May 2013
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Simple Trick Turns Commercial Polymer Into World's... →
iusedtobethechosenone:
A materials scientist has created the world’s toughest fiber using a mechanism based on a slip knot.
The paper itself is found here.
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“It’s time to stop thinking of computer programming as a specialty subject....”
– Why High Schools Should Treat Computer Programming Like Algebra - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic (via infoneer-pulse)
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Temporal processing in the olfactory system →
The neural machinery underlying our olfactory sense continues to be an enigma for neuroscience. A recent review in Neuron seeks to expand traditional ideas about how neurons in the olfactory bulb might encode information about odorants. One of the main authors, Terry Sejnowski, had the floor for a brief …
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Sorry for the lack of posting lately, y'all
thatmathblog:
I had to finish up my thesis and defend it (succeed, too!)
And then take finals, the last of which was today.
So, as of Saturday (assuming I pass my classes), I will have my Master’s.
I also have 2 job interviews for Friday and a third for Monday.
Is this what heaven feels like?
You are very much forgiven. Good luck on all your endeavors!
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“The girl in the mirror wasn’t who I wanted to be and her life wasn’t the one I...”
– Francesca Lia Block (via onlinecounsellingcollege)
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SO HEY IN FINLAND IF YOU COMPLETE YOUR DOCTORATE...
xvrabia:
I SHIT YOU NOT
Guess who just decided to go to grad school in Finland?
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thesummerofmark replied to your link: Understanding the turbulence in plasmas
Ugh, turbulence in regular hydrodynamics is bad enough, but having to consider Maxwell’s equations at the same time really makes this a nightmare.
Plasma physics is always a nightmare.
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Proof that an infinite number of primes are paired →
A new proof brings mathematicians a step closer to solving one of number theory’s most famously intractable problems
An article on recent progress towards the Twin Primes conjecture (arxiv paper) and Goldbach’s conjecture (arxiv paper—it’s long! I haven’t read it yet) in number theory.
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Understanding the turbulence in plasmas →
A longstanding joke holds that practical fusion power is about 20 years away and always will be. One simple phenomenon explains why practical, self-sustaining fusion reactions have proved difficult to achieve: Turbulence in the superhot, electrically charged gas, called plasma, that circulates inside …
I noticed that the “plasma physics” tag is very empty yesterday, which I...
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ladyphysicist:
oh I had my E&M exam today, actually
funnily enough there were no questions on polarization! or magnetization, and I was expecting one or the other (there was a question about wave boundary conditions but that wasn’t really about magnetization itself). and the radiation question was very straightforward. but there was a really tough electrostatics question involving image...
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Polarization (and a little on Magnetization)
ladyphysicist:
(the first of a series of posts discussing material I learned this semester)
I assume everyone reading this knows that there are things called charges, that matter is made up of particles which often have charge, that charges create electric and magnetic fields as they move.
Given some charges and how they are moving, we know how to calculate their electric and magnetic fields...
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(Overheard in the engineering library)
Student: My physics TA is a particle physicist, and she has a textbook like THIS THICK *holds thumb and forefinger about three inches apart* with just like, the names of particles.
Me: *facepalm*
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IBM takes a big new step in cryptography:... →
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I am spending this afternoon alone in my room wearing shorts and a tank top proving theorems from Galois Theory on my white board and drinking warm samurai chai tea mixed with ayurvedic white tea and honey with the music of Schubert’s impromptus on repeat filling my room.
That sentence tells you two things:
1. I’m sort of a pretentious bitch
2. I am having a really nice day despite...
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xanthocomically:
I forgot that, during finals week, one actually cannot go to the library because it is full of all the idiot sorority girls and frat bros and other assorted partying-types who suddenly have to learn the entire semester in one weekend, and therefore go to College to sit in large circles and gossip at the top of their lungs instead of actually accomplishing anything with their...
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*at a math department cook-out*
Professor: I tried using facebook's new graph search and it SUCKS.
Undergrad: What? I thought it worked okay.
Professor: I mean, it does what they say it is supposed to do, but it does not do it well.
Postdoc: Well, what were you searching for?
Professor: Well, I searched for people with interests in number theory and death metal, but it did not turn up very useful results. I can tell you, though, that a lot of people in India apparently have this combination of interests.
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xanthocomically:
The power is back on, which is great because it was really worrying to watch grad students running around freaking out about their PCRs and lab specimens and cell cultures, et cetera.
In the physics department, the grad students weren’t the ones freaking out. In fact, about an hour into the power outage, they all decided to leave and get ice cream because they had...
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“Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I’ve never cared much for...”
– Miranda July (via onlinecounsellingcollege)
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New nanowire transistors may help keep Moore's Law... →
(Phys.org) Two French researchers, Guilhem Larrieu and Xiang-Lei Han, may have succeeded in possibly setting back the date to which Moore’s Law would no longer apply by creating a new kind of nanowire Field-Effect Transistor (FET). In their paper published in the journal Nanoscale, the two describe …
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“Bacteria are the ultimate BitTorrents of biology.”
– Computational biologist Sergei Maslov, on his new work comparing Linux operating systems with bacterial DNA. Because these two networks are both open source, they evolved in similar ways.
The term “survival of the fittest” is usually thrown around in biological settings, but Maslov found that it...
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April 2013
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My math homework only took 3.5 hours!
Hooray! It turns out that Field Theory is way more intuitive than Module Theory.
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I have a lot to look forward to this week.
Beautiful weather, an interesting math talk tomorrow, relaxing on the terrace, learning about black holes in general relativity, wandering State Street in search of more sundresses, the Physics Awards Banquet, Devil’s Lake with the Physics Club…
I am going to miss this city so much over the summer. I am sure that I will love Pasadena (I don’t think I’ve told my followers,...
