Various things...
Jul. 17th, 2004 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meanfreepathI'll be writing this rather piecemeal during the several minutes of downtime I get in between running analysis codes in the lab.
I was up late last night writing some important correspondence. So I slept in this morning, until 9:15 or so. Given how early some days (ie, trip to Fermilab) this week have been, sleeping in felt nice. I went for a run in Lower City Park, which I enjoyed. When I got back, I ate a little and then packed up to head down to the lab. I packed my laptop (which I'm writing this on) because I might need to run IDL later and I don't want to be running up and down stairs to the astro computer lab on the 6th floor (our group only has 2 licenses). I wound up taking the speakers from the PC in the lab upstairs and connecting them to my laptop. Now at least I have music, which is a heck of a lot better than the lab noises I'd be listening to otherwise. In our lab, there's a constant, aggravating hum of electronics, and a whirring of vacuum pumps and pumps for coolant for the vacuum pumps. Typical physics lab noises... seriously, if I were a grad student in this or in a similarly noisy lab, I'd seriously consider investing in a set of those Bose noise-cancelling headphones, as expensive as they are. But music is good; periods like this, where I'll be here for a long time, give me the chance to listen to longer pieces, ie Mahler symphonies. I'm trying to get to know Mahler better, anyone have any suggestions?
Various downtown IC businesses have been having sidewalk sales the last few days and today. Earlier this week I thought about getting a paperback Divine Comedy at Iowa Books, but decided against it because Dante requires a lot of footnotes, which that edition didn't have enough of to my taste. This morning, after dropping off stuff in the lab, I walked downtown as I had some stuff to return to the public library. I stopped at Prairie Lights' sidewalk sale. Prairie Lights is the independent, literary downtown bookstore, that has an upstairs cafe in a room frequented by a number of famous writers in the 30's. It's a nice contrast to huge megabookstores like Barnes and Noble. In terms of the books they were selling (inside and on the sidewalk), it'd be a Swattie's heaven.
I wound up buying, of all things, a book on differential equations. Now, I haven't completely lost my mind. It's just that I don't have a book on ODE's besides Potter and Goldberg, and the inexpensive Dover paperback I bought actually has discussions of things like existence, uniqueness, and convergence of power series solutions. I don't plan to read it immediately, but I largely got it because I really was annoyed in P50 by the general handwaviness of the course. Not that P50 was a bad course; it's just that it's about very important calculational techniques rather than about theory. For instance, one point that always bothered me is that we just assumed Fourier series converge. The book I got was originally published in the 1960's, so the presentation looks dense, and I wouldn't want to first learn ODE's from it. It should be readable though, since I supposedly already have learned how to solve ODE's. It's also got some material on Laplace transforms. I figure that any modern textbook would set me back a lot more than $5.
Maybe I'll drop by again before dinner, especially since it's the last day of the sale and they may slash prices to get rid of some more stuff. There were definitely some other non-technical things I was thinking about getting.
At the library, I also got a Nero Wolfe mystery. I haven't read a mystery in a very long time, and this may be a pleasant antidote to the denser reading I've been doing lately. At the moment, it's definitely a lot more appealing than the ODE book...
I was up late last night writing some important correspondence. So I slept in this morning, until 9:15 or so. Given how early some days (ie, trip to Fermilab) this week have been, sleeping in felt nice. I went for a run in Lower City Park, which I enjoyed. When I got back, I ate a little and then packed up to head down to the lab. I packed my laptop (which I'm writing this on) because I might need to run IDL later and I don't want to be running up and down stairs to the astro computer lab on the 6th floor (our group only has 2 licenses). I wound up taking the speakers from the PC in the lab upstairs and connecting them to my laptop. Now at least I have music, which is a heck of a lot better than the lab noises I'd be listening to otherwise. In our lab, there's a constant, aggravating hum of electronics, and a whirring of vacuum pumps and pumps for coolant for the vacuum pumps. Typical physics lab noises... seriously, if I were a grad student in this or in a similarly noisy lab, I'd seriously consider investing in a set of those Bose noise-cancelling headphones, as expensive as they are. But music is good; periods like this, where I'll be here for a long time, give me the chance to listen to longer pieces, ie Mahler symphonies. I'm trying to get to know Mahler better, anyone have any suggestions?
Various downtown IC businesses have been having sidewalk sales the last few days and today. Earlier this week I thought about getting a paperback Divine Comedy at Iowa Books, but decided against it because Dante requires a lot of footnotes, which that edition didn't have enough of to my taste. This morning, after dropping off stuff in the lab, I walked downtown as I had some stuff to return to the public library. I stopped at Prairie Lights' sidewalk sale. Prairie Lights is the independent, literary downtown bookstore, that has an upstairs cafe in a room frequented by a number of famous writers in the 30's. It's a nice contrast to huge megabookstores like Barnes and Noble. In terms of the books they were selling (inside and on the sidewalk), it'd be a Swattie's heaven.
I wound up buying, of all things, a book on differential equations. Now, I haven't completely lost my mind. It's just that I don't have a book on ODE's besides Potter and Goldberg, and the inexpensive Dover paperback I bought actually has discussions of things like existence, uniqueness, and convergence of power series solutions. I don't plan to read it immediately, but I largely got it because I really was annoyed in P50 by the general handwaviness of the course. Not that P50 was a bad course; it's just that it's about very important calculational techniques rather than about theory. For instance, one point that always bothered me is that we just assumed Fourier series converge. The book I got was originally published in the 1960's, so the presentation looks dense, and I wouldn't want to first learn ODE's from it. It should be readable though, since I supposedly already have learned how to solve ODE's. It's also got some material on Laplace transforms. I figure that any modern textbook would set me back a lot more than $5.
Maybe I'll drop by again before dinner, especially since it's the last day of the sale and they may slash prices to get rid of some more stuff. There were definitely some other non-technical things I was thinking about getting.
At the library, I also got a Nero Wolfe mystery. I haven't read a mystery in a very long time, and this may be a pleasant antidote to the denser reading I've been doing lately. At the moment, it's definitely a lot more appealing than the ODE book...
