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.

Other than that, planning a second book, which will explore the various off-limits parts of Carleton, getting ready for Comps, and starting the post-graduation job search. Now, back to that last paper!

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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.

I unbent the coat hanger and snipped off the twisted end. The door locks were the pull-type, small vertical posts that, in their locked state, remained safely recessed within the door body. There was no chance of extracting them from above, barring the use of strong adhesives, but I imagined that it might be possible to catch whatever locking mechanism connected those posts to the door lock by inserting a hooked wire into the door body at the midline window seal. Then Carrie offered that she had power locks.

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For the last lab of the term, we learned how to use the scanning tunneling electron microscope, or STM.

This is an image of the surface of a flake of graphite–the same stuff pencil lead is made out of. We take a small block of graphite and peel off layers using Scotch tape, then mount them on the bed of the STM. An extraordinarily sharp needle, with a tip only a few atoms thick, is given a small electric charge, and positioned a few angstroms above the sample. Electrons then tunnel across the gap between the needle and the surface at a small rate, yielding a current. We sweep the needle across the surface using piezo crystals, and measure the height/current data at each point. That data yields an image, which we’ve filtered with an FFT to show the structure more clearly.

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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.

I talked to my friends, who said their providers let you opt out of receiving text messages; great, since it’s a service I didn’t sign up for or want in the first place. However, T-Mobile doesn’t let you opt-out, claiming their software isn’t smart enough to do that. I can block texts sent as email, which I guess is a big problem thanks to advertising, but I can’t keep my friends from costing me money by accident. The network obviously knows what kind of plan I have, as it bills me for service instantly. Why can’t it also check to see if I don’t want the messages in the first place?

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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.

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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.

TEM00	TEM01	TEM02
TEM11	TEM22	TEM23
TEM33?	TEM35?	Radial mode?

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Winter term concluded nicely: solid work through 9th and 10th week, then caught a ride with Anna out to Madison for a couple weeks with Justin & company. Finished up my finals and emailed them in from WI–everything was either a paper or take-home, so I was able to take my time, put in my best work on everything, and turn them in without a 4 hour drive. So, spring break felt like 3 weeks, which was a really nice change. I needed the space to decompress, get to know myself again.

I’m taking up the guitar again: bought an old Suzuki from a guy in Madison through Craigslist, which sounds pretty good. Deeply resonant sound, bit of a buzz (in the tuner?) on the open G string, but otherwise plays nicely. I ran into Dirk’s Guitar Page, which pleasantly has many of the same pieces I played as a kid: Carcassi, Sor, Paganini. Progress has been surprisingly fast, but I’m a long way from playing well.

Carrie, Justin, Jenny, Bobby, and I all trekked down to Florida for Spring Break; my first independent vacation! It was really nice to spend the time with friends; screaming through the Tower of Terror at Disney World, swimming and hanging out with new friends from Ohio State at the beach, learning to play tennis, and just relaxing on the beach. I do regret not reading more of Quantum State Diffusion, but that’s a small complaint.

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You know what’s going to be awesome? When I have to get a normal job.

“So, why do you think you’d be great at Jimmy John’s Sub Shop?”
“Ummmm… I can compute first-order perturbations to degenerate Hamiltonians. Please hire me?”
“What else?”
“I can design your web site and ordering system…”
“Nope, already got one.”
“I can be thrown around safely!”
“Next please.”

I have the weirdest skill set on the planet.

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