I’ve started having meetings with faculty and facilities in preparation for taking photographs for the next book. My goal is to explore hidden spaces at Carleton—rooftops, tunnels, basements, and secret rooms, recording messages left by past adventurers and to share the experience of discovering unseen infrastructure. Goal is to have a library of photos collected by week 6 or so, produce the book source by week 7, and have physical copies before I leave.
I went in for the first implant surgery today, to replace the missing three upper teeth from my January Broomball accident. For those of you who haven’t heard of dental implants (I hadn’t!), they’re roughly 1.5 cm titanium screws which are inserted into the bone where the tooth’s roots used to be, ending right under the gumline. Artificial teeth are then attached to those screws.
The impact shattered two teeth, so I had to have the left-behind roots extracted from my upper jaw. Between the injury itself and having to dig around a lot to get the roots out, I’m now missing the thin sheet of bone which runs over the front of the roots, for the canine side of the upper jaw. Luckily the bone near the middle is reasonably intact. This is problematic, because the implants need solid bone to anchor to. If, upon opening everything up, they found that there wasn’t enough bone to place the implants, I’d need a bone graft taken from my mandible behind the molars, and six months additional recovery for that graft to integrate. Luckily, this wasn’t the case! The implants took hold in the jaw even though the labial bone wasn’t intact. (Note to kids: another reason to get your calcium!)
Back in 2004 I played this mod for UT2004 called Neotokyo, which, in addition to being a really fun futuristic shooter with a good community, had an excellent soundtrack. Over the last five years they’ve been busy porting the game over to the Source engine, and are almost (fingers crossed) to a first release. One of the coolest things to come out of their efforts so far has been the just-released soundtrack put together by the talented Ed Harrison: a two-disc album which I now have the pleasure of owning.
First impressions: astounding. There is not a single track among the 26 that is not worth listening to carefully. The album has a characteristic “Neotokyo” design: ominous scale and atonal drones, punctuated by sampled vocals and driven by electronic baselines. Soaring orchestral movements empower tracks like “Scrap I/O” and “Tachi”, while spacious drums and harsh cello drive the centerpiece “Pravhaba” to inexorable conclusion. “Footprint” evokes a more contemplative mood, with light percussion and querulous synth piano taking time to explore the landscape, building to discontinuous crescendo. The bass sometimes feels lacking, and at some points the layered sound can become so complex it’s hard to tell what’s happening, but these are minor flaws in an all-around solid release, full of high-quality material. For $11, it’s a bargain. Go get it while it’s still around.
Stretching a visual metaphor from my comps presentation entirely too far, here’s some cute little photons playing soccer (with a buckyball) on the electromagnetic field.
Well, I gave my comps talk (senior thesis) on the Casimir effect last week. It went surprisingly well, though it took much longer to prepare a 70 minute lecture than I expected. There are few graphics on the web which really explain the effect in a sensible way, so I had to draw most of them myself. The audience even seemed to follow quite a bit of it—impressive for starting from ground zero and moving rapidly to quantum cavity electrodynamics.
When I went in to meet with my faculty advisor the next day, I was surprised to learn that the reason he had not kept any of our meetings, or indeed showed much interest in discussing my comps at all, was because he had somehow not realized that he even was my advisor! Apparently, when I finished the talk and he saw his name on the final slide, he was very startled and realized his mistake. I am somewhat disappointed by this, but on the other hand, it was nice to get away without significant critique.
In a discussion tangent to our research, Arik just managed to explain the mechanics of Zeta-function regularization in the Casimir effect in a (mathematically) action-packed half hour. This conversation cleared up two days of confused scribbling–because now I accept that infinity is, in fact, equal to -1/3.
I’m dreaming math again. I had the weirdest semi-conscious dreams about water slides and renormalization theory. When my first draft goes in, I am going to enjoy taking the weekend off. Two weeks left!
A stick to the face in broomball took out three of my top incisors and broke one of the bottom ones as well. I spent a couple hours in surgery last week to stabilize and reimplant some of the damaged teeth, and just went back in yesterday morning to have the shattered roots–and the third avulsed tooth–extracted. Next week is a root canal for the bottom tooth, followed by a crown. Hopefully I’ll start the procedure for implants pretty soon–depending on whether I need a bone graft, I may be basically back to normal in a few months.
Not really much pain, I’m just a little inconvenienced by having to eat slower, and my lips are kind of torn up but healing rapidly. Hopefully I can get back to full activities soon!
-25 degrees absolute, -50 with windchill.
Okay, even I am prepared to declare that it is now cold outside… Laura and I tried to go to Stadium this morning, and my eyelids started freezing. AWESOME!
I’ve migrated Aphyr.com off its old, dying hardware onto a spiffy new Linode. So far it’s going pretty well! My new blog engine, Cortex Reaver is also up and running.
Currently waiting for my flight to depart from PDX. The 15 inches of snow Nature dropped on us this week meant long waits for most people, but I was able to get through ticketing and security in about half an hour, and the MAX got me here just fine (though we passed a couple jacknifed semis on the way). Now all I have to do is make my connection through SeaTac in an hour. That… could be interesting.
Term’s almost over; one final left. Research reached a nice finishing point this week; I finished the comparative Lyapunov analysis and prepared the graphs for submission. Noise really kills the linearity we’re looking for, but it does suggest an experimentalist will see some unexpected things, which is what the original paper tried to show with power spectra–and moreover, the figures are in the right ballpark for More on that when we draft a response to PRL.
Tested for 2nd kyu this week. It was tough–especially remembering the right vs. left distinctions for techniques that sound very similar in Japanese! Mechanically things felt pretty solid, though, which was nice. I was even able to clear 3 feet on jumping-over-partner, which was a great feeling. Plus, the front strike continuation is just plain awesome.
Carrie (one of my summer housemates) locked herself out of her car earlier this week. She gave Justin and I a call, asking us to contact a local locksmith. Rather than go to the expense of calling a locksmith after hours, we offered to try to break in first.
I’d never tried, or really thought about, breaking into a car before. I don’t drive my car very often, and I don’t tend to leave my keys behind, so it had never really occurred to me that I might need to know how, but here was a chance to find out. We stopped by the house, picked up a wire coat hanger and a pair of wire cutters, and drove out to the store she had parked in front of. “Thank goodness you’re here,” she exclaimed, and showed us her key-containing purse, neatly tucked away on the back seat.
For the last lab of the term, we learned how to use the scanning tunneling electron microscope, or STM.
<img src=“/data/posts/93/graphite.png” style=“width: 100%”, alt=“Graphite STM image” />