February 2007 Archives
"Max Palevsky looks like a cross between a Canadian women's prison and a Taco Bell."
--Frank Richter
I was working on this paper using the GSS dataset, when I came across this lovely post. We'd be very foolish to trust bloggers-turned-sociologists, but it is nonetheless thought-provoking.
Blogs are an interesting thing. I am convinced that they are engines that propagate inefficiency. When do I write lots of blog entries? Times like now, when I am procrastinating my physics 185 problem set. When do you read blogs? When you probably should be doing something more productive or edifying. Since you and I have already sinned against efficiency this much, here's one more piece to nourish your laziness:
Students seek special someones, see mixed success
I found it rather amusing, yet somehow unsurprising.
As for me, my Valentine's day was spent going to class, going to research meetings, sifting through the General Social Survey, and debating our topic: "Opp Choice: You are Henry VIII. Do you divorce Catherine of Aragon?" Although we ended up on the side against divorce, we were happy to suggest appropriate alternatives like poisoning her and having an affair to procure a male heir. After all, it's better than messing with the Pope, right?
It was almost as good as the topic that won Ben and I the novice portion of the BU tournament: "You are the Pope. Henry VIII has just broken away from the Catholic Church. Declare war on Henry."
There were some who questioned if it would ever happen. There were others who speculated that I would remain an unemployed, starving student for the rest of my pitiful existence, hateful of practicality
Evidently, I am still a student. I probably still come off as hating practicality too. But I am indeed employed. Actually employed: not some fake internship with a stipend or cold fusion mumbo jumbo. I work for Professor Blucher's research group, which is participating in the Chooz experiment to study neutrino oscillations. They are currently building a prototype for the muon vetoing system that will surround a neutrino detector. There is a undergraduate working on his senior thesis whom I am helping to build the prototype and soon take measurements. The ultimate goal of the experiment is to measure the parameters of neutrino oscillations more precisely. This has various implications, notably for understanding CP violation, which is sort of how I became involved in all of this. It seems like a really cool project so far.
Despite my lambasting of my Hum professor's paper topics, out of all the possible topics, I did end up writing about the philsophical basis of physics. The paper was written in a feverish stupor after I returned from the BU debate tournament, and was therefore absolutely terrible. Nevertheless, I concede that I was wrong about the merits of the topic. I was thinking a little too literally when I wrote that last post. Descartes did indeed have many useful insights into the philosophy of science and physics. In fact, I would argue that his Meditations develop a fairly complete epistemological system for doing good physics. I still, however, believe he was a much better mathematician than philosopher. Those proofs of the existence of God are simply insufferable and mostly unnecessary...
Oh how I hate the metaphysics while sick, feverish, sleep-deprived, and most of all, exhausted.
They tell me that our Hum professor this quarter is very famous. I can believe it. He's has some very penetrating insights and interpretations of the texts we read. Nevertheless, the class seems far easier and less intense that last quarter for many reasons: there are fewer readings (although we read them so closely that we agonize over banalities), our professor is of English not philosophy, etc. These characteristics have irked me slightly from time to time, but upon reading the following, I lost all hope in the order of the universe:
My professor suggested that one could write an interesting paper on the following topic:
"The science that Descartes was most interested in was physics. Explain how the Meditations can be seen as providing a philosophical basis for modern physics."
And we thought the Sokal hoax settled all of this long ago...
After I took a shower this morning, I noticed on my computer that it was -9 degrees F outside. A little discouraged, I nevertheless decided to walk the 20 or 30 meters across the courtyard to the dining hall in order to eat breakfast. When I arrived at the dining hall, after about 20 seconds outside, I noticed that most of my damp hair was completely frozen into hard locks. It's quite remarkable that the past few days have seemed like such sunny beautiful days, but one can hardly feel any warmth from the shining sun.
So much for Chicago's unusually balmy winter this year. I had to walk to a lab on 57th street a few minutes ago. This, of course, necessitated walking across the Midway. During the winter, the long and open expanse of the Midway essentially acts as a wind tunnel from inland parts of the city to Lake Michigan. When I checked the weather upon my return, NOAA was reporting a temperature of 2 degrees F with winds of 25 miles per hour. Given the nature of the Midway, the winds there are probably even higher, resulting in an effective temperature (post wind chill) of less than -22 degrees F.
