very satisfying, although in an odd way not as satisfying as I would have liked because it was too busy." Or maybe what I mean to say is "homework."

The thing is this. In order to learn physics it is necessary to solve problems, lots and lots of them. Which is not a bad thing, since these problems are fun and interesting and working through them is informative. But each week's cumulative load of homework would require, on average, just a bit more than a week to complete, meaning on more than one occasion I had to hand in an incomplete assignment, and that's just never fun.

Plus this left me almost no time to just read the texts and roll the ideas around. So while I was (for the most part) able to do the problems I'm left with this vague feeling that I don't actually understand the material in a deep way.

These tensions between homework and time and homework and understanding left me kind of a drooling stress monkey for much of the term, to the point where I did worse on two midterms than I should have because when they began my brain imploded and all I could do for the first half hour was write "I am a fish" repeatedly.

I'm pretty sure Websters lists "drooling stress monkey-fish" as a synonym for "grad student." If they don't they should.

Anyway, I need to take some kind of mental step to the left (or perhaps to the up or one of those other directions that Lisa Randall spoke to us about during her visit) for next term. Or perhaps I should note that just because the terms of my fellowship allow me to take four courses instead of the usual three doesn't mean I have to, and furthermore that doing so might be, well, bugfuck insane.

Besides courses and homework and such there were lots of really interesting colloquia this term, most of which I understood at least slightly better than "not at all," although in some cases not much better. I've also been sitting in on the cosmology group's weekly meetings, which has been fun. I'll definitely keep doing that.

Oh, and somehow I turned 40 last week.

I spent much of this week going through various orientation activities¹. For the most part this was pretty generic information, the kind of thing most people should have already read on various web pages but which some might find comforting to hear in person.

But the information wasn't the real point, the real point was to give the new students a chance to meet each other and the rest of the department. It's been great! I've sort of hit it off with a few of the other incoming students (though whether we have anything in common beyond physics remains to be seen). The department secretary (fulfilling that title's usual role of "person who knows everyone and everything that's going on") introduced me to a fourth-year student who is doing exactly the kind of research I want to do. We talked quite a bit and at some point I'll definitely want to meet his advisor. And I spoke to a bunch of members of the faculty, including Mark Trodden (of Cosmic Variance fame) whose group I could also see myself working with.

There were also very nice short presentations of the major research areas, and there's lots of nifty stuff going on here! I never thought I'd be much interested in condensed matter/solid state stuff, which I always thought of as a kind of glorified electrical engineering (shudder) . The talk opened my eyes to the fact that it's really about a whole variety of interesting emergent properties — even the study of the formation of traffic jams is solid state physics! There's an introductory course this semester, but I can't take it due to a conflict.

Speaking of which, ( This semester I'll be taking )

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1. Having been oriented I can now be sure I'm not a klein bottle. Not that I thought I was.

Did I miss anything? Are people still talking about Snakes on a Plane or has the Internet moved on to something else?

Physically me and my things are all here. Mentally I'm still in some in-between place. The apartment somehow manages to look both cluttered and sparse, and the few decorative things I've put up look like future echos of decorative things unconnected to their surroundings in the present. Possibly moving a few boxes, the arrival of the sofa later this week, and laying down the area rug will help things feel more coherent. Or maybe I just lack even the most rudimentary decorating skills and they won't, but I'll get used to it anyway. The space is becoming at least functional, which may be sufficient in the short term. Beyond that, since I never had a clear idea of what I wanted the apartment to look like I can't be disappointed by how it looks.

I've taken care of the school-related paperwork I know about, leaving only the much larger quantity that I don't know about. It seems somehow I'm supposed to be paid although I don't need to fill out any tax or other employment-related forms. That should be interesting.

I have an office, or at least a spot in a temporary office to be shared by all the first-years. It's in the basement, although it somehow gives the impression of being in a sub-basement. It looks like one professor wanted to use it as an auxiliary classroom and another wanted to use it as storage space and they've both managed to do so for several years without ever running into each other. When switched on the enormous beige computers sound like washing machines in their death throes. The room also contains a Mysterious Pair of Pants and some socks draped over a chair.

I utterly and profoundly adore it.

Seriously.

I wouldn't trade it for a building's worth of the private window office I had as a manager.

So, I graduated on Friday. It should have felt like something more than sitting in the midst of 14,000 strangers in an athletic field listening to a series of people saying things of no great relevance and getting damp in the rain. But it didn't. Maybe it was more momentous to those who hadn't been through this before, but I suspect it just wasn't a very effective ritual.

Two years down, five to go. I am insanely excited about graduate school.

My stuff is all packed and awaiting movers. I eventually got a company to give me a flat rate — a high rate, but at least this way I won't be in for any unpleasant surprises. Unless, of course, I am. Packing reminded me, yet again, of how heavy boxes of books can get, so in the final analysis I'm glad to pay someone else to deal with them. My current landlords will meet the movers in Stony Brook the evening of the 31st, and I'll meet them in Syracuse on June 1st.

The rest of the summer through August I'll be in Manhattan. The next ten weeks will be a mix of a programming job weekdays, physics in the evenings, and hopefully seeing friends on the weekends.

My second lab report was returned to me today. The professor was quite impressed with it, even more so when I told him I'm still an undergraduate.

After discussing the report he asked me about my future plans, and when I told him I will be attending Syracuse he reacted with shock and horror, and perhaps even sadness. I probably couldn't have provoked a stronger reaction if I'd said I was giving up physics entirely in order to pursue a janitorial career.

I suppose I should be flattered that he thinks I could have made it into a more prestigious school. I can also remind myself that Syracuse is doing the kind of research I want to do, and that I chose to apply there based on a pretty extensive search. Mostly though I'm now worrying about, well, everything. Should I have held out for some place with a higher national ranking? Is the name "Syracuse" going to keep me from future postdoc and faculty positions? What horrible secret about Syracuse did I somehow overlook?

Feh.

There, the worst three weeks of the past two years is over. I finished all the things I needed to do, but I didn't have time to do any of them as well as I would have liked. My history paper is trite, I was unable to complete the analysis on one part of the lab report, we're getting wacky results with the new lab that I just don't understand, my grade on the thermo midterm was, shall we say, not good, I was so zonked when I did this week's topology homework that I wouldn't be surprised to discover I just wrote "I am a fish" a hundred times, and so on and so on...

The lamest thing a student can do is whine "but I have so much work in my other courses." But sometimes it's true.

I just received word that Syracuse has accepted me! Full tuition, plus a teaching assistantship plus I've been nominated for a fellowship.

I'm still waiting to hear from the other four, but Syracuse was pretty high on my list. Even if no one else takes me I'll be extremely happy with the outcome.

From today's quantum mechanics class:

"We milk a factor of i*k from this cow, and then kill it with the conjugate cow."

(Describing the evaluation of ψ^*(dψ/dx) with ψ=e^ikx)

I really wanted to write something for Rabbit Hole Day, but several hours of thought produced only boring, random non-sequitur stuff and obvious, pale imitations of other things. So I didn't.

Classes started Monday and have gone more or less as expected.

The first day of quantum the professor gave out an anonymous quiz in order to get a sense of how much people know, and the results were pretty depressing. Consequently we're going to be proceeding very slowly, and it seems pretty certain that we won't get to anything I don't already know. I guess I should be glad of an easy course given how much else is going on this term, but I think I'd rather learn something new about this amazing subject. Ah well, I guess that's what grad school is for.

The topology professor opened class by saying how much fun the topic is, and that if there were fewer students he would just give out A's right away so we could focus on the fun without needing to worry about that tedious grading stuff. He didn't think he could get away with that with a class of 20+, so he warned that there might be a few B+'s. So far it has indeed been great fun.

There's an odd number of undergrads signed up for senior lab, so it seems I won't have a partner this term. I think I'm OK with that. It does mean I'll need to pick experiments that are more data-analysis and less data-collection, but that was pretty much the plan anyway. First up: I'll be observing sunspots and flares over the next few weeks in order to determine that rate at which the sun rotates.

I guess I'll take that as a compliment
Overheard in the physics department office on Friday: "I had him last term, he's really smart. I think he's the guy who does all his homework in TeX, which either means he's completely nuts or..." I didn't find out what the alternative was. For the record, I'm pretty sure there's no one else doing their homework in TeX, but I suppose it's possible they were talking about someone else.

"Prepare to die, blowhole!"
There's nothing worse than discovering years later that something you once loved is in fact utter crap. I am therefore delighted to report that The Adventures of Pete and Pete is even better than I remember.

The coming of The Dread
Classes start tomorrow. I've looked over course web pages and I fear I may be in for a significantly more insanely hard semester than I had thought.

Indifference to the rescue!
On the other tentacle, I don't need to maintain my current average since grad schools will be making decisions based on the previous terms, and no one else will even conceivably care. All I need to do is pass.

Survival
Astoundingly, the poinsettia that my landlord gave me didn't croak while I was away from a month.

Distance
It would take over two hours for me to get to a store from which I could obtain mushroom soup. Which is a shame, 'cause I sure could go for some mushroom soup.