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I suppose the main thing I accomplished today was to write and submit an abstract (posted at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nibot_lab) for AGU for the poster I'll be presenting. This is the first "publication" I have with me as a first author! It's not a peer-reviewed paper but just a poster session, though, but it's still cool. So I'm first-author on one poster and a secondary author on another. AGU is going to be awesome! I'm looking forward to seeing all my Berkeley buddies and geophysics friends.
School here is still not particularly exciting. Quantum mechanics is still mind-numbing. We had a "reception" last night for new grad students and the faculty. Not too many faculty showed up (5 or 6) but one of them was the QM professor. I mentioned to him that I was already familiar with all of this linear algebra that we're going over in so much detail. He asked if I thought others in the class were also already familiar with it, and I said that those I knew were indeed familiar with it. So I went to class today hoping that we'd fast forward to something new and interesting, but instead we had an hour and a half about eigenvalues. Gah! But this time I was not bored out of my mind, because I had brought the textbook and was able to read ahead. I read about the path integral formalism.
Afterwards some other students remarked about how difficult it was to follow the lecture. Someone asked whether I had followed the lecture, and I wasn't sure what the sense of the question was: Did I subject myself to following the lecture, or was I able to follow it? The intended meaning was the latter. I'm afraid, I'm very afraid. But Ryan says things will get harder pretty quickly. I'm looking forward to it.
On Wednesday I went to the Gravitation (G.R.) class, and it was excellent. We all sit around a conference table and the professor (Prof. Das) is a great lecturer. I think it will pick up neatly where my differential geometry course left off.
It has been raining a lot lately, supposedly because of the hurricane. The streets flood. The walkways at school flood. I'm surprised that everything floods. Rain isn't unusual here, is it? They had a thing on the news that said you shouldn't try to drive through water that's more than two feet deep. Two feet deep?? It rains infrequently in California, but when it does, we don't have this kind of flooding.
In general I'm liking Rochester. I like that there are nice wooden houses and tree-lined streets, and that everything is inexpensive and that it's not crowded and that it's a new place to live in and a new place to explore, and the people are nice and I have a great house and awesome roommates and all that. But when I read that Richard Clarke, Paul Krugman, and Al Gore are speaking at UC Berkeley this semester, and when my professor can't answer my question about Hilbert spaces — it's sort of depressing.
nibot_lab) for AGU for the poster I'll be presenting. This is the first "publication" I have with me as a first author! It's not a peer-reviewed paper but just a poster session, though, but it's still cool. So I'm first-author on one poster and a secondary author on another. AGU is going to be awesome! I'm looking forward to seeing all my Berkeley buddies and geophysics friends.School here is still not particularly exciting. Quantum mechanics is still mind-numbing. We had a "reception" last night for new grad students and the faculty. Not too many faculty showed up (5 or 6) but one of them was the QM professor. I mentioned to him that I was already familiar with all of this linear algebra that we're going over in so much detail. He asked if I thought others in the class were also already familiar with it, and I said that those I knew were indeed familiar with it. So I went to class today hoping that we'd fast forward to something new and interesting, but instead we had an hour and a half about eigenvalues. Gah! But this time I was not bored out of my mind, because I had brought the textbook and was able to read ahead. I read about the path integral formalism.
Afterwards some other students remarked about how difficult it was to follow the lecture. Someone asked whether I had followed the lecture, and I wasn't sure what the sense of the question was: Did I subject myself to following the lecture, or was I able to follow it? The intended meaning was the latter. I'm afraid, I'm very afraid. But Ryan says things will get harder pretty quickly. I'm looking forward to it.
On Wednesday I went to the Gravitation (G.R.) class, and it was excellent. We all sit around a conference table and the professor (Prof. Das) is a great lecturer. I think it will pick up neatly where my differential geometry course left off.
It has been raining a lot lately, supposedly because of the hurricane. The streets flood. The walkways at school flood. I'm surprised that everything floods. Rain isn't unusual here, is it? They had a thing on the news that said you shouldn't try to drive through water that's more than two feet deep. Two feet deep?? It rains infrequently in California, but when it does, we don't have this kind of flooding.
In general I'm liking Rochester. I like that there are nice wooden houses and tree-lined streets, and that everything is inexpensive and that it's not crowded and that it's a new place to live in and a new place to explore, and the people are nice and I have a great house and awesome roommates and all that. But when I read that Richard Clarke, Paul Krugman, and Al Gore are speaking at UC Berkeley this semester, and when my professor can't answer my question about Hilbert spaces — it's sort of depressing.
