Yes, I have turned in to someone who posts about their cats, but I think you should know that ours are getting along really well now. I was worried about this, but we emptied out a spray bottle and started leaving them together but spraying them with water when things got too rough. They spent a day very wet and now play a lot but get hissy and growly a lot less. And we'll find them curled up together asleep on the couch, or on the cat bed Ben put under his monitor to steal them from me. At some point he apparently found them sitting together, licking each other's faces, which is very cute.

The first paragraph was a ruse; this entry isn't entirely about cats. I finally finished the last fellowship application I was working on, in a flurry of signatures, paperwork, and express mail. Which means I applied for three, all national and all really competitive. I have to admit that I don't expect to get any; it's just too reminiscent of the first time I applied to graduate school. Some of them, this is the last year I am eligible, and there are some especially for women that I will still be eligible for next year. But applying to them is so very unpleasant, and sort of expensive with all the transcripts and things that you need. It seems like a waste of time that you could be spending on research, but then I wouldn't sneeze at the extra money. There is a Penn fellowship I would be eligible for except that only one person in each research group can have one, and someone else in my lab already has one. But maybe in a few years I can steal it from her.

I like reading pop neurology books, like Phantoms in the Brain, and I just finished Oliver Sacks' classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It is a series of case studies, and one of his comments really took me aback. He mentioned that Shostakovich was examined by a Chinese neurologist who found a metal splinter in his brain, embedded there no doubt sometime during his military career (from which a lot of his best work comes). He apparently refused to have it removed, and claimed that when he tilted his head to the side, he heard melodies which he made prolific use of in his composing. I was unable to find much confirmation of this on the internet, though, which seems weird for such a cool factoid. The same fact is referred to in a 1998 New Scientist article, though. Apparently Sacks has a new book about the neurology of music, which I should really get from the library.

And also, we received our wedding invitations in the mail and they are beautiful; I'm very happy with them. We also got some quasi-engagement photos in the mail, which were a present from my dad, and I want to see if I can scan them in before giving them to people. I wish I could still ninja Chih's scanner.

It's nearly the end of the semester. This means that I am finally done with teaching, after having to get a lot of make-up lab students in this week. It also means that I'm done with classes, though the only class I was taking was this seminar. I have a short paper due next week that I'll have to get on this weekend. And then there is research... blah. I learned a lot of cool microscopy techniques this semester, as well as some device fabrication, and had a lot of fun doing mini-projects with that. But my main project, the cryostat for low-temperature AFM, is a big pile of fail. The vacuum is bad and the current theory is that that's causing the cold finger to not get cold. Figuring out why this is happening and how to fix it has taken a lot of time and waiting on materials and machining, and doing it in parallel with everything else has made it really drag on, to the point where I'm just sick of the equipment and hate working on it. But I persevere, mostly so that I can someday finish this project and get one that's actually fun. The low-temperature AFM we would be able to do if this ever succeeds would be very interesting.

And just as I'm writing this, I get an e-mail about needing to specify my classes next semester. I think I'll be taking a course on Nanofabrication, but the course is crosslisted and the two listings sound really different, so I'm trying to find out more about that. And I might take a mathematical physics course... I don't know. I wish I knew whether they were going to teach Advanced Solid State physics next fall (I inquired with the professor and the graduate chair and neither knew). But I shouldn't be teaching, so I should have a lot more time available for research.

I also need to do a couple more fellowship applications, in the 'not very likely but please give me some freaking money' category. The NDSEG is due at the beginning of January, and the GSRP is due at the beginning of February. And of course they have different essay prompts than the NSF. Time for fun!

But I am getting paid to learn about strange and beautiful things, like liquid crystal domains or blinking nanocrystals or quantum dots.

I got my NSF application in on Friday, after a lot of help editing my essays from Jen and my dad. It was interesting reading Jen's essays and seeing some of the amazing outreach things she's done, and talking about how we wanted to represent ourselves in our essays. In our initial drafts, we were both too hesitant to blow our own horns. It reminded me of a study I read about a long time ago, asking high school students who had been accepted to good schools how they got in. The guys were all, "I got in because I'm really good and the school knew I'd do well," and the girls said things like, "It must be a fluke, I'm not really good enough to go there, etc." Women also tend to share credit more, though successful people also do this because they know they can. But I digress.

I feel I have a better chance at actually winning this time, just because I understand better what they want and have a stronger record. It didn't occur to me as I was doing it, but the WISP (POW, whatever) revitalization speaks strongly for my efforts at outreach, which is very important to the NSF. Of course, it's something like 17% of applicants who actually win in physics, so it's unlikely. But at least I tried, and I'll try for the NDSEG and NASA GSRP too.

Then Saturday morning, I got up really early and drove Ben to the airport for his trip to Japan. I'm excited for him, very much so. But I do miss him, especially late at night. This is a little silly, but for a long time now I've liked to talk a little to him just before bed. When we were long-distance, before moving here and over this summer, I always called him when I went to bed and talked a little. And of course now that we're living together and I still go to bed earlier than he does quite often, I make him come hug me before I go to sleep. It's sad not doing that. On the other hand, being the only person in a bed and comforter large enough for two, with twice as many pillows as usual, is extremely cozy in its own way. And I can have a week of eating lots of granola, salad, and salsa.

I read a really interesting short book, called Ten Nights' Dreams by Natsume Soseki. It's ten short stories, all of dreams, and each is beautiful and thought-provoking. Anybody else reading anything interesting?

I picked Ben up at the airport last night, late, and brought him back home. It is really weird to have him in the house now, since I've gotten really used to him not being there. But it is also really awesome.

I'm pleased overall with how my summer went; I was initially worried that I wouldn't enjoy it much, that I would be lonely, that I'd be unhappy. The first week was really hard, just because I had to reprogram myself to not expect Ben to be around, but after that it was pretty great. I traveled a fair amount (but not expensively), did outdoorsy stuff, visited friends, played piano more than I had been, started running along the Schuylkill River Trail a couple times a week, etc. etc. The only thing that could have been better was my job, which wasn't as great as I was hoping it would be. But it's gotten better since the beginning of the summer, I'm moving towards doing more science, and I did a good job with the work I did get. Oh yeah, and I read a lot of books and watched a lot of interesting movies, and got out and met more graduate students in other departments (as well as more in my own department). Now that I don't have massive coursework demands on my time, I'm trying to experience the East Coast really thoroughly, in part because I suspect that when I graduate, I'll move back west, and in part because at Berkeley I felt like I got a lot more out of living there the longer I was there, and it was only near the end that I'd found everything I really loved. I definitely had the feeling there that I did more fun things in the last five months I was there than in the first two years I lived there, and I want to even things out more so that I'm finding cool things from the very beginning.

Ben loved his internship, and while I didn't like us being apart for the summer, I do like that it makes him that much more marketable for later when we have to find jobs near each other. He really enjoyed working at EA, and it's obvious to me that he's in the right field: he programs and plays computer games all day at work, then goes home and... plays computer games and programs. He has a focus which I don't have and will probably never have; I think that if I were making a living writing, or playing piano, I would go home and exercise or read or do math. He is extremely broadly knowledgeable, one of my favorite things about him, but I'm not sure he has a driving desire to do lots of crazy different things all the time. We match each other well, because I admire him for his focus and immense competence in his field, and he admires me for my breadth, even though really we both have each of those things somewhat. But one thing that I like about him loving game development so much is that he can almost certainly have a stable, well-paying career, and so I feel less pressure to have one myself (though it's pretty likely, hopefully).

Sometimes I am frustrated by how difficult simple things can be at work. But sometimes they are rewarding anyways.

For example, our computer situation is kind of retarded, as I've mentioned before, but number one in the 'this is dumb' category is that only one computer can print. So, if I want to make mechanical drawings for the shop, I have to get CAD on the only computer that can print, since drawings are no good to me dead--err, no good to me unprinted. In fact, I think this is so dumb that I found out how to network our printer, what we need to order to do it, and asked my adviser if I could go ahead and get a JetDirect card (I tried doing it another way but it didn't work). It is gratifying that she thanked me for 'taking initiative'.

The drawings I mentioned, I'm doing them because I'm designing several copper and teflon pieces to machine for the interface between the cold finger, AFM stage, and AFM sample. Now, I have never done actual drawings and design this complicated before (at LBL, I just went in and told Rich what I wanted and he helped me do it). In addition, I've heard my adviser be pretty harsh on the design choices that the previous student doing this made, so I didn't want to screw up. After figuring out a geometry that would work, I took some drawings in to her on Monday and we talked about them for an hour. At the end, she only asked for one very minor change, and told me I had done a good job. Ha! Take that, mechanical engineering!

I just want to do a good job.

I did it! It went well!

( Read more... )

Overall, I'm really pleased with how things went. I hope I get to do this kind of thing more when I get involved enough in my research group at Penn.

Things are crazy and hectic. I have been working a lot to finish my remaining homework and get my talk ready, and I leave for the Bay Area in about four hours. I still have two homeworks due after I get back next week, and I'm bringing my lecture notes with me because my finals start late next week. I'm pretty anxious about my talk and everything, though probably it will go fine. But this is the first invited talk I've given, rather than a conference talk or a local seminar. Errrgh. After Wednesday I'll be a lot more relaxed.

Class now. Must relax!

Ben got a really great offer from EA to work in LA for the summer. So that's pretty much decided on, and it sounds like we'll try to sublet our office as a bedroom. We don't have a bed in here, but maybe we'll get a futon to try to get someone to pay a little to live here... it may not work because we're a little far from campus. Who knows. I had been doing okay with this, but the finality of it made me upset again. I love being with Ben so much, and since this hit last Friday when I was very unhappy with E&M, I began to see how people can give up careers to be with loved ones. But now it's Tuesday, I still love physics, and I see that this internship will be one more gold star on Ben's resume which will help him get a great job wherever I end up. I assume my choices will be more restrictive, though I suppose it could go the other way.

That invited seminar which I am so happy to be giving is next week! I practiced by giving my talk to the first-year seminar, which was good practice, gave good comments, and made sure that I had finished and practiced my talk at least a week in advance. I would love to have more opportunity to give scientific talks, because I abhor bad ones so much. I was really nervous about it, but overall I'm happy with how things went.

It is nearly the end of the semester, so my last teaching is this week, and I have one biophysics problem set, one E&M problem set, and two quantum problem sets to go. Then finals, which will be both more numerous and more painful than last semester. Oh god, and homework solutions, and grading... *sigh* but at least now the end is in sight.

Btw, the second cervical cancer vaccine shot really hurts!

I went with Joao and Gersende to LBL this morning, intending to chat with the people I used to know there. I sort of figured that most people would have like fifteen minutes for me and then need to get to work, but I didn't count on the procrastination that can be induced by the return of an exile! I thought I would probably leave before lunch, but instead I stayed until 7 pm catching up with various people. I talked to Bill, Steve, Sherri, Armin, Masaaki, Michael, Kyle, and Natalie, and of course Joao and Gersende, though I'm staying with them so I see a lot of them. I was really touched how many people heard I was coming and wanted to see me and talk to me about graduate school and also what they've been doing.

For dinner, some of us went out to Joshuya's, which remains some of the best sushi I've ever eaten. Yum to the ten. We need to figure out if one of those restaurants by Rittenhouse Square is any good.

The last project I did before I left LBL was the edge effects study for LBL CCDs, which I finished a week before leaving and ended up with great data for. I didn't have time to write a paper before leaving, but I wanted one and so I told Natalie I'd write a draft and e-mail it to her and we could work on it remotely. I wrote a couple pages of a draft, but it was summer and I was having fabulous trip after fabulous trip, and basically I just dropped the ball and never did it. But I told her that today, and she was like "oh yeah, I forgot about that", and I talked to Steve about it too and we're on! One of my extracurricular things this semester is to get that damn paper out!

Speaking of which, I am officially published! It was in the December IEEE Transaction on Nuclear Science, and Natalie and I looked it up to make sure it was there and then shared an official handshake. This seems like a good note to end on.

I regraded that homework that they wanted me to regrade, and tried to prevent it from filling me with bitterness. I felt very much like I was being punished for trying to actually grade accurately, instead of blowing through it quickly and giving more perfect scores. Then one of my lab groups turned in a report which not only shows poor understanding of the physical principles the lab was based on, but also completely neglected error. It is the first fail that I've handed out since the beginning of the term.

One thing that makes the time I spend grading each week feel a little futile is that most of my students have about the same cumulative lab grade. Which is to say, the difference between the best group and the worst group is about 5%. I don't know that telling them that would make them feel good, though.

Oh, and one thing that rocks about it raining is when I walk to campus before it starts, and then can spend my whole day in DRL since all my classes are here. It's rather convenient.

In brighter news, I was actually invited to give a talk at SLAC, as part of an advanced instrumentation seminar. Apparently the guy organizing it remembered my talk from APS-CA! It's really exciting, though what sucks is that I may not get to go. See, I suspect that one reason he picked me is that he thinks I'm still at Berkeley, so transportation expenses would be negligible. I wrote him back saying I'm at Penn, and would like to go if SLAC can defray my travel costs, and I guess we'll see what he says. I might try for a grant from GSAC, alternately, but that is less likely to succeed. Obviously, if I could go, it would not only be super-exciting and awesome, but also give me a free ticket to see my friends in Berkeley.

I have a wicked to-do list before my midterm Friday and Joao and Gersende's arrival, so I guess I'll get back on that. Bah.

I am...
Vindicated
I am selfish, I am wrong
I am right, I swear I'm right
Swear I knew it all along

Dear Jessamyn,

Congratulations! I am happy to report that the Admissions Committee has
accepted you for graduate study in the Department of Physics at the
University of Washington. You will shortly receive a letter from the
Physics Department with more details of our offer. You should soon
receive a confirmation of admission from the Dean of the Graduate
School. Your admission to the University of Washington is not official
until you receive this second notification.

We are pleased to offer you the following financial support:

- 3-quarter Teaching Assistantship with a salary of at least $1370/month
for the 2006-07 academic year (9/6/06-6/15/07)

- $2,000 Physics Department Fellowship for the 2006-07 academic year
paid on 10/10/06.

In addition, your support will include a tuition waiver and full health
insurance. More information about this support will be included with our
acceptance letter.

Once again, congratulations! We do hope you will choose to pursue your
graduate studies at the University of Washington.

Sincerely,

Simon Reeve-Parker
Graduate Advisor, Physics

I just won $100!

At the APS-California section meeting, the one I did right before going to Puerto Rico, they had student talk awards which they just now announced. I got third place for Best Presentation: Speaking (Luis Alvarez Award).

Ha!

I finished my proceedings paper, with a lot of last minute input, and it's now submitted and will be published in the conference proceedings. I processed a lot of input on it today, some of it frustrating, and I think it's really quite good at this point. I'll e-mail copies to anyone who asks, though I could see how it might not be fascinating for some of you. :) At the last minute, Natalie told me to just be the sole author, and put everyone else in the acknowledgment section, because I had given the talk and written the paper. Which is really awesome, even though on the TNS paper (rightfully) I'll be the primary with a bunch of people who put a lot of work in as authors, too.

I also was photographed for a diversity website, with Juhi and Natalie, because promoting diversity means finding the only women around and posing them in front of equipment. It's the most time I've spent in the lab since before the conference, though. :P

Today was the last day of the conference, so now I've got two days of tours and things, and then I return to Berkeley on Sunday.

( the conference )

( my talk )

( the hotel )

I'm running out of time in the computer room, so I guess I'll write more about Puerto Rico itself when I get to it, after seeing San Juan and El Yunque.

Ben won't be going with me to Puerto Rico, because the airline told us to wait and they'd contact us with reservations, and then they said there were no seats available. This makes no sense, because when bookworm_myrtle called them on Friday, they found seats. But now they say there are none. :( I'm disappointed (I say that a lot these days), but it was still really great to see someone be so kind as to offer miles in the first place.

I'm working on my talk and some supporting data right now. I'm supposed to give the talk to Natalie on Thursday, to the CCD meeting on Monday, at the APS CA meeting next Friday in Sacramento, and then at the IEEE meeting on Wednesday of the following week. It's kind of nerve-wracking to imagine all those things, but I'll definitely be prepared.

Last night I went with Ron to Yoshi's to see the Montclair Women's Big Band, who were fantastic. The soloists were great, the musicality was great, and I loved the songs they played. They also had Linda Tillery as a guest vocalist, who is apparently pretty famous around the Bay Area, and she was very good. There was one alto sax player who was especially good, and the percussionist and pianist and all the trumpeters. It's great too to see a women's brass band, since brass instruments tend to be so guy-dominated. It was surprising to me to see how few young people were in the crowd, though; I joked with Ron that I must've been the youngest one there, and the mean age was probably around 45. But the band was just amazing, and it was so relaxing to go there, have some sushi, and listen to great music.

So, it's for sure that I'm going to the IEEE conference in Puerto Rico. :) I'm giving a twelve minute talk, and staying here. I still kind of can't believe that I'm really going. I was very afraid that at the last moment, they'd decide not to send me, not because I work for mean people, but because it seemed so unbelievable to go to Puerto Rico for work reasons, for free. :)

I'm pretty nervous about the talk itself. I'll get to practice it at the weekly CCD meeting the week before, though, and I'll probably practice it to my mom when she visits. I want to practice a lot, so that it goes smoothly, doesn't sound the same as the earlier diffusion presentation that Armin from this lab did, and is easy to follow. I also would kind of like to meet people there from my field, and I suspect this'll be hard, because I'm so shy sometimes. :-/ I really hope that I can make myself be outgoing while I'm there.

The part of the conference that I'm attending is October 24-27, and my talk is the 26th. But the conference runs through the 29th, so I could stay on at my own expense. I'm in a condo and will find a roommate to share it, but most people who need a place to stay are staying for the whole thing, so I could get two extra days for the same hotel rate, which isn't too expensive. So I'm really thinking about coming back Sunday, October 30th. There are also a couple events that the conference sponsors that occur on those two extra days that sound cool. Here are the descriptions:

( old san juan and bacardi )


( el yunque rainforest excursion )

I don't care about Bacardi so much, but Old San Juan would be cool, and I'd really like to see a rainforest. :) There are a couple other trips that sound cool, especially "Eco Kayaking / Rio Grande", "Puerto Rican Fusion Cuisine" (kind of expensive), and "Camuy Caves and The Arecibo Observatory", which is sadly during my presentation.

It would be nice to have some company for these, though. I can probably meet people there, but it would be so awesome if Ben could come. Unfortunately, he would have to pay airfare, which would probably be a lot. Hmph.

It's funny, the last week of the summer semester, I was unhappy. Freaking out about my class, my friends, feeling alone, and wondering if the entire next year would be like that. I said something like, 'I feel like I've done everything to get around the grad school thing, even waited for time to pass, but it's still there and nothing has changed'. Four months, I thought, and this is how far I got? It was like there was a me that had only just found out, in great shock and pain, who was walking everywhere behind me. Mostly I was aware of her peripherally, but if I turned away for too long, she'd tug at my sleeve and her touch was numbing, was blinding. I was starting to feel like I'd never get rid of her.

But then my final came and went, and I went home. I saw people I hadn't seen in a long time, and made it through the somewhat moving and somewhat awful visit to my grandparents, and spent a lot of time with my parents and a few close friends. And I was starting to feel better, to feel focused on the moment. I had felt for a long time that the only reason I was dealing with grad school was because I avoided thinking about it, but I had this moment in the car with Ben where I realized that even if I turned my entire mind to it, it seemed commonplace, something that had happened a long time ago. And then when I found out about the A and had that day of good things, can you imagine, good things happening to me... well, that helped a lot.

Being back in Berkeley is much easier. My job is still a bit frustrating, mainly because of hardware problems, and I still have another semester of quantum to go, but everything is brighter now that I got that one part of the task done. I talked to Rich Muller, my physics advisor who was so helpful in encouraging my thesis and talking to me about what to do next. He was very kind, again, and supportive, and happy about the A. I gave him a copy of my thesis and he insisted that I sign it for him. I also talked to Natalie, who is leaning more and more towards sending me to that IEEE conference in Puerto Rico in October, which would completely rock and would also mean a publication. And on Tuesday, I did a presentation for this small journal group I'm in, like 5 people, that was 40 minutes or so on CCD basics. It's not a huge deal, but I felt really good about it and how well I could explain it. It felt good to do, and good to get comments on afterwards.

My time is nicer too. It still feels busy, but I'm used to mornings of swimming, piano, and then lecture, and then home and to work. Ben comes up on the weekends and we have this thing now, of going somewhere (Lake Anza, Point Reyes, campus, Wildcat Canyon, etc.) and taking a hunk of cheese, a loaf of bread, a sausage, and some wine, and having a picnic. It's fantastic; I love it. I especially loved swimming in Lake Anza last weekend. I can really feel my love of swimming growing as I feed it, and it's turning into this new thing of wanting to swim in large bodies of water. I don't know how useful this is, though. :P

I have to admit that in terms of news, I've put up a shield. I get these times when I feel so connected to the world, to everything, that I'm either very happy and reveling in beauty, or unspeakably sad. I try to protect myself, at times, from what I feel is a case of my personal empathy drowning my own self in waves of compassion or tragedy. So while I feel a little bad writing this entry without mentioning Katrina, etc., I have to admit that I try not to think about it. I sympathize a lot with what bookworm_myrtle said, about 9-11 killing you all at once, and then this. It feels as though tragedies increase, though probably I'm just becoming increasingly aware of them. And when they are too heavy for me, I try to embrace them and then move on, operate orthogonally so that they're part of the landscape, rather than a crushing burden.

I wonder if that makes sense.