Visit Jen at Conversion Diary for more quick takes!
1.
<classmate a> *staring at blackboard* WHY? And more importantly, why THAT way? Can’t we just… *writes*
<classmate b, total deadpan> Because then the universe would collapse.
<a> Not that again.
<b> Am afraid so.
Physics. With great power comes great responsibility.
(Also, when you’re googling a definition that came up in class and the first result is “Harmonic analysis of probability measures on hypergroups”, run.)
2.
Speaking of running, I’m trying to get back on the bandwagon. One of my choir mates invited me to race with her sometime, so I need to become better than her get back into shape! So far, so good. I forgot how wonderful it can feel.
3.
Last Monday I needed a bit of comfort, so I put on my ancient jeans, ancient choir tour hoodie, and extremely ancient gym class t-shirt (from my posh private first secondary school – I switched to a state high school soonish, as I was very private but by no means posh enough). My dad, reading the school name on my back, fell over laughing with the comment that most 24-year-olds would be delighted to still fit the clothes from when they were eighteen… let alone twelve.
The reason that this shirt was too big when I first got it, was too big when I was at my biggest (around age 16), and is too big now, is that People Don’t Look. They just hand me the biggest size, and I didn’t speak up about it until I was at university.
It does mean I have a range of very comfortable shirts to sleep in. And I easily layered three sweaters under my girl guide rain jacket, making it a true all-seasons garment that the others could only wish for.
But still, you know, should you ever need to distribute uniform clothing to tall people, do this quick test: stand next to them. Lean aside. Chances are your shoulder will hit hip-bone. In that case, start with medium. We of the 38″-and-up inseam thank you.
4.
My friends rock so much. One of them gave me a tutorial on Familial Relationship Management that mentioned Dirac combs, three humorously mangled figures of speech, and two memes from our friend group. See, I’m not so difficult to communicate with (for people with a physics degree and 4+ years of intimate knowledge of my mind’s workings).
5.
Physics-Medicine mental Babel Tower of the week:
<me> But why would you use a battery pack? You want to have a constant signal, so it would make much more sense to use a power supply.
<lab technician> How often have you blown up an electrical circuit with one of those?
<me> Hey!
<tech> Well?
<me> *sulks* Less than five times…
<tech> Are you going to test this one, with the electrodes glued to your head?
6.
“I’ve got something for you,” said my thesis advisor, as I was staring myself cross-eyed at the whiteboard.
“I tried to get a gevulde koek out of the vending machine, but they gave me a bag of monkey-shaped banana liquorice instead. Everyone says you might like it.”
“Who is ‘everyone’?” I asked carefully. “Well, both of The Guys,” advisor replied.
This was a very interesting (though expected) piece of information, as The Guys know how my body (and temper) reacts to large amounts of colorants and sugar. I’m wondering what their purpose was. Maybe they thought bouncing up and down would help me to write legibly on vertical surfaces.
7.
My new boss is rather cool. He has the free lunch radar and -appreciation of a grad student – and brings some for me! (Admitted, this is in his favour, as bringing caffeine and food to my work station means I stay there for longer and get more work done.) But what really sealed the deal: he has taken an elementary LabVIEW course so he can understand his programmers better. I think anyone who has ever been hired for their expertise can appreciate the effort.
I am still trying to get over the facts that my desk is actually an exam table (I didn’t even notice until yesterday, although I’d appreciated the squishiness) and the anatomy room, where students cut up bodies for practice, is two doors down the hall. Hilarity.
Rehearsal yesterday was… quite something different.
I’m not sure what I expected. Certainly not that the average age of the soprano section would be under 25. Until now I haven’t attended a Latin OF Mass where I hadn’t at least had dinner with every attendant under 30 (I’m not easy). And last Sunday the schola was pensioners only.
In any case, my home parish will have to do without me for another Sunday, because I will be singing in the Willibrord this week. And I will not be joining the choir.
Even though they sing from the Graduale Triplex. *collapses into a drooling heap*
I will not be joining the choir.
Even though their conductor and organist are rather amazingly cool and the other members really, really nice.
I will not be joining the choir.
But, you know, this Christmas I only have to sing on Christmas morning (in Amsterdam) and Boxing Day (in Groningen), so I could do Night Mass in Utrecht… would be kind of cool, three provinces in three days, right? It’s not like my family expects to see me awake anyway, I’ve spent the last 15 Christmases passed out on the sofa…
Last Sunday I went to the Latin OF Mass in the St. Willibrorduskerk in Utrecht, to be followed by a walk with my dad and my godnephew (my sister’s godson). We sung Credo IV (the one that starts exactly the same as Credo I… and you keep thinking… which one will it be? Stay tuned…! We Will Find Out After The Break!). Credo IV has High Lines. I’m a soprano, so High Lines make me Very Happy. I am also utterly shameless and devoid of any consideration towards those around me, so High Lines also make me Very Loud.
Afterwards, when I was pouncing on the coffee (half a cup, to be merciful towards those who still had to be near me for the remainder of the day) and the others were, you know, being social and scary stuff like that, a lady came walking up to us and announced that She Heard A Voice.
Uh-oh.
A nice singing voice.
Oh, right. That was him, I said, pointing at dear Godnephew.
A high, female singing voice.
Right. Definitely him, I nodded, and prodded dear Godnephew’s arm for good measure.
Yeah, that’s her, treacherous Godnephew said to the lady. She sings.
You should join the choir! lady enthused.
At that point, several things happened at once (I need to add here that I was on a post-Latin-Mass high, and thus completely blameless):
- My dad did his “This is a currently pleasant but potentially lethal situation” smile.
- Godnephew started grinning.
- I had a brainpower brownout. To be exact, my reasoning skills were replaced by a repetitive “pretty pretty church pretty church latin latin music pretty music latin pretty church”.
I politely told the lady that since I don’t live in Utrecht it wouldn’t be feasible to join the choir. She agreed. My dad vehemently and vocally agreed. The lady told my dad to shut it. But, I added, since we only heard chant today, I was rather curious about their normal repertoire. My dad started shaking his head.
Hey, I’ve been a choir girl for the last 62.5% of my life, it’s déformation professionelle.
Long story short, a couple of minutes later the organist was playing the Kyrie of Mozart’s Kronungsmesse and the conductor and I were singing the tenor and soprano parts (respectively). Because I just had to impulsively say “Oh, I know that one!” when the conductor sighed he’d had to cancel it due to lack of sopranos.
Me and my big trap. (But seriously, lack of sopranos? How can you have a lack of sopranos?)
This must be the first time I sang top G’s in walking boots and backpack.
Why can’t I be spotted for a gleaming-if-short catwalk career, like normal girls?
I did lose all of my “woe is me, I have a solo” whinging rights. On Saturday I was shaking at the thought of Two Whole Lines (oh no!), but now I emphatically failed to pass out or even just pee my pants. This was probably a combination of post-Eucharist-high and the complete suddenness of it all. I hope it’s not permanent, because it was most unnatural. And disturbing.
(And then we walked 10+ miles and I got covered in blisters. And we talked and talked and had organic carrot (the menfolk) or cheese cake (me). And at some point there was a joke about a cow but I forgot.)
Among other things, I found:
-a watch with analogue face plus digital Millenium Countdown Timer
-a “Atlanta Olympics” Flik Flak watch
-a “save 500 guilders and get a free watch” watch (incidentally, they all have blue straps)
-about 12 smaller-than-fist-sized containers (little tins, boxes, etc) filled with what are undoubtedly treasures for a 12-year-old (including a department store coin valid until November 4, 1995, a week before my 11th birthday)
-a disturbing amount of unused soaps, little bags of sugar, and for some strange reason those little things you use to open a can of coke (I am, and have always been, intolerant of fizzy drinks, and my parents didn’t do those things anyway)
-a package of Zuricher honey cookies (exp. 1995)
-assorted candles
-a fake horseshoe magnet, six different types of pencils, colouring pencils, and a compass
-a braid ring knot, scout-scarf sized
-a set of Gypsy fortune telling cards in six languages (none of which I spoke back then)
All stuff that was apparently important enough to throw them in a box and take them to my dad’s when my mum moved to France.
I’m going to burn up the candles, get a new battery for the Atlanta watch (it fits my wrist and it’s cute), put the pencils in my bag, and throw the rest out.
Visit Jen at Conversion Diary for more quick takes!
1.
The new academic year has well and truly begun, featuring a MASSIVE amount of firsties! Apparently the credit crunch helped many decide to get some further education. Unfortunately, the government is once again cutting funding, so it’s more students and less money. I wonder how that will work out. It probably means that our seven-year-old student computers will not be updated anytime soon.
2.
I want one.
I’m getting one.
I am also considering dying my hair grey, but the chances for that to happen are considerably smaller than me getting a slide rule.
Because I am SO getting one.
And NNDad will teach me how to use it (he’s a pre-pocket-calculators-educated engineer, he ought to know how it works! And, er… still remember… right.)
3.
This was going to be about my sixmonthly haircut, but something way more important came up: WE HAZ WIFI. That is still at full strength in my room. Now all I need up here to make me perfectly happy up here is a kitchen, but I don’t think I can talk my dad into it. (Maybe if we converted to Judaism… although I don’t think the local rabbi would think it very good reasoning, not to mention that I’d have some explaining to do upon entering the convent.)
4.
(Warning: if you know me and my family personally, this might scar you for life.)
My father revealed to me that he has done “sacral dancing” back when he had a girlfriend who was into that kind of stuff.
5.
This week’s inter-academic-misunderstandings:
1. I confused an ECG with an EEG. Even though Wikipedia clearly says “Not to be confused with…”. This did inspire my boss the medical doctor to send me lots of info on EEG (which the thing I’m building and programming is supposed to make), with the note “Don’t be scared, you don’t have to learn this.” I do like my boss.
2. Professor: “And why are you not disturbed by these tricks? Because the series all converge absolutely!”
Murmur from students: “No… because we’re not mathematicians.”
6.
“So, I’ll see you at the lab tomorrow?”
“Dunno… I’m going to a study meeting, but that’s after lunch. I have work in the morning.”
“Well, I could always get in an accident and come see you at the hospital. Although that would be bad news.”
“That would be very bad news, because it would mean you somehow ended up in the basement of the neurology research department.”
I love how telling people where my desk is located gives them visions of brains in jars.
7.
I love The Guys. I do. I can think of some, but not many things that are nicer than lying on Guy #2’s bed reading great books while he curses at his computer and his PhD thesis, or hanging at the pub with Guy #1 and having five conversations at the same time. And having them both together is great, because that means 50% more cooking to enjoy and 600% more physics arguments fought out on a whiteboard.
However. On those occasions when it’s the three of us…
They team up to tease me. Endlessly.
NOT FAIR!
My father wants to be involved in my education, and relate to my university experiences. One of his methods of doing this is comparing my subjects to things he studied.
Unfortunately, he holds degrees in Slavic languages and psychology, which are both almost, but not quite, entirely unlike physics.
This has lead to extensive frustration on my side, as he would insist that my doomed efforts with various electronic components (morituri te salutant) is just like a course he had in uni, because after all, they’re both about signal processing, only his was with brains and mine with OpAmps. I could yell BODE PLOTS OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN all I wanted, he’d made up his mind, and my “doubts” on the matter were, of course, caused by an insufficient understanding of his field.
I lamented my woes to Guy #1, and he understood exactly what I meant – both the situation and my feelings on the subject, as he had the exact same thing with his father (who works in medicine, which is slightly less entirely unlike physics, but as soon as you start doing the stuff we’re doing it might as well be Aramaic).
The problem is not that they want to know what we’re doing. It is that, as our fathers, they are used to knowing things better than we do (as long as the things in question don’t have too many buttons). My dad is very welcome to tell me how to file my taxes, but in this case it is just not true.
Do not claim things about physics that are just not true when talking with a physics student. There be dragons. (I think that this holds quite universally for most enthusiasts, by the way – how do you deal with it?)
Guy #1’s solution: overload the systems. Don’t explain, translate, refer to common household objects, or tell parables – show exactly what you are doing.
So today, after a particularly exhilarating lecture, I dropped my note pad on my fathers’ lap and announced that this was the review lecture, the course proper would start from this point, so if he could just skim it we’d know we are on the same page, and if he didn’t understand it he was invited to pre-emptively withdraw his future offer to explain the course to me.
He thumbed through the pages and laughed. This could mean one of two things:
- We have left the universe where six years of psychology in the sixties is equivalent to four years of physics in this decade (but not vice versa, of course), or
- Someone in this house is going to write an essay on the scope of switching from classical to quantum-mechanical systems by means of translating Poisson’s brackets to -2πi/h times the commutator, and it ain’t gonna be me. Translating, dad, translating! It’s just like Russian to Dutch!
Either one is fine really.
This must have been the greatest weekend since Walsingham.
There were some vague plans to go sailing with a few people from the lab (The Guys, a second grad student, and me), but grad #2 was in France and Guy #2 was swamped with thesis work. Fortunately, Guy #1 is the one who can actually sail. The weather was so nice (not to say absolutely perfect) that we decided to drat the double per-person rate if we rented a boat with just the two of us, and went anyway. It was the shortest Saturday afternoon in my life. My hands, though, were glad that it was over: the clamps for the jig sheet were very annoying to manipulate, so I held the ropes myself for the better part of four hours. Ouch. Not a great hobby for concert instrumentalists, I think.
The physics of sailing is absolutely fascinating, by the way…
In any case, thanks to Guy #1’s expertise we got safely back on dry land, and we decided to hang around in town for a while after, waiting for Guy #2 to emerge from thesis-land and get him drunk some relaxation. We managed (although not on the drunk part, and honestly, did they really need to discuss in the pub whether Γ*T would give good fitting curves for Guy #1’s data?) Unfortunately this made me miss the last train back home, so I could get the taste of apple juice out of my mouth by replacing it with the rubber of the valve of Guy #2’s spare mattress.
In the morning, while commandeering Guy #2’s MacBook, I realised that another member of the Inner Circle lived within 500 metres of my current location (it turned out to be a 200m walk, 150 for a bird*). He was on GTalk and arrived even before I was done doing Guy #2’s ironing (it’s not unfeminist if he made you breakfast first). We left Guy #2 to his thesis again and decided to fill the time between the early afternoon and the 17:15 mass in Amsterdam with Random Cycling.
Random Cycling is greatly enhanced by Random Chatting. Unfortunately my fellow adventurer’s front mudguard was rattling at a noise level greatly above what our vocal chords could comfortably produce, and I didn’t have my girl-scout-with-OCD-grade backpack with me**, so we had to improvise.
Leave that to a physics and a mathematics student: four old train tickets and two free bags to clean up after your dog later, it was fixed to satisfying permanency (we did nick two spare bags should new repairs become necessary). It was really unfortunate we didn’t have a piece of gum and a broken elastic, or we could have built a solar-powered motor for it as well. Drat.
We followed the Rhine for about ten miles and found a nice place to have a late lunch, at which point I started to worry about my hair, which hadn’t been combed since those five hours sailing in a stiff wind, and a night of trying to find my place on a strange mattress. Actually, I still haven’t brushed it. You can see what it looks like in the picture.
There’s something wrong with my hair. It’s self-combing. I might need to have it exorcised.
Lunch was followed by meandering to the train station, Mass in Amsterdam, and some enthusiastic following of the traffic rules, after which we went home, I cooked dinner, and we did not get into a food fight while playing Politically Correct, Non-Violent War.
If you said that’s already way over the fun quota for one girl in one weekend, I would agree. Then the doorbell rang and my favourite neomist priest dropped by to return a brownie pan, and somehow we ended up around the dining table going through a shoe box of old family photos (think my grandparents’ wedding picture, and my great-great-grandfather’s requiem mass card) that had surfaced during the recent moving activities, and we were all grinning at the archaic Dutch and my dad at three years old (in shorts).***
Weekends like these? I can have more of them. Really. Bring it on.
*unless it’s a road-walking bird, which we don’t have in Leiden I think, and if we do they’d go Dodo pretty quickly.
** the one which enabled Sr. Julie on that very Walsingham pilgrimage to fix the bathroom lights in the presbytery hosting us the first night.
*** there was also one of my dad at 55 in shorts, but that wasn’t nearly as cute.
To be honest, Sept. 11 does not feel like a day of remembrance to me. It is, however, one of those things where you’ll always remember where you was when you heard the news (like the murder of Pim Fortuyn and, on a way more positive note, the election of Pope Benedict XVI). Our national day of remembrance is May 4th, and personally I include the victims of terrorist attacks just as much as war victims.
Mark posted a remembrance that got me silent, and also illustrated how I feel – like the Russian cosmonauts who are shocked at the tragedy as much as anyone else, but know that we will never fully feel the grief of the Americans.
And I pray, pray, pray that we can once live in a world without martyrs.
Visit Jen at Conversion Diary for more quick takes!
1.
Minus three points for huge cliché-ness, because this week I learned the meaning of “I’m not okay, but that’s okay.” That pretty much summed up Monday night and Tuesday. I managed not to angst too much about it. I hope. :)
2.
I called a friend: “I don’t want to come this afternoon. Talk me into it.”
Without missing a beat, he said “Should I talk you into it? I don’t think so. You’re just coming. Imagine if you didn’t, how people would talk! I’ll see you at the entrance at ten past.”
I don’t think anyone would have noticed if I failed to show, but the threat was exactly what I needed to hear. And I managed to sneak out before the event turned into an occasion where “So, I heard you’re staying in the country” became an appropriate remark. Win! And extra-win: I got an invite to apply for a job. That was on Friday. I sent an e-mail on Monday. And…
3.
I have a job! Yay! Part-time, and I can plan that time largely by myself, so it’s ideal. It’s in the teaching department of our university hospital, but I don’t have to do any actual teaching (probably for the best, as I can’t tell a kidney from a desk chair). The job is divided in projects and my first project is to produce a BAER test setup with a desktop computer and a couple of sensors. It won’t be medical grade, but the idea is that the students can play with it (through an interface that I am also to program).
4.
This is the first time I will have a job I’ve actually been educated for. I’ve done physics related stuff before (like giving shows explaining physics concepts) but that was a combination of on-the-job training and what’s really high-school level physics. This job ties in directly to the programming classes I’ve had, and building an experimental setup with all the signal/noise puzzles that come with it. Plus making it user-friendly. I’m really excited about this.
5.
You can probably expect some amusing stories about physicians and physicists trying to communicate. It already started.
6.
Sleeping over at sister dearest, we staid up way too late (as one does, although this time it was fully my fault). Neither of us had commitments in the morning, but my sister still had her I Am A Productive Person sequence of alarm clocks lined up, which meant that I woke up (and promptly went back to sleep) about three times before I could bring myself to acknowledge that there is a world out there.
This made for some strange blurring of dream and reality.
So just to check, I asked my sister, was it a dream or actual reality that the cat came into your room just before it turned into a kind of train with the door opening to either the hallway or the place where the train was right then, no way to tell in advance, and your landlady came and stuck her head around the door and told us off for taking the cat with us AGAIN, because he’d get out at some point and it’d be impossible to find him?
My sister thought that one was probably real.
7.
These are the joys of the student travel card: at three-thirty I decided that it was high time to travel a couple of provinces to the north-east, wifi’d it to my sister, and four hours later we walked into her choir’s rehearsal room. Wikkit :)
I was going to wait for this week’s Seven Quick Takes, but I will just re-post it there :)
As of today (technically yesterday), I Am A Programmer.
Where “programmer” is “someone who gets paid to write code”.
PAID. People give me MONEY to play around produce software.
I absolutely can’t believe it.
Redeeming point: the language I’ll be writing in doesn’t look like proper code, so I can just pretend I draw colourful lines for a living.
My job interview was quite hilarious, as my boss has a medical background, not physics or computer sciences. So he was explaining what my first project needed to do (adapt a technique used to determine the amount to which someone is under anaesthesia so that it can be used in a student lab setting, e.g. with lots of external noise and the test subject being very much awake and not very stationary). To illustrate this, he showed me graphs of actual patients (personal information cut off) and talked about nervous systems (apparently we have two of them) and inner ear physiology.
These fifteen minutes of information went through my functionality sieve and came out as “if you push the button, this thing needs to go “bleep”, the thing glued to the student’s forehead will go “bleep” back, and that needs to be graphed.”
Welcome to the physicist’s mind. You are basically a bag of water. That sometimes goes “bleep”. But we do appreciate you as a person!
