Confidence

For now I will let this chart speak for itself. It sums up my latest mental arithmatic.

Name my day

Every month, the last day will be reserved for reflection. This month I plan on reflecting on my oral work. On a future reflection day I might reread some old posts and label them.
But I have a problem! All important days have a name. A name which is subtle and derives from a complex or obscure historical context. For example Christmas vs Secretary Day or Halloween vs Talk like a pirate day. In each case the cool name wins, both in popularity and revenue. So what should I name my day of reflection? I have five days to decide!

RIP WOXY

Today I lost the best friend I met when I got to graduate school.
WOXY was like an oxygen tank on Everest. I heard so many wonderful things I never would have heard. Thank you WOXY. Dont worry about me, I'll find the Future of Rock and Roll on my own. Just wait for me when you get there.

Summer Review, ugh

Getting worried about reporting progress. Too easily distracted by neat physics.
This summer:

• started to study the strings, needed QFT to really get it.
• started to study QFT.
• QFT has a lot of solid state stuff and irrelevent quantum phenomena, thought I wanted a cosmologists take instead.
• Went looking for quantum cosmology reviews.
• Most papers are too new, I need stuff three degrees of reference back.
• Wrote reference/citation intersection search to find these.
• Old papers dont have references making this not useful except for the third degree articles.
• Read review on non-equilibrium measures of temperature.
• Began reading and decifering older articles. (Guths original inflation, bekenstein's entropy, hawking's area theorem) using Dodelson's cosmology et al.
• Realized this was far from the original objective. How is this going to help find a topic?
• Also realized that many relativity proofs are in the language of topology and set terminology, well duh, but more precisely theyre as clear as mud. Some soul searching here. Should I need a class to learn some of these concepts? Field Theory, Topology, etc Why cant I focus on my own?
  

Crusty old journal

This summers task is to write a coherent proposal (and get ready for the Oral in the fall). The latter will be the real challenge given the naivete and ignorance with which I am approaching some of the most obscure physics on the planet.
Here I'll try to keep track of the digital side of the work. Not sure how detailed I'll be about my own theory. I guess maybe I'll keep my own umble ramblings to the paper journal and the reasearch to the online half.
I've also starting keeping google notebooks along with the Personal Library on NASA ADS. Hopefully one of these methods will help tackle the record keeping problem.
The problem:
Most new PhD students have advisor guidance through the maze of literature. I must find my own way here, at least to do this first serious attempt at topic finding. I should come out of this with a good understanding of the basic problems as well as ancillary "mail room"/intro problem areas that are good possibilities for PhD work. I should also have gained familiarity with some of the community I want to work in. Who are the personalities, where are the meetings, what are the seminal events they might remember, secret handshakes, etc. All I know right now is that out west the Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting is a big deal.

Snapshot of my day.

Heres a novel way to waste time... defining how I waste my time. After I made this I remembered I should add a "completely wasted time" category. This includes PhD comics and everything else that counts as distraction (including making dumb graphs -sure its positive feedback but I'm sure there is an equilibrium for me somewhere.)

Storytime! and the Plan

This entry is to answer the question:
What am I interested in?
I definitely need a paragraph that is sort of like an abstract for my existence. The importance of this paragraph should be obvious but I didnt notice until I used the phrase "what I'm interested in" during a meeting with an advisor and I realized he couldnt read my mind. I felt sillier when I couldnt come up with much more than some garbage that must have sounded like

"uh... well... I have been reading some about Time Asymmetry.... but I've sorta been all over the place... these papers are confusing sometimes. I guess I still need field theory".

Then I tried to mention The Emperor's New Mind, by Roger Penrose; but couldnt remember the name of the book or Penrose! Doh. I suppose I was trying to project "GUIDE ME" but I guess helplessness and bewilderment didnt have the desired affect. Go figure.

Anyway enough with storytime.

*Pause for reading through archives*

Seems like one of the most useful things to have would be a list of articles read. They speak for your interests better than you can in a way. When I follow my nose through citation lists I'm guided by my intuition, my sense of what is interesting and/or important. Not sure how to put it quite into words yet. Maybe thats what you get a PhD for. And for learning not to end in prepositions.

The other useful thing to have would be a list of questions and/or not well understood topics of interest.

The Spring 06 Semester Plan

1. Make the list
   
• Make a big stack
• Get BiBTeX entries
• make a long .bbl file
2. Gather questions
3. Read more Zwiebach (toast?)
4. Keep eye on current articles. (eg GRB measure of Hubble flow)
   

That should occupy much of my time, but theres nothing in there about reading more new papers... Maybe thats not that important. Here I'll add a 4, I'd be doing this anyway.

These two articles took an hour and 15 minutes of my time (including time to catch up on my PhD comics). How much time should I spend per day? Lets try this much at first, I still have the whole Tornado thing to figure out.
Oh yeah, I'm doing my Oral on The Physics of Tornados unless something catastrophic happens. I'm sorry I guess thats my paper journal that knows about that. Dont worry digital journal there is still a place for you I promise.

Record Keeping

Welcome back after that awful fall semester. This semester is better, I'm getting 3 credits to fool around here!

I guess I'll just jump back in where I was back in October, how to track articles? This issue keeps nagging me. I can't shake the feeling that I'm spending most of my time in culdesacs of esoteric physics and reading many papers on the arxiv that will never even see a peer reviewer let alone the contents page of a journal.

I'll probably never get around to developing the kind of reference analysis tools I'd like to have. NASA ADS is probably one of the best online databases I could use, and there is Perl code I can get, but I dont know perl or object oriented programming to really make any use of it. Its not really clear from the ADS documentation the true extent of the database to the regions of physics I wish to hunt through with my own algorithms. How many records have all the citations recorded? Which records? My ideal database would have

• ApJ
• Physical review D
• Physical review Letters
• General Relativity and Gravitation
• Nature
• some proceedings that I dont know about
• other important journals that I dont know about

This is my ideal database, so I would want to make some discoveries like the awesomely apt conference or obscure-but-neat journal.

I think the best thing I can do right now is to build my own database of papersI have read. The easiest way I can think of to do this is to get BiBTeX entries for each reading into one file. This will make citations easier at least. I wonder if I have the patience for that.

Oral Ideas

So I am laying in bed last night trying to come up with a good oral topic and here are the constraints I am trying to apply.

A good oral should:
showcase ability to solve a problem and explain results.
not be too ambitious in conclusions or difficulty
be about 30 minutes
not expose any weakness
encourage 30 minutes of discussion to reduce possibility of damaging questions.
avoid topics where committee members consider themselves experts

Whithin all these constraints I was struggling until I thought of my old advisor. He carries on a side interest in Fractals. How they can be applied to problems like turbulence and astrophysical event distribution. Fractals in Fisics! This is an excellent topic! Thoughts about scale invarient and chaotic phenomenon kept me awake for hours.

C

Today I spent trying to put charge into completely MKS units. Yes, pretty much the whole day. There were breaks for lunch, seminars, and other similar things but mostly

1 Coulomb = m^a kg^b s^c

What are a,b, and c? Apparently, in SI units, current (A) is a "fundamental unit". What I'm wondering is, isn't the charge an observable independant of the parameters MKS?

One defines the current in terms of a force between two wires where the force is so many Newtons. The only problem is that force (per unit length) is given by

F \propto \mu_{o} I^2

and \mu_{o} has units of N/A^2. Thus if you give me the force between the wires I can give you a value for A but it will be in MKS+A units. A seems to depend on itself. Is this making sense? Where am I going wrong?

Today I am reading:
"Curved Space or Curved Vacuum?" by Eric Linder from gr-qc

PS: Would someone please write a Latex interpreter firefox plugin?

Back!

Comps are over I'm back.
To celebrate here is a picture of my new and improved Suzuki key fob. The one on the left had a really crappy button that kept falling off. While I was building this I set off the alarm three times and we dont even have a car alarm!

New Journal

A picture using the the new image add feature. Thanks to blogger you are looking at page 5 of my new readings diary. I decided I needed something a little more accessable to write in (having misplaced my shiny new $3000 Mac...)

No Apologies (Just lets not mention this unfortunateness).

Well, lets put that ugliness behind us.
I guess its obvious to everyone but I that being a new graduate student with vague goals leaves one open to all kinds of unpleaseantness.

Some reading notes:
Many references in "Double Standard" to Hawkings popular science "Brief History of Time". So I read it. Not quite as good as the other giants, Sagan (who wrote the forward), Gamow, and Feynman but mostly readable. Picked up some new pieces of history about the development of inflationary cosmology. Apparently I need to pick up Penroses time arrow book. Most of the interesting citations to him (likelihood of low S initial conditions, etc) are not in papers which I can download, but in his book (books?).

Whining, Cause whining is easy.

Lets take a break from the semi-proffesional academic type writing. Mostly because brain is numb and making sentences might make things better.

The time frequency of posts has plummeted during this the winter of semester two, hasnt it? Lets see why this is so.
Mainly, assignments dates changed about a month ago from everything due on Friday, to something being due Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

A typical week used to be.

• Friday turn in homeworks, get new assignments.
• Weekend 10-12 hours evaluating over the weekend and coming up with questions and ideally finishing both.
• Monday, ask questions, go back to desk and re-evaluate.
• Tuesday, do more work, probably finish, maybe more questions on Wednesday.
• Definitely finished by Thursday.

A typical week is now.

• Friday, get one assignment for next Friday and one for Wednesday (already have one for Monday from Wednesday).
• Weekend, work Monday problems because was busy finishing for Friday.
• Monday finish problems for Monday after asking questions. Then start problems for Wednesday.
• Tuesday work problems for Wednesday.
• Wednesday, finish problems for wednesday after class (like Monday). Get problems for Monday Start on problems for Friday.
• Thursday, work problems for Friday.
• Friday finish problems for Friday.

Im not kidding.
When the change occured the number of problems per week went up by a couple too.
Yeah I know, somewhere someones got one of those tiny little violens. I guess Im not actually drowning. But it sure feels like it.

So whats a typical day like?

• Attain Awareness: 6:30
• Eat Surpise Breakfast: 6:45
• Pick out some clothes and stuff in gym bag: 7:15 (Use Clothes Remembering song to prevent uncomfortable mistakes)
• Be in car: 7:30 (Hear Native American News, something boring happened in South Dakota)
• Be in Gym- Tower: 7:45 (angry girl snears, 90210 girl plays with animated fire, does arm-cross boob thing)
• Lift heavy things and put them back down again: Sometime after that
• Be at desk fixing hw: 9
• Take hw to class: 10
• Talk to Dylan after class: 11

* Intermision *

• Fix hw for an hour: 12
• Go to class: 13
• More hw/sleepinar: 14
• Go home: 17
• Find food: 17:30
• hw: 18:30
• sleep: ~24

Anyway. This post will probably not make the hit parade, but I just had to make sure I could still use the words and I didnt have a single thing to write about. Noone said grad school was easy. Just wish I had a project. Feel incomplete without it.
On the plus side I'm a general class Ham now. For what thats worth. Now all I need is a radio and a reason to talk on it.
Is it against the blogger code to delete embarrasing entries? I hope not.