You Can Drive?

A few weeks ago I was helping out with my pony club. (It’s like Girls Scouts, but with horses.  And technically it’s coed, but it’s almost always all girls.  I can’t imagine why.)  I was teaching the younger girls how to take apart their bridles and put them back together.  One of them asked me if I could give her a ride the next time, because her house is on my way.  I told her, “Sure, yeah, it’s no problem.”

The girl I was helping with her bridle—this new, very sweet eleven-year-old—looks up at me with wide eyes and awe in her voice: “You can drive?”  She made it sound like the most amazing thing ever.

 I had to stop myself from dying of laughter, because I didn’t want to embarrass her.  “Yes, I can drive.  I’m 25.”

“Oh. Okay then.”  And she went back to cleaning her bridle.  Children say the funniest things.

Aaron’s Lovely Russian

When I randomly run into Ivan in the hallway, sometimes I talk to him in Russian.  Aaron, my labmate, does not speak Russian, but he likes to swear in Russian when Ivan and I speak.

Here is one of our conversations:

«Куда ты идешь?» (Where are you going?) I asked as Aaron and I trudged up the steps.

«В лабораторию,» (To the lab) said Ivan as he walked down the stairs, to his lab, obviously.

«Моргала выколю, падла,» Aaron replied vehemently.  I won’t translate it, because it’s not such a nice thing to say.  And yes, that is pretty much all the Russian that he knows.

And this is how most of our conversations go.  Sometimes Aaron switches around the swear words, but that’s about it.

How Not to Speak at A Russian Nightclub

I’m taking first semester Russian this year, and I am lucky enough to have a Russian guy in my lab group.  So sometimes I like to practice my Russian on him.

While we were at work in the office kind of late last night, he asked me what I had been learning in Russian class.

«У тебя есть кровать?» (Do you have a bed?) I asked.

Slightly perplexed, but «Да.» “What else do you know?” he asked.

«У тебя есть душ?» (Do you have a shower?)

Even more perplexed, but «Да.»

A few minutes pass.

“You know Kacey, these are not the questions that you should ask at a nightclub,” he said.

“But why not?” I said without thinking.

Now he was a little uncomfortable.  “Well, it might imply something.”

“Oh, yeah.”  Yeah, whoops.  Apparently I was very badly, accidentally hitting on my labmate in Russian.  Yeah….  I guess that’s what happens when I stay up too late working.

My First Ever Anime Convention

Yes, I went to an anime convention. I am now probably caught up with my undergrad in nerdiness. (My lab has a running joke that Chad and I are in a competition to see who is nerdier. Mostly he wins, but only barely.) My friend from undergrad Iva was going to be at one on campus, so I went to it to hang out with her. It was an interesting experience.

When I first walked in, there were a zillion people wondering around in, umm, interesting costumes. I found Iva pretty quickly and met some of her friends, all of whom were also in interesting costumes. For the record, I was wearing just normal clothes. At some point in time someone said “cosplay.”

I leaned over and whispered to Iva, “What is cosplay?”

She said, “What we’re doing right now,” as if it was totally obvious.

“Standing around talking?” I guessed.

“But in costumes.”

Oh, so cosplay is wearing costumes and then being in your costume at the event. Okay, this part kind of confuses me. Lots of people have brightly colored wigs and interesting clothes. I only recognized a couple of costumes, like Link from the Zelda games, and oh yeah, that’s pretty much the only one I recognized.

It was kind of an interesting place. There were rooms devoted to various things: panel discussions on stuff (who knows what), music, booths selling everything from anime drawings and Pikachu hats to C-3PO masks for those who forgot their costumes. There were rooms for video games and card games and people talking about a million things that I didn’t really understand.

I gather from the event that some part of cosplay is actually acting like you are your character, though people take it to lower and higher degrees of seriousness. And then lots of people take pictures or videos of different people in different costumes. There was this really hyper group of middle school girls that were mobbing Iva the whole time. She was dressed like Riku or Repliku, or something like that. These girls kept following her around yelling, “Repliku” repeatedly and mobbing her. They kind of drove me insane after a while, but Iva is too shy or passive to tell them to go away. After a while I was trying to protect her from them, but they were really crazy.

There was judging of the craftsmanship of the costumes, because lots of people make their own costumes themselves. And then there is a sort of masquerade of all the cosplayers. (I don’t know if cosplayers is a word, but it is now.) Some people just sort of posed on stage in different ways, Iva and her friend performed a skit (as did some others), one of the little annoying fangirls sang a bizarre song in Japanese, a girl in a very strange green lantern costume recited a very dark and depressing poem that she wrote, and this awesome kickboxer guy scared the crap out of all of us by kickboxing all over the stage crazily.

Some of the costumes were really cool, especially the crazy hair and crazy wigs. And this girl in my program won the award for craftsmanship for her costume, which was crazy awesome. Iva won an award for her sword that she made herself. It is really cool and made of wood and clay and painted really well, so I was happy for her.

While we were at dinner, one of Iva’s friends told me that she was surprised that Iva had friends “outside of cosplay.” I thought that was a bit harsh, but Iva is very shy and it is hard to get to know her. But she is incredibly sweet and smart, and I love her a lot.

Right before Iva and all of her friends left, one of them told me that I was really cool. And then they all agreed that I was cool. It was very strange, because cool is not exactly a word that I get called a lot. And what does it mean, when a bunch of people in freaky costumes call you “cool.” Still, they were really sweet, and I did have a very excellent time. I really didn’t get any of the jokes, costumes, events, or pretty much anything else. But I was glad to see Iva and meet all of her friends.

The Downfall of Western Civilization

The other day I was standing in the checkout line at Safeway waiting to buy my usual weekly groceries.  I like to peruse the magazines, though mostly I am not that familiar with people who merit the cover of OK or Us Weekly.  I happened to glimpse a gray forehead with a bunch of white hair shoved into the very back of the magazine rack.  Lo and behold, Einstein was on the cover of Time magazine.  My line was moving without me, so I didn’t pull out the magazine.  But it got me thinking.

At first I was really annoyed.  What did Einstein do to merit being shoved behind Jen and Demi bonding over their tragic love lives and someone whose name started with a K having another baby?  Einstein was even partially covered by a copy of the National Examiner featuring Alex Hofstadter caught with prostitutes or something crazy like that.

I once read a book where several characters randomly offered their reasons for the downfall of western civilization.  The possible reasons included ball point pens and the inability to write a B and B letter among others, just in case you wanted to know.  But I have decided that the magazine racks at the grocery store, if not the cause of it, are definitely a symptom of the downfall of western civilization.  Seriously, does anyone actually care that Kate Middleton has a tattoo or that Oprah gained ten more pounds?  Okay, apparently I remember way too much from just glancing at the magazine racks every week while grocery shopping.  I am now worried that all of my knowledge of pop culture comes from the covers of magazines.  No wonder I’m so bad at pop culture trivia.

But then I started thinking that at least Einstein was in the magazine rack at all.  He may have been put behind all the other junk, but he was there.  The magazines featured a bunch of stars—using the term loosely—and one physicist.  He is the most famous physicist of all, though Newton, Galileo, and Feynman might be close.  I suppose physicists aren’t on the covers of the magazines, because they aren’t the right kind of famous and they aren’t doing crazy enough things in order to get on the cover of the magazines.

What would it be like if all the magazine covers were filled with scientists and politicians and world leaders and people who actually do real things with their lives?  And I don’t mean when the politicians end up in magazines because they were caught making hand gestures under bathroom stalls.  Could you imagine the headlines: Richard Dawkins To Write Another Book, Leonard Susskind Fails to Solve Equation, Water Found on Moon, Senator Smith Seconds Bill to Balance Budget (that one will never happen), or Obama’s Favorite Recipes (okay, this one might already exist),

Okay, so maybe Safeway is right: scientists don’t belong on the covers of magazines.  We are just not interesting enough.  On second thought, I would rather be boring.

The Undergrads in my Russian Class

This semester I decided to take first semester Russian. It seems like a little bit of a crazy thing to do, but it’s nice to leave the lab once a day and go to class and learn something completely different from physics.

Of course my class is almost all undergrads, and they amuse me sometimes. First of all, the guy who sits next to me is a sophomore physics major, and my housemate happens to be his GSI (TA for those not in the Berkeley know). They also make me feel really old. I worry that I am becoming an old and cynical grad student. I should be walking around with a cane, yelling, “Darn undergrads, stay off my lawn (or out of my building).”

The other day a couple of them were talking about their college applications and something about doing things online. I felt old, because when I applied to college you still didn’t have to apply online, and I chose to do paper applications.

Sometimes they get on my nerves though. The bad thing about undergrads, especially freshman and sophomores is that they haven’t quite figured out that college is not like middle school. The first day the GSI told us that every single homework assignment for the entire semester is on the calendar, so we just need to follow the calendar. But just about everyday someone in my class doesn’t have their assignment, because they didn’t know it was due or they forget their books at home or they were absent yesterday or they thought that a different section of the workbook was due.

I can see my GSI getting frustrated, though she is insanely patient, much more patient than I was when I was a GSI. And then I start to think, “I wasn’t like that when I was a first year or sophomore, was I?” I certainly hope not. I think it just takes people a while to adjust to the expectations of college. I hope they finish adjusting soon though, because I’m afraid my GSI is eventually going to explode.

You Know You’re An Experimental Physicist When…

I first started reading Physics Today when I was in high school.  My high school physics teacher thought I would find them interesting.  Actually I found them mostly incomprehensible and soon just gave up reading them.

Recently I was hanging out with my housemates talking and I was idly flipping through Kevin’s copy of Physics Today.  Surprisingly, I was most struck by the ads.  As most people who read Physics Today (or other science magazines) know, the ads are much more targeted.  They include software programs and pieces of equipment rather than drugs, watches, or perfume.

I was looking through them thinking, “Have that, have that, don’t have that, oh, really want that, have that, have that, don’t have that, etc.”

I’ve decided that know you are an experimental physicist when you—okay your lab—has more than half of the items in the Physics Today ads.

I Need to Sacrifice to the Lab Gods

You know those days where everything just goes wrong.  I think I have been having those for several weeks as far as the lab work is going.

Our machine parts were delayed by an extra week or two due to machinists getting sick and going on vacation and what not.  But they were finally finished today.  Yay!!!!  So we went to pick them up.  First we checked to make sure they were right, and then we wanted to clean them and make sure they fit together with the rest of the heat shields that are already clean.

The pieces are pretty big—the biggest is around 9 inches in diameter—so we had to use the extra large ultrasonic cleaner.  So we pull it out and fit it into the fume hood and fill it with water, by itself not an easy task.  We get everything just about ready, and then it doesn’t work.  Sigh.  We replaced the fuses on the control box, because they were blown.  But as soon as we plug the cleaner in they blow again, so there is a short somewhere in the cleaner itself.  So we dump out all the water and take it apart as much as we can to find the problem, but then we just can’t take it apart anymore.  So now our sonicator is in pieces on the lab floor and we’ve blown most of the fuses trying different things, but we are no closer to a solution.

This is just one day I realize, but both sets of our piezomotor drivers have died recently, so now both instruments are down.  Not that the Toucan wasn’t down already because of this whole heat shield problem.

We have just been having a lot of bad luck lately, so I need to sacrifice an undergrad to appease the lab gods.  Undergrads beware. =)

Waiting for the Machine Shop

In order to fix the problem with our thermal short, we had to slightly redesign one of our heat shields.  So now we are waiting for the machine shop to finish building the new parts.  Then we have to send them off to get gold plated, and then we can finally put our STM back together.  Yay!!!!

The Beast (the other instrument) is looking at C60 (buckyballs) and NaCl on a gold surface.  The pictures are quite pretty.  I’m going to process some of the images, and then maybe I will post some.

In other news, the Argon-ion laser is up and running.  It is giving me a little bit of a problem.  Over 40 mW of power is coming out of the laser, but then when you measure the power after putting the light through a fiber couple it is down to only 0.5 mW of power.  I know that the coupling is just really terrible, but it is turning out to be a royal pain to increase it anymore.  Luckily it turns out that for the moment that power seems to be enough.

I was joking that we needed to name the laser, since I have spent the better part of a week sitting next to it.  I decided that we needed a name that starts with A, but I couldn’t think of one (that doesn’t already belong to my lab mates or my brother).  Aaron suggested Aragorn, because he thought I would appreciate it.  My labmates are always teasing me about how nerdy I am.  I suggested Arnold, but then we compromised on Aragon (without the second r), so it is just slightly less obviously nerdy.  Of course there is another set of fantasy books about a guy named Eragon.  When I mentioned that though, the eyes started rolling.  Apparently I am too nerdy and read too many books for my own good.

The Eccentric HA Examiner

I help out with a pony club nearby, and part of the pony club involves ratings.  Basically it’s like exams before you get the next level, just like getting a Gold Award in Girl Scouts or becoming an Eagle Scout in Boy Scouts.  Our pony club recently hosted an HA rating, and one of the examiners was a little odd.

The HA rating is the highest rating for dismounted stuff, so it is pretty stressful for the pony clubbers.  At the rating I was dubbed the “Official Provider of Moral Support”, which basically meant that I wandered around cheering up the girls (and the one guy) who were doing their rating.  The examiner kept teasing me that I was the court jester and where was my hat and stuff like that.  He was pretty nice about it, but strange.

At the opening, we had to introduce ourselves, and I mentioned that I was working on my PhD in physics.  I have learned that this frequently results in awe and really strange questions about string theory.  And I was not disappointed by this guy.

At one point in time he called me over and asked me what I thought about UFO’s.  I must have looked confused, because he clarified, “I have seen several of them, and I want to know how they travel faster than the speed of light.”  I was thinking, oh goodness, there are so many things wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin.  First of all, UFO’s are UNIDENTIFIED for a reason.  They are not necessarily alien spacecraft.  And even if they are, how do you know that they travel faster than the speed of light.  I told him that I really didn’t know the answer to that, and he made me promise that I would think about it.  He kept periodically asking me for the rest of the weekend if I had figured out the answer yet.  But I really don’t think it is something that anyone can figure out in a weekend, even if he wasn’t a little crazy.