time reversal

Urbana always has the weirdest gatherings. First there was the Sweet Corn Festival with its butter drenched, golden ears and tiny carnival rides, and this weekend there was the Beer and Chili Festival. To fully understand what this was like, imagine a wine and cheese party mixed with a good ‘ole fashion country cook off. [...]

On Tuesday night I talked to Tucker. “What are the chances of you ditching work and coming climbing with me this weekend?” I asked. “Excellent. See you Thursday evening,” he replied.
Tucker arrived from LA on Thursday night smelling of salt. “I had to stop on the way to go surfing,” he explained. After a [...]

Apparently, beer is bad for science. This is devastating:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/science/18beer.html
A study done in the Czech Republic found a very strong negative correlation between the number of beers consumed by a scientist and the number of papers the scientist published/citations of their work. However, the reason for this correlation wasn’t given, so it could just mean that [...]

I found out today that I am PQed, or physically qualified, to go to Antarctica. That means I can go back to doing all those unhealthy things like eating fatty foods, drinking caffeine, and … well I guess there’s not much else (and lets be honest, I never stopped doing those things in the first [...]

First off, that is the most awesome title for a government report ever. Secondly, read this:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/321/5896/1605
My favorite part is when he points out how few scientists and engineers are in leadership positions in the US.

This weekend, my mom and granddad came to visit me in California. Distinctly different from Dave visiting California, I found myself doing relaxing things and generally staying in an extremely well-fed state. Thursday and Friday my mom and granddad wandered around Berkeley and San Francisco, and fed me delicious dinners when they saw me in [...]

Dave came out to Berkeley this weekend, and we decided to go rock climbing in Yosemite. It was 94 degrees F in the valley this weekend, so we decided to head up to Tuolumne meadows. We left Berkeley at around 7pm and rolled into the campground around 11:30. After searching for awhile we found an [...]

In a class I am taking called Emergent States of Matter, we recently watched a video from the stone age that shows a lot of cool phenomena related to superfluidity. If you have a spare hour, you should watch the whole thing; if not, you should at least watch the first few minutes. The narrator [...]

Recently I have been spending a lot of time in lab, and I have learned some totally awesome stuff while hanging out with the other students in lab. I fiber coupled some lasers, aligned an AOM (a cool thing that changes a beam’s frequency through scattering events with phonons), stub tuned an antenna, made a [...]

I’ve been reading Cryptonomicon for a little over 4 years…that is until 20 minutes ago when I finished it. It’s weird to say but my viewpoint of the book, and the topics it raises, changed so much after having gone to MIT. (Remember, by “gone to MIT” I am referring to 4 years of my [...]