time reversal

Yesterday, Apple released a bunch of new notebooks in their usual style  of a told-from-on-high sermon of how awesome they are. Their main announcement was a new machining process (which is not really that new and is a solution to a problem they have had for more than half a decade), but right before the [...]

Following suit with Liz, many of you are probably wondering what I am up to as well or at least why you have not heard from me in a while. Mostly, I spend my time in lab learning how to do things that are completely obvious to everyone else here. The group is starting a [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

Over the last weekend, I got a group of first-years together to bike out to Homer Lake and have a picnic. I picked the perfect day, the weather was great, the traffic was light, and everything was going well. Eight of us showed up to ride the 15 miles to the lake, but only six [...]

So letters were placed in our mail boxes at 5 PM yesterday announcing if we had passed or failed the qual. Luckily I got one of the former letters, so now I can move on and worry about more important things like where to acquire house plants for my office. My office…I don’t know if [...]

Well, I have gone to two days of class, taken two nights of qualifying exam, and am ready to return to a state of order and tranquility. The test went as well as could be expected, and I will have the result on Friday at 5. A bunch of us went out to celebrate at [...]

The weather has been beautiful almost the entire time I have been in Illinois, and I could no longer resist the temptation of the open roads. This morning I biked with another first-year out to Homer Lake, which I had been told was about 15 miles east of the Urbana. We got on our bikes [...]

For the past month or so I have been studying for a qualifying exam that is part of my Ph.D. program at UI. Over this period of time I been in varying states of panic and fear, and I have come to realize after talking to some of my fellow first-years that this process in [...]