Claire Gray

Do you believe in the Christmas bunny?

We had a rather strange and unexpected visitor in our back garden this morning. I had just got back from gym and Chris was in the bathroom brushing his teeth when he looked out the window and exclaimed, "Claire! There's a bunny in our garden!"

The strangest thoughts tend to cross your mind at 7am; mine were: "Haha, he's making a joke like it's meant to be the Easter bunny", and "but wait, it's coming up to Christmas time, not Easter. What the..?"

But, no jokes, there it was, a cute little black and white thing with blue eyes that had got into our garden from under the back gate, and was feasting on one of the peaches that had fallen to the ground from our peach tree.

(Don't) Show Me the Money!

Last night I had a rather infuriating experience while trying to get a pizza. I was on my way home rather late after a collaboration meeting and was feeling too lazy to cook, so I decided to just stop and get pizza on the way home. I phoned ahead to Debonairs round the corner from our house to place the order for pizza and also a 2 litre coke for Chris.

However, when I got there to collect and pay they didn't have any coke, only coke light (yuck), which annoyed me cause the woman who took my order didn't tell me that. So I asked to get a refund for the coke and only pay for the pizza.

The woman who took my order then spent the next 10 or so minutes in a state, looking for change for R20 (the coke was R13 or something) while I waited, wondering what on earth she was doing, just wanting to pay for the pizza and go home.

Finally she found what she needed and put the R13 or so down in from of me. I looked at her like she was mad. "No," I said, "You see, I haven't paid for this yet. I just want to pay for the pizza, not the coke."

"Oh," she says, an obviously automated response.

Feeling smart and still running on the high of finding the correct change, she then whips out this monstrosity of a calculator, takes the cash slip, and works out the cost of the pizza by subtracting the cost of the coke from the total. The fact that this price was nicely displayed not only on their menu but also on the line above on the cash slip didn't seem to register. (And tax is included in our prices here as well, "the price you see is the price you pay", so she didn't even have to deal with that).

Anyway, I smiled my congratulations to her for performing this mathematical feat and gave her the money for the pizza - in exact change, to prevent any further complications.

She then gave me the R13 for the coke.

I couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry, so i just sort of stood there for a while staring.

I decided to give it one last shot, explaining with as much patience as I could summon up at this point, that I hadn't paid for the coke so she didn't need to give me the money back for it, etc, etc. And then I just gave up and left, leaving this woman thinking she'd cheated me out of R13.

Sometimes good karma's just NOT worth the effort!

Knife of Dreams

Yay! The long awaited book 11 of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series has been released! Chris pre-ordered a signed copy online and we can't wait for it to be delivered. We've got the whole series so far, and I've just finished re-reading all the previous books in anticipation of book 11. For those of you who haven't read the series, I strongly suggest you do, it's amazing!

(pic from Dragonmount)

Nerdy Epiphany

So just for fun I've been going to the 4th year's General Relativity lectures, held on Monday and Friday mornings. Why? Cause it's interesting, and it's amazing how much you forget between one year and the next. Also, the syllabus is slightly different this year; last year we looked a lot at geodesics and descriptions of different types of curved spacetimes, but we never actually got to deriving the field equations. This year they are doing that, another reason for me to want to attend the lectures.

Anyway, up till now we've been covering pretty much the same stuff as we did last year, only in different orders and different ways. Today, though, we got to something new that made me really excited in a completely nerdy way.

But first, a little bit of GR and personal history... In differential geometry there's this thing called the Riemann Curvature Tensor
(if it's hard to see, those indices are the greek letters mu, nu, rho and sigma)

which basically describes the curvature of a manifold, and is used in GR to describe the curvature of space.

Now, in third year Computational and Applied Maths, we had a course on tensor analysis. We didn't really understand what was going on, to tell the truth, but we just learnt all the rules for index notation and worked from there. One hot stuffy afternoon we were semiconsciously making our way through a lecture, when our lecturer threw in what was probably supposed to inspire us that what we were learning was so cool... He went (something along the lines of):

"And what Einstein did was take the Riemann tensor R mu nu rho sigma and changed the third index to mu, so it was R mu nu mu sigma, and hence got his field equations!"

Needless to say, there was no resounding "wow!". In fact, it was more like a resounding "Huh???"

Okay, back to this morning's lecture. R.... as it's shown above, for a 4-dimensional spacetime, has 256 components. This is rather nasty, so we'd want to reduce the number of components to make things easier for us. The way we do this is by "contracting" the tensor - summing over identical indices a la Einstein.

So after quite a bit of maths, obtaining and using R....'s (anti)symmetry relations and it's other properties, it turns out that the only non-trivial way to contract the tensor is exactly the way we "huh?"-ed about two years ago. Only now, after going through the math, I (think I) understand why. I was so excited, it made my day. Can you say NERD?!

Oh yes, the new tensor you get from contracting R.... in just the way we did above is called the Ricci tensor.  And after a bit more mathematical fun on this one, you can define the aptly-named Einstein tensor, which appears in ... ta-da! ... the Einstein Field Equation.

But we're not there yet.

Just in Time

Every week (usually on a monday) Mark and I have a collaboration meeting on our projects via a conference call from the people at JLab. This week, however, Mark and Anthony (the other PhD student - who lives in the US - working on the same project as Mark) couldn't make it, so the meeting was pushed off to Thursday. The reason Mark couldn't make it on Monday was because he was flying down to iThemba LABS in Cape Town to help with an experiment, but he would be back on Thursday.

Anyway, the meeting was supposed to be at 4pm. At 3pm I get an sms from Mark saying please call me on some weird number. So I do. Turns out, he's stuck at the airport - the lab gave him a lift out there on Monday but couldn't pick him up for some reason - and his cellphone is dying. So I rush out to the airport in lovely pre-rush hour traffic, which is still bad anyway, get pushed off the arrivals onramp and onto the departures onramp by some idiot with attitude in a merc, have to go round the whole airport again to get back to arrivals, and pick Mark up. Then we race back to the lab, miraculously find parking by the front door, and race into the office just as the phone is ringing! Talk about getting there just in time :)

Nobel Prize 2005!

Hey, optics fans... Congrats to Roy J. Glauber, John L. Hall, and Theodor W. Hänsch, the winners of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics!

Roy Glauber was awarded half the prize for "his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence" and John Hall and Theodor Hänsch were each awarded a quarter for "their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique".

Read the press release here or a more advanced (interesting) document (pdf) on the laureates work.

(above pic comes from nobelprize.org)

Curtains

So these are the curtains that I have spent some time making over the past few weekends  :)  There is actually  a matching pair on another big window, but these photos came out nicer. I've just got to iron the hems now and do some final touch-ups, but at least now after a year and a half of living here we have proper curtains!

So the reason I had to make these instead of buying them is because our windows are bigger and wider than the standard size, and you cant buy curtains for that height anywhere (believe me, I looked). Yeah, you can get them made to order by some fancy company, but it costs a fortune. So the ones we used until now didn't match the house at all and were too short in any case.

If you look closely then you'll see that they have a little square block design all over them. This makes them really pretty, but a bloody mission to pin together so that all the blocks match up correctly. If I never have to pin another thing again I won't be sad. And you've gotta sew straight as hell too. A big Thank You goes to my mom for putting up with it to help me :)

And my tip for any aspiring curtain-makers out there... Get them made, it's worth it!

Spring Cleaning

So here I am, still alive. I just can't believe how fast time has gone by the last few months! Life just went so busy all of a sudden and I'm not really sure where it all went. That said, I have also been procrastinating terribly with blogging; "Just let me finish my proposal this evening and I'll write tomorrow", and "as soon as I get this code fixed I'll write a blog again" and before you know it another month and three deadlines have gone by. But, as with all things in life, you've just got to sit down and do it! (even when there are a hundred seemingly more important things to do!)

But it's September which is spring down here on the tip of Africa, which means time for fresh starts and spring cleaning which, much to Chris's astonishment, is another thing that has occupied random evenings of mine recently. It really is tough to convince yourself to work (blog) in the evenings when your desk at home is piled mountain-high with paper, so about 2 weeks ago I threw out about 2 enormous garbage bags full of rubbish, stuff I know I won't need again, and stuff I thought I would use 3 years ago and still haven't, and my desk is now clean, tidy, and fits both my laptop and sewing machine on with space to spare for writing. I then got inspired and did the same for my dressing table, clothes cupboard and both spare rooms. AND THEN made curtains for our lounge and dining room with the help of my mom. Those I just finished hanging up on Sunday, and I know my mum is dying to see what they look like so I'll take some photos when I get home this evening. I must say I'm pretty impressed with them myself, although if i never have to look at another pin in my life it may be too soon!

It's not like I haven't been doing any physics at the same time though - as well as continuing with my analysis I have finally done my MSc proposal (yay!) and a progress report thing that we have to submit to the faculty twice a year. Damn paperwork... But you can find them from my homepage which I have also finally got round to doing. And I've also been doing some reading, along with my little physics cat Phoebe...

HUGS day 3: Renormalization

Quote(s) of the day (Krishna Kumar again):

on Renormalization in electroweak theory...

    "They were absolutely convinced that the theory was right. Me, I would have just said No Way!"

    "...you just take the infinities and play with them..."

on virtual photons:

    "What's a virtual photon, anyway? We just believe it! Why do we believe it? Because the theory works."

on CERN's particle accelerator:

    "Imagine crossing the border 45'000 times a second - you pay customs every time!"

After two nights of supper at Ryan's we decided to try somewhere else last night. There's Nawab, an Indian place up the road, and we invited Krishna to come with us. Luckily he goes there quite often and enjoyed educating us on the different constituents of Indian food. I also got to try some Indian beer, which beats the Bud Light and Miller Light you get here by a few orders of magnitude. Left to right around the table are: Richard, Lamiaa, Krishna, Brian, Ryan,  Scott, Mat, Jim and Mark.

After dinner we bought some beer, went back to the ResFac, and played some poker. Scott (right) has his own poker chips that he carries around with him. So you can imagine who won in the end! :D Now we had had horrible rainy weather the entire day, and we were all pretty sick and tired of being inside for so long. So somebody decided it would be a good idea to go play midnight volleyball in the rain - the ResFac has a beach volleyball court. We found a rather flat volleyball in the gym room, put on shorts and missioned off for an hour or two of what most (normal?) people would have considered insanity.

It was fun.
*grin*

And by the end of it, we were sopping wet, freezing cold (ie. cold enough to sober up) and covered in sand from head to toe. Boy, did my arms hurt this morning! And if our coordination is anything to go by, we're going to be doing physics for a long, long time!

(right: Clausell took the sensible option and stayed dry to watch the NBA)

HUGS day 2: Karaoke Time

The second day of HUGS kicked off with the first of six lectures on The Phases of QCD by Thomas Schaefer. Very theoretical. In fact, i hadn't realised over the past six months or so just how much of an experamentalist I have become. A year ago this realization would have driven me to search for some suitable penance, but now I officially say that I am proud of it.

(I can just see Chris and my classmates from last year rolling on the floor laughing!)

But all this is irrelevant, actually, when it comes to this particular post, and my recent transition has nothing to do with the quality of the lecture. It was actually really interesting, though I tended to get lost in the midst of Lagrangian densities.

After Phases we had another lecture on Proton Tomography (proton pancakes), then it was lunch, another Phases, and then a new topic, Electroweak Physics, by Krishna Kumar.

Electroweak had me hooked from the start, Kumar is a fantastic lecturer, and giving a course that could unofficially be entitled "Electroweak theory for experimentalists who don't like big nasty equations" was bound to go down well :) The quote of the day definitely came from this lecture... I think Kumar was talking about adding more and more particles to make the theory work, because "when you're a theorist you can cook up anything you want!"

Anyway, enough of physics. We went back to Ryan's for dinner again, and then Scott thought that it would be a good idea to go to the Mexican place across the street from JLab, Plaza Azteca, for karaoke. In the end it was only four of us who went: Scott, Chris, Jim and me. Well it was interesting, the first time I ever did karaoke was on the second night straight of partying for my 18th birthday, "I Got You Babe" with my gay friend Eugene. It was horrible! So somehow Scott convinced me to do it again with him, but I needed courage (read: beer) beforehand. So while I mustered some courage, Scott sang "Beyond the Sea" and then Chris sang "Dead Man's Party".

Well let me tell you Scott is an amazing singer, and by the end of the evening he even had a bit of a fan club! Anyway, when it closed at 10pm the karaoke guy convinced us to go back there on Saturday night for an even bigger party. So tomorrow that's where we'll be. And Bob, you'd better join us this time!

PS I have just found out that you can view the slides from the talks by going to the HUGS website program schedule and following the links from there.