May. 28th, 2004

meanfreepath: (Default)
Today seemed a better day, generally. The photographing the "dusty plasma" electrode for the July Physics Today front cover thing that the postdoc is working on seems to be going better. Everyone seemed to be in a better mood. This morning, I worked through the material in Hutchinson's "Principles of Plasma Diagnostics" about Langmuir probes in plasmas w/o B-fields and read some journal articles on Langmuir probes in RF plasmas. Group went out for lunch. Afternoon was slow; didn't have a whole lot to do and took off early. Next week: running the plasma apparatus and also working w/postdoc to repair and test a broken Langmuir probe. Need to probably do some soldering, check out some electronics since the Langmuir probe requires some inductors and capacitors to filter the RF from the plasma.

But there is seriously NOTHING to do in Iowa City! A bunch of the other REU students and I went into to an Indian vegetarian restaurant downtown and we had a nice meal. But afterwards we tried walking around. Nothing was open except for bars, and they all seemed to have bouncers at the door. Besides me, a couple of the other students were also underage and no one really was in the mood for drinking in any place (not that I typically would anyway). So we walked around, strolled along the Iowa River (quite pretty) and then went back to our dorm. I've shot out the roll; hopefully will get photos developed soon and then I'll post them somehow or other. Anyone know any good sources for basic HTML instruction?

The other REU students are nice, but they're from a completely different world. One of them is a sorority girl, and I have no problems with that, but they're just different. They worry about their eating, and how much they are exercising. They're on their cell phones with their boyfriends/fiancées a lot of the time. I guess it's also their dress -- I think they try to be a lot more trendy than most Swatties. That's the thing: Swat and especially SWIL are just so different. If this were a Swat Friday night, we could be discussing something intellectual. Or more likely, as I'm sure is going on now, gaming. My roommate wants to bake chocolate chip cookies though so that might be fun.

The sheer number and density of bars in downtown Iowa City, near the University, is just mind-boggling. And then there are all the frat/sorority houses near the campus too. I don't want to imagine what this place would be like on a weekend during the year. Thank goodness I'm only here for the summer. But things should get better; there's a University summer session so there might be some stuff they sponsored. Plus there are jazz and Shakespeare festivals scheduled later in the summer. I should also get a library card and thus obtain some non-physics, non-technical reading material.
meanfreepath: (Default)
ExpandPhysics stuff )

I should learn how to do LJ cuts so that I don't subject people to long random posts about physics or other things. I'm probably just writing such long posts because there's little else to do.

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