ChapterZero

I am near the end of a very inactive work day. My supervisor had a daughter, his first kid, yesterday– yeah!– and I just finished (I think) the first task I had to do, and don’t know how to proceed from there. So I mostly took the day as a reading day, and finished ‘Blood of the Fold’ by Terry Goodking. I’ve bought the whole series, and am proceeding through it very fast. But I did also spend some time doing internship related things: I submitted the first copy of my abstract– the one where I know nothing– to the SACNAS people, and printed out and read through a presentation that we’ll be seeing tomorrow at the intern videoconference. I went to a talk earlier today, given by Edward Teller, one of the founders of the Livermore Labs, and one of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb. Although I agreed with him on much, I think I disagreed with him on a lot, in particular, where the responsibility of applications of science falls– upon the scientists, or upon the politicians–, and the circumstances under which it is acceptable to use nuclear weaponry. So I was disappointed to see that a lot of knowledge and experience does not equal what I consider wisdom. But then, he may have it right: he lived through both World Wars, and fled Hungary, then Germany, to escape oppression; I, on the other hand, have had a comparatively placid life. What is to me a cerebral matter might be to him a visceral one. He certainly didn’t strike me as a deep thinker…

I’ve not posted in so long, I nearly forgot my login information. I shouldn’t be posting, because it might be against the Lab’s acceptable use policy. But I need to get out a couple of things:

I chose my project a while back, to work on a giant laser. The specific information isn’t categorized as classified, but to talk about it offsite, I would need a release, so I won’t go into much detail. There’s a deformable mirror inside the laser cavity that helps keep the intensity of the beam even by flattening the wavefront. My first task is to characterize the influence function of the actuators which deform the surface of the deformable mirrors. But the data set I was given to work with has too many misregistration errors, and clear physically impossible measurements, for me to do anything with it.

I’m working on a Mac! I never thought that would happen, but I wasn’t given a choice really. But at least, it is OS X, which means I can just use the BSD subsystem. Which I find that I don’t really. I did download Fink Commander, and adaptation of Debian’s packaging system for OS X. So now I have Octave and TeX to work with. And I downloaded the Apple Development Package, all 300+ Mb of it, so I can program with good ol’ gcc too! I’m surprised no one has said anything about my bandwidth usage yet.

I’ve learned so much math that it is ridiculous to think about. I think I’ll be well prepared for my Systems Analysis course and my Signals Math course next semester, because I’m understanding convolution and fourier series.

This weekend, I’m going to read about ray-tracing, radiosity, and photon mapping. So maybe I’ll finally write a raytracer. I am currently working on a simple symbolic calculator in my free time here at the lab, because that is the only computer I have access to. I would be done too, except this computer crashes at least 5 times a day, and it crashed right after I wrote a critical routine and didn’t save it.

I need to go now, or it will crash, and I will lose all this typing.