Random Days

I’ve been up to some fairly random stuff over the last few days (and not nearly enough working on projects). Just for fun:

• PhD Comics! Jorge Cham, the creator of PhD Comics was speaking at Cornell Thursday night. He was a very humorous speaker and it was a nice way to spend an hour and a half, even if it did mean I missed Grey’s. After learning about the power of procrastination of its benefits, several friends commented that the talk left them feeling much better about their life. I didn’t get that feeling, but then again I’m happily writing this rather than my cosmology paper right now, so perhaps I didn’t need a pep talk about procrastination.
• Expand Your Horizons Saturday was the EYH conference at Cornell. I was a buddy – meaning I spent the day with a girl whose parents couldn’t come. I had fun attending workshops with her, but I was beat by the end of the day. I felt much older than I should thanks to an aching leg/ankle/foot. Sadly, they weren’t all on the same side, so I couldn’t even just favor one side of my body. I left as soon as the conference was over, skipping out on the free food at the reception to go home and take a much needed nap.  Fun tidbit of the day.  I wore my favorite green pants in the morning without a whole lot of forethought.  Turns out the volunteer T-shirts were dark green, so I had a very green day.
• SETI Lunch: Galaxy lunch  attendance was high this week (standing room only) as we had a visitor talking about SETI for the day.  He was arguing that SETI will fail because if alien intelligences existed they would have come to Earth already.  His argument rested on a premise that you could assign human motivations/psychology to alien intelligences, which I am not convinced of.  Regardless, it was an interesting talk and it was fun to watch people’s reactions.

One is Better Than None

I turned in the second (and last!) exam for my stat mech course yesterday morning. Unfortunately, I still have an assignment to do in that class, and no motivation to go with it. At this point in time, I’m just hoping for fifty out of one hundred points on this exam. Taking the exam was a brilliant lesson in why I despise stat mech. I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to start the second problem (of three) which is worth fifty of the hundred points (part of the reason I’m not expecting to do much better than a 50….). My problem? Figuring out to get started. I spent hours, spilling over into days (it was a 9 day take home…), trying to start the problem by writing down the partition function. The partition function is this magic piece of information that essentially lets you figure out any thermodynamic property of the system you might be interested in (energy, entropy, etc.) once you know it. What makes life unbelievably difficult is that writing down these functions is not trivial, especially in cases like this where you have interactions – the energy of one particle affects the energy of a neighbor. Let’s just say I’m pretty sure I didn’t get the correct function, which means everything I did for all three parts of the problem is incorrect. Not exactly the greatest feeling in the world. This is also why stat mech is much more evil than Jackson E&M – at least I can start those problems (and then get stuck with integrals, Bessel functions, Green’s functions, etc.).

Where’s my Certificate?

I finished my last night of supervised observing Friday night – I’m now allowed (and encouraged) to take observing sessions on my own. (I just wish I had a cool certificate to prove this….) I spent the last night doing all the observing on my own with another experienced graduate student in the room, just in case. I did manage to “hide” some files in an incorrect directory at the end of that observing session but they were easy to move to where they belonged the next day. I’m pretty sure that I won’t make that mistake again. The question is – how many more mistakes can I find to make? I’m not sure I want to know the answer.

Infrared Zoo

How I’m passing the time while observing: Infrared Zoo

Provided by Spitzer’s outreach site this contains infrared pictures of a wide variety of animals – it’s pretty awesome. My personal favorite (so far) is the swan.

Crazy Times

It’s that time of the year where there seems to be so much going on at once. Besides the end of the semester craziness with classes there’s lots of other fun milestones occurring. A whole spate of A exams kicked off today. The A exam is a sort of a PhD thesis proposal – you talk about the research you have done and plans for the next few years. You leave the room with a masters and as an official PhD candidate. We’ve also had one B exam (thesis defense) and have several more coming up. Plus, job offers have been coming in which means going out to celebrate.

I spent Wednesday afternoon doing outreach, which is always a great time. We had a bunch of extremely bright seventh grade girls visiting. I helped with activities to explain spectra to them. One of the most challenging parts, at least in my opinion, was making sure everyone was able to see the spectrum of some lamps we had. I’m personally so bad with the little diffraction viewers that trying to help other people is near impossible. Thankfully, our technology wizard was helping me and he was able to articulate how to view the lamps best. We had lots of other fun hands on activities – matching known spectra to mystery spectra and figuring out what objects bottles represented based on their composotion.

On a random note, Spitzer (the infrared space telescope) went offline for a few days a couple of weeks ago – it started just sending garbage down rather than useful information. It’s back up and working properly now. The problem? No one knows. The solution? Power cycling. It always works.

Projects, projects and more projects

It’s that time of the semester where I need to start working on all my final projects. I’ve been thinking about them for a while but have somehow managed to avoid doing any actual work all semester. That’s alright – I now have an extremely thick stack of papers to make it through. I have an assignment to go finish now, but I think I’ll try to write a little summary about my cosmology project because I think it’s an extremely interesting topic.

Scientists are Dopes? Or are Doping?

I really should apologize for the pun in that title – I blame the Friday afternoon (continuing into the evening) beer.

As if making fun of scientists for being nerds isn’t enough, you can now ridicule them for drug use. Nature conducted a poll of readers which found that twenty percent of respondents reported using prescription drugs to aid in concentration. The original Nature article can be found here and this is a summary news story for those who don’t have a university paying for a Nature subscription. I just found the whole article amusing, especially given that we were discussing it over morning coffee the other day. Ahh, coffee, the “enhancer” that is socially acceptable. One little tidbit that I wanted to share was one of the quotes from a respondent to the survey:

As a professional, it is my duty to use my resources to the greatest benefit of humanity. If ‘enhancers’ can contribute to this humane service, it is my duty to do so.

66 or older from the United States

Of course, this article reminded of the story from a few weeks ago about scientists and beer. There was a study that supposedly found an anti-correlation between the amount of beer consumed and a scientist’s productivity. I was worried for a few minutes, until I realized that I was willing to sacrifice a little bit of success to be able to enjoy beer occasionally.

A Ball and Bacon Plus Basketball and Bamboo

• A Ball: I went to the Grad Ball this past weekend and had much fun. Dancing was good, especially when they played Nirvana at the end. A few pictures are up on Flickr. Like all good graduate student outings, moratoriums on nerd talk would last for only twenty minutes or so before being broken and reissued. At least we only discussed progress on problem sets and not details on how to do them… The one sad thing about the dance was how long the drinks line was. I think I spent almost as much time in line waiting for my two free drinks as dancing. I definitely got both of my drinks at once so that I didn’t have to wait in line again. I’m already thinking about solutions for next year….
• Bacon: I don’t eat bacon at all, and I’m always amused by how strongly people feel about it. We found a little room away from the dancing that had bacon wrapped scallops. Wrapping other types of meat in bacon always seems a little excessive to me (and reminds me happily of certain people in Bloomington). The best was the friend who commented that they were more excited about the bacon then the scallop…I was also introduced to the concept of bacon gin (although it could apply to any alcohol) over the weekend. The process involves soaking rendered bacon fat in gin for a day or so at room temperature then refrigerating (possibly freezing also) the gin so that the fat will congeal and can be sieved out. You then have gin that smells like bacon, and I can only presume also tastes like it – I smelled some but didn’t try any. This leads to fun things like bacon martinis.
• Basketball: I didn’t actually watch very much of the final games in the tournament at all. I watched the first half of UCLA and Memphis – I wasn’t surprised that UCLA lost given the terrible ball handling I saw. I sat down to watch the final game and decided to go to bed at half time – it was already 10:30 and I had to be up early the next day. I did hear all about the game that night though, when I got a phone call around midnight to discuss the exciting end to the game – the overtime and Memphis’s free throw shooting (or lack thereof) coming back to haunt them. I’m not sure I was entirely lucid during that phone call, but I appreciated it. Something really needs to change with the final game – for it to end that late for the East Coast on a weeknight is a little ridiculous.
• Bamboo: I don’t really have anything to say about bamboo – I just thought I could use a fourth “B” for alliterative purposes. Plus, this is a reminder to myself as the end of the semester hecticness is beginning to start that it’s always good to laugh at life.

First Trip to the Gunks

Sunday was my first trip to the Gunks and first rock climbing trip of the season. I was meeting some people from the Outing Club at the West Trapps parking lot Sunday morning. I woke up super early to leave town that morning – I left around quarter to six and made it to the Gunks three hours later. I arrived a bit earlier than the people I was meeting so I hung around the parking lot for a bit and walked around – I was just super excited to be outside and climbing again and had a cup of coffee to get out of my system.

The guys I were meeting up with for the day showed up shortly and we headed off to the cliffs. There were five of us so we split into two groups – I was in the group of three. We walked around a bit before finding an open climb we were interested in. I found it enjoyable just to be outside walking around rather than stuck in my office. We ended up getting on a nice little climb, something along the lines of Frog’s Breath (?) – I wasn’t in charge of finding the climbs and often translated the names in weird ways in my mind. It was a nice little climb with a couple of tricky and fun moves. We moved on to Buddy Bush (or something like that…) next, but did just the first little bit of before escaping to a rappel station because it was wet above there.

Weekend Wrap-up

I had a crazy busy weekend full of many exciting things. A brief overview includes:

• Remote observing on Arecibo
• Cosmology (can’t forget the homework)
• Psychology test
• Installing numerical code for this summer (with help)
• Making a galaxy! (with help)
• Grad Ball and dancing (and bacon wrapped scallops)
• Stat Mech (there’s always more homework….)
• Cocktail Party and bacon gin
• Climbing at the Gunks (and it was cold!)

More details to follow eventually – I want to write a trip report for the Gunks at least and share what I learned about bacon gin. But, alas, there was no enough stat mech done this weekend and it’s due tomorrow morning.