Mitt liv som Tobin

Remember that movie Twister? No, not the get-to-know-each-other party game, but the movie where a bunch of crazy guys goes driving around chasing tornadoes? Well, our job here is kind of similar. However, instead of driving around the midwest chasing tornadoes, we sit on the beach and chase earthquakes.

Yesterday started out rather amusingly. I came into Todd's office to ask some questions.

Todd: "Let's walk and talk.. we have to go on a venture."

Tobin: "Okay. I want you to tell me about the Vee-Orb Router."

Todd: "It uses the BGP protocol, just like routing on the internet. Hey, did you bring climbing gear today?"

Tobin: "Nobody told me to bring climbing gear.. anyway, how much of VORB router is implemented?"

Meanwhile Todd unloaded a couple full-body climbing harnesses and a hard-hat from his trunk.

Tobin: "Where are we going?"

Todd: "On a venture!"

We walked down to the lower building of the Scripps institute and took the stairs down the basement. We visited Jose who was pumping down a vacuum in a bell jar to test a new, ultra-sensitive seismometer that essentially uses a michelson interferometer to measure tiny vibrations, and air resistance has an effect on the spring constant, you see.. so the air had to be pumped out.

Todd opened a hatchway in the floor, and here we found a gigantic hole. Supposedly there was at the bottom of this hole a large room with a vibration-isolated floor. One-by-one we climbed down the ladder into this hole.. it reminded me very much of the entry to that cave in the X-Files movie.. you know, down to where the "alien life presense" was lurking.

Todd entering the abyss:

Todd: "I've reached the bottom... I don't see any .. passageways."

It turned out that the room we were told of did not exist, or at least we didn't find any evidence of it. Nonetheless it was a rather thrilling and unexpected adventure. Here's the hole -- that speck is the lamp at the bottom:

* * *

Usually the earthquakes we're chasing are small or far away. But yesterday there was an actual earthquake right here, and all hell broke loose -- albeit in an incredibly organised fashion. We were outside on the beach, drinking coffee at the time. In fact, I was slurping a delicious iced double mocha latte at the time and happily hacking away at some crazed C code from another decade (on my laptop computer which happens to be named "hacktop", by the way), when all of the sudden F and various other persons jumped up and exclaimed, "Tiiiiime to get to work!" as they all ran back towards the lab.

Tobin: "Wha-Whaa..? I am working!"

F: "Didn't you feel it??"

Tobin: "Feel what?"

I guess I was in another world, one full of hacktops and delicious fresh pressed espresso and that delightful color of the ocean shimmering in the sun, a world in which I was completely oblivious to this alleged earthquake.

So rather than calmly looking at the "wiggles" (as we so lovingly refer to the seismic signals) from hacktop, I ran inside with everybody else. But I'll paste in some wiggles here for your enjoyment:

Already the phone was ringing incessantly with various press enquiries. Already a betting pool as to the magnitude was set up. The big flatpanel display showing automatic earthquake locations attracted a whole crowd of people.

P:(urgently) "Have you got a solution yet?"

F: "Not yet.. Okay, looks like it was off the coast here.."

P: "USGS is reporting Mojave desert.. "

G: "No, we have a location off Pt. Loma .. out to sea. "

...

A pretty exciting day at the earthquake lab, all around.

* * * *

P.S. here's to the novelty of having my (almost) own office:

I bought a refillable UCSD coffee mug today. What a dangerous item! I'm all hopped up on caffeine now. I was hopped up on caffeine already when the cafe closed and the guy offered free refils to anyone from the coffee that was left over. Who could resist an offer like that? So far I've had "Chocolate Raspberry" (yum!), "Best of Africa," and "Moto Brew." (jitter jitter!)

Sitting at Grove Caffe. Writing column for Forefront. Thinking about going to the beach.

John ran a marathon this last weekend... I wished him luck on Friday.. when I came back on Monday, he answered the door in crutches. "Oh, I see." "Yeah, I twisted my ankle [or something] at mile 16!" "Oh my." "And then I ran 10 more miles!" So, congrats to John. I couldn't have done it.

Check out the plea I posted on the ucsd community.

P.S. The wireless internet access on this campus is awesome. Walking to campus this morning a lady at a bus stop asked me if I knew when the bus was coming and if it would take her to wher she wanted to go. Well, she was visiting from Australia and I am a complete San Diego neophyte, so we were both clueless. No matter -- whipped out the laptop computer and we were close enough to campus to get access and check the bus schedules and all that.

Next stop: UCSD tunnels?

Some interesting email:

• I just received some spam with the title "so strong so big eigenvector compagnie". Is this what they call math porn?

• I also received my livejournal MindMap. I don't know how it's computed, but it's still kind of interesting.

• I also just received a little update from Google saying that I was added to the SDSC staff listing. Add a ego-search to Google's webalerts and you'll be notified every time Google discovers a new reference to you (or whatever search phrase interests you).

Okay, now to the beach.

I spammed the UCSD fraternities asking about summer housing. I received the following response:

Unfortunately here at UCSD we do not have houses.

It's a strange, strange world.

They don't have co-ops either, but that's less surprising.

I created a wiki page to track these SanDiego oddities.