(no subject)

[meanfreepath]

The Hunt was a lot of fun. This was my third year of it, and now I've been a hunter (when I was a frosh and not yet a SWILlie), a monster (dactyl guard, sophomore year), and a squire. Playing the spondees looks fun. I decided to squire this year because two years of experience have shown me that I'm not much good with hand-to-hand combat, but maybe it would be a little different with water pistols. At any rate I had a good time running around shouting, "Squire! Squire!" and collecting swords to be returned to Hunt Central. Considering that I haven't gone running since Wednesday because of the two colloquia this week, it was a decent workout too. And catching up with nightengalesknd afterwards was good too.

Note to self: propose having two Hunt Centrals, one dedicated solely to swords/hunter regeneration and the other with money/sales. I suppose the one complicating factor is that the squires would have to run all the regular swords to Sword Central and any longswords/shields to the Central Bank of SWIL. Also a bullhorn or other communications equipment should be procured for communication with the wizards, for crowd control, and emergency use. Perhaps walkie-talkies, if available cheaply, might be considered. Or else perhaps if I'm crazy enough and someone like blaketh with more electronics know-how can help, it might be possible to build a small radio transmitter/receiver. Perhaps that would even make a tough Physics 82 electronics project. Probably there are a ton of FCC regulations, though, about frequency bands and radiated power. A bullhorn should certainly be got somehow, however. Perhaps it might be possible to borrow from Public Safety or the athletics department.

I'm learning to get through junior physics with my sanity intact. Carl's seminar is just not as intense as I think it ought to be, and while we've done a decent number of problems, I don't feel that I've learned a lot more that I didn't already know from Physics 8. Jessica Gersh will be joining our section and from her description of how Carl is in hers I'm glad I'm not in it. Amy's seminar has become much more reasonable; it was this that drove me nuts for the first two or three weeks.

I should email the fire company to tell them that I'm not having seminar this Thursday and so could be interviewed. I don't know about joining... I feel that it would be a good thing to do but I just don't know how I'll have the time, or what I'd cut to make time for it. Definitely I'd have to be more efficient on weekends next semester if I lost all day Sunday to training. I also worry a little about my ability to hear the fire horn in the Science Center and also about my ability to respond to alarms that could go off at any hour of the day or night. Being an EMT does allow one to have a fixed on-call schedule, which I like, but I think they have more need of firefighters than EMT's because a lot of premeds do it.

Heaven only knows what I'll be doing next semester. 113 with Catherine and 114 with Doc are the only certain things. Ideally, I'd like to have some time to start my senior thesis research during the semester, before the summer. And that's a big decision to make. Working with Doc is the logical thing, and he is the best-funded physicist in the Department, but I'm not sure how thrilled I am with experimental plasma physics after two summers of it. More worrisome are the rumors of things that went on this summer, but since I wasn't there and have only heard one side of the story I shouldn't expostulate further, especially in this public forum. On the other hand, Chris Cothran is a good person to work with and I think he and I are rather similar in temperament.

The other person I might like working with is Amy. I was asking her about numerical stuff after seminar last night, and offhand asked about being able to compare theory with experiment. She mentioned that some of the stuff she does can be done experimentally, too, with people she knows at either Los Alamos or Lawrence Livermore. I think the ideal thing I'd love to do would be something that involved some theory or simulation as well as experiment. If I had the chance to do something like that with Amy, I think I'd love to. Working with cyrstalpyramid would also be nice. Then again, I do know that Elana Belova does some resistive MHD simulations at PPPL for Doc and SSX. I don't know... sometimes I love doing IDL programming and other times I hate it. But that's not to say that experimental work doesn't have its frustrations. If there's anything I learned at Iowa this summer it's that with real research, as opposed to pre-made labs, real experiments will never go perfectly the first time, and that sometimes whatever can go wrong, will.

Then whoever I'd do my thesis with affects my course selection. For if I were to work with Amy or any other computational stuff, I'd probably want to take CS 21. I know how to write code, but it's working code and not necessarily good code or elegant code. Were I to work with someone like Catherine or Peter, I might consider taking solid state, probably at Bryn Mawr or Haverford. With Doc, I would probably want to spend some time relearning basic plasma theory (single particle motion, MHD, waves, kinetics, etc.) And then there's all the humanities/social science courses I'd like to do: art history, macroeconomics, linguistics, to name a few, and perhaps more math classes (maybe the algebra seminar? an applied math course? something like the Haverford complex variable course my Screw date last year was taking?). With regards to the math i'll see how 49 goes; so far so good but we haven't had a midterm yet and I'm pretty sure Bergstrand is gentler than Hunter, for one. I'm not spending as much time on Shakespeare reading as I ought to be, now.

*sigh* Such is life. I do worry too much about little things. Seriously, being in the fire company would connect me to the real world and teach me to stay calm even in real emergencies. Learning to deal with serious emergencies like fires, car accidents, and the like would put the little things I panic over in perspective. Staying calm and composed under pressure is something I very badly need to learn to do, especially if I ever become a professor. For one, there are far worse things in life than screwing up badly on the blackboard in 111 seminar. crystalpyramid and blaketh were both there, and I'm not happy with how I reacted to that.