...is to buy some, put in the refrigerator outside the room. It applies to most edible stuff. This way one would think that there's still some left in the fridge and won't buy that much in the market. However, when he is in his room, he will be too lazy to go out and get the food from outside the room. And then consumption decreases.
The exam center took almost three months to grade those exams, which actually could take as short as one week. Just insert the answer sheet into the machine one by one.
Passed.....not surprised at all. I'll try to take the next level (which I should have been taken last year) this December. By that time all the grad school application should be done. There will also be no lab class to worry about. So it should be possible to go. We'll see.
Too much work to do could prevent depression, but at the same time it also makes you forget your goal. I almost become the type of student who only cares about the grades. Thanks to my friend. I feel like finding back some of the past passions about research.
Snow is pretty, but this is what follows the snow:
Some people here have this bad habit. There is only a little bit snow and definitely not enough to form a layer of ice on the ground. I don't see the point of slushing so much artificial stuff on the ground. It is not even uniform. Well, it's probably cheap and people don't really care about the amount, but I don't think this is environment friendly. Definitely not aesthetically.
So, as a consequence, disgusting colors start to appear within a couple of days after snowing.
I don't recall the use of this in Europe though. They probably used gravel.
In the lecture this morning, the professor spent too much time explaining in the first half of the class. So the speed jumped up in the second half of the lecture. It feels like this famous quote by former MIT President Jeremy Weisner:
"Getting an Education from MIT is like taking a drink from a Fire Hose"
You can feel the material pouring at you. :P This finally feels like MIT.
But it is clear nevertheless.
At least to me.
....without leaving footprints. It's actually just a small trick. Ahaha.
ps. Don't explain here if you know it. :P
ps2. That's not me in the photo. I'm the one taking pictures.
I can now almost fully understand an anime without subtitle, but yesterday I couldn't understand which anime title a Japanese person was talking about. Ughuu. Looks like I would still have a hard time listening to "non-perfect" pronounciation.
I found out the reason why time is going so fast. That's because I'm busy copy slides into my notebook. But now I figured out that the slides are all from the book, I lost the incentive to copy things down. Instead I only jot down a few words indicating that this or that has appeared in the class. Forget about the numbers.
And when I stopped copying all the numbers down, things suddenly became very different....this is probably not something I would spend time doing research on later in my life.
In today's lecture the professor spend more than half of the time reviewing stuff from last week. As for the new material, a lot has been unexplained, or probably it is me who has the problem. His handwriting was also very stylish.
My family comes to visit me, so I won't post as often compared to the last few weeks.
We went to the science museum and watched a 3D show. It used polarized light to control the image seeing by each eye, thus creating 3D images. Before the show, I played a bit with the polarizer and found out the polarization of light by just reflection off surfaces is much more than I thought.
In basic physics, there is a calculation determining the specific angle for a light to be polarized by water surface. As I thought before, 1 special angle vs. R (0~180 degrees) is almost nothing, so I did not expect to see any polarized light coming, say in the auditorium. But apparently I was wrong ^^"
There were many large patches of polarized light.
I wish it was purple moon....just kidding
Morning, :)
Wow, there was snow. The field was all white, And I got the impulse of taking photos again. Well, I could do that later. Let's watch some animation first.
Noon, :|
The amount of snow is actually sufficient to build snowman. I had no intension on playing around with snow, but I did take some photos. Hey, it hurts to stand in the shower of hail.
Afternoon, :(
The snow became rain. And puddles everywhere. I accidentally stand in a of the pile of snow, and as a consequence there is some ice in my shoes. I could actually feel the temperature, and the shape. Soon it became water, and my shoes were all wet.
Evening, :]
I was too lazy to go out again....let's watch some more anime~
ps. as a result I watched 12 new episodes of animation today....
Today I wandered to the lab, and suddenly a lightning hit me. Bang. The step that used to be an obstacle became trivial as a consequence. It can be done in one minute......
Then we were stuck in the second step for two more hours. Then the TA came. Then it is solved again by a surprisingly easy way. It could be done in only one more minute.....
This is life (sigh).
I brought my camera with me today and got some nice looking photos.
Looking through the telescope which receives light from the interferometer...this might not make sense to most of the non-physics major people but I won't go deeper to explain them. Just think them as some optic apparatus. Look cool, aren't they?
Hyperfine splitting. This is the transition from p to s orbital, and clearly there are three peaks corresponding to m = 1, 0, -1.
I did too much today, and because of that I barely finished my assignments by midnight this evening. Sounds kind of stupid, ahaha. I underestimated the amount of work needed to prepare for tomorrow's lab section. Well, there is some progress in the research so I guess is fine. This would probably be the stereotype of my life during this semester.
I've been used to SI unit since I start learning physics. Now almost all the textbooks and lectures are using cgs unit. It's really a pain. Symbolic calculation are fine, but when it comes to numbers, I never get it right. I still haven't really plug numbers into the fine structure constant and get it right even once. Why are there two sets of units in the first place....
One of my good friends told me some easy ways of cooking. ^^ Suddenly I have much more choices for dinner(s) next week. He really could be a chef....
We used the extra 2 hours in day 0 to get ourselves used to the apparatus. The official starting date of the first experiment is next Tuesday. But we couldn't even line up the mirrors after trying for two hours. The two mirrors have to be completely parallel, or the interference pattern won't appear. We turned the three knobs (only three!) back and forth, but nothing was found. Frustrating....
Favonia and I tried to make egg rolls as a experiment. He learned very quick and found a good way of rolling the egg rolls. For me, the rolling was not easy...I made a gigantic one as my first one. It tastes good to me, probably a little bit to oily, but still in the tolerable region. The fat roll tastes like rice cake ^^". Although the taste is okay, there is still the aesthetic problem. Air between two layers of the egg roll outer cover will expand when the roll is fried, producing some air bubbles. Is there anyway this could be avoided?
Part of "the rice cake". This alone is equivalent to 5 or 6 rolls altogether.
The last one. I totally forgot to take pictures. There was some 20-ish rolls before.
The first part of the course is taught by Professor Peter Schiller on eye movement, which coincidentally is the lecturer of Vision and Audition system which I took last semester. The assigned readings are mostly the same as last term, except being packed a little bit due to the nature of the course. The transparencies look also familiar. Looks like I would have an relatively easy time for next couple of weeks. ^__^
This is a strange class that I'm not sure to classify as interesting or boring. Time flew by very quickly, and this is normally a sign of the course being interesting. But I can't find anything that is attracting me from today's material.
The class does look easy though. And underpopulated. Compare to microeconomics, there are only 1/3 to 1/2 students.
Fine to me as long as there are no oral presentation or long essay on boring issues. :p
The pdflatex in the cygwin disappeared? I wanted to write my problem sets on my computer...luckily I have an older copy of the cygwin setup. But that's on windows XP.....
Luckily, the section is not crowded, so we all don't have to move. My lab partner also moved without problem to this section. Experiments look pretty cool. I want to do the superconductivity one. Then I could have the chance to play with liquid Helium. 4.2K. And there is an experiment sometimes has to be performed at 3AM.
This class again has too many students signing up for it. First we were in a smaller classroom. A lot of people were standing in the sideways, and it is incredibly crammed. So we moved to a new location during the class.
The lecture today consists of introducing the 4-vector notation, variant, co-variant, metric, etc. Not new to me, but reviewing is always good. The professor who will teach the recitation also came. He had a special way of paying attention that makes others think he was asleep. That's my guess.
starts at nine in the morning....
There is an unexpected number of people signing up for this term, whereas there are only a few students in the past. This means that the time needed for everybody to have a presentation will be around seven lectures, and this is simply impossible. So there is a high possibility that the presentation would be replaced by a short paper which is expected to be 2 pages long.
It's kind of fun to see the professor ask how many of us are really thinking of taking the course for real. Everybody raises his hand.
The final version of the classes I will take for this semester:
Actually Windows Vista looks better than XP.
The games all seem to work under vista. I tried Otoboku, Tennai and ef -the first tale-, they all run fine. There are fewer reasons for me to switch back to windows XP now.
Allegro doesn't work anymore. It is supposed to be based on OpenGL and DirectX, but somehow it goes wrong. I'm pretty sure OpenGL works under vista. Maybe I should rewrite the core system of DWProject in OpenGL instead of allegro.
The X-terminal of cygwin is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Often I have to reopen the program a few times before it comes out. However, once it comes out, it is stable.
There's still the problem of sound support. My headphone works fine, and this is what I want for most of the time, but it's a bit annoying to see that the speaker doesn't work.
Red bones tastes good. If I continue to eat this much, I might end up fat.
I don't watch too many American football, so the only thing I could tell is that the line is moving left or right. And what a tremendous amount of commercial. More than half of the three hours are commercial. They must have cost a lot of money.
Looks like the anime's are playing fine. I can live on this then ;)
More screenshots will come later~
But until now it doesn't seem particular special to me. Kind of like old windows + new skin. And some new features that I don't care. Is this really a new version?
Oh yeah, it crashed already once.
I just downloaded directly from the website ^^.
Now installing. I wonder how it would look like.
Happy birthday~~~!!
As a celebration, we went to a fairly good Italian restaurant. It seems from online reservation that there will be no vacant seat until nine o'clock in the evening. We didn't think that we would like to wait until that late, so we went there at around 7 and tested our luck. Luckily, we didn't have to wait in line and got a seat immediately after we arrived.
The price on the menu seemed pretty unrealistic to us students. We started to convert into other currencies, and, wow, that dish equals 8 lunch boxes. Well, it's birthday. So we decided to be extravagant just once in a year.
My impression (which proved to be false later) is that food in this kind of restaurant won't be much. It's kind of stupid to leave and eat at other places as a continue, so I decided to order at least an appetizer, a main dish, and a dessert.
The appetizer was quite delicious. It was a stuffed boneless chicken wing with some sauce and vinegar. There is also some complimentary bread. We thought that since it is so expensive, we must eat more bread to balance the price a bit. So we ate all of them. Alas, the bread was so good.
Then the main dish came. For me, it was a 6cmx6cmx6cm pork cube (6cm ~ 2.3 inch). No bone inside. The surprising thing is that the meat were cooked, yet there was no part that was charred except a shallow surface. What a spectacular skill of the chef. It was delicious. But it was a little bit too much. Wait a second, there was still the dessert, right?
Then the dessert came. Oops. Why was it so big? We all wanted to cry when we saw the desserts. My dessert is a chocolate cake with melted chocolate in it. And some ice cream. That was where things went wrong. The dessert, which was supposed to be delicious as my rational brain told me, started to look like a monster. We tried very hard just to eat them. I still had a large cup of coffee.
Why did we eat the complimentary bread in the first place? Argh.....
So I tried my best to consume all of the food, and left the restaurant with a overstuffed stomach. I was really pushing my limits. It is really fortunate that I didn't eat lunch today. But still, 60 dollars is a large amount. I probably have to be frugal for a while.
Happy birthday, Dawsen....I'm sure this will be a unforgettable birthday for you.
All posts regarding Japanese animation will be put there.
http://fheadanime.blogspot.com/
There will also be a game blog, introducing/summarizing the games I've played so far. Coming soon....
It must be a conspiracy to pack food in so many different sizes that it is essential impossible to use up everything at once. At least for a beginner like me ;) As a result one have to buy new stuff constantly, which makes it more difficult to stop cooking without wasting food. Well, cooking is fun so I don't mind this though.
In order to use up the tofu, I cooked again this evening. Then the tofu is smiling at me again :( I'll cook again some time soon then.
The release date has been announced!!! 2007 Jul. 27
Looks like there will be something to look forward to during summer.
official site: http://key.visualarts.gr.jp/newsoft/index.htm
(The wallpaper is from official website, which is free to download)
