welcome back to class.

I remember my move-in day first year. It was hot, humid, sticky, disgusting. We had to carry large amounts of my stuff up a few flights of stairs and I unpacked in an un-air-conditioned room. It was horrible.

I don't know about anywhere else, but the weather in VA the past week or so has been downright chilly. Move-in day was cloudy-ish and only about 80F. Still humid, but it could be, and has been, a lot worse.

The temperatures kept dropping. Well, that's a lie, Monday was still hot and humid out, but it's rained every day since, with a high of about 70F. It's been nice, I've been able to break out my chocolate wellies and splash through the puddles without consequence, but I've also gotten a little bit soaked. It's cold, sitting in classrooms with the AC on high while my clothes dry out.

On the plus side, I find it a lot easier to focus on the lecturer when it's not sunny and wonderful out. The fake-fall weather has me tricked into studying, I'm more willing to make that transition than I would be if I felt like it was still summer.
-Also it's a lot like being in Scotland, this constant grayness. Only it didn't rain quite so persistently, it was more of a steady drizzle or intermittent downpour, not a 72-hour Rain Fest.

so speaking of physics

I'm not sure if I've posted this link yet. Pretty sure I haven't.

"So You Want To Be A Physicist"

Scroll down about a fifth of the way, and you'll see Part V: Applying for Graduate School. Just before it is Part IV: The Life of a Physics Major.

I feel the guide is pretty good, and is a good explanation for anyone at home unsure what studying physics really means, especially after the BS is finished and we move on to Grad school. [Edit: I just reread that sentence and realize it can be read two ways. That's pretty clever. I really meant a Bachelor's degree, not the other, but I'll keep it as it is.]

By no means do I think you should read the entire thing; for one, it goes on further than I intend to take my education, and for another, I don't want to think about a PhD thesis right now--as an example--so neither should you. It's a pretty long document, so I suggest only Parts V-VII and IX.

attic antics

The Physics building has a small attic on the top floor, which I suppose is the fourth floor. I call it 'small' because it doesn't take up the entire area of the floors below; if the building is an H shape, the attic represents only the middle, horizontal line and not the caps on either end. A better analogy is an I, but as you can see my font does not have capped, capitalized i's, so think of an H but with a longer middle and shorter ends.
It is also directly underneath the roof, so the width is shorter than the floors below as well, with a higher-than-normal height near the two stairwell entrances, and about a three-ft height on the opposite side. Like being stuck in an elongated tent.

I couldn't find the lightswitches, only delay timers that looked a bit like analog kitchen timers stuck to the wall, the kind where you turn a knob and wait, and it goes to 5 minutes past zero before the bell rings and you find your cookies have been burnt to charcoal. Except that these timers were in hours, not in minutes. But either way, they were dodgy looking, and I did not want to play with them. There were windows flush with the floor, and rose about two feet high. A good effect for the outside, but it was a little dark and light coming from the bottom of a wall is a bit unusual.

I was up there looking for something or another, a bright lamp I think, but I'm not sure.
I did not find a single lamp.
What I did find was fascinating, at least the stuff I could see. There was a cabinet in one dark corner with a sign on the sunlit-side reading "FREE TO A GOOD LAB", and though most of the equipment on the shelves were hidden by shadows it looked like balances (both analog and digital), small power generators, ampmeters, that kind of thing. There were many cardboard boxes, some stacked up and clearly empty, some overflowing with old books; filing cabinets with drawers partially falling out; ancient desks, chairs, coatracks; step-ladders and too many other odd pieces of furniture to mention.

I was surprised when I saw a Christmas tree.

I was even more surprised when I examined the attic further and found four or five of them.

How many artificial trees does one PC physics department need? Apparently the answer is less than five, since those have been gathering dust for who knows how long.

Olympics!

Fish Update: Last night I found one lone fry swimming around in the top. I guess I could live with one more fish, assuming he manages to make it to adulthood. Of course there's no guarantee I don't have more somewhere in the tank (they really are tiny) but at least the dozens I had last week are gone.

Sports: I really like watching the Olympics. As time goes on, I become more interested in watching sports, in general. If done well, it is real-life drama. I realize a lot of the 'drama' aspect relies on the network/sportscasters, but it can actually be gripping. A particularly good match never fails to capture my complete attention even when I have no emotional connection to either team.

Nothing made the reliance on the network presentation of games more clear to me than the coverage of the women's discus that was on primetime NBC last night. In the finals, each woman had six or so rounds to throw the discus. There were probably somewhere between 6-12 women competing.
I was shown three women throw a discuss five times all together, to somehow represent the 30-70 discus throws for the gold-medal round. One of the throws was shown a second time. There was zero drama, zero anticipation, just a narration of "Here is the representative from America throwing in Round 1. 210 feet, that's not bad. Okay, now in Round 3 the Russian contender's shot goes for 206, short of her standard. Oh look! Round 6, and this is the final throw of the competition. If [Smith] can get this one she's getting the gold. Annnnd, she has it!"

Thanks, NBC.
That is not how sports should be covered. I know there's already a lot of controversy about what sports 'deserve' to be shown in the prime-time coverage, but I feel that if you're going to bother giving these women a slot in the 9 o'clock hour, you might as well give them more than two minutes clearly intended to give a breather for the audience between men's sprinting qualifying rounds.

However, best thing about the Olympics: Volleyball.
I'm not sure that volleyball is ever shown on TV otherwise, and I love watching it. I prefer the beach volleyball, it feels faster paced and requires a different kind (not more, and not less) of teamwork than the indoor six-person teams. And I think it's funny, but volleyball is one of those sports I think is better when women play it, which is hard to find---again---on primetime sports coverage. Men's volleyball is great to watch too, don't get me wrong, but there's a different dynamic when the women pairs play.

I've been enjoying the American Football preseason (that's NFL), too; but rugby??? where is rugby? I miss it.

extra fish no more?

My plan of withholding fish flakes worked pretty well, I'd say. It was on the first or second day I could no longer see any of the fry, so on day three I provided food again. These fish can actually go much longer without food, but with a food source right there, they went for it!

I'm glad that problem got taken care of sooner rather than later, better to deal with miniscule baby fish than bloated, floaty tadpoles in my aquarium. Ewww.

Except today I found another little fish fry when I did a partial water change. Alas, maybe this is a problem that will never completely go away.

Sushi, anyone?

I was out of town for a long weekend and had my flatmate feed my fish while I was gone. All four are still alive, so she did an exemplary job. However, we still had some issues when I returned on Sunday night. I opened the tank to discover...

fish babies.

My fish are only about an inch long and 1/4-inch wide, so these babies look like black specks with tails, not too big, but far too many to count. In addition, one of my plants had green webbing I mistook for algae but now believe was the net/sac that fish are hatched in.

I swapped out some water, about a gallon of the 4-5 the tank holds, and with it dumped out some of the baby fish. If I can barely see them in the water they don't count as living creatures. I'm not sure what to do about the babies, really, my tank isn't big enough for more fish, and the net I have is too big to catch the babies. The only thing I can think to do is not feed my fish for a few days. Hopefully they'll get hungry enough to eat the young'uns.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure what to do to prevent my fish from having sex. I doubt my flatmate did anything out of the ordinary that would excite the fish, except that their light was on all weekend. Maybe the warmer water makes for good breeding conditions? which I doubt, the websites I've found suggest cooler water.

On the other hand, I know the spawning happens, and I guess it's a sign of good health. Hopefully most will die off, though some suggest that it's a good way to keep the population sustained, as the lifespan isn't very long. That said, I still have an original fish from 20 months ago. Another site says the lifespan for these little guys is 3-10 years. Yikes.

One Day in the Life of

Alexander Solzhenitsyn died Sunday of heart failure.
Last summer I read just about every Russian gulag novel I could find: of course the list was topped by Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Obituary: "Nobel Winner Chronicled Tyranny of Soviet Union"

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, 89, the Russian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature whose pitiless and searching chronicles of Soviet tyranny made him a symbol of freedom and the durability of the human spirit, died yesterday in Moscow.

Solzhenitsyn always kind of puzzled me. His story is certainly fascinating; the fact he was able to survive such a long ordeal in the gulag system despite health problems and still come out of it intact enough to research and write accounts as detailed and informative as he did is amazing. I doubt most people would have that strength. I think the surprise in Solzhenitsyn's life was his politics, he still held on to an idealistic view of communism and the 'slavic heritage' that one might expect a gulag survivor to reject.

I wish the translations of his work had been better. They felt as though lacking in some way, and I assume it's a translation problem rather than Solzhenitsyn's style.

Sad news.