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” />
I reorganized the photographs according to EXIF dates, where available. This should clear up the fact that I tend to go back in my archives and publish things months or years after they were taken. I’m not sure what to do about new material yet; I may let the front page see recently updated photographs, but put old photos in their temporal context, or leave them at the top of the stack for a few days then let them slide back.
I really don’t know how to explain this one. I walked out of the restaurant, took one look at the sky, and sprinted to the van to grab my camera. Two hours of thunderstorms and a tornado system moving up from the southwest left the sky churning with clouds, at times pale gold, at others a vicious burning orange. I spent the next 45 minutes running through Superior, past scrap yards, bar parking lots, and through the massive granary complex on Dock Street. Each photo just kind of led to the next in an adrenaline-fueled rush; I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to witness a storm system like this move overhead at sunset.
I don’t know how to handle the color correction for these images: Stormstack is basically a flat white-balance with the saturation brought down, and it’s still a little too orange. All I can tell you is that yes, the sky did look like that. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.
So, I just got a cell phone for the first time. I held out for 6 years; almost unheard of for an IT guy and student. Ended up with a little Samsung slider phone, the t429, which I’m growing to like: it’s small, lightweight, has easy-to-feel buttons, and a large screen. I do have one complaint, however.
I don’t really need text messaging. I have email and IM already, and both are more convenient for actually writing something down. However, people my age are obsessed with it. I got a text within 2 hours of getting the phone out of the box, and made the unpleasant discovery that receiving a 36-byte message cost me fifteen cents! Fifteen cents for something I didn’t even ask for! If I had a chance to reject it, as you can with calls, that’d be fine, but apparently that’s not an option. You just pay whenever someone else decides to send one to you.
Over the past 10 weeks, I made a book, entitled Sampling Error: Stochastic Perturbations to Reality. It explores the relationship between measurement in the physical sciences and photography as an act of measurement. I designed the layout in Scribus, an open source desktop publishing tool, worked with a local print shop to have the photographs printed, cut woodcuts and set type, then folded, bound, and cased six copies. They’re finally done, and being distributed to friends and family.
I’m really happy.
So, life continues insanely unabated. This week in lab we’re a.) measuring the speed of light, and b.) weighing the galaxy, which means we get to spend time on the roof playing with the radio telescope! Gave the talk on pi0 photoproduction, which Nelson says went pretty well. Pre-2nd kyu test is coming up next Wednesday. Still working on The Book, which is rapidly acquiring more capital letters.
Anyway, the awesome news is that I drew Scott 300, a townhouse apartment! Reid, Josh, Laura, and Jennifer will be rounding out our amazing house. Should be a terrific year!
These are pictures of various transverse electromagnetic modes for the laser we’re working with.
Laser beams aren’t constrained to being nice little smooth dots, though that’s one of the possible modes (TEM00). Since TEM00 has the most tightly focused beam, and the fewest irregularities, it’s the one many laser manufacturers force their device to operate at. There are other possible solutions, with varying patterns. The subscripts here indicate the number of divisions in the beam—I’m guessing on some of the higher ones. There’s also a strange pattern which looks like it has radial, not rectilinear, divisions; I’m not sure what that is, exactly.