co-op

My new housemate moved in yesterday--Ben, a very cool medical doctor from North Carolina. Was a co-oper at Oberlin during college, did medschool at UNC and is now doing his residency at the hospital here (U of R). He brought with him tons of neat stuff, like two bike racks, some plants, furniture, bongo drum, and a lot of ideas about co-ops. Gonna be great.

This brings us up to nine people currently living at Ant Hill. We decided to use a lottery to determine who from our wait list will get to live here in the Fall. P.S. Special thanks to hypostatization for his generous gift of delicious beverages to the co-op.

LIGO

I'm finding Peter Saulson's Fundamentals of Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors to be an excellent introduction to the subject—readable, accessible, informative. It's a little bit dated by it's optimistic tone (which I nonetheless do find quite refreshing), though:

The next few years should see the commissioning of several new gravitational wave detectors of unprecidented sensitivity. There is real excitement for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the U.S., VIRGO and GEO in Europe, and all of the other gravitational observatories that may soon be built. While ultimate success is not guaranteed, the prospects are good that the world will soon be equipped with a network of gravitational wave detectors sensitive enough to record numerous signals of astronomical origin, broadband enough to allow waveform analyis that may reveal the structure of the sources, and widespread and redundant enough to allow location of the sources on the sky by triangulation. With such a functioning network, it should be possible to experimentally verify the basic physics of gravitational waves, as predicted by the General Theory of Relativity.

What happened?