The final insult

Holy crap this take home final is really really really hard.

I have a week to do it...might actually take the entire week! O_o

Cookie cutter

It's so nice to not have to study quantum mechanics...

Thinking of re-starting the World of Warcraft account, though probably not till after I take this final. Might roll a rogue character. Haven't decided yet. Thinking of respeccing to 33/28 arcane/fire for my mage, too...

Penultimation

My quantum mechanics class ended early. Apparently he just ran out of stuff to teach us, so today was our final lecture (and it only lasted about 15 minutes)...so we're done. Sort of anticlimatic, really.

We go in on Tuesday morning to pick up the take-home final, and then we have a week to do it. This is a huge relief for me...I don't have to cram for this thing! I can do pretty much anything he'd care to throw at me if I've got a week to do it. I'm not sure where I really stand in this class...I ended up getting a 90 on the second test, so if he counts that first horrible exam, my average, including my homework grade, is about a 65...which is a mid-C according to his odd grading scale. If he doesn't count it, then I've got a pretty high A. Either way, I'm definitely passing, and I'm basically guaranteed a passing grade thanks to the final being take-home! (And after I turn that sucker in I'm headed down to Atlanta to have the most extravagant meal at Pappasito's Cantina that you can possibly imagine...)

My research project still isn't finished, but hopefully Jake will get back to me soon with the news that my analysis and routines basically work fine, and all that's left is to assemble the paper.

So, I'm basically done...my protracted undergraduate years are finally at an end. This summer I'm gonna chill a lot, play a lot of video games, and then go on a long, one-way road trip to California in July. Lookin' forward to it!

Ding!

Going up!

The latest news on Bigelow Aerospace's commercial space station plans. Genesis is still in orbit, Genesis II, set to launch later this month, is in the pipes, and Sundancer, which will be launched in 2010, will have a human crew.

The Genesis I, which is still orbiting, will be followed by a series of larger and more sophisticated vessels -- with a first functioning space complex by 2013 and a set of three complexes by 2017, Bigelow said.

Awesome.

Another one!

Got a letter from UC San Diego today...apparently I've been accepted into their program. This is odd because it took so long, and because they're not offering to interview me...the letter is simply an unconditional acceptance. If they had sent this sooner, I would have seriously considered their program, but I'm set on going to UC San Francisco now (which is a better school for what I want to do anyway, although UCSD is not much worse), so it's a moot point.

Also had my second quantum mechanics test today. I'm pretty sure I aced it! I discussed the test afterwards with some other folks from the class, and I can't identify a single mistake I made. Unless I made some careless error (and I double-checked my work, since I finished early), I may have actually gotten a perfect score!

OMG Madagascar doesn't really exist!

I was late for work this morning. This is odd, since I woke up when I usually do, spent as much time sitting around yawning as I usually do, and traffic was no worse than it usually was. I didn't even feel like I was all that unlucky with the lights this morning. But somehow, I was about 10 minutes late. Not really sure what happened there.

Something I found out indirectly (that is, via the facebook hotline...) some time ago is that my ex-girlfriend Kara has become an atheist. Not just an atheist, I found out when I had an actual conversation with her a couple of days ago, but a militant atheist, with a particularly strong animus towards Southern fundamentalism. Didn't get much detail about it at the time, but I sent her some kind of obnoxious little message along the lines of "ZOMG WTF WHO R U AND WUT HAVE U DONE WITH KARA LOLOLOL?!1??/"

Kara and I dated back when we were both freshmen in college -- which, by my lengthy college standards, is a good long while. We broke up almost exactly 6 years ago. (We have intermittently kept in touch since then, mostly online, but I haven't actually seen her in years.) I remember our relationship as being a ghastly failure, primarily because of our extreme differences in religious belief: she was a hardcore Christian fundamentalist, and I was perched atop the fence between agnostic and atheist, as I am now. Since this put us at odds on just about...well, every conceivable subject, our relationship went downhill pretty fast.

Over the past month or so, I've been reading this blogalogue between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan (whose blog, The Daily Dish, I read regularly), on the nature of faith and religious belief, and whether or not being a religious moderate makes any sense at all. It's an interesting debate, although most of it has spun off onto related tangents. Here's a paragraph that neatly distills the essence of the discussion:

There appears to be no principled separation between religious moderation and religious fundamentalism other than a facility for (and an inclination to) doubt. But how much doubt is too much? Why not doubt the whole shebang, as I do? The pope seems to believe many things which you doubt. Do you have reason to believe that the pope is mistaken about the true doctrine of Christianity, or do you just not like the social consequences of some of his beliefs? Can you justify the intermediate position you've taken with respect to Catholicism in terms of truth and falsity (rather than consolation and its lack)? And if you disagree that the truth of an idea can be neatly separated from its consolations, what does the phrase "wishful thinking" mean to you?

For the most part, I'd say that Sam appears to be cleaning Andrew's clock, but they are still in the process of writing, so it wouldn't do to make a final judgement too soon. But here's a different, but related, point that I thought was germane, especially with regard to Sam's stance, and Kara's recent de-conversion: Does being a militant atheist make any sense at all?

Since speaking (well, typing) with Kara a few days ago, I've been giving this a fair amount of thought. I've always described myself as an open-minded agnostic, and, when it comes down to it, an atheist, as well. The logic behind is goes something like: I do not know whether or not there is a god. Therefore I am not actively believing in a god. Therefore I am an atheist, sort of by default. I've read all sorts of arguments that attempt to show why there must (or must not) be a god, and I've found them all very unconvincing (it would not be charitable to call them 'laughable,' I suppose). I think militant atheists are a peculiar breed, and the zealous ones befuddle me. What are you being zealous about? Your lack of belief? And you think everyone else ought to share this lack of belief? Well, it's odd, that's all I'm saying.

But not necessarily wrong, just because it's odd. And being zealous about a negative belief is not that unusual, when you think about it: suppose you thought up a conclusive disproof of the theory of relativity. Wouldn't you be eager to share this with the world? (Well, perhaps you wouldn't. I would, though, being of a scientific mindset.) Or suppose you found good reason to believe that Madagascar did not exist? If you started sharing the news, would you be regarded with disdain as a 'militant amadagascarist'?

So, I guess, in this sense, there's nothing weirder about being a militant atheist than a militant arelativist, or a militant amadagascarist, which are both logical or illogical exactly to the extent to which their arguments make sense. To date, I haven't seen a militant atheist make a particularly conclusive case (to wit, you can't prove a negative, so any such case would have to revolve around negations...so the argument would be sort of a protracted siege, at best. This doesn't mean it couldn't be done, however, and there are certainly negations one could imagine that could make the hypothetical militant atheist's case much more persuasive than it currently is), but this doesn't mean that one could never be made, or that the attempt to make one is in any special sense silly, or worthy of condemnation out-of-hand. (Well, someone who's spent their life studying the theory of relativity, only to have the rug pulled out from under them, would understandably be pretty defensive, too.) It's probably also worth pointing out that there is quite a lot of evidence in favor of Madagascar actually existing, and of the theory of relativity being correct, so the analogy fails somewhat at this point.

So the answer, as far as I can tell, should be: It could make sense to be a militant atheist, but only if you have a real case for it. If you, like most atheists, are just saying, There sure seems to be a lack of evidence that god exists, then you probably ought to be what philosophers call a 'weak atheist.'

Dead run

I am doing really badly in my QM2 class. I think that he has dropped the first exam, which I failed terribly, since everyone else also did terribly. He was a bit vague, but I'm pretty sure he dropped it.

My next exam is April 12th, and then all that's left is the final. I can't fail this one. I really need to knock this one out of the park, just in case he decides to count that first exam. (Rumor has it that my professor will let you retake the final if you need this class to graduate and you're failing, but there's no way I'm going to let it come to that.) I figure if I do nothing but study from now until the 12th, I can at least console myself that, if I do fail, I did everything I could have possibly done to pass. I need to know everything completely cold. I'm going to work and rework homework problems until I can do this stuff in my sleep.

Right. So, degenerate perturbation theory, here I come...

(...and on a happier note, my knee is feeling better, and I've finished my past three runs without incident!)

Frat boys and matrix elements

First of all, let me just say that I hate frat boys. I really do. Screw frats and the people in them. It's 11 AM and I'm at work at the SLC and there's about 20-30 frat boys here (and they ARE frat boys, you can tell just by looking at them) screaming and running around and cheering. AT THE SLC. For about 2 hours solid. It's intensely obnoxious. Anyone who would be in this area studying has to go to a different area of the building because of these imbeciles. I can't even tell them to shut up because this isn't technically a quiet area.

Anyway...

One thing that turns up over and over in QM2 is 'matrix elements'; this is because you represent operators with linear transformations, and linear transformations are written as matrices. I realized that I don't understand that well why this is, so I'm reviewing that, and using this as my notepad...

For any vector with components a1, a2,..., an where you know what a linear transformation T does to its set of basis vectors, T|a> returns a new vector |b> with components:

b1 = T11*a1 + T12*a2 + T13*a3 + ... + T1n*an
b2 = T21*a1 + T22*a2 + T23*a3 + ... + T2n*an
...
b3 = T31*a1 + T32*a2 + T33*a3 + ... + Tnn*an

And T acting on the basis vectors gives you:

T|e1> = T11|e1> + T21|e2> + ... + Tn1|en>
T|e2> = T12|e1> + T22|e2> + ... + Tn2|en>
...
T|en> = T1n|e1> + T2n|e2> + ... + Tnn|en>

These equations give you the matrix elements for T. Take the inner product of each equation with one of the basis vectors to find these; for example, to find the element T21:

<e2|T|e1> = <e2|T11|e1> + <e2|T21|e2> + ... + <e2|Tn1|en>

But the Tij's are scalars, so you can take them out of the inner products. Assuming this is an orthonormal basis, you are left with only one term on the RHS that is not zero:

<e2|T|e1> = T21<e2|e2> = T21

So this is the formula for finding the matrix elements.

C++ ftw

I've been thinking that I would like to get involved in computational biophysics research when I get to UCSF, even though my background is mostly in experimental work. The work I've been doing with Jake here at UGA is mostly computational/analytical stuff, and while the specific stuff we are doing (analysis of threshold traits in multiple environments) is not particularly interesting to me, I do like the sort of work that I've been doing. I guess I've always enjoyed working with computers, so it's not any great surprise that I like this kind of stuff.

One thing that I am planning on doing this summer is really throwing a lot of energy into re-learning C++. I knew C, and C++ to a lesser extent, fairly competently when I was in high school, so re-learning it should not be so difficult, but I think I will probably have much more success getting involved in computational research at UCSF if I show up and can demonstrate that I am a good coder. It is something that I do have a relatively strong aptitude for, but a lot of the more complex ideas and syntax fades from memory when you haven't done it for such a long time.

I actually sat down at Hot Corner tonight and spent some time reviewing simple C++ stuff, and it's coming pretty naturally to me, so that's a promising sign! I guess I shouldn't spend too much time doing this during the semester, though. I've got a little over a month left until I graduate...ALL I need to do is pass this crazy quantum mechanics 2 class and I will be done. Easier said than done, though...

Not even four-letter words

Words really can't describe how much I hate having to be at work at 8 AM.

End do

So, I ended up getting rejected from Harvard. I expected this, since their application was due back at the beginning of December, and you normally don't wait this long for an interview offer! It's a moot point anyway, though, since I've already accepted UCSF's bid.

Would have been a nice ego trip, though...heh.

So, I applied to 8 schools, one of which (the University of California, San Diego) actually returned my application fee, which I suppose means there was some undetermined problem with my application and it wasn't processed or something. Of the 7 I was considered for, I was rejected from 4 (MIT, Stanford, UW, and Harvard), and received 3 formal admission offers (from ASU, UCSB, and UCSF). And I'm going to UCSF.

Perks!

I just found out that UCSF's graduate program includes not only payment of all fees and tuition and health insurance and a $26,500 annual stipend for living expenses, but also includes a fitness center membership and they give you a free brand new Mac laptop when you begin. I mean, I'm sure this is a for-business-use-only sort of deal, and you probably have to give it back when you graduate, but...wow! How cool is that?

Hee. Excited!

I am teh uber nerd

So I'm sitting at a coffee shop downtown, reviewing some mathematics (calculus, actually), and it's spring break. Everyone else is out partying, and I'm sitting here, studying theorems about infinite series and convergence. I guess this makes me some kind of uber-nerd or something. What's more, although I am reviewing this because I need to for one my classes, I actually enjoy this stuff a lot. I like learning about mathematics. I find it satisfying, and interesting, and even fun. I think I like it more than I like, for example, drinking myself blind, which is, I suppose, sort of the normal thing to do over spring break.

It's strange that a person can go out and drink until they puke every night of spring break, and their peers will think this perfectly normal, even praiseworthy, but if a guy would prefer to sit down and study something, that's weird, and mockable.

Ah well...that's why I'm such a nerd I guess...

Degeneration...

So, it turns out that degenerate perturbation theory is, like...hard. And tedious. And my homework assignment is due tomorrow morning at 9:30, DAMMIT!!

Decision

So, I've accepted UCSF's bid. (And canceled my trip to Phoenix, which seemed like the more polite thing to do at this point...)

I'm really excited about this. Moving to San Francisco, baby! Woo!

Crawling towards a decision...

Well, the UCSB interview is over, and I'm flying back to Atlanta at noon. The interviews themselves (or 'meetings,' as they call them, for us pre-accepted visitors) went alright, although I have to say, I guess everyone here was more interesting on paper than in person, because I'm not sure what I was thinking when I decided that UCSB had cool research and I wanted to come here! This makes me doubly glad that I got into UCSF! There is some interesting stuff going on here, but nothing that really got me fired up like, well...just about everyone that I talked to at UCSF.

Also, some of the graduate students I met here seemed pretty weird. The ones vetted by the school to show us around were unfailingly polite, cheerful, and had their heads up the schools ass, of course, but the other grad students I talked to that were not part of the recruitment session were pretty sketchy. They took us out drinking last night, which was fun, and a lot of the people there were cool, but some of them were just... I mean, damn. Nails in the coffin, guys, I definitely don't want to come here if the other grad students are douchebags. Overall, while the school and the town were beautiful, I got kind of an off vibe from the place. I don't think I will come here.

I have considered simply canceling my trip to Phoenix and accepting UCSF's offer, but it's only a week from now, and I am genuinely curious to meet Gro Amdam, who is so interested in working with me that she requested that I come early and spend almost an entire day meeting with her and her lab. Her research sounds pretty interesting, but this could also potentially be the most boring thing I've done to date... But I've told the UCSF admissions people that I will let them know by March 12th (when I get back from Phoenix), so even if UCSD or Harvard make me some kind of offer at this point, it's hard to see what they could offer than UCSF isn't doing better.

Santa Barbara is incredibly beautiful, though, I have to say. The pictures of this place, nice as they are, do not do this place justice. That is the main reason why I would want to come here, to be honest, after these interviews...and it would be so nice!! But, of course, I can't make a graduate school decision that way.

So, it looks like I'm going to be throwing all my stuff into the Civic this summer and driving to San Francisco. Sounds like fun to me!

En route

So, I'm on the plane to LA, headed to the UC Santa Barbara interview. This is interesting, because since I've already been accepted to both this school and to UCSF (which I am almost certain I prefer), there is absolutely no stress associated with this, so I can just breeze through, and enjoy Santa Barbara...which is an insanely beautiful area!

I am keeping an open mind, though. People have been telling me all along that I shouldn't take the US News rankings too seriously (and if you look at their ranking methodology, it's easy to see why!), so even though UCSF is much better ranked than UCSB (or ASU), I'm still going to their interviews, just in case they absolutely blow me away and I decide that I actually want to go there, instead! After all, as far as location goes, I'd be perfectly happy with any of my three options - San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Phoenix are all fine by me.

So, I still haven't heard back from Harvard or UC San Diego yet, and I'm not exactly holding my breath. To be honest, I'm fairly certain I'd prefer UCSF over either one of these places, and god knows I sure don't want to move to Massachusetts! San Diego's neat, because it's right on the beach, but San Francisco is better ranked, and it seems like there's more cool research going on at UCSF, anyway. Actually, that's kind of how I feel about these other schools: they're alright, and there is some cool stuff going on at each place, but UCSF has just so much cool research going on there. At this point, I am about 95% certain that I will end up accepting UCSF's offer.

Also, using this extraordinarily large laptop on an airplane really is no good. Wonder if Colin's managed to sell his tiny Vaio yet...

Yes indeed

I GOT ACCEPTED INTO UCSF!

OH SNAPPPPPPP!!!

More extreme happiness

Well, I got my rejection letter from MIT yesterday.

Also, I failed the CRAP out of my quantum mechanics test two days ago. And when I say 'failed,' I don't mean that I might have gotten below a 60% or some shit, I mean I would be super-duper stoked to even have gotten a 20%. I couldn't figure out ANYTHING on that test. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do about this class (obviously I should have taken Emag instead, but too late for that...). I NEED to pass this class, or I won't graduate.

Still crossing my fingers waiting to hear back from UCSF; they said I ought to hear back by the end of the week. Getting an acceptance there would make this whole rotten week alright again.

I hate days like today

I got my rejection letter from Stanford today.

I got my rejection letter from the University of Washington today.

I got my rejection letter for my story, Rally, from Asimov's today.

I'm working a split shift today, even though it's President's Day.

I went snowboarding yesterday, so today I hurt all over.

Also, I have a quantum mechanics test tomorrow that I am going to cram intensely for tonight, even though the material is this close to being impossible to comprehend, and hope that somehow I manage not to fail.

In summary, I would like to extend a hearty 'fuck you' to days like today!