shocking facts revealed

Morale today: 6.0
Morale yesterday: 3.5 evening: 6.0 <-- the beatings must be working!

I have this awesome new Morale Index.

Now we just have to invent some kind of Morale Sensor, and then we can plot not just heart rate, blood pressure, thought clarity, etc, as a function of "time since caffeine consumption," but also morale! Yes!

Wait, no. I'm trying to reboot my coffee addiction. Today was going to be the day, but how can I pass up "Chocolate Raspberry" flavoured coffee? I know, I know—some little purist faerie dies everytime someone buys flavored coffee—but it's worth it.

Something like every two weeks I become utterly convinced that I have to leave the University of Rochester. Yesterday was one such day. Except that notion has also become convolved with the knowledge that I'm in much too deep a well to ever get out of this place while I still want to. So I spent most of the day moping about the physics department, until Kris (vyncentvega) gave me a sandwich, I fixed up Qin's computer with an ebay'd wireless card, Ryan (four) and I went for take-out chinese, and Brette (narrow_bridge) and I went for a walk in the snow. Then things were better.

Current outdoor temperature: -11 degrees Celsius
Current outdoor windchill: -21 degrees Celsius (insert expletive here)

The best part of yesterday, actually, was when it started snowing. But the snow was kept aloft by the wind, and from our fourth-floor office window, we could look down into the turbulent air-snow mixture and it was very fascinating. Maybe like that bag-in-wind scene in American Beauty was supposed to be.

The Morale Index runs from zero to 10, with 0 being "get out of here by any means necessary," 5 being "general ambivalence," and 10 being something like "Congratulations, you have won the Nobel Prize!"

I am going to stay in ROC this weekend. Shocking, I know. I have a lot to get done, both for school and personal projects. But I put Pittsburgh on the road trip list. B: If you have a party, we will come.

Some awesome things I have come across lately:

* Cori [the awesome girl from friendster who invited Ryan and me to a dinner party last week and has established a livejournal presense as txcori] has clued me in to the existence of what must be one of the awesomest ways possible of preparing coffee: the vacuum coffee pot (and the physics thereof). I guess it's sort of a retro thing that's just been rediscovered by the Starbucks Generation, or something, but it sure is nifty.

* Every self-respecting computer scientist (and I am hereby disqualified from the title) surely must own ("have read" would be too much to ask) a copy of The Art of Computer Programming. As close to a holy text as Computer Science can muster, it's still being ground out page by page from the secret underground bunker of Prof. Knuth at the unmentionable School Across The Bay And Down the Peninsula. Anyway, I've been enjoying stealing time to read through the online preprints of the coming Volume 4, including such scintillating topics as "generating all permutations."

* erinmack introduced me to archimedes314 who studies mathematics in Burlington, VT and Uppsala, Sweden. Check out this one. Fjords!

And now back to tensors. Next on my reading list is "A simple demonstration of the Wigner-Eckart theorem". I am highly skeptical, although it does begin with an unintended bit of undiluted hilarity: "At the level of a graduate student, the Wigner-Eckart problem can be divided into two parts (Eckart 1930, Wigner 1931)." Also check out this hilarious story about group theory in physics.

p.s. that Wigner-Eckard paper goes on to cite a paper by [the?] "Messiah, 1960" ! who knew?