Julia

it's good to have role models

2009-09-03T07:13:32Z

Happy birthday, dear donferdinand.

How far I've come

2009-07-27T05:33:57Z

When I look back at how my life has gone since high school and where it seems to be going, I am pretty pleased with it. I get to live with my favorite person in the world, I get along with my family, I get to do the science I want to do, and I get to live in San Francisco. If you had asked me in high school what my dream life would be, I think this would be close to it. Of course, there are minor details that I complain about, but that doesn't change anything. On Mt. Rainier a month ago, prompted by the immanent terror of a deep crevasse, I came to terms with the fact that while I really didn't want to die, I felt like I had lived well and didn't have any regrets.

Happily, the crevasses did not swallow me, and I'm still alive, and mostly well, and now there's a whole new host of problems to overcome. As an undergrad, I always felt like I was dumber than most of my peers (or at least the ones I cared about) and this bothered me mostly because it offended my ever-so-inflated and prickly vanity. Now, as a graduate student, I feel like I am not as willing to put in long hours as my successful peers, and this bothers me because I don't know that I can be successful as a graduate student/scientist while living a sane and happy life.

This is an uncertainty in my life, and while it's definitely a good problem to have (as opposed to, say, being a leper) it's uncomfortable because it's so uncertain. Who knows whether I will succeed or fail at this effort level? It will probably take more effort at least part of the time in order to get things done, but will that be something sustainable? And what will I be willing to give up in order to succeed in grad school? Not much, I think, although I'm sure I could be more efficient in some ways, though not necessarily in enough ways.

I shall see. In a few years these uncertain things won't be so uncertain.

crystalridge @ 2009-07-03T09:25:00

2009-07-03T16:27:07Z

Mt. Rainier was success!
See facebook for photos. Trip report might follow.

New Perspective on Sickness

2009-05-22T18:32:54Z

I'm sick today (I got sick yesterday, kind of suddenly) and while I have all the usual feelings associated with sickness (guilt for not going to lab, disgust with myself, feeling like a wimp for not being stronger than my sickness, feeling like God (useful concept for days like today) is punishing me for my sinful ways and my attempts to get by on less sleep than can, etc etc) I have also thought about my body fighting this disease. It's really quite remarkable that our bodies can fend off sicknesses caused by all sorts of nasty scary (and random) bugs. My throat is hot--you know why? Because my immune system is fighting. I've spent a lot of time recently studying chemicals and how they are sensitive to all sorts of environmental perturbations. The fact that plants--and our bodies--are as adaptable as they are is really pretty awesome, and makes me appreciate my body's reaction to sickness in a way that I haven't appreciated before.

I'm participating in a blog meme!! Woo internets

2009-03-06T06:14:35Z

this is from Heather. Here are the instructions: Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

Here are the things Heather associates with me:
-The Crusades
-tea
-hard science (non-fuzzy)
-drinking with one's parents
-Israeli dance

The Crusades are awesome. In the sense that they inspire awe. It's fascinating to contemplate that a bunch of smelly knights to got off of their butts and marched to some far off lands to fight some "infidel" in the name of some lofty "God" idea. What was it that compelled them? Was it money? If so, how much, and where was it coming from? Was it boredom? Was it too crowded in Western Europe? Did they actually believe in their Catholic God enough to sincerely believe they were fighting for him? And, given that these people were somehow motivated enough to get off their land and go fight, how do you explain things like the Fourth Crusade, which nearly ended in excommunication, a sack of the fellow Christian city of Zara, followed by Constantinople, all to avenge the Venetial doge's personal (or economic, I don't remember) vendetta with the ruler of some other town (or his son). The Crusades were also a political tool for lots of European Monarchs like King Louis IX. In fact, the Crusades were a great many things and learning about them shows me the crazy and wacky deeds that human nature can be stirred to do.

An important point about the Crusades (as well as the inquisition and >100 year old history in general), for me personally is that I don't care about them. I think if I were to study, say, the Holocaust, or World War II, or Vietnam, I would be personally affected. It would just be "those sucker infidels that got slaughtered" that I'd be learning about, it might actually be someone in my family, or someone I know. Learning about relatively recent historical events affects me personally in a way that older history does not, so I can appreciate the drama of history without getting personally involved in it.

Also, history got boring after the French revolution. I think that's because a lot of mindsets we see in post-french revolution western thought are much more similar to our own than

Tea

I guess I drink a lot of tea. My family never really ate dinner together when I was in high school, and for a while I thought of this as a sign that we were kind of dysfunctional (and I do think it would have been nice to eat together, thought I don't think that not doing so makes us dysfunctional) but I remembered recently that we actually drank tea together quite often, or at least my dad and I did. So when people come over I guess the most obvious thing to offer them is tea.

Before I started dating Robert, I never really cared that much about how tasty the tea I was making/drinking was. It was more of a social thing and warm beverage, and I drank tea from tea bags without giving it much thought. Robert cares a lot more than I do about tea actually being tasty, so now I've come to appreciate many finer details of how to brew tea. And now I have opinions about how tea should be made too--Jasmine tea shouldn't be steeped for too long, or at too hight a temperature, otherwise it's disgusting! And my favorite tea is orchid oolong tea.

hard science (non-fuzzy)

mmmm...science. Heather is giving me liscence to be pretentious, because I think saying the word science is just pretentious in itself. I inadvertently capitalized Science, but then realized that Heather didn't, so I shouldn't. (She did, however, capitalize the Crusades). I like science. I like learning about how and why things work. I've always wanted to be a scientist (although now that I know some real scientists I'm having my doubts, but that's a whine for another time). But I don' have anything specific to say about science as a whole,so I think I will just talk about lasers here.

Lasers are the most interesting things ever. I dare you (yes, you, fair reader, if you did not expire in the 19th century) to suggest something that is more interesting than a laser. LASER stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. If you can understand each of those words and how they fit together, then you can understand a laser. The hardest part for me to understand is stimulated emission. That is because we never see it (except in lasers). When we see light being emitted from things like the sun and fireflies and incandescent lights, we see spontaneous emission. Spontaneous emission is when you have an atom/molecule/semiconductor/metal filament/whatever in an excited electronic state, which means that an electron isn't in its lowest energy configuration but in some higher orbital. This excited state can occur beccause the system was heated up (and thermal energy gives the electron enough energy to be in an excited state) or it was pumped electrically, or the atom absorbed some light in the first place. Then, after hanging around in an excited state, the electron relaxes back down to the ground state and emits light, spontaneously, into nothing. The probability of this happening at a given time is more or less constant.

Now, lets get back to the issue of how the atom got to the excited state in the first place. In order for an atom in the ground state to transition to an excited state, it has to absorb energy, as I already said. One way for it to absorb energy is to absorb light that has the right amount of energy to raise an electron to an excited state. This is called "absorption". This is what any colored object does. Furthermore, this absorption is called "stimulated" because it is stimulated by the interaction of light with the atom/molecule/semiconductor. Now, imagine you have the reverse process going on--An atom is in an excited state, and some light comes by that has the energy equal to the difference between the ground state and the excited state. Then there is some probability that this light will stimulate "emission" from the excited state to the ground state. The mechanism is the same as for absorption (this just means that the math is the same, except you have a minus sign instead of a plus in a few places), but in the end you have light coming out of the system. In other words, in "stimulated absorption", you have energy transferred from the light to the atom. In "stimulated emission" you have energy transferred from the atom to the light. So if you start out with 1 photon, you can end up with 2 if the photon crosses an excited atom. That is stimulated emission. It is different from spontaneous emission because it requires light; in spontaenous emission, there's no photon causing the second photon to come out; the first photon just comes out on its own. The special thing about stimulated emission is that the second photon is identical to the first photon, so you get two photons that are the same coming out. This is why people say that laser light is "coherent". And then if you were to repeat this process, and you had lots of excited atoms in your "lasing medium" (which you can achieve by "pumping", i.e. putting energy into the atom electrically, or by absorption of another laser beam, or by heating, or by getting lots of little leprechauns named Sisyphus to move electrons to the excited state) Then those 2 photons could make 4, to 16, to 32, to lots and lots of photons that are ALL THE SAME. And since the number of photons increases, we call this Light Amplification, which, as I said already, occurs by stimulated emission. Of Radiation, which is just a more general term for light. Lasers could realy be called Lasels, but that sounds lame.

Disclaimer:Laser light isn't actually as perfectly identical as this, because those damned atoms and mirros and everything have finite physical size, but that's the general idea.

drinking with one's parents

My first glass, and fifth, and tenth, was from the hands of my parents. (Первая рюмка из рук родителей was a saying hammered into me throughout my teenage years, after many many many рюмки).

So yes, I like drinking with my parents. I associate drinking with parties. And parties are one of the things that my parents excel at. And drunkennes usually coincides with dancing, which is the most fun way to spend a family party. Or really any party, for that matter.

I like to tell this story to everyone, and I've narrated on my livejournal before: When I was 11, my mom decided to teach me a lesson by coming home friday night from a party hung over. She was miserable all saturday. It was gross. I never ever want to be hung over like that, ever. And so far, I haven't been. I suppose my children will have to learn that hangovers are bad from Daniel, or something.

-Israeli dance

I started doing Israeli Dance in college, the summer after my freshman year. Becca and I went with some other college people to this Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto. It was fun. I've always like dancing in circles holding hands, and I really liked the Israeli Dance music. Also, I didn't suck at picking up the dance moves, and no one told me that "maybe your'e just one of those people who just can't move" like some revered person said when I was 13 (and before he was a real fake-reverend).* So Israeli dance was also a pretty key thing in terms of gaining some confidence that I could be an normal person. Being Jewish was more important to me back then than it is now, and I thought about it more, so I think I felt that there was some cultural significance to it as well. But mostly I liked the music, I liked the dancing, and I came to like the people at Stanford that were involved with Israeli dance, and it was nice to be accepted by them.

Apparently I associated Israeli dance quite a bit with facing and occasionally overcoming various social phobias.

I did Israeli dance for a semester last year at Berkeley with the Hillel. They're a lot more serious about it here because there are more Jews from LA who grew up doing Israeli dance. But the atmosphere is not really super-friendly there (at least not to me--it seems like all the people know each other from Hillel things, plus I'm a grad student, and attempts to make conversation with people tend to not go well--maybe because I'm so surrounded by socially awkward people that I'm actually more socially awkward than I usually feel). Plus, I have other things to do on Tuesdays now, so I don't do Israeli dance on a regular basis any more. But I still listen to the music, and I really like the dances. They make me feel all sorts of feelings that I don't usually get to feel.

Thank you heather for inspiring this post. It has taken several days to write.

sophomoric tendencies

2009-02-04T23:04:19Z

When I was either a junior or senior in high school, I asked Mrs. Vosovic (the Great English Teacher from high school) what classes she requested to teach. She told me that she asked not to teach sophomores. I asked her why. She told me to examine the etymology of the word. Then she elaborated a little bit about how sophomores are annoying because they know more than freshmen, so they think they know everything, but in fact they know very little.

Well, I am now in my sophomore year of graduate school, even though we don't call it that, and my sophomore nature is manifesting itself as severe irritation at people who tell me things that I already know. Like for example--most people in my lab know more than I do, but it's no longer the case that everyone in my lab knows more than me about everything related to this lab. And also, we're all grad students, and consequently we are all know it alls who think that everyone really wants to know what we have to say all the time!! (except for me because I'm perfect in this scenario!!) So sometimes I ask something of people who I think will have useful answers--and get other people, who are sitting in the same room, to give me not so useful commentary, just because they think that everything they say must be magnificently useful. Or something.

It was a humiliating experience for me to learn that not everything that pops into my head is worth saying, even if it is pertinent to the matter at hand. I still cringe, occasionally, when I remember that summer after high school when I first confronted this sobering reality. But I think it's made me a better, if not kinder, person. Sometimes I wish other people could have these kinds of humiliating experiences and learn from them.

Thoughts on Math

2008-11-30T19:32:29Z

I volunteered at the San Francisco Math Circle today, and helped a few kids and one very persistent grown up solve the "tiling torment" which involved figuring out if it's possible to tile a n by n board wtih 2 by 1 (and later 3 by 1) tiles. It was fun and exhausting. Afterwards, I talked a little bit with the math teacher who organized all this (who is quite a notable organizer of math things in the south bay). I told him that one of the kids started working on the puzzle I was helping out with, and then got bored and left, saying "I don't like to explain, I only like to do things."

Josh (the math teacher) said that it's a shame that math in schools is so heavily biased towards "getting to calculus" and thus math involves more rote computation and less thinking. This is a problem because people who would like math in it's higher-level incarnation that involves proofs and such end up deciding, in high school, that they don't like math, and people who think they like math and are good at it get rather disillusioned upon taking real analysis with proofs when they get to college. I'm not sure what he exactly meant by disillusioned, but maybe he meant that people give up on math, or else they feel really bad about themselves and decide that they are stupid. Yes, yes, that last part happened to me.

But I don't think he meant that rote calculation is necessarily a bad thing in itself. I think it's very important to be able to know multipliation tables and to be proficient with rote calculations. Just because something is rote and straightforward doesn't mean it's non-trivial. It's the difference between knowing the alphabet and being good at reading. Knowing basic multiplication, knowing certain trig identities, and knowing the indefinite integral of various basic functions is very important to me because it means that when I try to learn physics or some more advanced math, I know why the details that involve these rotes steps are true.

Ignoring for the moment that maybe non-technical people have different needs than I do. Assuming that the point of a math class is to get people to learn a body of knowledge, I think that doing rote calculations is a good thing. I think that familiarity with a subject matter is very important, and I don't think I got enough of that in my education

Of course, that's important to me because I spend a lot of my time doing things that involve a lot math. The question, though, is what is the most important math that people in high-school need to learn? What should be considered basic requirements, and what should be considred "extra" that technically-oriented people learn in college? Are integrals more important than group theory? More important than probability theory? Or maybe some other math that I don't even know? Maybe learning to recognize symmetry is a more valuable skill for people to have than knowing how to integrate things.

I want to continue writing about this later, but this post has been sitting opened for over a week now, and so I will post it and hopefully put up something more coherent and

oy.

2008-09-18T09:12:43Z

School has started again.

This whole sleep-deprivation thing is getting lamer and lamer each year.

But on the plus side I got new running shoes and am learning some of the things that I should have learned but didn't learn freshman year of college.

crystalridge @ 2008-08-16T22:20:00

2008-08-17T06:40:39Z

I'm in Boulder, Colorado. The mountains are lovely and the weather was warm. Then today a glorious rain poured upon me and through my wet field I felt a fond nostalgia for hiking in the rain with my mother when my little brother was a baby. And today I got to stroll along the beautiful, beautiful Boulder Creek with Diane, a grad student at University of Washington who I met at this conference that I came here for, which was on energy efficiency.

And one thing I learned in all of this is that I am pretty bad at empathizing with people. This comes as kind of a surprise to me, because I had fancied myself as being pretty good at empathizing with people, but it turns out that that was all a vain fancy. Specifically, I realized that I am completely incapable of understanding how it is that people can have different taste from me. I don't really understand how someone could not enjoy certain things that I truly enjoy, and vice versa--how they could enjoy something that I don't. Take, for example, two topics that were discussed at this workshop--solar cell fabrication, and spectroscopy. Which one sucks? Which one doesn't?

If you ask me, solar cell fabrication is mostly boring, and spectroscopy is mostly really exciting. Sure, both activities have their not fun aspects to them, but thinking about how things interact with light is so much more fun than thinking about how the boiling point of your solvent or your band structure affects the morphology of your film.

I didn't realize this two years ago; there were many things I didn't realize two years ago, like, for example, that mojitos are delicious and that chocolate-flavored alcohol is a perversion of both chocolate and alcohol. But now I know.

However--and this is where I lack empathy--there seem to be people who like chocolate-flavored alchohol. And solar cell fabrication, and also synthetic chemistry. They really, truly enjoy these things. And they think spectroscopy is boring. And they don't want anything to do with optics, or with stat mech--not because they can't, but because they don't want to. I'm not really sure what kind of weird synapse-connection linked the excitable portion of these peoples' brains to areas that, in my brain, seem to be a dark void, but I'm grateful that these people exist and love to do things that I think are sucky but important--and also, to some extent, I'm grateful that not everyone wants to compete with me for getting to do the things I want to do.

I started being successful in college classes when I started assuming that everyone is basically the same intellectually. But I think I'm beginning to learn that beyond college classes, there's a great deal of value that comes from realizing that people are different. I used to resent using that term because to me it always implied that some people just suck more than others, and this offends my delicate sensibilities. And I don't think I'm completely comfortable with just saying that people are different, and that this is a good thing, and leaving it at that, because it's easy to ascribe laziness to "differentness." But, truly, people have different interests, are excited by different subjects, and enjoy thinking about different problems. And that is a truly great thing.

The bestest thing on the internet

2008-05-26T19:26:03Z

Ok click on this link:

If you don't think this is the best thing ever....well..
It should go without saying, but everything they say is absolutely true.

This basically rivals the Hitler rap, and is better because it won't offend anyone :)

It's taken me nearly a year to feel this

2008-05-15T08:07:58Z

There are a few things I miss about suburbia. one of them is the smell of spring.

Fortunately, that can be remedied if I ever take our Jasmine plant back from my mommy's. I don't know if I will though, because it's so much happier with her.

What grad school has done to me

2008-05-11T01:55:37Z

I now believe in the Lamb shift. The Lamb shift is a splitting between the 2s and 2p energies of hydrogen by some small amount. This splitting in energy is due to ZERO POINT fluctuations in the electromagnetic field. If you just read that and said "wtf is a zero-point fluctuation, Julia is going crazy like some sort of catholic on crack or worse yet, a modern existential philosopher, zero-point fluctuations are bullshit" i would not blame you. Because they sound like bullshit. And most explanations of these fluctuations ARE bullshit.

But see, if you read enough lecture notes( http://bohr.physics.berkeley.edu/classes/221/0708/221.html ), you will become comfortable with the idea of zero point fluctuations, comfortable enough to use it as an explanation to other respectable persons of stature. And then people using zero point fluctuations to explain all sorts of things will not be weird and implausible any more.

Seriously, when I first learned about the Lamb shift, I just thought that's retarded and impossible. Actually, that's how I felt about quantum mechanics and the whole wave-particle duality thing when I first read those bullshit physics-zen type books back in high school. Now, not only do I believe it, I use it, and am comfortable with it. It bothers me because once upon a time, not so long ago, when I wasn't even completely retarded any more, I didn't believe any of this stuff.

I hate people; that's why I do math

2008-05-05T05:50:06Z

I am a terrible, attention-grubbing, crotchety old drunk, even when I'm somewhat sober. I'm reminding myself of Ellsworth Toohey's namesake. And of ping pong cow. and everything else that is objectionable on the internet.

crystalridge @ 2008-03-28T14:47:00

2008-03-28T21:47:51Z

Does anyone know anything about the angular momentum of photons and want to enlighten me?

My Skateboard

2008-02-17T23:18:48Z

Fuckcccccccccckkkkk why can't chemists and physicists agree to use the same terms for the same thing? Why oh why oh why?

Density Functional theory hates me

2008-02-17T06:19:30Z

So I am drunk. I am pleased about this. Robert and I went out to dinner at 7 or so, and I ate a fair amount of fish and vegetables and a few pieces of beef and some rice. Lots of food right? Right. So as we were walking back, with 24 dan ta from the golden gate bakery, plannig to have dessert at home (and me planing to have tasty sangria wine of which i have a 4 liter bottle with my wonderful egg custard pie desert) I realized that because i've eaten, i won't get drunk from my delicious wine. And then what's the point of having it.

But miraculously, I must not have eaten too much for dinner, because 1 (albeit large) glass of this wonderful wine has left me wonderfully intoxicated and ready to be confused by the theory of [electron]density funcitonals. I'm very pretensious, I know, just like a Russian programmer.

But I think hatred breeds hatred. I hate chemistry (Because I am insecure) and chemistry hates me back. In particular quantum chemistry. I don't know whyl. I wish it would reveal it's secrets to me and make itself easitly manipulable to me.

But no. Sadness. and hence sweet sweet drunkenness.

crystalridge @ 2008-02-03T23:23:00

2008-02-04T07:24:12Z

if you want to know why I hate chemistry departments, you can read about it here:

http://crystalridge.blogspot.com/2008/02/why-i-hate-chemistry-departments.html

and If you think my hate is not suitably expressed, you can leave a comment as if you were an english teacher editing my writing.

C'est la vie, et c'est l'eau de vie aussi

2008-02-01T07:40:35Z

In my most recent conversation with my mother, I told her of my angst in the past week. It's nice to tell here these things, but honestly, what kind of reply am I waiting for? Not much of one. So after lamenting for a while I said "oh well, it's ok, I just need to drink lots of vodka."

And my mom told me she was so proud of me. Because you see, at my young age of 22 I already understand two very important facts of life:

Fact 1: Hangovers are awful and terrible and disgusting and I never ever ever want to have one. Ever. They are grosss.

and

Fact 2: Alcohol makes everything better. Like making me forget why I am mad or upset, and thus enabling me to enjoy myself for at least the duration of the alcoholic effect.

My mother taught me Fact 1 when I was 11, by coming home from a party in San Francisco with vomit all over her beautiful silk blouse. I will always be grateful for this. I think I will need someone like Daniel to do such a favor to my children, when I have them, because of Fact 1.

Fact 2 I knew about in theory, but am only coming to appreciate it since moving to San Francisco.

Also, I HATE chemistry departments. All of them. Or at least the 2 I've been in, which are supposedly among the "finest" in the country. This merits its own, far more serious post. And related to this, beer does not fall under the auspices of Fact 2.

I am a drunk

2008-01-15T08:15:45Z

We just got back from Hawaii. I learned to like pina coladas, especially when they have sufficient quantities of alcohol in them.

Happy New Year--с новым годом!

2008-01-02T05:19:52Z

Despite concerns that I am growing into a crochety old man, I had an excellent New Year's Celebration. So excellent, in fact, tnat 2007 departed and 2008 came in in classic soviet style. So classic, in fact, that it fills me with an exuberant desire to tell everyone about it, and thus I return to livejournal after four months of writing nothing.

Right, so after much angst and much biking around Potrero Hill yesterday in search for a store where I could purchase man-shaped cookie cutters, and after finding this lovely lovely store called "Cooks Boulevard" in Noe Valley, Robert and I drove down to Los Altos and had dinner with his parents. Robert and his mom prepared won tons (more on those later) and around 10 pm we went over to my parents house with the won tons. I was immediately accosted by my little brother who asked me if I brought him a present.

Since this boy is getting to be spoiled, I asked him if he got me a present. He mumbled something--he didn't remember--and then I admitted that I did get him a present. Having had that conversation I pressed onward, to the kitchen, where I set down the wontons. The wontons were consumed immediately. Olya and my mother told me that I should stop "заниматса ерундой" i.e. grad school and start learning how to make tasty things. Point taken. I like tasty things too, and am becoming increasingly insecure about my ability to produce them.

Although I swore of drinking about three weeks and 5 drinks ago, there was delicious cherry "самогон" (self-made booze) that was brought by two fine ladies Tanya and Natasha from Utah. I had to consume some, but because I had eaten dinner I did not become intoxicated.

Soon after the drinking commenced Robert's parents arrived with Ray's guitars and amps. They joined in the drinking, and soon Daniel returned from his debauched party with his friends, and we ushered in the new year with champagne and shouting.

Then there was the requisite раздача подарков, awkward as usual, and then Ray played the Beatles (and I got to accompany him by playing chords on the piano!!), which was awesome. After the playing there was dancing to Alla Pugacheva (Russian 70's disco or something). Inevitably, dancing at my parents house always starts out awkward, because no one is ever *that* drunk, and gradually everyone realizes that they would really much rather dance than stand around and be awkward, and they convince themselves that they are drunk enough to start acting giddy and silly, and then in half an hour or so everyone is dancing. Oh good times.

After the dancing was sort of over, Robert, Chris, and I walked to the Solomonik's house. There, Anna greeted us in wonderful hospitality. After Daniel arrived and Irena sent him downstairs with a Napoleon cake, I was told by a rather loud and rather drunk charismatic young man named Corey that I am amazingly bad at math, and that it is very charming. Anna also gave me birthday presents (OMG!!!) and I learned that BBQ is internet shorthand that belongs in the same category as WTF and OMG. This was a shock to me, and I blame the reverend for it.

So that was my new year. When ushered in like this 2008 just can't be bad.

Indeed, school has started once again

2007-09-06T13:41:06Z

So I've been up since 4 am working unsuccessfully on a certain quantum mechanics problem. It's ok, though, because I woke up naturally, and because the class is awesome awesome awesome.

The purpose of this post, however, is not to lament my waking early, but rather to lament my other class, electromagnetism. It is the (other) standard first year physics course, taught out of Jackson, which is probably an excellent text. The professor is a nice guy, but the class is incredibly poorly taught.

It seems that when people teach E&M they tend to want to focus on "sexy" topics like Lorentz transformations and other relativistic stuff like gauge invariance and vector potentials. While that stuff is indeed sexy, the truth is that working with at this level it is a lot easier than doing the more standard stuff like solving for potentials of charge distributions. And solving for potentials and fields and trajectories is really pretty important to be able to do, in order to consider one a qualified physicist and also to apply to all sorts of important research topics (such as *ahem* lasers).

I'm going to make a generalization now. I may not be qualified to make it, but I still feel pretty comfortable making it: it seems that E&M is very poorly taught, on the whole. Particularly electrostatics, the first and most basic topic. I think it is because these subjects are not considered to be sexy or new or modern, and so most professors don't consider it to be a really exciting intellectual challenge to present electrostatics in a clear and exciting way. It could also be that these classes don't attract the best professors, because the best teachers want to teach sexy things like quantume mechanics. I had 2 (and now 3) excellent quantum mechanics profs, and 3 (now 4) really crappy E&M profs.

This bothers me because I really want to learn E&M well. I can't really consider myself a well-trained physicist otherwise; I need to use it for my research; it bothers me that I'm really not clear on some rather basic concepts. I didn't learn it well the first time, and it's looking like this class isn't going to help me learn it either.
So on one hand I am considering dropping it and taking an engineering class that might be better. On the other hand, I'm thinking of sticking to it so that I can maybe TA the class (or its undergraduate version) next year or something and take up this challenge of presenting basic E&M in a clear way.

More drunkenness

2007-08-16T06:55:25Z

Much like the last night of our honeymoon in the virgin islands two years ago, this final night of our vacation finds me rather intoxicated. Robert bought me two margaritas from two differen mexican restaurants here in Old Town San Diego. The first was a regular strawberry margarita from this place called Coyote Cafe, and while I was drinking it Robert had a mojito; then we went accross the street and had the other, a Mango Rita which had mango liquor and stuff. Then we climbed up this hill here.

Other highlights of this trip have been seeing lots of really good paintings. I can't really admit my inadequacies until I've come to terms with them, so here goes some retroactive confession: a lot of art really bores me. I think about 95% of the SF MOMA bores me, althouth I still go there occasionally for the 5% that doesn't. And I can say this because here, in San Diego and especially in La Jolla, I've seen lots of paintings that really don't bore me. At the Timken museum of art I finally understood why they call Renaissance masters "masters." And I've seen some contemporary paintings at Galleries, and I have a better sense of what I do and don't like, and why.

And also, yesterday we discovered (viat the internet of course) this lovely bookstore in La Jolla and we acquired lots of good books. I bought Vikram Seth's "The Golden Gate" which basically tries to be Eugene Onegin set in Silicon Valley and in English. More on that later...

Commies, Steinbeck, and San Diego

2007-08-08T21:28:48Z

Let's see, where shall I start? It's Wednesday now and according to my initial plans I should be on a plane to San Francisco right now. But I "missed" my plane today, since two days ago I purchased a ticket to return on August 16th. I bailed out of my SPOT scouting trip last week, and I guess our unplanned backpacking trip is getting nixed for a now slightly-more-planned San Diego vacation. Robert is here for Siggraph so we are staying in the Mariott hotel near the San Diego convention center and dining on fine San Diego fare. We celebreated our anniversary on Monday with some not-too-drunken debauchery at a nice seafood restaurant. On Saturday and Sunday the debauchery was a good deal more drunken, at least for me; I tried a martini, a passion fruit mojito, a sangria drink with wine, a champaign/raspberry liquer drink, and a "mojitini" in the course of 3 nights. So far the passion fruit mojito has been the best, and I now understand why the mojito is everyone's favorite drink.

I read Cannery Row over the last few days. Steinbeck was apparently quite popular in communist Russia at least for a while, and my gradfather spoke very highly of "The Grapes of Wrath." After reading Grapes of Wrath, my reaction was "man, capitalism blows." But after reading Armageddon by Leon Uris, spending much time in the company of my paternal grandparents this summer, and seeing Paul in Berkeley last week, I think I have gotten better at identifying bias in the books that I read. And so--Steinbeck was a communist.

I'm using the term communist loosely here to encompass communist/socialist/hippie. While all these movements have their important differences, I think that there are some important similarities among them. It seems that people become communists when either their life is materially so bad and their opportunities so dismal that they feel completely stuck in their current situation and see no way of improving their situation. Probably seeing other people whose lives are significantly easier and better adds to this feeling of helplessness; it also inspires anger and jealousy. And then the idea of rearranging the social system becomes far more appealing than trying to work up in it.

But it also seems that people become communists or hippies when their lives are so easy that they don't have anything that they obviously need to work for. Then they start caring about social welfare and the plight of the masses and solving other people's problems. I'm not a communist, but I could be if I hadn't been blessed with four living grandparents, and if I did become a communist (or develop other hippie tendencies) it would be because my life is really quite easy. In fact this whole solar cell thing, and the interest in renewable energy, is a sign that enough people have easy enough lives that they worry about things like "stopping global warming."

Then again, maybe the problem with Soviet communism wasn't communism, but the Soviets. Maybe Russians are just destined for bad government.

In addition to drinking and contemplating communism, I've managed to acquire a math book for myself (called "Quaternians, Clifford Algebras, and Relativistic Physics") and an art book for Daniel. I also discovered a book on the 14th century at the "Upstart Crow" bookstore this morning, and I might go back later and purchase it because it seems to be well written in addition to being about the 14th century. I saw "Two Gentlemen of Verona" yesterday at the Old Globe Theater in Balboa park, and it was great. It always amazes me that actors can take Shakespeare's 500 year old words and make them sound real and alive. And the play was great. Tonight I will probably go see Measure for Measure, if I get my ass off of the convention center floor and take the bus over to Balboa Park in time to buy half price tickets. I also saw the Dead Sea scrolls, which are on tour here at the Museum of Natural History, and I went to the Timken Museum of Art. The Timken Museum of Art houses paintings from the collection of the Timken sisters, who were these spinsters who collected European masterpieces and Russian icons. The paintings are awesome and the museum is free. I almost went to the San Diego Museum of art, which has some impressionist exhibit, but now I think i'd rather go to the Timken Museum again.

So in conclusion, San Diego is beautiful, Shakespeare is magnificent, communism is questionable, and mojitos are tasty.

Pat On the Back

2007-07-31T23:23:23Z

As I was unpacking and hanging up yet more clothes this morning I began to get very angry. I felt like "I'm doing all this work and no one is going to appreicate it or even notice." And in my frustration (and possibly becuase I was reading some book yesterday about how one's childhood experiences affect what kinds of things evoke strong emotions) I realized that my frustration at my hard housewifely work going unnoticed is pretty much the same as my frustration with not having a so-called "real job." I've become accustomed to having someone tell me that I'm doing a good job. So when no one tells me I'm doing a good job I tend to feel like I'm doing a bad job. But in fact, when I'm doing something on my own initiative, because I think its important to do and not because someone else wants me to do it, there really isn't anyone who is supposed to tell me that I'm doing a good job.

I'm glad to have realized this because there have been times when I've realized that the things I'm working on are not particularly worthwhile, but that I've kept working on them because someone is giving me positive reinforcement.

And now I will go to the important task of giving goods to goodwill. I read this piece of writing this morning and found it to be highly relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

Reading and Writing

2007-07-31T02:07:16Z

I am looking forward to having to commute to Berkeley in the upcoming years, because I learned today that the train is really the best way for me to read. At home I get too distrated by other things, things that feel like they are more useful because they attempt to produce tangible results. (However, these results are frequently retarded) I was discussing with my mom today that I feel like many of the things I've been doing haven't really been useful, which really means that they haven't been deemed useful by anyone else. And this frustrates me because then I begin to feel like a useless bum. In fact this summer is turning our pretty much exactly the way I would like--of course, it'd be nice if I went to more dance classes, and more backpacking trips, and played more piano and read more books, and was generally more awesome than I am, but as it is it's still nice, I'm learning a lot about other things like how to make wood look pretty and how to cook various things. Nonethless, I'm not making any money and I'm not doing anything for anyone else, which isn't something I'm used to and isn't something that I was taught to be a "productive" way to be. Its not really that I need more money--it's more that I don't have anyone patting me on the back and telling me that I'm doing a good job. And I've gotten so used to working for something like that that it's a little disorienting.

My mom said she thinks this feeling of uselessness I seem to have is a consequence of the way she raised me. It's likely that it's true. My mom has changed a lot in the last 6 years, since she had Aaron, and I think that the values she holds now and the things she admires have shifted a great deal from the past. I think I've also changed what I expect from myself and from life, and I think that these changes have come from understanding the world better than I used to. There were a lot of questions in my mind three years ago that I've answered for myself. These aren't answers that can help anyone else, so it's not like I can answer other people's questions for them, but these are things I've learned for myself. These are quesions like what do I enjoy doing? What am I capable of? What kind of people do I like to spend my time around? How do I react when people don't behave the way I'd like them to? (well actually I'm still figuring that last one out, but I have more evidence than I used to). I learned, when taking Chinese, that I'll work a lot harder if someone tells me that they don't think I'm doing my best. I work harder because it means that someone noticed and someone cares enough to be disappointed. And I also learned over the course of writing my thesis that when someone tells me that I'm doing good work when I know that I'm not, that will make me want to quit.

I sucessfully delayed choosing a graduate school advisor for almost a year by getting my two professors of choice to agree to me doing rotations in their labs. I'm a little concenrned that they're both bigshot directors who don't spend much time with their research groups, but I think I'll be interested in the science and will hopefully be able to learn from their groups. A current 5th year grad student advised me to be picky about picking a PhD topic, and spend some time learning different things before committing to a project.

I realized while reading Armageddon that the book is so exciting because the charachters are involved in these important events that have a powerful effect on the way the world goes--events like the Marshall plan and terrorist attacks and the foundation of Israel. Of course, as I mentioned in my previous post, fiction writers can do whatever they want and that's the beauty of fiction. Nonetheless, it seems as though there is some amount of excitement involved in making decisions that have the power to do a lot of good or a lot of damage to the world. Maybe weilding that kind of power is what draws people to politics. Admittedly it is kind of alluring to me too. It's hard for me to feel really passionate about my work, passionate enough to neglect other things like my family for it, when I can't convince myself that it's important. I'm sure I'm not alone in being this way, and perhaps that is why my family has always advised me to stay away from doing things that I feel too strongly about. But still, there is some appeal in working on something that's somewhat relevant, like figuring out how to prevent the air in the Bay Area from becoming like the air in Shanghai. That's not a problem that money can solve, or a problem that I can solve alone, but it's one that gets me pretty worked up whenever I think about it.

I also learned about composting with worms from my friend Jessa, who said she can give me some worms. So I will hopefully soon be getting in touch with my hippie self and start composting my produce waste.