ħ/2

Physics Grad Student studying Nanotechnology. Part-time astronomer. Part-time adventurer.

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Roommates

"Hey! I'm your roommate! I start cooking dinner at 4 and won't finish until 7, and I'm going to make your house smell like cabbage and garlic well into next morning!"

Fuck I hate roommates.

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Still operating

So I'm pretty behind on quantum homework. It'll be a furious couple of weeks ahead for me until exams are done. Here's my list of things to do:

Quantum Homework: 5 (half done), 7 (more than half done), 8 (technically more than half done), 9, and 10 (hadn't started). They're all due by the end of the semester--May 13-ish.

Poster: I'm presenting a poster on finite-difference time-domain methods of electromagnetism for a couple of thin films I've been working on all year. A crew of us are heading to Jefferson Lab next Thursday and presenting, hopefully for a cash prize. Since it will be after Easter, I might be wearing my seersucker suit. 

Final Exams: I have one for Quantum (an oral/interview exam) and one for Nanotechnology Fundamentals (possibly written, but I've heard of another interview exam). 

Paper: I'm going to write up and attempt to publish a paper on this year's research. This will lead me into working on my thesis due at the end of the second year (oh wait, do I anticipate another opportunity for the seersucker?!?)

And that about scores up the last few weeks of my first year at graduate school. Fifty percent done!

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Growing Season

Costly trip to Lowe's this last Sunday, but I managed to plant 4 tomatoes (3 early-birds and 1 roma) and some herbs (Rosemary, basil, parsley, and mint, from left to right). It's mainly to keep me sane this summer and keeping me from having tomatoes in the fridge and forgetting about them (or worse, jackass roommates leaving the fridge door ajar overnight).

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Happy Pi Day! It's because it's March 14th (3/14).

But someone has beef with pi. Apparently, CNN felt they didn't have much to report on today (despite the Japanese earthquake/tsunami or middle east upheaval that's been in the news for a while), so they threw in an article about how pi could change (paraphrased). They cited this article that I've linked above.

I understand the fundamental argument this person provides. But really? Because every physicist or other scientists are gonna put their research to the side to fix all their "incorrect" papers because they used pi instead of tau. Screw that. The author even says that this is change should be for the new kids learning trigonometry. I doubt it will make it easier. It won't necessarily make the subject easier. Memorization is still memorization.

Also, I feel that this shouldn't be a new argument. We've been using the Circle Constant as pi for quite a while. Hell, major mathematicians like Gauss and Euler have researched extensively into the subject. So why didn't they think about this? Or, more importantly, even if they had agreed to make this correction, why are we still using pi? My argument is that they didn't think it was broken, and it's still not broken; thus there's no use in fixing it. 

A good read on the subject is A History of Pi by Petr Beckmann. Make your own damn opinion. My opinion is that theorists will say, "Duh, why didn't we think about this sooner?" and the experimentalists will say, "Who cares?". And those computational physicists? They'll say "Hell no, pi is built into the computer. Tau ain't."

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Long Simulation

So I'm running a simulation again. This time, it's taking 10ks (yes, that's kiloseconds), so I'm burning time by catching up on cracked.com, then by searching for "Stormtrooper" on Etsy. People have some cool shenanigans involving Stormtroopers. Sabrina always said we need to invest in art. 

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Random events

Alarm clock was suspiciously late today. As soon as I got a txt message this morning, my alarm clock went off; then my computer randomly booted up.

I think the house sits on a pocket of electromagnetic energy. I'll probably have to start typing numbers into the computer every 108 minutes.

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On another note, I'm getting married to Sabrina A on Sept 2nd up in Richmond. This is one of the few non-goofy photos of us together that I have. 

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BLOG!!!1!cos(0)!1!!

So I've taken the liberty to create a new blog (tumblr thing?). I need a vent, and this is where I'll dump my ramblings.

I named the blog ħ/2. Why this? Goddamn "spin". This is a term that scientists use to describe a particular property of particles (say that five times fast!). It implies that the particle is physically spinning. But we have a term for that--it's angular momentum, or more specifically, the "orbital angular momentum." The "spin" scientists are talking about is a quantity of that particle, with no damn way to change its value (similar to mass or charge). 

The technical term is "intrinsic angular momentum." I just call it IAM for short. 

And now you have an idea of what this will be about.