Archive for August, 2006

Before I get around to finishing up my remaining Berkeley-related posts, I had the distinct privilege to meet up with a few of my Marshall colleagues in Washington D.C. this week. The event, something of a ‘preunion,’ was a vacation from what was already a very comfortable summer vacation and I had a lot of [...]


Ah, I thought I was done with this, but I just came across a fantastic book cover that got me laughing:

The book is not listed on Amazon, but I found the following description on authorhouse:
This is a text on Hamiltionian and Lagrangian Dynamics aimed at the student who has just finished the calculus sequence. 
            [...]


Unfortunately I’ve departed Berkeley and am now hurriedly unpacking/repacking in Los Angeles. I have a short list of unfinished Berkeley-related blog posts that I’ll be putting up in a week or so, but I’ll be going on a short vacation starting on Tuesday to meet some of the other Marshall scholars a week early in [...]


Update 30 Aug 2007: I got a rather rude comment from Josh, apparently a Cal undergraduate, who didn’t think I was portraying the full glory of the Cal-Stanford rivalry and claiming that my personal anecdotes were lies. I originally took down this post, but have since decided to return it since I think it’s still [...]


I’m going to try something new and post a public ‘SOS’ asking for help on a few details that I’ve become confused about. If you have any insights, please feel free to drop me an e-mail or post a comment. References refer to Peskin and Schroeder’s Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. Questions are bulleted to [...]


I have nothing coherent to share, but I do have a few random science-related and Cambridge-related links.

Ah, tha’ed be brrrill-yunt. A repository of accents (not necessarily the best representations) are available at The Speech Accent Archive. I can’t wait to visit Glasgow.
Darwin, the new King George. A Michigan State University study has shown that [...]


Or: How pop culture got intelligence wrong and misjuged the value of information.
Ok, I should explain the sensationalistic title. “Baby grad students” refers to anyone who may have a future in academia. Despite their poor science and mathematics questions, I have nothing against Jeopardy … and mostly nothing against babies. I do have a problem [...]


Today I was treated to a very nice lunch at the Berkeley Faculty Club, so I thought this was a natural subject to append to my “Big Physics” series:

Big Physics I: Analogies
Big Physics II: T-shirts
Big Physics III: Parking
Big Physics IV: Faculty Club(bing)

Faculty clubs are interesting things that I don’t quite understand. The primary function which [...]


A message from Scooter (pictured below) and me to the television industry: Please stop playing scary previews for scary movies.

I’ve recently taken to having the television on in the evening to provide some ambient noise while I grade/blog/read. However, Scooter and I have been disturbed by the number of scary movie previews that are played [...]


One thing that a professor with a Cambridge PhD once told me was that even as recently as the 90s, Cambridge still had the flavor of an ‘old boys’ club at the expense of its women. A recent article in The Times describes one current (female) Cambridge professor’s recollections of an older academic era where [...]