Archive for September, 2008
Repatriation
A few thoughts on my adjustment back to the US… “There are three things you can’t do in life. You can’tr beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.” -Bill Bryson, Notes from a Big Country. I’ll never get tired […]
Filed under: Just for Fun | 6 Comments
This is another post on my “farewell tour” (which will last until I can properly say farewell). I thought it was important to write one more literature guide since my QFT and SUSY guides seemed reasonably popular. For the first time since the deep inelastic experiments of the ’60s the high energy physics community is […]
Filed under: Physics | 4 Comments
Brief thoughts on blogging
Soon I’ll be off the blogosphere. Will I be back? (A question relevant to all of maybe two or three people.) I have mixed feelings about whether it is wise for a PhD student to moonlight as a blogger. On the one hand, it’s a great way to connect with the physics community. The way […]
Filed under: Opinion | 4 Comments
Arrival in Cambridge
This unfinished draft has been sitting in my blog directory for almost two years now. I think I’ll just leave it as-is and share it as a memory of my first week in the UK. I have similar scraps of paper recounting thoughts while I was on the plane to London, on the train from […]
Filed under: Expatriate Life | Closed
Totally random bits before I go
Here are a few totally random snippits that I had hoped to incorporate in some posts. Enjoy! Anybody who has not already done so should play with arXiv Structure. It’s not perfect, but it does a very good job of creating a ‘web’ of interconnections between papers. It’s a great tool for skimming the literature […]
Filed under: Expatriate Life, Student Life | 1 Comment
Thoughts on Race in the UK
Race and ethnicity in the UK is something that I really wanted to write a proper blog post on. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, my experience was just too limited for me to say anything really meaningful. From the perspective of a Los Angelino, one of the most fascinating (and at times jarring) […]
Filed under: Expatriate Life | 2 Comments
LaTeX Etiquette
Here’s another post that I wished I could flesh out more had time permitted. A few subtler points of LaTeX etiquette… Quotation marks: use ` and “ instead of ‘ and ” for opening quotations, or else your quotes will look silly. Bras and kets: use \langle, \rangle instead of less-than, greater-than Align your equations! […]
Filed under: Just for Fun | Closed
This is an old post that I never got around to fleshing out and finishing. I figured it was worth posting before letting my blog freeze-out (yeah, that was a Boltzmann equation reference). More than half a decade ago I was sitting in the same course and had a very inspirational TA and now I’ve […]
Filed under: Student Life | 3 Comments
PiTP 2008 lectures online
Yeah, I’m supposed to have written my “goodbye” post by now… but things have been really busy. So instead, here’s a link to the PiTP 2008 lectures (recently released): http://video.ias.edu/PiTP2008 Enjoy!
Filed under: Physics | 1 Comment
An American Physics Student in England 