Happy Black Sabbath!!!

No, I'm not converting to Satanism.

Stromboli slept off her overindulgence and by this morning was feeling rather feisty. We engaged in bit of play fighting and chase and I eventually got her so worked up that she started doing the weird sideways charge/razorback cat thing she does. It's always so cute and I need to get a picture of it. She'd probably be embarresed if she could understood that I thought it was cute, as I suspect I'm supposed to be intimidated.

I started thinking about the music that I've been listening to and it occured to me that, oddly enough, I really like guitar music. Only, it has to be actual guitar music that isn't just endlessly repeated power cords. It sort of explains why I appear to simultaneously enjoy Black Sabbath, Dick Dale and old Pink Floyd. So yeah, weird.

Now if only I could explain why I like those types of music AND some of the more melodic forms of electronic music. My suspicion is that what I'm grooving on is the complexity in the song. I don't like guitar when it's just power chords, though I can like songs that have lot's of power chords if there's something else that's holding the song together. I like techno, but I don't like it when it's too fast and the overall beat of the song starts overwhelming other aspects.

So yeah, good music needs to be complicated but still simple enough to have some kind of a rhythm. For example, I don't seem to like Opera and as near as I can tell, Opera is usually pretty light on the rhythm.

A Very Stromboli Thanksgiving

Basically, I went to the store today and bought treats for myself and the cat. She got wet cat food and I got some wine and ice cream. Yes, it's been a long weekend of studying so far. I gave her a can of the "Gourmet Chicken Feast" and she proceeded to gorge herself on the food. So now, I have a very sleepy cat spawled out on the carpet near the door to my room. Heh heh. I wonder what'll happen when I feed her the "Gourmet Turkey Feast?"

Friday Picture Blogging

Sorry about the derth of posting lately, folks. I've been swamped with homework and studying. Graduate school is insane. One of these days I'll post something interesting, I swear. Until then, here's a picture of Stromboli that I'm sure you'll get a kick out of. Thanks to Scottland for taking it. :)

Scottland and the Rollercoaster of Doom

Scottland's visit last week was fantastic. More on that below.

Everything not related to his visit? Ugh. I'm really getting hammered by the homework monster right now. I sorta think I'm getting most of the material, but I feel very frazzled at the edges. I even had my first grad school nightmare last night. Thankfully, it was relatively straightforward in terms of interpretation. Basically, I'm in some random class being taught by some random dykish looking female professor. I feel like I'm understanding the material, but I don't want to ask any questions because she's really mean to the other students that ask 'dumb' questions. Then, towards the end of class, I freak out when I look at my notes and realize that what I thought was comprehensible writing was actually just random bits of swirly chicken scratch in weird spiral patterns. Yes, it was like a scene out of "A Beautiful Mind." Things then get even weirder when the dyke-prof.. demands that we all walk over to a piano and start praying and singing hymns. We all sort of shuffle over to the piano, but when I realize that the professor is serious, I balk and angrily retort that "you can't demand that we sing hymns and pray at a public university." The professor angrily glares at me with this sort of "you're right about that and I'm going to flunk you for contradicting me" look and then starts banging away at the keyboard as all the other students start belting out the Lord's Prayer. And then I wake up.

So yeah, graduate school is starting to get to me, I think. I'm just glad this is most likely a one term thing. Once it's over and I haven't failed out of school, I probably won't get this stressed out again until maybe my general exam or when I have to defend.

The visit with Scottland was very, very good. Everytime he visits, I'm more at ease about the whole long distance dating thing. It's just going very well, as near as I can tell. The weekend was generally uneventful, although Friday was Scottland's 36th birthday (which we celebrated with a custom built ice-cream cake and Saturday saw us going to the Six Flags park near San Francisco for some crazy giant rollercoasting fun.

Now mind you, I've never been on a "real" rollercoaster before. I've been on those silly little things that you sometimes see at state fairs and the like, but I've never been on an honest to goodness giant rollercoasters that are bolted to the ground.

The first coaster I went on was actually something along the lines of a magnetic rail gun for people. Basically, powerful electromagnets propel you up this corkscrewed incline. When you stop moving forward you start falling backwards, and the electromagnets kick in again at the bottom to push you even faster in the back direction. It's sorta like a kid sticking out and pulling in his legs on a swing. You go up this crazy upside-down vertical pole at the back end of the thing. Since I was in the first seat the first time I did this, I was literally sitting in seat such that my face was parallel to the ground, although there was about one hundred feet of open air between me and SPLAT!!

The next coaster I went on (Roar) was a traditional wooden coaster. Suzanne and Scottland had both warned me that the ride on a wooden coaster was pretty rough, and boy they weren't kidding. Still, setting the exceedingly bouncy ride aside, the whole thing was really cool. The coaster was a pretty "tight" design, so you were constantly going down insanely steep slopes and then straight back up weirdly tilted inclines. Very cool.

After that, we went on Kong. Kong was my first experience with a modern steel track design. It's much smoother than a wooden coaster because the structure of the thing doesn't vibrate as much and the joints between connections are much smoother. As a result, you're ride is simply more "smooth." The coaster is an "inverted floorless" design, which means that your seat hangs from a track and there's no floor beneath you. So, inversions mean that you're above the coaster and upside down. The picture I included shows you what I mean. It's too bad that the stupid palm tree was in the way, or it would've been a much better picture. So, Kong was fun, but kinda short and oddly unimpressive. I think that as Scottland pointed out, the thing is really tight, which means you don't have many really sharp drops towards the ground and you spend so much time inverted that you sorta just get used to it. Inversions are definitely best when used sparingly.

After Kong, we went on this silly 3D haunted museum ride. It was fun, but kinda corny. Basically you sat in a hydraulic chair wearing 3D glasses and "rode" through a haunted mine. It felt sorta realistic at times, but the ride was too long and the charm wore off with about 20 seconds to go. Still, it was better than the Stargate ride that would've normally been playing.

After the Haunted Mine Ride, it was time for Medusa. Medusa was by far and away the best ride at the park. The drop from the top was 150 feet all the way to the ground. I guess we got up to about 70 mph at that point. You go through a number of inversions and near inversions, but they're placed strategically so that you only have a short time (long enough to freak out) to see them coming before you're in them, but when you aren't in them, you really can't see them. So yeah, this was the ride where I found myself getting really excited. At first I was scared, but then I just thought it was cool.

We rode Medusa four or five more times after that, went to some haunted houses where I got to watch Scottland jump and scream a number of times and then went home. It was a good day and Scottland is already starting to talk about where our next Rollercoaster trip is going to be.

Friday Rollercoaster Bloggin

This is the Top Thrill rollercoaster ride at Cedar Point amusement park near Sandusky, Ohio. This beast is the second highest and fastest ride in the world.


On this ride, you're magnetically accelerated to 120 mph in about four seconds. You shoot down the track and then straight up 420' into the air while doing a couple of twists in the air. Then you crest over the apex and plummet 400 feet straight down at a ninety degree angle while doing a 270 degree rotation. Then the ride ends.

My Yin And Yang

In the exciting world of Yang today, I realized that my idea to dye my curtains orange was a good one. Yes, I really did dye my curtains. You see, when I moved in the windows in my room were these dirty, broken down dog hair (and maybe cat hair) covered monstrosities. I think they were supposed to be roman curtains, but if so they were definitely curtains from the period AFTER Rome was sacked by the Vandals.

A couple of days after I moved in, I took them down, washed them and "re-strung" them. They were perfectly serviceable after that, if nothing fancy. While in the middle of this I hit on the idea of using that RIT dye you can buy at the craft store to dye my curtains and give my room a little bit of color. Like most rentals, the place I live in suffers from the "Tyranny of White." So, I went out and bought myself a couple of boxes of orange dye and dyed the suckers. I wasn't sure if I had made the right choice in terms of colors at first, but now that I've had time to get used to it, I know that I did. My room looks COOL when I wake up in the morning and when I get home in the late afternoon. Sunlight that filters through my windows when the curtains are closed makes my room glow orange. It's really neat.

In a funny bit of serendipity, I was thinking about how I hadn't talked to Marty Durham since right before I moved to California. Oddly enough, a package arrives from him today containing exciting new D&D stuff. He sent me two new books (Magic of Ebberon and Heroes of Horror) and a pile of miniatures. I definitely have to call him. I now have so many Ebberon source books that I think I definitely need to run an Ebberon game at some point. Strangely, my Ebberon book about the city Sharn is missing. I have no idea where it is. I must've left it behind during the move.

So yeah, that's the world of Yang today. In the world of Yin, I'm seriously working hard to stay ahead on the homework. I've actually made the effort to figure out the ratio of homework problems to days until due so that I can prioritize a bit in terms of what to do when I have time to study. Of course, sometimes it's hard to gauge how long it will take you to do any given problem.

For example, take my most recent mass transfer problem. I started in on Sunday. I just finished it. Normally homework problems don't take me this long. Believe me. It was "teh suck." And you know what's worse? This was technically an EASY problem to solve. Part of what made the problem so difficult was that I had literally never been taught anything on how one goes about solving a linear second order partial differential equation. To make it all the more frustrating, when some of the students queried him about the problem, the professor acted as if it was something we should have been taught how to solve during out undergraduate years, preferably in our Sophomore year of school.

Personally, I think he's bullshitting us. I have it on good authority (Suzanne's) that a problem similar to this is handed out to graduate schools all across the country during the first weeks of the first term. It's sort of a "wake-up" call to new graduate students that the world of straightforward homework assignments was dead and gone. Of course, I think she's making a rather large generalization using a relatively small set of data, but I'd rather believe her theory than the theory that I'm undereducated when compared to "average" graduate students. Besides, I did some checking and none of the grad students in my class that I talked to remembered ever being taught how to solve something like this. I also looked at my old undergraduate textbooks and saw that they also didn't contain any relevant solutions. So yeah. I think is was a set-up. But whatever, CUZ I SOLVED THAT BITCH!!! It's pretty. If you're lucky I'll scan it in and you can see it.

Also, the cool pictures (at least I think they're cool) were found at a site where some geeky academic posted pictures he'd made with his Scanning Tunneling Microscope. Some of them you may have seen before. Basically, those little mountains you see are ATOMS and the little waves are fluctuations in the electron density of the material that the atoms are deposited on. To make these pictures, you use the STM probe tip to literally drag atoms across a surface one by one. Pretty cool, huh?

Nothing New To Report, Really

Seriously. It's why I haven't posted much lately. It's still sunny and warm down here. What's it like where you are? We still have to water the lawn three times a week to keep it from dying. Stromboli doesn't hiss at the dogs anymore and my terrarium has appeared to survived the insect infestation I discovered and treated about two weeks ago.

The play by post D&D game that I'm playing in started today. The one I'm thinking about running is going to have to wait until I've got a feel for how one handles PbP games. If you're curious, you can find the game here. Read all you want, but please don't post. That'd be a social faux pas or something.

School is going well although my classes are definitely starting to ramp up. I'm still ahead of schedule and such, but the work-load is definitely getting heavier. Luckily, mid-terms aren't for another month.

So yeah, not a lot going on. For those of you who might not yet know, I'll be visiting Seattle the last weekend in October. I'm going to be staying at Scottland's and attending the HOF Halloween party, assuming there is one. I should call Olga and ask her about that tonight. Oh yeah, and Scottland is visiting me this weekend. We're going to go to the Six Flags park near San Francisco. I'm going to ride a real rollercoaster for the first time ever.

Oh, and I still owe Suzanne a post on slide-rules. I haven't forgotten about it.

Friday Picture Blogging

Meet Retardo.



He's saying, 'My God...it's every color in the known universe all at once...and music...and, look, there's Wavy Gravy...'

Statistical Thermo Is FUN!!!

Well, maybe not fun, but it's certainly the class I'm enjoying the most. It very much reminds me of the quantum mechanics course I took during my junior year of school. Then and now, the thing I'm really digging about the material is the level of abstraction and the fact that despite this abstraction, the material actually relates to the real world. I'm not learning how to prove some centuries old theorem using bizarre multi-dimensional mathematics, I'm learning how to calculate fundamental properties of physical systems based on a set of very basic assumptions.

Now granted, it's not like I'm going to have some simple equation that allows me to perform these calculations. My understanding is that the mathematics for handling these types of calculations for real world problems is immensely complex and inevitably requires a lot of computer power if you want to do something useful with the concepts. That's fine. Ultimately, what really turns me on is that I'm getting a better understanding of how the world really works from first principles. Obviously, that window into the "real reality" is still very fuzzy and very small, but it's still a window that allows occasional glimpses of the deeper "truth" that we generally don't perceive as we go about our daily lives.

I also think that Professor Faller's lecturing style jives pretty well with my style of learning. The accent and the bad handwriting were tough the first few days, but adaptation to that has been pretty quick. A big help was learning that characters that look like upside-down v's are actually the number 1. I also like how he's easily able to work interesting anecdotes about material into the lecture, usually in response to questions. For example, today he briefly touched on the concept of what are called "periodic boundary conditions." I'm not going to bore you with a further explanation of what those are, but suffice it to say I had encountered them once before while visiting RPI earlier this year. This created an interesting quandary in my head which I'll explain later. To resolve this quandary I asked Professor Faller how recent of a technique "PBC's" are. Apparently they're fairly recent, in that they were definitely used by Edward Teller to solve some problems in the 50's and were also probably used by a guy named H. Ising in the 20's. So yeah, I like that I can ask the Professor a question like that in class and get an interesting answer that involves Edward Teller or in an earlier case, Laplace's Demon. I'm not really sure how exactly to describe why this is different and cool, but it genuinely is. Even though he tends to focus on computer simulations (which I've never thought of as interesting) I'm probably going to talk to Professor Faller about his research.

Now here's the skinny about the earlier mention of PBC's and RPI. I was talking to Suzanne on the phone last night, and the issue of bullshit came up. My experiences with Neah Power and the WTC have generally made me a more cynical person and drove me to the conclusion that there are a lot of people out there that are "full of shit." So, one interesting question I'm going to be answering while I get my PhD is "are the proportion of people in academia that are full of shit greater, less than or equal to the proportion of people in corporate-world and government-world?" The answer to this question will probably do a lot in determining what type of positions I apply for when I'm almost done with my PhD.


What was interesting about my experience with "PBC's" at RPI was that I had been led to believe that the use of "PBC's" was in some way very new and had in fact been invented by the professor that was using them in one of his molecular simulations. It was never directly stated that the professor "invented" them, but it was strongly implied that using them in a molecular simulation was somehow very novel and non-obvious. In my brain, that means "invented". Too bad it was neither. Apparently, using PBC's is very very common and as Professor Faller stated, nearly 99% of these types of problems assume them. So, I get the impression that the grad student I was talking to was trying to impress me by correctly guessing that I didn't know what PBC's were and then implying that his Research Advisor had invented them. In other words, this guy was probably "full of shit."

So, I guess I need to start keeping a tally of number of graduate students and professors met, and the number that bullshit excessively.

One Other Thing

For those of you who had to register to comment on my Blog, I have fixed that. I had an inappropriate box checked in my settings. That's been fixed. So now, you can comment anonymously.

Oi Vey

Yes, my new life as a graduate student has started in earnest. Six hours of class on Monday. Three hours on Tuesday. Five hours on Wednesday. Two hours on Thursday and a whole HOUR on Friday. Yes, I'm being oppressed by the 17 hour work-week. For those of you who think that's nothing, let me just explain that my brain HURTS at the end of the day on Monday.

But still, life is grand.

I absolutely LOVE the weather in Davis. Last week it was in the high 90's. I mean, the high on Wednesday, September 28th was 97 DEGREES. I walked outside during the part of the day when the temperature is at its maximum and thought, "Hmmm, it's kind of warm today." Biking between classes on campus in the sun is just "the bomb."

I also find myself walking through buildings on campus and thinking, "I wonder if this is where I would be attacked by vampires if this were Sunnydale."

School has definitely been a challenge, but it's a challenge I'm fairly confident I'm up to. The small amount of studying that I did before school started has really paid off. I just need to make sure that I maintain my lead on the material, except in the rare cases where it actually works better to read the text AFTER the class. Statistical Thermodynamics is like that. Professor Faller (the guy teaching it) is personable enough, but his notation sometimes literally looks like a flock of birds and he's not teaching the material in the manner that I would. But then, he's a professor and I'm not, so maybe my notation IS supposed to look like it's going to fly south for the winter.

I'm thinking about starting a play by post D&D game on ENworld.org. Apparently, those types of games take ten hours to resolve a single round of combat and I could see myself having time for that. Those of you who read my blog and are interested should let me know. It'd probably be something simple to start with, to see if it's worth doing.