Case in point, this perfectly innocent figure from the texbook used in the course I'm teaching:

So far I have spent 90% of my vacation tied to my computer, analyzing gravitational waveforms. Nifty? Sure. But it means not only have I gotten no rest, I have also not had time to start next week's homework, or the end-of-term report for one of the classes, or get my taxes done, or go shopping, or...

In other words, at the end of this week "off" I'm going to be more tired and further behind than I started.

The only other thing I've accomplished, and I use that term extremely loosely, has been to extract the cell phone sounds from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei for use in my email client.

(Update, 3:21 am: The programs finally finished running, the plots are finally plotted, and I'm going to bed. Unless I decide that's too much effort and I just fall asleep in the desk chair).

Happy Birthday, _akenokoru! Here's to the start of a better year.

Although all that means is that I won't be taking or teaching any classes this week, and no new work will be coming in. I still have ample accumulated work to do, however.

The most notable aspect of this semester (apart from how insanely busy its been) is that my research plans have changed. It turned out the cosmology group wasn't able to take on any new students, so I'm now working with the gravitational wave group. It's a direction in which I wouldn't have initially expected to go, but I'm finding it very much to my liking. A couple of weeks ago I helped assemble our new supercomputer!

Physics. Eh? Physics. Phyyyyyyyysics. Physics! Physics. Physics, physics, physics, physics, physics, physics, physics.

I hope one of you is getting all this down.

( Here's the plasma I've been working on for the last six weeks. )

It looks impressive, but I may in fact be further behind than when I started. I discovered today that in the process of getting the electronics to work I punctured a bit of the vacuum system. I can get pressures low enough for this Argon plasma, but not nearly low enough for the actual experiment. I'm not sure yet how much effort it will take to fix, or if that piece will need to be replaced ("Sometimes a thing gets broke can't be fixed." - Kaylee)

Were you to look at my ass (which I strongly advise against) you would see a large purple bruise that, if you were able to overcome your nausea long enough, you would identify as a boot print. Had you not yet recoiled in disgust you could examine the print more closely and would eventually discover markings left by raised letters on the boot reading "property of the Fall 2007 term."

I'm doing so many things this term and all of them take lots of time and some of them happen early in the morning which would leave me exhausted even if there weren't so many others. I'm beginning to find myself thinking things like "I'm going to try to make next term more reasonable but if it turns out to be as bad as this one then it will be my last." I probably don't mean that, but it's there in my brain nonetheless.

Quick roundup of things:

Teaching is kind of fun. Running labs is not. Grading is very much not.

Doing graduate laboratory is also, for the most part, very much not. I will admit that getting my first plasma to go yesterday after six weeks of trying was kind of a thrill. However, most of that six weeks was spent doing things like disassembling large pieces of equipment meant to contain and direct mighty energies and looking for a gorram half-centimeter washer that wasn't making good contact with some tiny screw. Much of the next eight weeks is likely to be more of the same, since getting the plasma going was not the experiment but just the first step in getting the equipment ready for the experiment.

Relativistic quantum mechanics is a very beautiful subject. Pity that I don't have time to actually learn much about it beyond the bare minimum needed to keep up with the weekly homework.

I'm making some good progress on the CMB-analysis project and learning a bunch of interesting things about the early Universe and how it is studied. Maybe I'll say more about this at some point (although more likely I won't).

I'm glad I'm auditing the general relativity course, it's been a good refresher of the stuff I did in the independent study last year. But I'm also glad I'm not taking it officially, since I would need to somehow create at least one more day a week in order to do the homework (or give up on sleep entirely, but that never works out well in the long run, where by "not working out well" I mean "at some point they'd find me naked on the table in the conference room writing christoffel symbols on my flesh with dry-erase markers and giggling").

It hasn't been all work. Just before the term started I finished watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and fell deeply, and perhaps a little obsessively, in love with it. I've very slowly been reading the novels, kindly translated here and while the translations often read a little awkwardly they are nonetheless quite wonderful. I'm looking forward to the fansubs of the upcoming second season.

I've also been slowly going through the box set of the first season of the new Doctor Who. I'd seen through The Empty Child around the time the series first aired, thanks to a long weekend and a friend with bittorrent, but decided to start again at the beginning. I'm up to Dalek which I may watch tonight. I don't have enough words of praise to heap onto this series.

I have a new computer, a 20-inch iMac. It feels good to be back on a desktop after 5 years of laptops.

It's gotten chilly. Yay!

Ok friends, see you in December.

The quals (or, as _akenokoru called them, the chuunin exams) are over. I don't like speculating on how I did on tests, so I won't. I'll know within two weeks, probably sooner.

Afterwards I was in the mood to not think about anything for a while, so I took a bus to the (yuch) mall and caught The Simpsons Movie. I really enjoyed it! Perhaps that's due in part to the euphoria of having put the quals behind me, but mostly I think it's because it's actually good. There's nothing profound in it, nor even anything particularly new, but I found it solidly funny and fun in a way the series itself largely isn't lately.

That was the entirety of my break, as the semester started today. And this semester looks like it's going to be even more insanely busy than last year:

• I'm TAing Physics 101, the huge 300+ person intro course. I'll be running three two-hour "studios" (a combination of recitation and lab) per week, each with about 18 students, and grading their weekly homework and lab reports. Plus I'll run the physics "clinic" (a room where students can come for help in any course at any time) two hours a week.
• I'm taking Quantum Mechanics III. Relativistic QM, fun!
• I'm also taking graduate laboratory. Although I'm beginning to think that I should put it off for next term.
• I'm auditing the General Relativity course. I did a GR reading course/independent study with this professor last semester, but it's an important and beautiful subject that I'd like to spend more time with.
• Finally, the most exciting news, I'm starting research! Well, sort of. I'll be working with a professor in the cosmology group on his studies of the cosmic microwave background, but officially I'm doing it as a one-semester independent study and not "research" in the this-will-turn-into-my-thesis sense. However, this did happen as a result of my asking to join the cosmology group officially, so I suspect, or at least hope, that this will evolve into something larger.

So if none of you hear from me for the next 15 weeks, this is why.

Today's run of Software Update brought me a new version of iTunes, described as:

With iTunes 7.3, you can now activate iPhone service and sync it with your music, TV shows, movies and more. Also, you can now wirelessly share and enjoy your favorite digital photos from any computer in your home

The temperature here have been climbing back up. I spent much of yesterday morning trying to get climate control working in my living room, unsuccessfully. Consequently I spent the whole day hot and angry and stupid.

Today I gave up on the living room, purchased a small $40 computer desk from the local Rite Aid and moved into my bedroom, where the AC works fine. The difference was amazing, I was happy and able to focus on my studies and make some really good progress.

The conclusion is obvious: I'm part troll, in the Pratchettian sense¹.

This bit from Men at Arms is particularly applicable

The rising temperature hit his thoughts like a flame-thrower caressing a snowflake.

---

¹For those who haven't read any of the Discworld novels, Pratchett's trolls are silicon-based lifeforms whose brains work something like computers. They naturally count in binary. In warmer temperatures they overheat, degrade in performance, and eventually stop altogether. However when sufficiently cooled they go into overclocked mode and become capable of things like this.

Last weekend was full of productive studying, and by Tuesday I was not only beginning to feel more confident about the quals but was even remembering that I actually enjoy this stuff.

Then I received the TA training schedule.

Most grad students go through training before their first year, I didn't because of the way my fellowship works. I knew I'd have to do it around the time of the quals this year, but based on the TA training at Yale I figured it would be short and wouldn't interfere with studying too much.

Turns out, here, it's seven days, a rather sizable chunk of the time I have left before the exams. That news got me all panicky again, which ended up costing me a few more days, and then we had our first practice exam and that was about as unpleasant as you'd expect.

I admit my natural tendency when faced with adversity is to think "I'm old, I'm tired, bugger this I'm gonna go get a job I don't actually care about too much and enjoy relaxing in the evenings." So I'm working on staying focused on the fact that I do want to do this and finding ways to gather my strength and just get on with it. It would probably help if there were some grad-student equivalent of "I will be the next hokage — believe it!" that I could yell at random intervals.

Okay, moving on to other subjects, I have a hornet update! Although after further consulting the big page of things what can sting you it turns out they're yellowjackets, not hornets. Smaller colony, more aggressive, no more welcome.

I had blocked off the tops of the windows with a combination of plastic bags and duct tape, which worked but was clearly not going to last. So as a more permanent solution I ordered some of that foaming insulation stuff. Which worked perfectly, inasmuch as no yellowjacket born of Earth is going to get through it. However I was sloppy and didn't get to a couple of spills fast enough, so I now have very noticeable blobby yellow streaks on my screens.

These are, so far as I can tell, permanent. No commercial solvent will dissolve them. They can be sanded down from the inside, but extend outside as well. They can't be burned off, at least not with any flame I'd be comfortable using. Maybe a pressure washer would get them off, but it seems more likely it'd just rip the screens out entirely and blast them across the street. Replacing the screens would either require dismantling the windows, a four-story ladder, or spider-powers.

So I guess I win, but probably at the cost of my deposit (at least). I can't help thinking that, unable to sting me, the yellowjackets instead attacked me through my own stupidity.

This, by the way, is why I'm not an experimentalist or artist. I like to think I'm pretty good at understanding things, but I'm incredibly and consistently ham-fisted when it comes to working with the physical world to accomplish anything.

On the plus side, the heat wave has passed and temperatures are more like I'd expect in central New York. Not always cool enough to be comfortable, but always enough to be functional.

I told you I'd shoot, but you didn't believe me! Why didn't you believe me?!

(Aparently they thought the terms of our treaty allowed them to start colonies in other windows. They were very, very wrong.)

Here is a snapshot of a typical recent day:

• 8:00 am: Wake, plan to jump right into studying for the qual
• Some time later: wonder how much of the decopodean life cycle has been documented on wikipedia
• Some time after that: "Ok, just one quick game of Gunpey."
• 12:00 am: Go to bed, lament having done basically no studying for the qual, promise to do better tomorrow.

Repeat seven or so times. I've been better since Sunday, but it's been a fight to stay focused. No doubt a part of this is whatever has caused students to procrastinate since the first amoeba attended college. But another, more tangible, part is the heat. The horrible horrible heat. As noted earlier my brain basically ceases to function at about 85 degrees, and works best at something like 68. I'll spare you the tedious details, but suffice it to say that all my attempts to cool my living room down have failed. Clearly the next step is "ship this AC back and get an even bigger one."

Now, yes, there are places I can go on campus to escape the heat during much of the day, but it's psychologically important to me that my apartment be a place to which I can escape from the world when I need to, and part of that requires that I be able to be comfortable. If I don't have that I get tetchy and whiny. Like I am now. Obviously.

So, in other words, I really hate summer. I hate its heat and its stickiness, and I also hate its bees.

Which brings me to the bees. Hornets, actually.

This morning when I went to the living room window I saw a hornet between the screen and the window. "Crap," I thought. Then I saw another. Then, like in any horror movie, I raised my eyes in slow motion to the nest in the upper corner of the window.

I'm pretty easy-going when it comes to the little critters of nature but I have my limits, and apparently one of those limits is a nest of hornets on the inside of my screens. Which, morally if not legally, constitutes "in my apartment."

It was a small nest and, again sparing you the details, I was able to kill the hornets, remove the nest and block off the gap in the screen. This was not pleasant.

Then I though to check the other windows and, yup, another even bigger nest in a completely inaccessible corner of another window. As it happens this other window is the one with the AC (the one which does not, as previously noted, work too well) and is already sealed off, so I added another layer or two or eight of sealing tape around the entire window and made a pact with the hornets that so long as they don't enter any further into my apartment I won't have to destroy them all. I don't trust them though, I know even now they're plotting to break in and sting me and eat my miso and sell off all my textbooks on eBay.

Well, okay, they probably want even less to do with me than I want to do with them, but this is just another thing that makes me feel not safe-and-comfortable in my own damn home, and this is the last thing I need when I'm supposed to be studying for the biggest exam of my life and not attending peace summits with bees or blogging about peace summits with bees.

I owe a few of you emails. I'll try to get to them in the next few days.

Once the ridiculous bureaucracy was out of the way the summer job wasn't bad. In fact I might even say it was close to the perfect job: they put me in a quiet dark private office and let me do to the code whatever I thought was the right thing, without a lot of meetings or micromanaging. I made good money, although at some point I found out what other consultants there were making and realized I could have asked for 1.5 times what I did and they wouldn't have blinked. I could even have asked for twice what I did and they would have blinked and then given it to me anyway. Ah well.

The downside is the commute was over two hours door-to-door, so adding those four hours to the hours I worked and the time needed to get ready in the morning and eat dinner and such and subtracting that from the hours in a day left, basically, nothing. I haven't been reading lj anything like regularly, so if I missed the announcement of your engagement/marriage/childbirth/ascension to godhood I apologize.

I wish I could say this would change, but the Ph.D. qualifying exam is only... let me check... 8 weeks away. EIGHT WEEKS? AHHHH! QUICK, SOMEONE HELP ME SHOVE PATHRIA STRAIGHT UP MY NOSE AND INTO MY BRAIN, IT'S THE ONLY WAY! Okay I'm better now.

On a somewhat-related note, since returning to Syracuse two days ago I have determined that the temperature at which I lose the ability to think coherently is about 85 +/- 2 degrees F (not accounting for variations in humidity). I have determined this thanks to highs in the 90s and the fact that my top-floor apartment traps heat so efficiently that even a carefully arranged series of fans can't keep it from being five degrees hotter inside than out.

That's about it for now, but I leave you with this short list of Things That Are Good from the previous month

• Katamari Damacy (and sequels, and soundtracks)
• Recieving lengthy, poetic, incomprehensible equations in the mail (thanks mellawyrden!)
• Sour cream and onion pringles
• Lumines
• Hot tubs in New Hampshire
• Bowling
• Gunpey
• Grilled vegetables
• Grilled Morningstar Farms veggie burgers (other brands turn... strange and disturbing when grilled)
• Pickle rounds!
• Bloomin' onions — in moderation
• Spending time with friends

I'm genuinely surprised by the apparent lack of lolporn.

The past few summers I consulted for a small company and a mid-sized company and in both cases the transactions were very simple — I did the job. And then I got paid¹.

This summer I am consulting for a huge corporation. Apparently Huge Corporation is not able to hire people as consultants, but only other huge corporations. So for the next few weeks I will technically be an employee of a national consulting service, subcontracted out to a local consulting service, who will farm me out to the actual client.

Each of these middlemen will, no doubt, be expecting money over and beyond my hourly rate, so this has got to be costing Huge Corporation a not-insignificant amount. Very probably this is worth it because it somehow protects them from some kind of liability, but it's also possible that it's just stupid.

So with three companies involved I have been deluged by employee handbooks and forms today, all of which must be completed, signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters².

About half of these forms arrived as PDFs. The other half arrived as MS Word. I have nothing with which to read Word documents³, so I asked that they be resent as PDFs. The poor woman I've been dealing with didn't know how to do that, so she scanned them and sent them as ginormous tiff files.

I also have to piss in a cup on Monday.

---

¹ Gratuitous Firefly reference!
² Gratuitous Hitchhikers' Guide reference!
³ Well, TextEdit on OS X actually does a respectable job of opening them, but clearly not a complete one. I could try open office, but in general I'm opposed to downloading and installing 30 Meg packages to read a handful of documents, especially since the odds are good that said 30 Meg package won't do a significantly better job than TextEdit.

My first year of graduate school ended yesterday. I think I survived it, but right now my brain is so mushy that I can't be sure whether it's normal post-finals mush or more serious post-mortem zombification mush.

I should be able to relax, but the feeling of constantly having assignments due is so ingrained that I can't shake the sense that I should urgently be working on something right now.

And of course that's in part because I should. The qualifying exam is just 14 weeks away.

Typically students don't start doing research until the second year, so most spend the first half of their first summer TAing to cover their summer expenses and then focus on the qual the rest of the summer. I can make a lot more money in less time consulting, so that's what I'll be doing through the middle of June. In the evenings I'm going to read about various non-qual-related things that I'm interested in, in order to remind myself why I'm doing this.

mellawyrden gave me a letter of the alphabet, and I had to name 10 things I love that start with that letter.

My letter is ~ S ~ and so:
( in no particular order )

If anyone would like to do this meme, just mention it, and I'll give you a letter! (You can't choose your own, although anyone who can do this with an Icelandic Þ will gain my temporary respect).

I came home today to find him at the bottom of the sink, unable to climb or jump out, so it was easy enough to capture him, take him up to the park, and let him go. Where, if The Simpsons is to be believed, he was immediately eaten by a hawk.

( I took some pictures. Want to see them? )

Within 10 minutes of getting back I heard scrabbling coming from behind the stove, so either I'm dealing with some sort of super-mouse that was able to defeat the hawk and make his way back or, more likely, what I have is not so much a mouse as it is mice.