rochester

It's an amazingly beautiful day in Rochester—the most recent in a sequence of spectacular days, all spectacular in their own ways.

Three days ago it was sixty-two degrees and sunny. Sixty two degrees! In the middle of January! It was as if the Earth had wobbled in its orbit, suddenly thrusting us again into the sun's life-giving rays. I ate breakfast on the porch. We walked outside in shirtsleeves, no snow in sight. Bree and I climbed the "pinnacles" of Rochester, tramping up through the fallen leaves and bare trees from Pinnacle street up the hill that sprouts all the radio antennae in the middle of Rochester. It's not high, but still has distinction (as mentioned by rudybang) as the highest point in Rochester.

Yesterday came a snow storm, and today the temperature plunged down to 12 degrees (F). I like the winter, though; snow blasting through the air, it's pretty to look at and makes for a good studying atmosphere. Hole up in a warm and cozy house with hot chocolate and some books to read. Today dawned bright and clear, blue skies and sun on a very cold and snowy landscape. It was too much to remain holed up inside. I took the excuse of returning something for Amol (dhondu) to his place of work eleven miles south of here in the town of Scottsville. He's right, it's a scenic drive, by the river, by snowfields and barns. I like how the amber stalks remaining in the cornfields poke through the brilliantly white snow.

I kept driving past Scottsville, out into the countryside, village to village in the sunny, snowy landscape, navigating without a map but by wits, dead reckoning. I wish my digital camera were working. It might be a nice bike ride, down to the villages, get something good to eat at a little diner, ride back. Driving back towards Rochester I discovered the Caledonia Fish Hatchery, supposedly "the first fish hatchery in the entire western hemisphere." I parked briefly at the Rochester airport and scoped out the small, single-engine planes operated by Rochester Flying Club and Rochester Air Center; I'm tempted to seek out flying lessons with the latter.

grad school

Poking about on the Departmental Reports page on the "Internal" section of our Physics dept website, I stumbled across Dan Watson's rather odd talk, "What are graduate schools looking for?" It's odd in two respects: First, he recommends a specific reading programme to prepare for the verbal GRE, and second, he gives a bizarre formula to evaluate your prospects for grad school admission. Giving a formula is not so completely weird, but allegedly this formula, a linear combination of the strengths of your various application materials with coefficients taken out to six significant figures, is recommended by the NSF.

(If the the thing is accurate, my conclusion is that I should definitely have retaken the Physics GRE or applied in computer science; substituting my CS GRE score for my Physics GRE score, my score on this thing goes from 3.6 to 1.7; in words, from "apply to a couple of the elite schools, five or six schools in the next tier, and a couple of safe schools" to "apply to all of the best graduate schools, and for fancy graduate fellowships like the NSF Fellowships. You don't have to worry about anything.")