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.

New photos!

Oh, and I've put up a few photos from this past semester, see the link to the right.

Hunt of the Laptop

My computer has been dying for the past three months or so. I've needed a new one desperately, but was never motivated to do anything about it. I hoped that it would hold together until the end of the semester, which it did, though I didn't trust the little machine to hold my files. I relied solely on my little flashdrive to get me through the semester and spent many hours in the UVA computer labs to write my lab reports.

I don't know what finally motivated me to get a new one, I guess I was done with being frustrated every time I started my computer (a process that took about 45 minutes) or opened a file (requiring about three minutes, ridiculous for opening a word document), or any other process. Everything took a long time. Worse, I couldn't trust it to save my documents and be able to open them later. When I realized that my laptop would not last for another full semester, I knew it was time to buy a new one.

I did some research online. A lot of research. So I knew what I was looking for, and I knew about how much I could expect to pay for it. Monday night I went on a little survey of the local stores that sell laptops, to check my top choices for picture quality, keyboard lay out and feel, weight, so on. I fell in love with one I saw at Best Buy, a little 14.1" HP. I planned to come back and buy it online direct, but it was actually cheaper at Best Buy.

It was tough to wait a full day once I knew what I wanted, but I managed to hold off until last night to buy my little guy. She is fast, light, beautiful.

It will be some time before I'm finally "moved in" to this laptop, but an external harddrive holds all the important things from the old laptop. Slowly but surely, I'll reorganize this computer. A fresh start will be nice.

Hunt of the Haggis

There are no British specialty stores anywhere near Charlottesville, that I can tell, but there are a few in NOVA. When leaving home this weekend I remembered that I had set myself with a mission. I needed to find some haggis.

There is a place called the British Pantry out past the airport, in Aldie. They have British biscuits, chocolate, meat, and other products in one room and a tearoom in the other. I could tell I was at the right place because they had a British-style telephone booth in the front. The other cars parked there had license plates like "UKGIRL" and "CYMRU", my little Scottish flag sticker fit right in.

I bought 1.77 lbs of haggis for $15.71. It will probably not be worth it, but that's okay. It's haggis.

It wasn't too far out of my way, though the roads back there were little two-laners with passing zones and lots of hills. It probably only added about 30-45 minutes to my total drive time. I'm going to try and find someplace closer to Cville that doesn't mark up quite as much. First stop should be the Foods of All Nations just down the street, then we'll see.

Pictures should be coming soon, as well as stories of a third (and final?) Hunt.

Hunt of the Muffin

Last Sunday I decided I really wanted a muffin before church.

I spent about 45 minutes on Google, trying to determine what Charlottesville bakeries/cafes were open on a Sunday, and then finding one open at 10 AM was a tough job indeed. Luckily the church I was going to was downtown, and there are a lot of cafes in that general direction.

The first one was a cafe I'd been wanting to try out anyway, though apparently it moved about two blocks down the street from when I'd last seen it, this past summer.
It was in fact open. That was good.
So I go inside, and I look confused. When I asked the one employee if he had any muffins, he said no, they only get their muffins in on Mondays through Saturdays (wait, they don't bake them themselves? Hmmm, dodgy...) and sometimes leftover ones are half-price, but there are none today.

Employee started picking up the wrapped items on the counter. "But, we have a croissant, some... umm... carrot cake, paninis.... Cupcakes! Those are muffin-shaped!"

Poor boy.


I found my muffins on the third try. They were okay, the cinnamon-swirl one would have been amazing but the outside was a little stale. It definitely satisfied my muffin craving though, and the blueberry was spectacular.

I found a new church that I like a lot better and I think I'll keep going to. It's a bit smaller, of the two narrow sets of pews variety, but I liked the pastor and the atmosphere, so perhaps it's worth the drive downtown every Sunday.

walking to work this morning...

..I was reminded of one of those sights you see only on college campuses. Older, male professor-types riding bicycles to work, dressed in wool suits and dress shoes, with a reflective band around the right ankle and a briefcase bungee-corded over the back tire. Incredible.

Yesterday was the last day of exams and now the Grounds are empty, devoid of human life. It's kind of peaceful, kind of creepy.

Ten minutes ago I handed in my take-home exam. That was the last item for the winter exam period. So my penultimate undergraduate semester is now over!

It's funny, though I didn't have any "real" exams--no three-hour closed-book, in-class exam--this was probably one of the tougher exam periods I've had. A lot of writing to do. Yuck. But I got it all done, and now it is Winter Break time!

Between semesters, I'm going to keep doing research for Stefan. I wasn't able to actually collect much data during the semester in my independent study, and there are other things we'd like to know, so I'm getting paid for a few weeks this winter. It should be nice, keep myself busy during the days, and yet also relaxing.

Woes of Paper-Writing...

1. I just paid $1.45 for a 20-oz soda from the vending machines. I find that objectionable!

Dedication.

Oh wow, it's December.

Yup.

This week was the last week of classes for the fall semester! That's almost equally crazy. So today I had a presentation for my lab class, which was in lieu of a lab report for one of five physics labs this semester. My partner and I talked about a nuclear lab we did, in which radiation spectra were taken of a few different sources. But since it was the one required lab for everyone, we wanted to focus less on rehashing every single experiment and instead we focused on the practical side of the experiment. Namely, how do you decide what detector is appropriate for an experiment? So for a lot of our presentation we contrasted the main types of detectors.

Okay. So there's this class of detectors called scintillators, which means that the detector absorbs a high energy and emits a lower energy. The first scintillators used were in about 1906, way before technology caught up to the science they were trying to do. So they had materials that emitted visible light when hit by radiation. They would actually take a piece of the material under a microscope and count the flashes of light as it was hit by radiation.

Wow. That's some dedication to science.

kitty!

Last night I bought two more fish to round out the number of White Clouds in my tank to five (for the time being). And also I bought myself a catfish! YAY catfish!

The catfish just sits on the bottom of my tank and eats algae, it is very cute. I was going to name him Iceberg, but decided to call him Lettuce instead.

The other White Clouds are Magellan, Marianas, Archipelago, Amphitrite, and Kayak.

Protesting a Protest

Last week was "Proud To Be Out Week", here at UVA, with events every day to make the general student body aware of the prevalence of and obstacles faced by 'out' members of the community, especially other students. On Friday was a performance of "The Laramie Project", essentially a play written from the documentary of the responses in the Laramie, Wyoming community to the murder of Matthew Shepard. A few other universities were also having performances, I think that PTBOW is a national thing.

On about Tuesday, word got out that Westboro Baptist Church (yes, that one: the small congregation that protested Shepard's funeral, as well as funerals for soldiers and even the victims of the VA Tech Shootings two years ago) was going to come to UVA to protest the "Laramie Project" performance.

A counter-protest was organized. Anyone interested in showing Westboro Baptist Church that their hateful messages were unwanted were to show up outside the performance venue wearing black, to line the pathways to prevent WBC from preventing the audience from entering. I decided that I felt strongly enough about the issue that I went, though I've never protested anything in my life.

We organized an hour before the start of the play and lined the brick pathways, which at that point of Grounds extend in three directions. The protest-protest organizers passed out candles; the plan was to maintain silence no matter what WBC did or said, just in a line of solidarity and light. It was incredible to see so many people there, to see the radiant candles against the sea of black.

Westboro Baptist Church never showed up. A rumor spread about that they might have gone to Richmond to protest their "Laramie Project" instead of ours. It didn't matter, really, that we had no opposition. I think the overflowing support for the rights of a play to be shown, for a group of people to exist without hate, was a message in and of itself. It's a shame that we couldn't do that without an outside threat, but all the same... it was beautiful.


In the news!:
Local CBS news (check out the video at the bottom!)
Cavalier Daily (student paper)

One of my favorite signs at the protest simply said:
Love One Another
As I Have Loved You

Catch-Up; and Elections

Okay, yes, it's been a couple of weeks. About a week after I last posted, "Lear" went up, the weekend of October 23-25. It was actually pretty good! A lot of people came out to see it too, which was great. We had good numbers on the Saturday matinee, which is always the worst attended show, and the Friday and Saturday nights we had to put out more chairs to have enough seats. I like to think that I did my publicity job well.

And ever since then it's been catch-up time for classes, labs, seeing friends, so on. It's been kind of a crazy few weeks, but also nice in a way.

Apparently Mark Warner visited Cville on Sunday for a rally, and once again I didn't know until the day after. It's nice that politicians come to this town in their campaigns, though it is extremely blue (something like 75%?) so it's a guaranteed base of support.

Tuesday night I did some work before heading over to a friend's for a pretending to do homework while watching election returns party. I stayed long enough to watch Obama's Hyde Park speech, then drove home. A few apartments in the neighborhood were obviously having real parties, and I recall hearing the chants of "O-BA-MA" as I fell asleep. Not nearly as exciting as the evening other friends of mine had, who live in NYC and Chicago, another more lively places, but still... it was kind of crazy.

I'm really glad that the voter-registration folks will no longer be hounding Grounds.

put your back into it!

WOW I've been busy.

There are more cool things about the Physics Department here that I would like to share. Both of these happened last Friday.

1. I ordered some parts from a supply company, to the tune of about $15. The parts themselves were pretty small, maybe pen-sized.

On Friday my package arrived, and it was huge, the size of a shoebox. What could possibly be in here?, I wondered. The supply company sent a 'snack pack', which was pretty amazing. I think the food they sent me was almost more expensive than the parts I ordered.

I asked the Stockroom Manager if the food came with the parts? Or was I just confused? "They're not allowed to send those," he said, "but we don't tell them that."

2. ALSO on Friday was the Fourth Annual Physics Department Tug-of-War. I didn't know we did that, but apparently it's something the grad students have organized for the entire duration of my undergraduate career. They had planned competitions between different grad years, between library staff vs. machine shop guys, faculty vs. staff, and different research groups. None were planned for the undergrads, but since the tugging-of-war occurred in front of the main entrance to the building, we knew it was going on.

So a few spontaneous competitions were arranged as well. Somehow I managed to get roped in to competing in the undergrads vs. 2nd & 3rd year grads, AND the undergrad girls vs. grad girls. For the latter, there were two on each side.

I thought the Tug-of-War would be short-lived, and then the grad students would go back to work. Nope. It went on for an hour.

You know they're serious when the experienced competitors wear cleats.


I took pictures, but well... those will be up eventually.

Life Skills

A week or so ago I posted that I like soldering. A lot.

I remembered another possible-life skill today, meaning it is a skill I may possibly need/use for the duration of my career.
Technical drawings.

I love technical drawings. I don't know if I'm any good at them, but it's amazing to me that I can imagine something in my head, sketch it out in 3-D form and as a combination of 2-D components, and then a few days later hold the exact embodiment of what I imagined. It is amazing.

Hopefully that will work out for the adapter piece I drew today, because I have a cylinder that needs to fit inside and be held securely. If my measurements were off, or my drawings unclear...

Who says that labwork isn't suspenseful?