time reversal

I had a pretty sweet weekend….sort of. Saturday I went to a barbecue for Martin’s birthday. Sunday, I went to Castle Rock State Park (near Santa Cruz) and went bouldering and hiking. Sunday, I went on a lovely 38 mile bike ride (+ picnic) with Martin, Sirena, and Kevin. I’m finally getting in good shape and was totally kicking butt up the hills. All was going well until we got to the last downhill. Centennial Drive is really steep (there are long sections in excess of 12% grade). As I was coming down the hill, I hit a patch of gravel in a wide sweeping corner while going about 35mph. Since this was one of those corners where if you go over the guard rail you tumble for a really long way, I decided to hit the asphalt instead of the guardrail. I skidded down the pavement on my left side for a ways and then tumbled into a pricker bush.

When I stood up the pavement was covered in blood and my spandex was shredded. Two women in an SUV stopped behind me and gave me a ride down the hill. I felt kind of bad because I bled all over their nice car, but at least I ended up at Martin and Sirena’s apartment with my bike. I tried to shower off and scrub the gravel out, but in the process noticed a really big hole in my elbow. To the Emergency Room!

The problem with the emergency room is that it always takes forever. I walked in and started bleeding all over the waiting room, but they still made me sit there for over an hour while they got their paperwork together. I hadn’t eaten in a long time and had just finished a really long bike ride. Luckily, Martin gave me some chocolate chip cookies or I would have passed out from low blood sugar. By the time they finally admitted me I was starving, and the second they gave me painkillers I was totally out of it. I recall lying there while they stitched me up with my posse of friends exclaiming things like, “Woah, I can’t believe they just shoved the needle right in that wound. Gnarly!” Finally, the doctor said, “Well, this elbow is really shredded. It’s just not going to match up, but I’ll do my best.” Seven stitches and many bandages later I finally got to leave the ER.

I spent the majority of today limping around and being useless, and using the lab’s microscope and nice tweezers to pull little prickers out of my fingers and arms. Since my car is in the shop and I couldn’t actually ride my bike up the hill to get groceries, Kevin brought over supplies for pizza tonight and we made awesome thin-crust and deep dish pizzas with pineapple, sweet potato, mushrooms, peppers, and onions. I seem to be on the way to healing, so hopefully I’ll be able to get back to climbing and biking soon.

Tags:   barbecue · bike · crash1 Comment

Well, I’m back in Andover for the next few weeks and I have to say its pretty boring.  On the plus side I’m seeing some friends I haven’t seen in awhile and I’m going to Helmand’s or Mary’s tomorrow. If you’re in Andover or Boston and you want to hang out in the next week give me a call!

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I haven’t posted here in a long time. There’s a few reasons for this. One, I’m really hosed in lab. I’m upgrading a cryostat and have been battling mechanical compatibility and cryogenic issues for over 2 months now. A more awesome reason is because I recently traveled to the east coast. I was in Boston for Steer Roast and Dave’s thesis defense (he passed!), and then went up to VT for a few days to see my family. My brother and I got my dad a homebrewing kit for his birthday, and now my brother and dad are brewing up lots of beer. Then I went to NYC, (which I hated) but despite my hatred for the city I had fun because I got to see many old friends from the quanta lab who I haven’t seen in a long time. Then it was back to Boston for the 7th Annual Blow Shit Up Day (+barbecue). By the time I left to return to Berkeley, I was thoroughly exhausted.

I spent the last week dying from a terrible cold (likely brought on by the extensive travel) while working my ass off in the lab to try to fix my cryostat. I failed, but at least I know what’s wrong now and have a pretty good idea of how to fix it. This morning I attempted to go biking with Martin and Sirena, but as it’s 90F today in Berkeley and my ancestors are from a foggy island in the middle of the North Atlantic, by the time I got to the top of the first hill I was dying. Luckily there was a water stop at the top of the hill, and I totally drenched myself with water. When we started riding again, I found that I was no longer dying, and in fact I felt quite cool. I finally saw for myself why people whose ancestors came from somewhere warm (and hence actually sweat a significant amount) can survive exercising when it’s way too hot out. It’s evaporative cooling, baby!

Tags:   biking · evaporationNo Comments.

Well the end of the semester has arrived and I just have to finish a take home final, make a MOT, and finish my poster for DAMOP before shipping out on the 18th. So, in typical William fashion, I eschewed work and made something beautiful instead. Above is one of the graphics I made to show the current status of the 40K lattice experiment; it turned out especially nicely.

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Since Spring Break and my trip to Zion (from which I will finish posting pictures sometime), I have dropped completely off the map in a mad rush to build a set of hi-fi speakers and a vacuum tube amp. Well, actually my friend Matthias and I have been trying to build two sets of each. This probably seems like a strange thing to spend time on in grad school, but who cares? We live in the middle of a giant corn field and have to keep ourselves entertained somehow.

All of this started because Matthias has to take eight classes to get his masters before heading back to Germany, so he decided to take a physics of music class to fill out his load. The final project for the class requires everyone to build something related to music, test the hell out of it, and write a vaguely scientific paper describing what you did. His idea was to build a vacuum tube amp.

He told he his idea, and I told him to build two. Figuring the only way to convince him of this was to throw something into the mix, I offered to build two sets of speakers. What good is one without the other? Right?

We haven’t had a free weekend since. There was a good month of researching different components, designs, and deciding what we thought would work best. In the world of audiophile equipment, there is no upper limit to how much things can cost (some people will purchase $100 RCA jacks). In the end we decided to build ported loudspeakers based around 6 inch aluminum woofers and 1.25 inch silk dome tweeters based on the MIT IAP Speaker Design course.

Our single largest time sink was building the speaker enclosures. We started with one 4′x8′x3/4″ piece of fiberboard which I deemed was just large enough for all four enclosure. After one evening of cutting all the pieces out on the bandsaw, we had to figure some way to route the grooves for gluing the pieces together. Neither of us had a router or access to one, so we milled everything. This has the advantage that every cut was carefully planned and withing a few thousands of where I wanted it to be. But, it took forever!

Gluing all the pieces together wasn’t a huge deal–everything fit perfectly and we found some large clamps in a nuclear physics lab that helped immensely. We built the cross-overs, wired everything up, and then the testing began. One of the major benefits of a ported enclosure (a box completely sealed except for an open-ended, resonating pipe) is that one can tune the length of the port to change the bass response of the enclosure, and often one can imitate the bass response of a much large cavity.

The speaker are soldered, sanded, and primed. Their bass response is truly impressive (go port tuning!) and their frequency response is almost flat to 14kHz. Things go a little crazy above that, but the tweeters only cost $20 a piece, so I cannot complain too much. In the power spectrum it is not possible to identify the crossover point, and since the drivers are so close to each other on the enclosure, one cannot hear where the transition happens either. In short, they sound pretty awesome. We are still working on the tube amps. One of them will likely be done this weekend. The other will be done at some indeterminate point in the future after some science happens.

Any suggestions as to what color is should paint my speakers? I’m thinking Pantone 201.

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I am taking three classes right now. It’s too many. The good news is, after my two finals on Tuesday I’ll be all done. I’m really looking forwards to only taking one class at a time from now on, so that I’m not trying to d so many different things at once.

Boulder has us take more classes (10) than many physics graduate programs. It sounds like a good idea in general, especially since it eliminates the need for written quals. I think it will sound like a much better idea after this Tuesday, however.

To get through my marathon of studying, I’ve been listening to plenty of new music. It’s new only to me, probably not to any of you who read pitchfork or wherever kids these days get their music from. I’m enjoying the new Decemberists album, The Hazards of Love, it’s basically a very pretentious rock ballad. In a good way. Also, I really like The National these days, the lead singer has an unusually smooth voice for one so deep in pitch and they create a neat sound with it. And I’ve been listening to the Dandy Warhols, which is just good old-fashioned rock and roll. Finally, there’s a local group called Devotchka that I’ve absolutely fallen in love with, they have an accordion and a tuba and their music is sortof Eastern European Folk meets Wild West — I can totally imagine any of their songs on the soundtrack to a Quentin Tarantino movie.

After finals I’ll try to assemble some photos of my ski season, it was an absolutely crazy winter.

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I haven’t really posted about this because it felt awkward and weird, especially when things were still up in the air. But now that I’ve signed on the dotted line, gotten a job lined up, and am counting down the days until I leave I figured it was time to spend a few moments and explain what’s going on.  You see, I’m saying goodbye to Ithaca.  There are a lot of specifics, but the long and short of it is that Cornell/Ithaca and I did not mesh well together.  I don’t mean to blame Ithaca as I feel that if my choices of career hadn’t changed I would probably be fine hanging out in Ithaca for a few more years, but they did change.

Quantum Field Theory is a really cool class and I look forward to each lecture Henry Tye gives. But it turns out particle physics is not my cup of tea. So where does that leave me? There’s astro stuff and there is condensed matter theory and neither of those do it for me. So if I got a job in theory, I don’t think I would really like it a few years down the line.  I came to this conclusion in the fall and I had to stop and take an inventory of all I had done. My conclusion? AMO rocks my socks.

It was around October when I decided this and noticed that (as of that date) there was not a single AMO professor at Cornell. With that on my mind, I decided that I needed to transfer. Well, a lot has happened in those interveneing months, I started working for Mukund Vengalattore part time and I grew to loathe living in the middle of nowhere. So while working with Mukund is pretty awesome…I desperatly wanted to leave Ithaca. Therefore, when I was accepted into Boulder I was pretty ecstatic.

There you have it folks. Boulder stole a grad student from Cornell.

Just a few more weeks, and I’m heading out to Colorado.

Tags:   boulder · gradschool · transferring3 Comments

Dave came out to California this weekend to give a talk at Berkeley (and visit me). He flew in really late Friday night, so we had a rather late start on adventures Saturday morning. First on the agenda (after a breakfast of blueberry pancakes and smoothies) was to fix up a bike that Martin had lent us for the weekend. We got the tires inflated and a seat installed, and then biked up to the local bike shop, Missing Link. The bike was missing the nut (but not the bolt) that holds the cable onto the rear derailleur, the bolts to hold on the bottle cage, and the pivot pin from the rear brake lever. The guy in the shop wanted to know how we came to be missing such small and specific parts. After installing these parts + some hot pink bar tape, we were on our way for an awesome weekend.

First we biked down to the climbing gym, Berkeley Ironworks, where I managed to kick Dave’s ass climbing. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever been able to out-climb him–that’s what happens when you go to the gym 4 days a week. After climbing, we biked over to Takara Sake Factory and did a tour and Sake tasting. It turns out that there are tons of flavors and types of Sake, so of course we had to try (almost) all of them. To finish off the evening, we biked up to Kirala where we had sushi, more sake, and really delicious mango and green tea ice cream. (Note for my mom: Yes, I dressed pretty for my date.)

Sunday was another glorious sunny day in California. We baked some scones and apple-walnut pancakes in the morning to prepare us, and then biked up to meet Martin and Sirena for a long bike ride with a picnic near the end. On this ride, Dave and Martin decided to push it up the hills, while behind them I was working really hard and barely managing to keep up with Sirena, who was carrying the entire picnic in her panniers. I guess it’s revenge for beating Dave at rock climbing. After we parted ways with Martin and Sirena, Dave and I proceeded to have a reverse date.

What is a reverse date, you ask? Well, here’s an example. We biked up to the Ben and Jerry’s and had ice cream, then we picked up a movie and came back to my house to watch it. After the movie we cooked dinner, ate it, and then had some pre-dinner wine. Strangely, Dave and I seem to have a lot of reverse dates. We’re pretty incapable of doing anything normally, but that’s fine with me.

Monday was fairly uneventful, except that Dave bought me a super-large coffee right before I went to watch his talk and hence I was bouncing off the walls the entire time. It seemed like the people in Berkeley really liked his talk, and the room was so full that people were sitting on the floor. Maybe they’ll give him a job and he can live in Berkeley too!

Tags:   berkeley · biking · dave · ice cream · picnic2 Comments

Every Tuesday is Pie Day, and I have pie for breakfast. The Walnut Cafe offers at least five different kinds for 2.50 a slice on Pie Day. It’s pretty much the highlight of my week. Today I had apple, but peach-blueberry is my favorite.

How did this get started? I was eating breakfast there one day and this little girl at the table next to me had gotten a huge pancake with a smiley face on it. Banana eyes, whipped cream hair, strawberry nose, the whole nine yards. With a smug little smile (I don’t doubt that her father’s nickname for her was “princess”) she turns to me and says, “mine has chocolate on it”. Princess slowly eats one of the chocolate chips that outlines the pancake man’s oversized smile. Show-off.

Of course I can’t get this pancake, because it’s on the kids menu. It’s just a tragedy, and I am so jealous. And then I notice on the menu that Tuesday is Pie Day. “Would you like ice cream with that?” asks the server. Oh, absolutely. Pie with ice cream beats chocolate chips any day of the week.

It’s fun being a grownup. Those of us that work out regularly are allowed to eat whatever we want. I have an especially painful lab meeting every Tuesday morning, and pie is exactly what I need for breakfast to get me through the day. I don’t have the ice cream every time though.

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After a morning in the snow, Matthias and I decided it was time to see a different part of the park. In this vein we headed to the rangers station and got advice on the southwest desert area. We only had a few hours of daylight by the time we left the rangers station, so we decided to take the shorter trail to the campsite we had chosen. When we arrived at the trail head for the Coalpits wash trail, we discovered than neither the trail we hoped to take or our campsite was marked on our map. Thinking that there would be no way to get lost, we decided to just figure things out as they happened.

After a few minutes of hiking, Matthias stumbled upon a tumbleweed and (as you can see in the above picture) was incredibly excited by the find. We managed to find the canyon we needed to traverse with no difficulty, but it was a strike of luck that allowed us to find the cairn marking the connecting trail that would take us to the ridge trail and our campsite. The only problem was we could not remember which way we were supposed to turn when we got the ridge trail. I was fairly confident from my glimpse at the map in the rangers station that we had to go west, so the decision was made. What I had not remembered was how far we had to hike to get to the campsite, so after a few miles we started to wonder if we had really chosen the right path.

As luck would have it, we had chosen correctly and just before the sun set we found our campsite. It was one of the more exposed places we camped in the park–situated on top of a hill with almost no vegetation, there was nothing to break the wind. So, we tied the tent between two trees with the hope that it would not blow away. Speaking of my tent (EMS Star 2+); it is wonderful! One can tell a lot of thought went into designing it and it didn’t get destroyed by the wind that night.

When we woke the next morning, we had the view pictured below. If you want a great place to camp in this part of the park, I highly recommend campsite 4. It is fairly easy to get to and the view is spectacular. Also, the site is exposed to sun early in the morning, so your tent will be nice and warm when you decide to get out of it. Since there was no that much to see in this area of the park, Matthias and I decided that we should hit the more touristy areas of the park. We finished the trail we were on and then just headed back to the car.

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