three questions for you!

[nibot]

AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION TIME

1. What are your summer plans?

2. If you're in Berkeley, how long will you be sticking around?

3. Tell me about something cool.

4. What is your operating hypothesis? (extra credit)

Comments

[sarasita.livejournal.com]

1. summer school
2. all summer
3. i'm living with diane next fall

summer school

[nibot.livejournal.com]

What are you taking?

Re: summer school

[sarasita.livejournal.com]

ochem

[ephermata.livejournal.com]

1. NTT DoCoMo Labs in San Jose

2. I'll actually be coming to Berkeley roughly weekly for prelim exam studying.

3. Michael Chabon, author of _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay_, lives in Berkeley!

[nibot.livejournal.com]

You fooled me! I thought NTT DoCoMo was in JAPAN!

[ephermata.livejournal.com]

They are. The USA lab division, however, is in San Jose.

[(Anonymous)]

Which prelim are you taking?

[ephermata.livejournal.com]

Operating Systems. I considered taking the Theory prelim, but decided taking OS would make me learn a lot of background in the area, which I will need down the line.

[roxymartini.livejournal.com]

1. summer at sinica (taiwan schmath institute)

2. june 4 (well, i'll be around, in SF)

3. i learned about quantum computing today. Apparently copying is impossible, and reading information from a quantum computer involves reading it multinumerous times and constructing a PDF to determine what was most likely the originally encoded information. kindof funny.

[ragnus.livejournal.com]

1. being a sellout and working for some capitalist in Palo Alto (my dad).

2. i already started paying rent for an apartment, and I don't want to sublet it. So i'll come here during weekends I guess.

3. You can't integrate ∫e^-x2dx in closed form!

answering my own questions

[nibot.livejournal.com]

1. I'm working at the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) and the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) at UCSD on some kind of project relating to geophysical data networks. I still don't know how much will be geophysics and how much will be data networks — I sort of fear that I'm being bait-and-switched. Nonetheless I am looking forward to a summer in southern california, since I have not spent the summer there since 1998.

2. I'm starting at UCSD on June 1. I have to stick around here until this project I'm working on is finished, but it will fill 120% of the time available, so I will probably be here until the last minute. On the other hand, it would be nice to escape for a little vacation and/or have time to find a place to live in SD.

3. Michael Moore's new movie is called "Fahrenheit 9/11". hilarious!

I'm also looking forward to working on projects at home in MV and exploring the SoCal areas. Some things on my agenda:

• try to catch up on my physics so that I won't be too far behind when I start gradschool in late august

• go on a road trip in mexico!

• hang out with the kids doing the UCSD REU in physics

• go to england or taiwan — but that's prolly not going to happen, as there's no time! )-:

• go hiking with squarkz if she actually comes to visit SoCal

• build a paraboloid reflector by spinning a vat of plaster! [link (http://www.livejournal.com/users/nibot_lab/17344.html)]

• build a multi-channel breakbeam detector to measure the exit velocity of a potato from the potato cannon (http://splorg.org/people/tobin/spudgun/). mr.brei uses potato cannons to teach improvised weaponry projectile motion to his physics course, and I think it would be handy to have an actual measurement of the exit velocity

• learn about wireless networks

• hang out with my friend john (squibb but never updates)

• go to the beach a lot

Re: answering my own questions

[roxymartini.livejournal.com]

MEXICO MEXICO MEXICO!!
You must inform me of when this is.

and this disreputable "squarkz"... thought you were never actually meeting her in person? worrisome.

Re: answering my own questions

[squarkz.livejournal.com]

i am disreputable?!

holy crap! never been called that.

but the disreputable types are always the most fun.

Re: answering my own questions

[squarkz.livejournal.com]

i didn't know you were going to be at IGPP!

i'm so jealous.

i'm not really sure why i didn't apply there. well, probably because one of the faculty was a jerk to me, and also becuase i just don't think i'd like san diego all that much. (cough.)

[rebbyribs.livejournal.com]

1. Working in lab, tutoring at San Quentin, visiting Boston for a week or so, juggling, and having lots of fun.
2. I'll be mostly around all summer.
3. I'm going to move in with hukuma at the end of the summer!

[janviere.livejournal.com]

Whoa, how come I never heard about that?

[rebbyribs.livejournal.com]

I probably just hadn't said anything, because I didn't want to get my hopes up in case the landlord didn't allow cats. Even sweet, affectionate cats who shed everywhere and occaisionally do worse.

[janviere.livejournal.com]

But still... I mean, Kevin hasn't said a word.

I take it the landlord allows cats then? I'm glad that bab5 happiness will be continuing.

[ankaerith.livejournal.com]

1. get my business going (make money)

2. I should probably visit before everyone disappears.

3. PE Builder (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) lets you create a preinstalled environment for Windows XP / Server 2003. I've created a boot CD with WinXP, Rip-linux, Flonix, and a bunch of other recovery utilities.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

What is your business?

[ankaerith.livejournal.com]

Computer hardware/software / network: support, repair, upgrade... stuff like that. Pretty much whatever home, home office, small office type of people need.

[heike.livejournal.com]

1. relax and recover from classes, find a place to live in Pittsburgh and move, take a vacation somewhere in New England, possibly backpacking and kayaking in Maine
2. not this summer
3. We transfered the 49 minutes of veideo footage of our cloud chamber in action from the Mac we used to film it into a Quicktime file. Next we'll edit it. I should have several minutes (up to 15 if you really wanted) of footage to put up somewhere soon to show you the cloud chamber in action. Plus pictures of it, of course. It looks home built, including the iron we used to heat the lid so the methanol would evaporate faster.

[janviere.livejournal.com]

1. Math REU at East Tennessee State University

2. I leave California on June 20. I'm going to try to stay in Berkeley right up till the last minute.

3. The primes in p algorithm has stuff to do with galois fields.

[eigenvalue.livejournal.com]

1. Math REU at Penn State. Other plans: I plan on taking the Putnam next year, so I'll try to do some practice for that. I also want to practice for the Berkeley programming contest.

2. Leaving Berkeley on the 27th to Southern California, then China for 10 days, then SoCal, then Penn, then SoCal, then back to Berkeley on August 25th.

3. This GBAX thing is really cool: http://www.gbax.com/gp32review.html

[clevermynnie.livejournal.com]

1. Working at the SNAP CCD lab up at LBL. I'm going to spend some time at home, though, and hopefully climb Redcloud and Sunshine Peaks (http://www.home.earthlink.net/~vanderbrook/redsun-narr.html) in Colorado.

2. I'll be here from June 7 through next year.

3. The best thing in the world is eating salt and vinegar potato chips in alternation with chocolates.

[ragnus.livejournal.com]

3. The best thing in the world is eating salt and vinegar potato chips in alternation with chocolates.


why is noone else alarmed by this? salt and vinegar with ANYTHING is wrong, purely wrong.

[eigenvalue.livejournal.com]

No, you're wrong!!!!
salt and vinegar chips are great.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

it's true, they are!

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

1. Mathcamp!! And a trip to Asia. And a friend's wedding.

2. I'll be in town until June 25th (the day after my birthday), when I leave for Asia. I'll be back home on July 7, but leaving for Mathcamp July 8 probably. I think I get back from that August 18, but may be disappearing for the wedding for the weekend of the 21st.

3. The category of quotients (by radical ideals) of the polynomial ring in n variables over an algebraically closed field K is contravariantly isomorphic to the category of algebraic varieties in K^n.

Some things I would like to do ...SOMEDAY...

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

***
See the Northern Lights
Go to one of those thunder and lightning parks and watch LOADS of lightning
Experience the edge of a hurricane {Somewhere safe but really intense}
Speak one (or more!) foreign languages really, really well
Ride in a "one horse open sleigh" in a "winter wonderland"
Scuba in the Caribbean
Write a book...or several
Get a job
Retire
Enjoy the celebratory dinner after Nibot wins the Nobel Prize
See Bush lose the election
Move out of So Cal
Enjoy the celebratory dinner after Kris is nominated to the Supreme Court...(or gets into law school....)
Hike the entire John Muir Trail
Go to Alaska
Enjoy the celebratory dinner when Eric comes home from Iraq.

Re: Some things I would like to do ...SOMEDAY...

[roxymartini.livejournal.com]

That sounds exciting. take me on the sleigh ride. and the scuba-ing in the Caribbean, i plan to own a tropical island one day, so you can scuba there.

Re: Some things I would like to do ...SOMEDAY...

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

mosquito forecast (http://www.weather.com/outlook/homeandgarden/mosquitoforecast/USCA0712?par=yahoo&site=www.yahoo.com&promo=forecast) for your amusement and elucidation

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Oooo... Hawaii!

[once-a-banana.livejournal.com]

Oooh... and the other one looks like "deer". The next time someone tries to run me over with their car I will glare at them and bellow "Horse Deer!!! Damn you, Horse Deer!!"
Incidentally, one of the most common ways to (affectionately) call someone a moron in Costa Rican Spanish is to call them a "caballo" (horse, once again). How odd... since horses are really pretty smart. Why don't people get called cows instead?? They do like to say "vache" a lot in French (as an adjective), but it usually means 'nasty' rather than just dumb. But I learned a new my-favorite-French-adverb on Friday! Vachement -- it's a vulgar way of saying "extremely". How on earth do you go from 'cow-ish-ly' to 'extremely'?

[once-a-banana.livejournal.com]

Well, the last time I was actually studying Japanese was in Kyoto in August 2002, while living with a host family and roasting in the summer heat. We finished that "Intermediate Japanese" textbook (I think they use the same one at Berkeley--it's white with some black and red on the cover, and written by people in Wisconsin), so I guess I've taken like 2 years worth, and by the end of that summer I could have conversations with folks on most topics pretty easily, but of course I've forgotten lots of vocab and it would take me a while to get back in the swing of things at this point. Same story for Mandarin, which I haven't studied for 4 years. I find Spanish much easier to maintain without really trying because English vocab is so thoroughly Romancified, and I suppose this would be true for French too if I bothered to study more than the 1 year I just got through. I took Korean for a year and it's really easy to read but I can barely spit out a single sentence in it now, since I never traveled there to really solidify things. My German sucks too, although I guess I can read 1st-year level reasonably well now. Next year I get to take Thai to pay the bills (yay for a new alphabet and another tonal language!). So you see, I'm not at all "well-versed"... just "slightly versed" in a bunch of languages--it helps for studying linguistics and linguistic anthropology because there's a lot of work written in non-English (esp. French, German, Russian), and for dealing with cross-linguistic/cross-cultural data from around the world (not that i've really done much yet... I am a lame grad student, spending too much time in class and not enough time researching!)

[yonked.livejournal.com]

1. Doing an REU at Los Alamos. They haven't assigned me to a project yet.

2. #[unspecified-return-value]

3. Corn starch mixed with water! Non-Newtonian mayhem (http://www.rsvp.rpi.edu/presentations/fluid-dynamics/asx/03.asx).

[nibot.livejournal.com]

I (heart) Ooblick!

[squarkz.livejournal.com]

1. may = working 12 hours a day in the lab, probably, trying to finish this paper before i leave. june = moving home with the parents, which ought to be... great (heh), and finding a place to live in seattle. july and august (and september) = argentina!

2. i'm not. but i got invited (just this afternoon!) to visit berkeley and party with geo people in december.

3. i graduated today!

Congratulations!

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

I just thought of one more thing I'd like to do--this summer would be good-- Or maybe next...
--Go hiking in the Sierras with a real geologist.
--Hey Tob--whadya say?? I think there's a group developing!

heh, thanks!

[squarkz.livejournal.com]

well, i guess now i am a real geologist, since i have the degree and everything!

but it's laughable how little i really know about geology. (though we did study the sierras last week in my tectonics class -- at least now i know something -- i didn't know anything about igneous formations when i hiked there two years ago.)

[squarkz.livejournal.com]

oh! i have something way cooler for #3. i learned how opals are made today! i had no clue how cool opals were until i took a materials science class, i guess. they are made of tiny little glass spheres in a close-packed arrangement! that's why they reflect all kinds of colors -- the diameter of the spheres is roughly the wavelength of visible light.

apparently they're quite easy to synthesize, and there is some reallyfuckingcool research going on that uses them for optics. i love when professors talk about their own research! now i want to be a materials scientist!

[once-a-banana.livejournal.com]

1. Editing and finishing Volume 30, 30S (and hopefully also 27) of the Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, learning to play and worship my new flute headjoint, catching up on video games and DVDs, not spending money on any more of them, spending some quality time with friends, watering my garden, probably spending 6 weeks in July-August doing fieldwork in coastal Oaxaca, where Huave is spoken (still don't if that's really gonna happen or not).

2. In Berkeley all summer except probably not July 1 - Middleofaugust.

3. My brother just bought a new house! I've just spend the last 24 hours helping him move the big stuff, in return for massive bribes of restaurant food.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

fieldwork in coastal Oaxaca, where Huave is spoken (still don't if that's really gonna happen or not)

It better happen! I've already booked my ticket to visit you! (-:

My brother just bought a new house!

In Berkeley?

[once-a-banana.livejournal.com]

Nope, in San Jose, where he works (for AT&T). I ride the bart down there a lot and he picks me up at Fremont, and we go gallivanting about the South Bay. I'll post an entry soon about our wild and crazy weekend...

[anemone.livejournal.com]

1. Sailing & kayaking, and generally goofing off. I may do research too.

2. I don't know.

3. Google calculator. Try 1 mole in baker's dozen.

4. I do not believe I have a soul, but others might have their own souls.

[shamster.livejournal.com]

1. Mad science, working for the Man, NIST.
2. I'm not in Berkeley, nor do I really understand what it means to be IN Berkeley. I'm definitely not IN.
3. When a massive star blows up in a supernova explosion, it sometimes reduces to a neutron star. The magnetic field of these neutron stars constrains electrons to move in synchronicity such that, when viewed from earth, they shine a beam of radio light that passes once every while. B 1257 + 12 is a rapidly rotating neutron star, and its radio pulses intercept the earth every .0062185319388187 seconds. The pulsations of these rapidly rotating neutron stars give rise to the name 'pulsar'.
4. The earth is flat when viewed from the reflections of a spoon.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

angry_geologist, comment on my post in 2008! (-: