I can't remember if I've posted on this before, but I'm not going to search my post archives to find out.
I can't stand listening to a song more than once in a row. More than once in a day is pushing it, and more than a few times a week is also pushing it. I don't exactly know why. Even (or perhaps, especially) if it's a good song that I like a lot, I really don't want to listen to it multiple times consecutively. Consequently, I get irritated when others want to listen to the same song several times in a row "because it's such a great song". This happened a couple of times in Atlanta, one with a few songs by Radiohead, and then with songs by Tori Amos. The only reason I'm remembering now is I'm listening to Tori Amos right now, and it's always the first thing that comes to my mind when Winter starts.
Crap, there was something else that was good but unrelated, and now I've forgotten it. Damn.
If I could learn to play one song on the acoustic guitar, it would probably be Over the Hills and Far Away, by Led Zeppelin. The intro to the song, anyway.
In other news, this marks the 242nd post of my weblog. There are currently 120 comments for all those posts. Which means I need only one more comment to achieve a 1:2 ratio of comments to posts. Hint hint...
If I could receive some sort of guarantee on the safety of my life, I might consider seeing Dr. Dre live.
I played my last game of UC Berkeley intramural softball last night. Our team lost 15-5 in our first playoff game. We played against a team we could have beaten if we had played one of our better games, but we did not. The last play of the game was a flyball that I should have caught in left field, but I broke in when the ball was first hit, and what do you know the damn thing sailed over my head. I knew the guy running the bases was slow, however, so I sprinted back to the ball and heaved it in the general direction of the cut-off man. Fortunately, it was a good throw, and the cutoff guy completed the relay to the plate. We got the guy by a wide margin, which helped me feel a little better about breaking in the wrong direction initially.
I really enjoyed the six semesters of IM softball I got to have at Berkeley with the astro department. It was fun every semester, even when our team sucked pretty bad. I think I will try to organize some summer softball games, like I did last summer. However, since I won't be around Berkeley after June, there won't be very many opportunities for games.
I think competition, at least in its application to recreational activities, should be primarily a method to make things more fun. Some people, however, take competition too seriously. These people are the ones who will do anything to win, including cheating and not-humorous trash-talking. These are the people who, in my mind, ruin the whole point of playing games. You don't play games to see who can win (unless you're a professional, which is a whole different situation). You play to have fun. And when competition becomes such a thing that the only way you have fun is if you win, well, then you know that you've gone off course.
I don't think most people are aware of this, but I have a fairly intense competitive streak within me. I generally play games with the intention of doing my best to win. However, I do all this within the context of having fun. Friday night I played in a broomball game with people from a couple of other co-ops. For some reason, broomball is one of those things that brings out my competitive nature. Our opponents were basically a bunch of thugs. Every time the ball would go by their side, players on their team not on the ice would kick the ball in the direction of our side of the ice rink. Also, people from their team would shout things like "You suck", as well as various other more vulgar renditions. It did not help that my team was losing, either. What really pissed me off about their behavior, however, was one particular incident.
One of the smaller players on their team (small in both physical height and stature of character) had a tendency to "fall down" onto the ball, grab it in both hands, and then chuck it down the ice. Needless to say, we're playing broomball here folks. This is simply not something you do. So one time, he did this when I was next to him. I then proceeded to "accidentally" fall on him, and then attempt to remove the ball from his tiny hands' grasp. The next thing I know, some other guy from their team (who had not been on the ice at the time) runs over, grabs my arms, and tries to jerk me up. I know I could very well be dealing with some psychotic jerk just waiting to get in a fight, so I surrender immediately, turn around and walk away without saying anything. After that, I went out of my way to avoid their side of the ice.
The point though, is that when you cheapen the game by taking competition too far you ruin it for everyone involved, including yourself. I should note that the team I played for was not immune to this bug. After we were down 2-0 (we eventually lost 5-0 or something), a girl tried to go on the ice to play, but was told to offer her stick to a male player, because "we need to score goals now." Fortunately, I was the male player being offered the stick, so I refused and she got to go out there and play some more (at that point, I had way more ice team than she had). Yeah, I might have been better than her. But that's not the point.
The talk ended up going well. I got some nice compliments on the talk from various faculty, post-docs, and grad students. Of course there were a fair number of people snoozing during the talk, but I think that happens with everyone. And of course there were a fair number of questions that I did not know the answers to, but then again I'm just an undergraduate and have been working on this project for only a year.
It was a great experience that will help me in my future talks as a grad student and onward.
In about 3 hours, I am going to give a talk on the research that I've done for the past year. The audience of this talk will be other people in the cosmology group that I'm working with at Berkeley, a mix of grad students, post-docs, and professors. The only sort of similar thing I've done in the past came at the end of the REU program I did at Flagstaff over the summer of 2002. However, this research has taken longer and has been more in-depth. Also, I feel more responsible for the outcome of this research project as compared to the REU project. I've been spending most of my time this week preparing for this talk, so I believe it will turn out ok. But it's still very intimidating when you're giving a talk to a bunch of people that all have more experience than you.
In case you are interested, you may download my presentation in power point format. The subject of the presentation is a characterization of millimeter wavelength fluctuations at the South Pole. And no, I have not gotten to visit the South Pole.
Yesterday I turned in my contract for housing for the summer with the co-op. For the first third of the summer, I plan to continue living at Fenwick, my current co-op apartment. During that time, I'm not sure what I will do. It's not looking like I will have published my paper by the end of May, however, so I think it's likely that I will be working on that during June.
The second third of the summer will consist of a road trip around the country with Tiffany. Tiffany has indicated she will get a car around late May, so that solves the problem of how the road trip will be accomplished. It still remains to figure out where exactly to go. I'd like to visit friends in Maine and see the east coast for the first real time in my life (middle school trip to Washington DC doesn't really count), but that may be possible within the time constraints of a one month-ish road trip.
The final third of the summer will consist of me spending a few weeks with my family at home in San Jose, before I head off to grad school to a PhD in astrophysics.
I am looking forward to all of these things.
As always happens in the days following Easter, I'm on candy overload. This year seems particularly bad, even though I haven't really come close to finishing half the candy I've got. My gums have decided already that I've had enough. I may even have to forgo cookies this afternoon as well. *shudder* Of course, it has been over two years since I last saw a dentist... I should set up an appointment sometime soon.
A quick check on the definition of the word biweekly from dictionary.com reveals:
bi·week·ly
1. Happening every two weeks.
2. Happening twice a week; semiweekly.
How confusing is that?
Not having internet at home sucks. I'm making this post from Tiffany's room at Castro. We just got back from bowling (100, 80 in two games for me), and now I actually have a brief opportunity to make a post.
Thursday evening I ate dinner with Tiffany and a couple of friends of ours up in the Berkeley hills. We had french bread, sliced turkey, two types of cheese (brie & swiss), cherry tomatoes, wine and beer for a real nice picnic right at sunset. It was thoroughly enjoyable. I took some pictures, but as internet is currently out of comission at home (I'm posting this at work right now), uploading the pictures will have to wait.
So while some people are engaged in a more serious theological discussion, I thought I would throw something fun out there: what would God do if a large asteroid crashed into Earth and removed all life there from existence? Scientists have found that such an event is possible, although not even remotely likely. It seems to me there would be an unprecedented rush to put all the billions of souls in their right place (heaven, hell, limbo, wherever). I wonder how God could handle all the beaureacracy that would surely accompany such an event.
Would this make God sorrowful? After all, there would be no new souls to enjoy seeing the glory of His light. Every bible there ever was would be immediately destroyed. All of man's record of God's existence, gone. It seems God would be the big Loser here. Well, of course, humanity would be extinct as well.
Or, perhaps I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective. Maybe God, all along, has been nudging potential killer asteroids just out of harm's way for millions of years. Maybe the dinosaurs were all very pious creatures until they degenerated to a bunch of misanthropic atheists. And then the Hand of God came down upon them in a fury, and now all the Earth has to show for it is a bunch of fossils.
Well I've managed to put off the state taxes until the day before they're due, and it appears I may not be able to file them online. Unfortunately, I owe $22, so I better get this taken care of tomorrow.
One of my favorite video games of all time is The Legend of Zelda, the classic Nintendo Entertainment System game. One of the fun features of the game was that you could burn down forests using some sort of flame device, such as a candle or magic wand. Sometimes, if you burned the right patch of trees, you would uncover a secret cave. Inside a few of these caves, a friendly Molblin will appear and say "It's A Secret", and then proceed to give you some number of rupies. You gotta watch out for the nasty old men that charge you money for burning the entrance to their homes though.
And that's a long way of saying that though I've "decided" which grad school I will attend, I'm keeping it a secret till tomorrow. I'm going to sleep on the decision, and if it still seems good, I'm going to go with it.
By April 15th, I must decide whether I will attend the University of Colorado or the University of Arizona for graduate school in Astronomy. This has become a staggeringly difficult decision with the recent offer from Colorado that I talked about in a previous post. However, I am pleased to report that I am not the only one struggling with the grad school decision-making process. No less than three prospectives that I have either met while visiting grad schools or knew from previous experiences have had a very hard time deciding which school to choose. By keeping track of their decision-making process, I have developed a plan of my own: discuss the issue with a few grad students in the astro department at Berkeley, and see what they have to say; think incredibly hard about it (mostly envisioning myself at both places and seeing how I feel); make a "decision" Monday night. Then see how I feel with that decision Tuesday morning. If it's good, then it's good and that's it. If not, back to the drawing board.
So, today I was supposed to be presenting a poster at the annual undergraduate physics majors poster session based on the research I've been doing for the past year. The poster session started at 2pm, but unfortunately I did not find this out until 4pm, when I went to get tea and cookies. In fact, if tea and cookies had not been held in the same room as the poster session, I probably would never have realized that the poster session was today. I was quite lucky that I had already made a poster for the AAS conference in January, so I quickly ran home, picked up my poster, and ran back in about 20-25 minutes. By the time I got back, however, most people had left and there wasn't much for me to do. I explained my research to a couple of people, but there really wasn't a whole lot of point to the process. It was actually eerily similar to the AAS conference...
Hopefully the talk I'm giving on the research in about two weeks will go better.
Up until today, I had been leaning more and more in the direction of Arizona. My reasoning was that there were really only two professors at Colorado that I had much interest in working with, whereas at Arizona there were something like six to eight. I prefer the living environment of Boulder to that of Tucson, but there is enough outdoor stuff to keep me happily busy in Tucson. I also thought that I would have greater access to observing facilities at Arizona vs. at Colorado. This is important because there is still a significant portion of me that desires to do some sort of "standard" observing run during my time in grad school. Another thing that I liked about Arizona was that they get you started on research right away and make research the priority immediately. I think classes are important, but in the end, when you're looking for a post-doc position, your grades don't mean anything compared to your research. Prior to today, what I was looking at with Colorado was doing a one year TA and then hoping a research opportunity would open up with either Erica Ellingson or Jason Glenn.
Today, however, I received an email from the department chair at Colorado saying additional funds had been procured so that I could get started on a research project with Jason Glenn on observational cosmology and instrumentation in the 2004-5 academic year. Also, I was informed that they are hoping to hire a new faculty member whose research interests lie iin mm-wave and sub-mm instrumental and observational cosmology. As it happens, this potential new faculty member works in the same building as me, only one floor up. So I just got back from talking to him about the merits of Colorado vs. Arizona. He told me he is leaning towards Colorado, in part because he is from the area (he was actually a ski instructor for a couple of years it turns out), but also in part because he feels there are good scientific resources to draw on there, yet the department is not so big that he would not have a significant opportunity to be a driving force in making it better.
So if you asked me to choose which place to go to based on the assumption that I had no idea who I'd work with, I'd take Arizona, because the breadth of faculty there as well as the tremendous observing resources. But if you ask me to choose between working with one of the two professors at Colorado that I liked a lot vs. the seven or eight professors at Arizona there were doing good observational cosmology, well, that would be quite a bit harder.
I'm still a little concerned about being isolated from the other grad students if I chose to work with Jason Glenn at Colorado (his lab is off campus), and I still think I got a better "vibe" from the Arizona students, for what it's worth.
If I ever become an advisor to students (like say, a professor) in some sort of research form, I think I will go out of my way to use odd phrases to describe physical situations, just to see student's reactions. For example, if a student is working on some research project with me and we're really going into little details to finish the project (much like I'm doing now with the atmosphere paper I'm working on), I might say something like, 'Boy, we're really flogging this one to death. In fact, I'd say that by the time we're done here there won't even be a horse left to look at.' You know, it's sort of an odd, almost uncomfortable way of describing it. And what would the student's reaction be? Well, that's what I would find interesting. I suppose if my advisor said that to me I'd kind of chuckle and smile and avoid commenting on it and maybe think to myself, 'What a freak I have for an advisor, jeez.' I've noticed already that there are plenty of students who have no problem sucking up to professors, so I would anticipate some interesting responses. Oh well, that will probably never happen anyway.
I actually typed up my impressions from University of Chicago while on the plane from Chicago to Oakland, but I kept forgetting to post them. Well, they're up now.
Since I moved into my apartment last fall, I have become more interested in cooking real meals. My biggest attempt was making a pizza from scratch, including the dough. It actually turned out really well and I enjoyed eating it immensely. However, it took several hours to make everything (the dough and the pesto sauce took the most time). So obviously I can't do that every day.
Today I used bisquick to make some shortcakes and had them with strawberries and ice cream for a very nice dessert. The shortcakes took about half an hour to make and bake, which is half an hour longer than it would have taken if I had purchased shortcakes at the store. But it was totally worth it, because fresh shortcakes beat the crap out of the store-bought variety.
My desire to cook varies quite a bit on a day by day basis.
I was just looking at the calender of athletic events that Cal students will be participating in, and nearly all the NCAA championships are around the middle of May. This happens to coincide with finals time at Cal. Which makes me wonder how collegiate athletes are able to balance school and athletics. My first guess is they don't---they are athletes first and students second. But there are a lot of students that are either not good enough to be professionals or play a sport where you simply can't be a professional, for lack of money. So it seems not the best idea to put sports first.
Then again, when in your life will you have another opportunity to excel at such a high level in anything you do? Life isn't all about academics, in the end...
As for me, I'm just happy that I can watch some of these people do what they do.
So I was just re-reading the previous post, and I have decided that that was a decidedly nerdy introduction. I think I could present it in person in such a way that would not be deemed so nerdy, but it would be difficult because at its core, it really is a nerdy statement.
I'm back from the fantasy baseball auction. Things went pretty well. I have holes at only a couple out of 23 positions, and in a 10 man nl-only league, that's not bad. I may or may not post the players on my team at a later date. Right now, I might go shopping. Or I might not. Boy, everything is up in the air.
In astronomy, one typical way of conducting research is to perform wide field surveys over a large fraction of the sky. Then, one searches the survey field for interesting objects and performs "follow up observations" on those objects, usually consisting of one to a few nights of focused observation on each object.
I am now going to perform follow up observations on my vignettes from March 30.
First, I'd like to say a little more about the softball game. The score was 2-2 after three and a half innings. Then, in the bottom of the fourth, we exploded for six runs, and we're thinking 'ok, we should be set from here on out'. But it's not like we got lazy or anything. We played solid defense in the top half of the fifth inning and still gave up eight runs, so we were down 10-8. Then in the bottom of the fifth we scored 12 runs. It helped greatly that the opposing team dropped several flyballs that should have been caught. Another interesting thing about that game was I batted twice in a row. I flew out to end the bottom of the fourth, then hit a double to start off the bottom of the fifth. But the top of the fifth was so long that nobody noticed. And then we trounced them, so nobody cared.
Ok, I think that's actually the only one I'm going to talk about. I was going to discuss the Cunning Man, but I will put that off for another day.
In case you didn't know, I got back from Chicago about three hours ago. I have already posted the main impressions that I got from Chicago, but I also have a more detailed version waiting to be uploaded. In fact, I think I'll do that now.
Clearly, as I have already made two posts while in Chicago, I am having more free time on this visit than on any other. I think the main reason for this is the lack of interaction (comparatively) with the grad students. And I guess at the root of that is the fact that I'm staying in a room by myself, instead of being hosted by a graduate student. Apparently, the department "just" started having grad students host prospectives this year, and grad students are unaccustomed to this, so only two volunteered to host prospectives, even though this is their Open House time.
Another quick impression of the department is that it's an offshoot (albeit a big offshoot) of the physics department. I think the lack of people who do straight observation and analysis bothers me. There is a good part of me that feels that I have already decided about Chicago, but nevertheless I think it was good to come here and see the ongoing research and meet the people who are doing it.