Valentine's Day Heart

I'm not much of a Valentine's Day person, but I gave it a shot this year, knitting the stylized anatomical heart by Kristen Ledgett at Knitty.

It took about a day, while I was reading/reviewing papers to make my qualifying exam presentation, and I am rather pleased with how it turned out.

 I wish the valves were a little more visible on this picture, but the variegated yarn makes for poor contrast.

Evolution of Language: The Good, The Bad and The Annoying

As a relatively loyal Linux user, I had never heard the term "Apple Ecosystem" until just a few weeks ago. Recently, though, it's been coming up constantly. Every time I hear it, I feel like Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."  

Generally, I enjoy the fluidity and adaptability of language, American English in particular. I didn't realize how amazing this is until I was in Mallorca for a conference. We had a local tour guide for a day, and someone recommended that she "google" something. She commented how much she liked how we could make new words as needed in English, and that she didn't think it was as common in Spanish.

However, I don't think absconding with a word and diluting the incredible complexity associated with it, as in the case of the new 'ecosystem', has any additive value to the language. And it drives me crazy.

Nerdy Delicious

During Christmas break, I spent several days in Denver, and stumbled on a really fun little place called Euclid's in LoDo.

Happy hour is called study hall and the beer menu is categorized by complexity, with each level labeled as a different kind of math! Normal restaurant review things like food and service were also outstanding.

It was an excellent find.

Reflect from a distance

During a summer of undergrad research, the student who was training me left for three weeks to go to Japan. Our project was not in its most successful phase and the industry PI had been increasingly merciless in hounding this student. Upon returning from Japan, he seemed unruffled by the external hazing we were receiving, a dramatic shift from his extreme distress regarding the PI and project even as he left the lab to drive to the airport.

I attributed it to the relaxation of a vacation, but he told me that whenever you have to make important decisions or solve hard problems, you need to get away from it for a little while. You can see things from a different perspective, let your mind work in the background, and be away from the immediate environmental pressures associated with whatever you're trying to sort out.

I try to take a least one big trip a year, just to invite a little perspective shift in. I particularly like it around the new year, where I can look at bigger pictures goals without being distracted by the small things that become clutter in your life at home.

How do you know an extroverted engineer?

He looks at your shoes when he talks to you.

Engineer jokes abound for a reason. I think we get trained to think in math and look at everything as a problem to be solved. Plus we seem to have a lot of introverts. A lot of the time most people spent practicing social interaction, we spent hanging out in our heads and never finessed the people skill set. Personally, I think we hang our old posters up in academic buildings so we can look at something besides the other people in the hall as we walk by them.

However, yesterday I walked across the engineering quad and was looking at someone who had a sweatshirt I liked. In that awkward moment when he realized I was staring, instead of the standard everyone-looks-away or the territorial stare-down, he just smiled and everyone's day carried on a little more smoothly. Now, to implement a new interaction algorithm!

Hiatus-ish

With semester starting, my attempts to make updates on my projects here became amazingly abortive. A few things that I think are of note, with updates to follow:

• Note taking and textbooks on a tablet
• Learning vector calculus - kind of like learning another language
• Calculating my physical displacement - very eureka! 

Hanging out with the Higgs

When a world megaproject creates one of the most expensive scientific instruments of all time, a lot of attention seems an understandable result. The CERN quest for the Higgs boson has certainly garnered a lot of attention, and not just in the scientific community.

Commentary has come from many sources (my favorite being The Onion explanation of the LHC or the "$50 Billion Science Thing"). Even Dilbert got on board:

The Higgs-bleed through into culture has shown up in fiction, satire and television. 

Alpinekat made a rap explaining the fundamentals of the epic scientific endeavor several years ago, which I love sharing. 

Most recently, someone sent me a video of the sonification (translating measured data into sounds) of the Higgs-Boson. For more explanation, including the sheet music, check out the article Higgs the musical.