A message from Lewis Black

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy67kwA6Xm4

First graduate exam

Friday was my first exam in graduate school. As Dr. Kantowski handed out the exams he said, "I hope you'll agree that this exam is fairly easy, but just long." Everybody groaned, because that same statement has prefaced all too many physics exams in our respective pasts which promptly proceeded to eat our respective lunches. But this time he was actually right: it was not hard, but much too long for the amount of time we had. I'm feeling pretty good about it right now. There are only 11 of us in this class so hopefully he'll have them graded by Tuesday.

I'm definitely in the physics department

As I've started studying more complicated physics, I've met along the way so many physicists who understood more than I ever thought possible. So much, in fact, that they had forgotten just how dumb the rest of us still are. I vowed I would never, ever become that way. No matter how much I studied physics I would always remember what it was like not to know anything about the subject, so I would never respond to a future student's question with my advisor's favorite phrase, "Oh, that's trivial." (And of course his explanation following that ominous response is ever-faithfully NON-trivial.)

Today in my office, as the five graduate students in there were studying for our qualifying exams next week, I suddenly realized that I was already a good way up that ivory tower I so dreaded ascending. Two specific examples jump out at me. First, we have started using LOTS of slang for things that at one time seemed far too nuanced to merit such language. Second, I noticed that we complete one another's sentences in ways that must seem completely nonsensical to the non-physics student. A conversation this afternoon perfectly embodied both of those:

Tom: "Hey, when you do the potential of the grounded cube thing, do you end up with an infinite series?"
Me: "No, because they give you V on that last side so you can do the integral. So you can do the orthogonal thing and get a real number... Oh wait, no, sorry, you still get the series but if you know V you still get all the coefficients. Otherwise you're stuck with the integral."
Tom: "Yeah, ok."

We had this exchange sitting about ten feet apart, without writing anything down or pointing at anything on a chalkboard. The contexts of these problems have become so familiar that our brains automatically set the stage, complete with props, so it's perfectly acceptable to resort to using words like "thing" repeatedly and with regard to different abstractions --- Thing #1 was the conducting cube, but #2 was the orthogonality property --- with no loss of clarity.

China spouse market!

Maybe I should consider this...

Volunteers soldiers are amazing.

Don't stories like this leave you awestruck? What really got me was the 18-year-old kid. He was 10 on Sept. 11, 2001. That would be... 4th grade. I was 14, a freshman in high school. And as I sat in my gym class and the proctor came to our class and read the note that said two hijacked planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers and two more were still in the air, that was the first time in my life that I actually feared for my life. (I had been in high school for all of two weeks. That was a pretty overwhelming welcoming present.) And the very last thing in the world I wanted to do was to join the Marines and go fight the guys who felt justified flying commercial jetliners into skyscrapers. And here is this kid, 10 years old, deciding right then that that was what he was going to do.

I'm not patriotic by any stretch of the imagination, but there is something about a person who volunteers for military service that absolutely blows my mind. Not in an are-you-kidding-me way, but in a that's-not-a-natural-thing-for-human-beings-to-do-and-it's-amazing kind of way.

I learned something about pee today.

If you eat a ton of asparagus, when you pee it out the smell will almost knock you off your feet. Good gravy. It doesn't even really smell like asparagus pee. It smells like death. As my good friend Chris put it, "It's worse than rank beer shits."

Today was my last day to be a college tutor.

I hate college more than just about anything, but there are some things to which I have become very attached. Tutoring physics is one of them. Today the class I tutor - or rather, the ones in the class who actually come to tutoring on a semi-regular basis - all signed a card for me and gave me a Starbucks gift card. It was then that I realized just how much fun I've actually had there. And part of me worries that tutoring/teaching in the future won't be the same because in the future there will be an age or professional gap between me and my tutorees, either as graduate student vs. undergraduates, or teacher vs. students. When there's nothing to distinguish me from anybody else, the atmosphere becomes very relaxed and comfortable, and people don't feel stupid asking questions. It is my sincerest hope that in the future I will be able to foster an environment at least somewhat reminiscent of what we've had here.