Antarctica

 

Flower in Ireland.

One of my fellow first years is heading off to Antarctica in the next day or so.

In any other group of people when I say that I want to make it down to Antarctica they either ask why or think of it as hard to do. However in my department when I say that people usually respond with “I have been there” or “I am going there in a few months” (well not all of the people say this).

It would just be so cool to be able to go down there for some legitimate scientific reason.

Listening to those that have gone down there it does not sound like an easy place to live.

 

Bead Physics

 

A glass flower (sort of a weird material).

Often it is the simplest well thought out experiments that give the most interesting results. Like rotating a bunch of beads and seeing what happens.

My favorite part:

Why this should happen is unclear. No equations exist to describe why such a slight change in packing density should produce such different system-wide behavior. “Known mechanisms for granular convection could not be applied,” wrote Rietz and Stannarius.

I hope to find a good question like that during my science career, something simple and easy to understand that gives brand new results.

 

Electrostatics

 

A lovely set of pink flowers

Electrostatics is a hard subject.

The first week we learned all of the physics for the quarter, now it is just math heavy what with Green’s Functions and complex analysis.

If I make it through alive I will join an elite group who have passed through physics grad E&M.

 

Matlab Magic

Images are sometimes too easy to make.

I occasionally stumble across some interested images in Matlab while testing things out. Particular when trying to run random data through my programs to see if the results are from the data instead of the program itself. In this case I cross-correlation a normalized magic square to get the above surface plot. It looked neat so I kept the code:

mg=magic(40);

 

points=size(mg,1);

mg_norm=zeros(size(mg));

 

for i=1:points

norm=mg(i,:)./max(mg(i,:));

norm=norm-mean(norm);

mg_norm(i,:)=norm;

end

 

a=xcorr2(mg_norm);

a=a.*(1/max(max(a)));

 

figure;

surf(a);

clear a i mg mg_norm norm points

I Love XKCD

I Love Momentum

Since watching this video yesterday it has been on repeat in my head all day.

I think it would actually make an interesting exercise. Write further lyrics to the song with things you love.

Boom de yada

Boom de yada

Red Balloons

 

A fallen flower flew back to its branch! No, it was a butterfly. -Moritake

DARAP is starting up a new challenge, this time for the 40th anniversary of the internet.

For a prize of $40,o00 you just need to find the latitude and longitude of ten red weather balloons scattered across the United States.

I don’t know if you can register in teams or if it is purely individual (at least officially). This will be fun to follow as I see several things occurring that could undermine the contest (or perhaps that is part of the contest).

• People posting the location of the balloons online for everyone to access.
• Doing the same but with slightly or completely incorrect data.
• Fake balloons showing up where they will be conveniently found by others.
• Selling balloon locations for cash or prize percentage (though I would not trust this).
• A balloon being found then removed by the person who found it (this may just disqualify this particular balloon).

If I somehow find one of these balloons in Seattle somewhere I will probably fall into the first category and post its location online, though I won’t give the latitude and longitude as I don’t have a GPS.

I just hope that at least some fake balloons start showing up.

 

Halloween!

 

The hat stayed on!

Today is Halloween. Hooray costumes and candy!

 

Unix Mail

Glad I did not need to sort these.

I had a departmental computer account set up for me, or at least I asked the IT guy to set one up for me. After I asked I never heard back about it.

Three weeks later my professor mentions something he showed me but he never did. He looks at his e-mail and he did send it to me, to my departmental e-mail address. I did not know that I had this e-mail address.

Turns out that I had an e-mail account and computer account set up but I was never told about it. Once I found this out I hunted down the IT guy and got the default password for the account. I then figure out how to set up forwarding.

However I noticed that I had about ten messages that I could get too, I know this since there was an error file with the names of the e-mails. Hoping a solution would turn up I continued on my way.

Today I logged onto my friends linux machine through SSH and saw a line at the top that I have never seen before “You have mail”. Odd I thought. I did not know what to do with this, so I blindly typed ‘mail’ and there it was. From here I could access the mail on my departments unix machines and finally read those e-mails.

I just could not forward the existing e-mails to a better e-mail account.

An important aspect of figuring out computer problems is knowing how to fiddle without breaking things or causing irrecoverable damage.

To get those messages I could probably use a modern mail client, I reasoned. I started up OS X Mail and tried to set up a new account based off my department server. Strangely it worked quite easily. I set up a temporary POP account, downloaded the messages, dragged them to an IMAP account and deleted the POP account.

It would have been nice if I knew I could do that from the beginning.

Seattle Metro

Dear Seattle Metro,

Thank you for having the 11:20pm bus not arrive. I appreciate the opportunity to wait fifty minutes at night for the 11:50pm bus to show up. If I had known that you decided to not send that particular bus I would have walked home and made it in less time then the consequent wait and ride time.

Also I appreciate your concern in regards to wanting to raise the price of quarterly bus passes to $250, that is such a great idea that I could buy a decent bike each quarter and ride it in instead of taking an overpriced, unreliable bus system.

Michael

Ahnold

 

My UC diploma with a certain someone's signature.

My undergraduate diploma finally made it to my parents house a week ago and the only part I wanted to see was the signature of the President of the Regents.

I am glad that I have that name on my diploma.