Back.

I opened this blog and realized that it's been far too long since I've posted anything. Either I haven't really got anything to say, or nothing I have to say is blog-appropriate. I'll go with the latter.

Many big things in my have occurred since the last post on here.

My great friend Dave Rodgerson, one who Daves (not in past tense - he still Daves in his own way), passed away to be in a place so much closer to God. I still feel selfish: I want him to be here. But God knows better than we do, so we trust and keep going. I trust that I can keep going.

(and now the non sequitur)

I've moved. No longer am I a Clayton Park, Ghetto hugging, Bus-52 Junkie. I've relocated above a comic book store. Isn't that sweet? A comic book store! ...I've never actually been inside it of course, but hey - it's there all right. Quinpool is kind of fun. The lack of Needs stores is a bit inconvenient, but with the bus stop directly in front of my door, and a theatre across the street, and my sister down the block... it's not bad at all. Too many restaurants for my pitiful paycheck though. Rent all On My Own sucks. But the food in the (new!) fridge is all mine, I never have to scoop leftover Mr. Noodles from the sink drain, and I can spend an entire weekend watching Grey's Anatomy without feeling like I should be maybe socializing with my Room-Mates.

On the subject of Grey's Anatomy: I am addicted. (good segue eh?)
In the past two weeks, I have watched the entire first two seasons of Grey's Anatomy, as well as catching up with the episodes I missed of this season. That's 35 episodes. I couldn't stop myself. One show would finish, and I just needed to see what would happen next. I even got the soundtracks (both of which are great). The whole experience threatened to throw me into a whirling pit of despair over my love-triangle free, non-sleep-deprived, unambitious life as I currently live it. I decided, however, that all my problems are a result of my lack of student-status and therefore it is only a matter of time before a life like Meredith Grey is my own. Less all the men she slept with (o.k., hello? Whoring is not the answer) ... Although, I am still waiting for my very own McDreamy (but shh, don't tell Joanne: she thinks I am aspiring to be an old lady with lots of cats).

Other than that, while I am not watching someone else's McLife, I'm still working at Ocean Nutrition Canada. Fun, eh? Actually it's not so bad. I've got free reign to experiment and lots of (potentially good) ideas to experiment with. It's not in a field I love, but every day is still interesting, and I am always learning a lot. That was my goal - make a lot of money, and learn a lot; if I've only succeeded in one of the two, well, half way is not so bad. Soon I'll be applying for grad schools and finding a new city to live in, so I'm going to love where I am right now, for now.

Because life is good. It really is.

xo, <><

math wiz (no, not me)

...got this as an email foward tonight:


YOUR AGE BY CHOCOLATE MATH - DON'T CHEAT BY SCROLLING DOWN FIRST

It takes less than a minute. Work this out as you read and be sure you don't read the bottom until you've worked it out. This is not one of those waste of time things, it's fun.

First of all, pick the number of times per week that you would like to have chocolate (more than once but less than 10 times). Multiply this number by 2 (just to be bold). and then add 5 and multiply it by 50 -- I'll wait while you get the calculator. If you have already had your birthday this year add 1756, if you haven't, add 1755. Now subtract the four digit year that you were born You should have a three digit number. The first digit of this is your original number (i.e., how! many times you want to have chocolate each week) The next two numbers are YOUR AGE! (Oh YES, it is!!!!!)


I don't know how "scrolling down" would have ruined the "suprise" but at any rate my first reaction was "oh dude! that is SO cool!" ...and then I had to be a smart ass and work out the arithmatic behind it to prove to myself that my age really has nothing to do with the amount of chocolate I eat. It doesn't. I lied and picked 9 and I'm still 22... but the math always seems to fascinate and entertain.

Whoever came up with this has too much time on their hands, or too many neutrinos hitting their brains... but they still get a high five from me!

The Mpemba Effect

Does Hot Water Freeze First?
("Since the time of Aristotle, some scientists have claimed that hot water freezes faster than cold. Philip Ball looks at current attempts to shed light on this puzzling phenomenon")



I love this:


"Kell, hailing from a country with ample experience of freezing water [Canada], stated that "some say that a car should not be washed with hot water because the water will freeze on it more quickly than cold water will, or that a skating rink should be flooded with hot water because it will freeze more quickly."

woo woo - hockey and washing salt off the car, hellloooo canuck!


It's funny to me because I've thought about this alot. I'm putting my money on the speed of water evaporation explanation... don't forget that when something changes from liquid to gas it will need energy, seems logical that it'll leave something cooler behind. But that's just my 2 cents. Mr. Varner would be so proud! haha

Inspiration

Anthony J. Leggett - Banquet Speech


"What advice would you give to a student hoping to embark on a career in theoretical physics? ...for what it is worth, here it is:

First, if there's something in the conventional wisdom that you don't understand, worry away at it for as long as it takes and don't be deterred by the assurances of your fellow physicists that these questions are well understood.

Secondly, if you find a problem interesting, don't worry too much about whether it has been solved in the existing literature. You will have a lot more fun with it if you don't know, and you will learn a lot, even if what you come up with turns out not to be publishable.

Thirdly, remember that no piece of honestly conducted research is ever wasted, even if it seems so at the time. Put it away in a drawer, and ten, twenty or thirty years down the road, it will come back and help you in ways you never anticipated, and finally, take your teaching every bit as seriously as your research."

~Anthony J. Leggett, Nobel Laureate


People always say that you should never believe everything you hear; you should question anything you come across. Just because someone says it is right does not mean that it won't be wrong 5, 10, 15 years from now. This is hopeful, in it's way, because it means that there will always be something to discover, and something to pursue. And anything you publish will be proven or disproven time and time again in peoples minds, until it is finally decided that while at the time of publishing it made sense, there is now a new way of thinking and a better way of explaining. Thus there will always be a new way of looking at the same problem.

...But my favourite part is the bit about having fun. We have a lot of fun, theoretically anyways.

thrown to the lions...

CBC News: Case against Christian convert dismissed: report

apostasy (a·pos·ta·sy (a-pŏs'te-sē) n., pl. -sies.
Abandonment of one's religious faith, a political party, one's principles, or a cause.


It is incredible how different our culture is - the death sentence because you change religion, political parties... Or what if you decide you're going to follow the Leafs instead of the Habs? I'm not trying to make light of the serious situation, I just find it striking that for some people a religious belief holds less weight than a favourite hockey team. In Canaada that (legally) is ok, in Afganistan, it really is life or death.

<><

A bit of BitTorrent bother

A bit of BitTorrent bother - Feb. 28th 2006, by Adam Livingstone, Producer, BBC NewsNight


Whoooo - 30% of internet usage is attributed to BiTorrent?? Is that a US figure? N.American? Global? (meaning global-with-internet kind of global) ...how do you measure that? Whats this about terrorists? ....and damn, how do I get a bigger chunk of the internet filesharing pie? ...I love pie!

The 'CSI effect'

CBC News: 'CSI effect' adds drama to real-life crime solving

hahahahahahha. Funny and sad and true. I wonder if this means that there will be more guilty people going free, or fewer innocent people convicted: we all know how reliable some witnesses' testimonies are. Or - big thought - perhaps more money goes into the police force, so we can have evidence AND tesitmony! Then real people get to play with all those cool, slightly recognizable, scientific gadgets.

All this from a TV show. Gee, it's better than reality tv!

Don't use Google?

CBC News: Don't use Google, Tibetan protesters urge

"Google has agreed to adhere to Beijing's censorship policies and limit certain search results in China to get broader access to the large market.
...
Among the topics sensitive to Beijing are Taiwan's independence and 1989's Tiananmen Square massacre, human rights and issues involving Tibet. On Google's Chinese site, searches for topics, such as the Dalai Lama, often come up with omitted sites or name direct users to Chinese government websites. "


...And the world just felt so happy and wholesome.... dammit.

Funny though, because for some reason I'd always viewed Google as "the good guys": ousting the evil Microsoft overlords while providing a fantastic world-over search tool to better educate the nations.... I geuss its all about the bottom line with them too. hehe, or did msn buy them out? Maybe this is just a foot in the door until they can find a loophole around the censorship. But then again that might just be too optimistic.

Plane waves and other things.

Plane wave - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the physics of wave propagation (especially electromagnetic waves), a plane wave (also spelled planewave) is a constant-frequency wave whose wavefronts (surfaces of constant phase) are infinite parallel planes normal to the phase velocity vector. By extension, the term is also used to describe waves that are approximately plane waves in a localized region of space. For example, a localized source such as an antenna produces a field that is approximately a plane wave in its far-field region. Mathematically, a plane wave is a solution to the wave equation of the following form:

u(x,t)=a exp[i(k.x-wt)]

where i is the

imaginary unit, k is the wave vector, ω is the angular frequency, and a is the (complex) amplitude. (In some conventions, this expression is conjugated.) The physical solution is usually found by taking the real part of this expression. For the vector wave equation of electromagnetism, a is the vector for the electric or magnetic field (and is orthogonal to k, for an isotropic medium). In this equation, the function ω(k) is the dispersion relation of the medium, with the ratio ω/k giving the phase velocity and dω/dk giving the group velocity. For electromagnetism in an isotropic medium with index of refraction n, the phase velocity is c/n (which equals the group velocity only if the index is not frequency-dependent). For the same reason, the ratio of c to the phase velocity is called the effective index and is proportional to the characteristic impedance of the medium. (The term is used in the same way for telecommunication, e.g. in Federal Standard 1037C and MIL-STD-188.)
J. D. Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics (Wiley: New York, 1998).



I know that should make sense to me. I know that I've been studying this for 4 months. And I know that sometime someone is going to ask me a crucial question where the knowledge of such concepts as "planewaves" is necessary. But dammit, I NEED A BETTER EXPLANATION. I get the words. I know what it says. I dont get the part where it becomes a system of protons, neutrons and electrons; with things like band-gaps and dielectric properties.

aaarrrgggg!!

If anyone out there has a reasonably clear grasp on the topics of Plane waves, Fermi energy surfaces, and/or Brillouin zones, among other key topics not covered in my collection of chemistry/physics courses... well, I would really appreciate about 6 hours of tutorial. For each.

Thanks in advance,
Laura Albrecht
BSc. Adv. Maj. Chemistry,
MSVU 2005

"All the other species are dying and so will we...

I'm whistling as I walk past the graveyard... whistling as beautifully as I can"

...

[Kurt] Vonnegut’s contempt for George Bush and his government is expressed with great force and clarity in A Man Without A Country, ... “the country is terribly at risk, because his [Bush] stupidities have terrible consequences, leading to deaths of many people, rotten schools, rotten healthcare. He should be protecting us not only from insurgents or terrorists but from disease and ignorance, and he’s not about to do either.

“Still, there’s not much difference. [Democratic candidate, John] Kerry said out of the side of his mouth at one point that he’s not for re-distributing wealth. He and George Bush belong to the same social class, went to the same university, belong to the same gentleman’s club. Can you believe that, in a country of 300 million people, we have to choose between two members of Skull & Bones [a secret society] at Yale?”

...

"We [the USA] have no army. What makes us the most powerful nation on Earth is our willingness to kill people in their thousands with remote-controlled missiles, the fact that we're prepared to set off nuclear explosions in the middle of unarmed people -- men, women and children.

"Only one country has been crazy enough to set off a nuke in the middle of a civilian population. Did it twice, and that's when members of my generation, soldiers, could see that 'we're not the good guys any more'. We were very careful not to hurt civilians."

~Kurt Vonnegut: A requiem for the USA

(SundayHerald)

(Read the article. Read the book.)

CBC headline - India aborts 500,000 female fetuses a year

Female feticide


India... Hinduism... polygamy...

Wait. Polygamy - multiple wives. That could be difficult without any women.

Oi. Silly men.