Archive for February, 2008
I’ve always enjoyed learning about how the body works. (This probably comes along with being fascinated about how nature works at the subatomic scale.) Recently, I’ve been having some tummy issues [1], and I’ve found myself spending my free moments looking up obscure ailments on WebMD. I’ve run into an inverse-problem (like this one) since […]
Filed under: Student Life | 2 Comments
Particle Plushies!
I assume anyone who reads this blog has already seen The Particle Zoo: Subatomic Particle Plush Toys via Cosmic Variance, but in case you haven’t… (Image from The Particle Zoo) I already own a few Giant Microbes, but the chance to have a Standard Model’s worth of little particles on my desk is too much […]
Filed under: Just for Fun, Student Life | 4 Comments
Over the next few weeks, university seniors around the US (and abroad) will be getting responses for their PhD applications. Congratulations to everyone for the news in the coming weeks. I’ve put together the following bits of advice regarding the post-admission pre-commitment period between now and 15 April, mainly to clarify some points that weren’t […]
Filed under: Opinion, Student Life | 13 Comments
This morning I had a chuckle at a piece of satirical news,”Athiest Sees Image of Big Bang in Piece of Toast.” However, armed with leftover frosting from my Gingerbread-[Feyn]men, I decided that I could go one step further. Ladies and gentlement, I present to you five-dimensional Higgsless electroweak symmetry breaking… on a pancake! I tried […]
Filed under: Just for Fun | 1 Comment
Comic Relief for the STFC
One of the more high-profile charity organisations in the UK is Comic Relief, which fights poverty through comedy and entertainment. Their Red Nose Day event concludes with a television event where studios and entertainers donate their time to raise money and awareness for their cause. In that spirit and the spirit of raising awareness of […]
Filed under: Just for Fun, Opinion, Student Life | Closed
The Naming of Sparticles Flip Tomato, with apologies to TS Eliot The naming of sparticles is a difficult thought It isn’t just one of your grad student games You may think at first I’m mad as a crackpot When I tell you, a sparticle has three different names. First of all, there’s the name we […]
Filed under: Just for Fun, Physics, Student Life | 4 Comments
Inverse Symbolic Calculator 2.0
For all you numerologists out there trying to explain the hierarchy of Yukawa couplings, you might enjoy playing with the Inverse Symbolic Calculator 2.0 (via Reddit some time ago). The Inverse Symbolic Calculator (ISC) uses a combination of lookup tables and integer relation algorithms in order to associate with a user-defined, truncated decimal expansion (represented […]
Filed under: Just for Fun, Links | 3 Comments
Academic hindsight
For any of a million reasons I recently found myself reading Phys. Rev. D 28 1010, Analysis of anomalies in higher space-time dimensions by Frampton and Kephart. The paper derives the chiral anomaly in spacetime dimensions, and includes some neat polygonal Feynman diagrams such as this: What really got me thinking, however, was a statement […]
Filed under: Just for Fun, Physics | 4 Comments
Gingerbread [Feyn]Men
To my grocery-shopping delight, I discovered some do-it-yourself gingerbread people at Tesco last week. For £1.50, one gets a set of five blank cookies, two tubes of frosting, and some candies. I replaced the candies with Reese’s pieces, the only American confectionary to ever impress my English flatmates. (A recent care-package of peanut butter cups […]
Filed under: Just for Fun, Student Life | 6 Comments
An American Physics Student in England 