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Sep. 23rd, 2005 11:38 pmThis week I've made some progress on my thesis, which I hadn't really gotten much done on since getting back to school. This is a good thing.
The contra dance this evening was fun as usual, although somehow I got the sense it was less wild than many contras I'd been to in the past. Maybe it really was, or else I've just learned to dance in a somewhat more restrained way. I still assert, however, that there's nothing like a long, hard, sweaty, dizzying contra swing.
Making lots of noise with the siren and air horn on a fire engine is more fun than I had expected it to be. And indeed, people moved out of the way.
Classes are going well. Music theory is a time sink but I find the stuff we're learning pretty cool (I don't think species counterpoint is as frustrating as Tom is saying that some people find it). For my 115 presentation on Monday, I have the old Advanced Lab open-cavity HeNe laser in the Physics Common Room. Aligning the cavity was tedious (I might tweak it around some more to improve the beam, and ideally the aperture stop I'm using to suppress transverse modes would be on a translation stage), as Jessica and I learned when we did the experiment last fall, so touch it and you die. But I took some data this afternoon on the cavity modes with a digital scope, and it looks good... should be the makings of a nice presentation.
The contra dance this evening was fun as usual, although somehow I got the sense it was less wild than many contras I'd been to in the past. Maybe it really was, or else I've just learned to dance in a somewhat more restrained way. I still assert, however, that there's nothing like a long, hard, sweaty, dizzying contra swing.
Making lots of noise with the siren and air horn on a fire engine is more fun than I had expected it to be. And indeed, people moved out of the way.
Classes are going well. Music theory is a time sink but I find the stuff we're learning pretty cool (I don't think species counterpoint is as frustrating as Tom is saying that some people find it). For my 115 presentation on Monday, I have the old Advanced Lab open-cavity HeNe laser in the Physics Common Room. Aligning the cavity was tedious (I might tweak it around some more to improve the beam, and ideally the aperture stop I'm using to suppress transverse modes would be on a translation stage), as Jessica and I learned when we did the experiment last fall, so touch it and you die. But I took some data this afternoon on the cavity modes with a digital scope, and it looks good... should be the makings of a nice presentation.
