A quick rant

There's a few types of Facebook statuses that tend to annoy me quite a bit. Let's list them out:
1) Song Quotes
2) Inspirational Quotes
3) ... Pretty much just a long stream of never-ending quotes
Does anyone sense a pattern here?

Now, to be honest, I don't mind the occasional quote amid a stream of status updates. However, when your status is nothing but quotes, it gets a bit annoying. You are not a wise old man with years of experience to be giving out insiprational quotes around the clock. You are not a jukebox or music player for there to be 2000 song quote on yor profile. In fact, these types of quote makes you seem quite the opposite: a person desparate for attention, either from an individual or from a group of people. And for those people who quote love songs for their crush or S.O., it's a bit annoying that you do so on Facebook. There are better and more private methods of doing so, without having to smother the rest of us with it.
Instead, go for status updates that are just that: status updates. I may not really care too much that you're eating a pb&j, but I can bet you that it's many times more interesting than a song quote for a song I've never heard.
Well, I guess that wasn't all that short after all.

Edit: Apparently there was some confusion as to what I was referring to in this post.  I wasn't referring to any person in particular. As I said before, I do not mind an occasional quote, but when that is all a person posts, it tends to be somewhat annoying. I'm really only saying that a bit of variety in your status updates would be appreciated.

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My First Research Paper

For the past two weeks, I've been very busy writing a research paper.  My advisor, Dr. Katherine Freese, asked me  if I wanted to write the conference proceedings for a talk she gave at the First Stars and Galaxies Conference in Austin, TX.  Seeing as this would put my name on a paper, give me experience writing papers, and help me better understand the material I'd be researching, I agreed to.

The next few days we very stressful, just trying to figure out what to do, and what information to put in the paper.  Katie was very helpful, giving me tips and pointers whenever I was stuck.  And, before long, I finally finished the paper.

It was an exhilarating process.  I had to relearn a lot of the things I'd forgotten about LaTeX, and learn a few new things, like adding figures and making a bibliography.  I learned how to create .eps pictures, and how to work with LaTeX macros.  Overall, this paper, for all the twists and turns we had in preparing it, was one of the most fun times I've had this summer.  The experience will greatly help me in my research endeavors, and I'm very grateful for my advisor for all the help she gave me along the way.

Since the paper is going to be published by the American Institute of Physics, I'm not entirely sure I can upload the paper onto my website.  If, however, I am allowed to (since I am an author), I will upload it for people to download and read (if they care to).

Now onto figuring out some more Fortran...

Quals

One thing most Graduate Students have to do at some point in their Graduate Career is to take what's known as the qualifying exam, or the quals.  Many Students shudder when they hear this word; it brings either bad memories or extreme nervousness.
True to most universities, University of Michigan also has a qualifier prerequisite for becoming a Ph.D. candidate.  As such, many of us graduate students scramble to try to remember things we learned in our undergraduate career, things that we sometimes haven't seen in 3-4 years.
This past weekend I took the first of two quals, the Classical Quals, at the University of Michigan.  From what I coulld tell, it was a pretty fair test, making sure we had basica understanding of concepts that we should have learned while in undergrad.  However, having not been exposed to many of the concepts presented for a while, I found myself stuggling with problems that I know that if I had tried answering back when I first learned about it, I  would have found extremely easy.  However, because of the time difference, I could not remember simple equations or relations between things.
Which brings me to my point: what is the point of these exams?  Much of the test seems to revolve around knowledge of random equations, which, throughout all my my undergrad and graduate career, was never the focus of physics.  Instead, at least as far as I know, physics is the interplay of concepts to try to come up with relationships between forces and interactions in the natural.  By testing our knowledge of a small subset of physics equations, are they really probing how well we know physics?
Now, I'm probably exagerating a bit, because most of the problems involved a physical system and a questions about what happens.  But, because many of my difficulties involved not remembering the equations, even though I knew what was going on, I could not solve the problem.
Several Universities are realizing this shortcoming of the qualifying exam and are either downplaying its importance or removing it from the requirements completely.  Instead, they focus more on research done by the student, and how they've taken ideas from classes and applied them to their research (the idea behind the preliminary exam, whose premise I agree with).
Then again, maybe they expect us to remember pages and pages worth of somewhat random equations...

Eddie

Blogging in the New Year

I have a nasty habit of not updating my blog very often.  Usually, I get carried away with other things, mainly with schoolwork, that I forget to update or, more likely, say to myself, "I'll do that later."  As it is a new year, I'm once again resolving to write more often on my blog.
So, there goes another year, and another decade.  This has been a very busy year for me, with me graduating from Iowa State University and the start of Grad School at the University of Michigan.  It's been a year of changes, of goodbyes and of new friends.  But most importantly, it's been a year that's seen a maturing in myself.  I've grown this year in ways that I could not have imagined when it started.
As 2010 commences, I only hope that I can continue to better myself as a person, to continue to pursue my dreams as a graduate student in physics, and to continue to live life to its fullest.  After all, what's a new year if you don't live your life, exploring the new opportunities the year brings you?  2010 will be a good year, and one that I hope will be as memorable, if not more so, than the ones that have preceded it.