Oops

I was completely wrapped up in labwork last week, and forgot to pick up tickets to go see former President Clinton today! But it’s not like I haven’t seen him talk before. So it’s no big loss. And even though I’m a bit of a political junkie, I feel that my labwork is more important.

Additionally, I installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on my desktop! That computer has been sort-of defunct for over a year. Ubuntu breathed new life into it! Yay! The only problem is that the wireless card in the desktop sucks, and I lose the internet rather quickly—the longest lifetime I’ve seen is 1 hour. It’s not like the signal is bad where the computer is, I’m writing this on my laptop, right next to my desktop.

Getting my desktop working got me thinking about the things that I haven’t gotten to work on my laptop. For some reason, I can’t use a key combinations with my windows key—Gnome’s keyboard shortcuts read the windows key as a bindable key (and not something I can use as a modifier). Additionally, the function keys don’t work either. Fn-F2 should mute, Fn-F3 lowers volume, etc. Oddly, when running the Ubuntu install/LiveCD on my laptop , everything works. But not in my configuration of Debian. I’m not sure what it is that is set differently.

I should do this more often.

Monday I was at Ashley’s, celebrating the end of classes. I have finished all my coursework, so I will now be spending, well, pretty much the same amount of time in the lab (since I hardly went to class). Now that I don’t have classes, I can spend free time studying what I want. Over several beers, I read/skimmed most of Atomic Physics by Christopher Foot. As well as rambling in my journal about what a quantum state physically means.

I found that I have about 6 pages of random notes ranging from what it is that we actually measure, whether entangled states and mixed states corresponds to some actual reality outside of their mathematical construct, a touch on the Copenhagen interpretation, addition of angular momenta (two spin 1/2 systems), and the EPR paradox.

I need to go through these notes, and write something coherent about them.

My last problem set

I’ve been cooped up this weekend, working on the last problem set that I’ll ever have to do (for a grade).  So, that’s good.  Unfortunately, it’s in particle physics.   That’s bad.  But I think particle physics is interesting, and an elegant theory.  That’s good.  But I don’t understand a lick of it.  That’s bad.

Can I go now?

Make yourself all honey, and the flies will devour you

Anyone have an idea as to the origin of this phrase? It comes up in the song “Symhonaire Infernus Et Spera Empyrium,” by My Dying Bride. A quick googling of this yields, obviously, My Dying Bride. And people quoting the song. Then I thought, “this might be a proverb.” Another search later, and indeed, it seems to be a proverb (and a variant: Make yourself honey and the flies will eat you). But what are the origins? I had a couple hits on Don Quixote (namely: ‘Only make yourself honey and the flies will suck you). Another site indicates that it is of Italian-Portuguese origin.

So the best I’ve got is that it seems to have originated either on the Iberian peninsula, or that it is a Latin proverb (hence explaining the ‘Italian’ as well as the Spanish/Portuguese). Does anyone have any ideas?

Snow in April!

I’m beginning to think that Michigan’s weather could be described as a phase transition. For about half the year, it is warm, and humid. The other half of the year, it is bitter cold. And there is no in-between nice and cool. So, is there some sort of order parameter that evolved in time that drastically changes the state of the weather? Would this be a second-order transition?

It seems like this parameter has some variance to it, and we are currently sitting right at the transition point. A few days ago, it was warm (not terribly humid), but now it is snowing. A change of temperature of about 40 degrees.

An analogy for EEs: We’re sitting right at the threshold voltage to turn on a MOSFET—say, for an inverter—and are measuring the logic output. Unfortunately, we have some noise in our input voltage, which causes the output to switch randomly between 0 and 1.

A little downtime never hurt anyone

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been down a few days. Apparently, there was a nasty bug in my code. So, things should be fixed now.