Graduation

I graduated yesterday! (Yay!) Three pictures are added to my Fourth Year album, go to the third page at the end of the album.

It was a nice day. It drizzled a little bit on our outside Physics Diploma Ceremony, but it wasn't bad. In addition to my BS in Physics with High Distinction, and BA in Chemistry, I received the Physics Department's Most Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award for the work I did in the fall.

A nice day!

Roadtrip!

The past seven days I mostly spent driving. I needed to get an apartment lease before actually relocating to a new state, and this week break between Finals and Graduation was the best time to do it.

The stats went something like this:
~1500 miles (hmm, time for an oil change?)
-7 states
-9 state border crossings
~$20 in tolls
~50 gallons of gas
-4 audio books
-17 apartment viewings in 2 days (13 on Monday, and I finished ahead of schedule! If you can believe it)

It was fun!

There were two short adventures of note:

-Rt 23 from Toledo OH to Ann Arbor MI was a cute little road. For about 15 miles I was confronted with many signs: "State Prison in Vicinity. Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers."
Indeed.

-I stopped for gas and lunch in a little WV town just outside of Charleston. In fact, it may have been the outskirts of Charleston, I forget.
I was innocently washing my windshield when a Marine recruiter approached me and asked if I'd ever thought about joining the Marines. (I didn't know their recruitment policy involved patroling the gas stations.)

I didn't know how to tell him that I am really not the person they want enlisting, so I blinked at him a few times before I finally just said, "Erm... no..."
He then asked if I had any friends interested.
So I wished him good luck. I didn't know what else to say to a Marine recruiter.

More pictures!; Easter

I just added about 15 photos to my photo album, mostly of my winter travels, check out the link to the right.

This year has gone by so fast. Easter snuck up on me, and now I have only two more weeks left of school before Exams (I have one final, and one project). It's really hard to believe how little stands between me and the end of my undergraduate career.

I was sick all last week and still catching up on my health this weekend, so Saturday night I watched the first 3.5 hours of "The Ten Commandments", the 1956 film starring Charleton Heston. It went on for 5 hours. Sadly that meant I actually watched the entire beginning, with Moses building cities and falling in love with the Pharoah's daughter, and then starting falling asleep by the end of the Plagues. I was unable to watch Charleton part the Red Sea. But the special effects were kind of cool, for the 50's. The Angel of Death was depicted as the billowy green fog of Pestilence, and it crept through the town; also, the Burning Bush had a glow to it, it was definitely not real fire.

My parents visited this weekend and brought me a little mini Easter basket, and Girl Scout cookies! Which made life okay when I could not find discounted Cadbury Creme Eggs on Sunday afternoon.

Indiana

While at IU I met some really crazy physicists, who told me funny stories. Or facts, I suppose?

If attacked by a bear, ideally she will bite you in a non-essential part of your body (say, your shoulder or your calf). Some bears just don't like the taste of humans, so after one bite she'll walk off. If she starts swiping at you with her claws, you're dead no matter how badly you taste.

The one business establishment in Antarctica is a bar.

In Krakow, every hour on the hour a boy appears in the highest clock tower (I think?) and plays a song on his trumpet. Each time he cuts the song off at a particular point.
Story has it that some hundreds of years ago, the very same song was being played by the trumpeter when the Huns invaded and shot him with an arrow, thus ceasing his song. And they've played the song to that point every hour since.

Snowy Days

The subtitle on the sign entering Holyoke, MA, reads "Home of Volleyball".

They were calling for snow all up and down the East yesterday, but the storms weren't really supposed to hit NE. Well, they did, and almost every school district is cancelled, along with almost every university. UMASS included.

My morning appointments were cancelled up to 11 AM, so I decided to roam about the campus and play in the snow. I bundled up as much as I could, meaning normal clothes but double-socks. I asked the front desk if there was a place I might be able to buy a hat, but the bookstore is closed whenever the rest of the university is. I think that with one, and perhaps a better pair of gloves than my leather driving gloves, I would have managed to stay out longer than the half-hour I managed.

The crews had already cleared the main sidewalks, though of course I took the opportunity to tramp through unshoveled areas. At some parts the wind cleared the snow down to about half an inch, in others the drifts piled to about a foot (though much deeper in parts I avoided). The "Valley" was not hit as hard as parts more east or south of here, as Boston.

The guy on the news mentioned Worchester (Wooooster!) and Concord (Conk-aaard) often. It was cute.

Written at 7:45 AM

Never before have I been to Michigan. I left VA this morning at 6 AM, on a flight with about fifteen passengers of a possible 80? or so. It makes me wonder why short, domestic airfares continue to be $300 roundtrip when the airlines have so much trouble selling seats. Or for that matter why I’ve been having so much trouble finding tickets. Further, I set off the automatic lights on my way to the end of the main concourse in Dulles at about 4:30. Apparently most sane people do not go to hang out in the airport at such a time.

Detroit was just a one-hour, fifteen-minute flight away. I guess it’s one of those uni-airline airports, because I have not seen any airlines but Northwest and affiliated friends.

In the underground walkway between Concourses A and B&C, the kind with the people-movers, the walls are coloured and flash corresponding to the music playing. When I first entered the lights twinkled and shifted merrily like an aurora; as I left the music became more dynamic and the lights changed to fit the tone of the piece, the left wall an angry, pulsing red with the low register and the right wall a softer aqua when the higher instruments answered.

I feel I must be spending too much time in airports when I start to sing along with the muzak.

When traveling I spend a lot of time thinking about inertial and non-inertial reference frames.

Resetting the Curve

An article in the Washington Post today:

Fairfax To Ease Grading Policy

The Fairfax County School Board voted unanimously late last night to abandon a strict grading policy it has long upheld as a hallmark of high standards, after a year of intense pressure from parents who have argued that the policy hurts students' chances for college admission or scholarships.

Kind of interesting. We commplained about our grading system when I was in high school (and earlier too of course) and I do feel that needing a 94 for an A is a bit extreme. Somewhere at the end of the article it says they'll change how they see honors and college-level courses:

After the report was released, Dale proposed giving students a half-point boost for taking honors classes and one extra point for Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes. Students currently earn no extra credit for honors classes and a half-point for college-level courses. Student transcripts note the more difficult courses.

If that was in place during my high school career I would have had a GPA more like a 4.5 than a 4.0. Which sounds completely unrealistic. I don't know if other schools use the same scheme, but this grade inflation is going to get way out of hand.