don't believe everything you hear?

Today I attended the weekly physics department colloquium, "The Ancient Science of Violin-Making". It was FASCINATING. Not as high-tech as most colloquia we have, but it drew a lot more people from the community/music department as well.

Two things I learned:

-When a faucet is turned on, the human ear can distinguish between hot and cold water.

-Researchers took three plates and adjusted them to play at exactly the same pitch. By computer analysis, the sounds were exactly the same. There was one each of the shapes circle, square, and triangle, and subjects could identify the shape when played.


The human ear is amazing. Amazing.

I got soul, and I like to solder.

My life is saturated with labs. I have lab classes Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons. Tuesday and Thursday mornings I work on my independent study, which is yet more labwork---although that will switch to paper-writing in a month or so. So as much as my life is dominated by labwork, it's no wonder I'm acquiring a list of new skills I find enjoyable.

The most recent: soldering.
This is not the first time I've soldered in my life, but it might as well be for the little I did before. And yet, the smell of the hot solder reminds me so strongly of middle school tech class where I completed a "circuit" unit. I kind of like that smell.

I don't solder very much, but I could happily do it all day.

I'm not very good at it. All my connections are messy and break and need to be redone after two weeks.


For those keeping up with my project, it no longer lives in a foil-coated box. I'm not sure what happened, because this summer the box definitely appeared to be necessary. Now, it's happy just sitting out where it is, without the low-tech Faraday cage
(Very basic explanation. Better but more confusing explanation?). Not sure why, but if it works it works...

Rally back

Two nights ago (Wednesday night), Michelle Obama visited UVA. It was kind of a surprise for everyone, I don't imagine it was a spontaneous stop on their Virginia tour, but the employees working in the plaza where she spoke didn't find out until an email was sent out less than 24 hours before it happened. I didn't go, I didn't even hear about it until I asked why traffic was so bad that night, but according to the Cav Daily (our student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily), it centered almost exclusively on women, especially the issues women face in the workforce.


The weather has gotten a lot more fall-like, which I think is wonderful. Soon it will be sweater season! Yes!

voli

It's been a while since I updated anything. Sorry. I've been pretty busy.

This weekend was a workday for RTF - the Rivanna Trails Foundation. There's a group at UVA that carpools to the worksite on the RTF day, which occurs once a month, and usually we work on a small chunk of the 20-mi trail that encircles Cville. This week I helped in paring back an invasive plant from the trail; we widened that section from about two feet across to closer to six. It looked a lot better when we were done. Other people removed poison ivy from trees and re-mulched the trailheads. The mulching is extremely helpful in creating safe & obvious entrances. It was really nice to get out volunteering again.


One really neat thing about UVA is the people the student organizations bring in. One great example is our occasional FREE advanced screenings of movies. Last week, they screened "Choke", from the writer of "Fight Club", which isn't due out for about a month. I don't recommend it highly, but it was okay. Some parts of it felt flat, the editting or the sound quality. It was as if the film was missing a dimensional quality---in pacing, in audio depth, something lacking that kept it from feeling real. (Also it was somewhat explicit movie, and I don't recommend it if you're not comfortable.)

This week they were showing "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist", which looked like a fun movie but I was too busy to be able to go. I know, that's really sad, but maybe I'll watch it eventually.

We don't usually have an advanced screening once a week. In the past it has been more like once a semester. Either the Arts Committee is trying to step it up this year, or we just got really lucky, I'm not sure which.

Glass Houses

When light passes from one medium to another, usually not all the light makes it through. Some of the light is reflected backwards, and some is transmitted through. (Think about when it's dark outside and you are inside a lit room and see your reflection in a window.) Usually the light rays are bent by an amount dependent on what is called the index of refraction of the media. That's why your legs look funny when you're swimming in a pool.

That's also why fish look bigger swimming around in their tank.

I found out in class on Friday that the fish see us exactly as we see the fish. That is to say that the same exact thing happens to light moving from the tank to the air as to the light passing into the tank from the outside. That's pretty cool.



I did a pretty thorough cleaning of my aquarium this weekend, and I moved it into my room while I was at it. It was pretty sad, having only Morning Breakfast Time interaction with the little guys. Now they're on my desk, so I can stare at them instead of doing my work. I forgot how entertaining they can be!

I think that soon I'll be able to tell them apart again. Maybe they'll get more permanent names than "Fish #4".

skype skype skype

Oh, so about a week ago I finally got my microphone to work. That's a much longer story, it turns out that because I don't have Microsoft Office, I don't own a driver for my internal microphone. As a result, I couldn't skype at all last year while in Scotland.

The super good news is that now I can! So if anyone has skype, you can find me at [myFirstName].[myLastName]. Just fill in those blanks, remove the brackets, and keep the dot in between. I'm not online a lot, but on occasion I am, and it's less expensive (Free!) than calling.

Fall Semester Plan

Though this semester will have my lightest courseload in terms of credits--at the school's minimum of 12.0---I'm going to be incredibly busy this semester.

-Half of those credits are split between two labs, one for Chem, one for Physics. Time in lab: 10 hours/week
time outside of lab: whatever it takes to write 1-2 lab write-ups per week.

-I'm doing an independent study, too, which is a required 10 hours of work/week, which is silly because I definitely don't spend that much time in any normal 3-credit class.

-I'm taking one normal, lecture-style class. Which is still going to be difficult. Really difficult.

In addition, I have two part-time jobs.
-One is 8-9 hours/week at the library. I love working at the library, actually. I worked there last summer (2007) and have been surprised at how quickly a lot of the proceedures have come back.
-The other is capped at 5 hours/week. I'm not allowed to do more, which is nice because I would but I shouldn't. It's a gradership for one of the entry-level physics classes, though I won't write which in case any of my students find this blog. I'm the only grader for a large class, so I am grading mostly on completion of the problem set, and choosing ~2 problems to grade in more detail.

I bought a 10-pack of red ballpoint pens. The first problem set is due this week. I am so excited!

So between that all, I'm pretty busy this semester, and mostly I see myself living in the physics building. Which will be okay, I guess. At the least I'll be a familiar face in the department.