ChapterZero

*Sigh* It’s been a while since I last posted, because I’ve been really busy with school, and the NSCS (http://www.uh.edu/nscs/). Who would have thought that being a webmaster for a student organization entailed so much work? I look forward to being able to dedicate myself to finishing the site after this week, when I get back from the SACNAS conference. Speaking of which, I still haven’t done the poster for yet, which I need to have ready and printed by Wednesday night. Hopefully, I can find someone that can do same day, or second day printing, and optimally lamination, all for cheap.

I’ve decided to start studying advanced physics again, because I’m trying to understand quantum computation. I bought a book on it which doesn’t seem to require that I learn much of the theory, but that just piqued my interest, so I bought a book on quantum theory, started to read it, and was lost before they even got to the quantum theory! Specifically, I’m having trouble following the example they give as a motivation for the development of quantum theory; the failure of classical physical theory in deriving the Raleigh-Jean law for explaining black body radiation. So, I’m going to start reading up. If I ever get the time.

I’ve tried to establish the precedent of reading up on the topics that I’ll over the following week, on the weekend. This weekend, I haven’t been very successful, which makes me grateful that I chose to do this, because that means it will save me time in understanding the topics later when I have to. Two things I’m having trouble with: uniform plane waves, and the superposition integral.

The superposition integral is for my EE Analysis course, and is just the convolution integral, in the context of determining the response of a fixed linear system, but the book I’m reading approaches it from a horribly thorough viewpoint. Which means, if I can understand it from this book, I really understand it– so even though I have a good idea of what is going on intuitively, I’m trying to master all the math behind it. I’ve given up for the moment, and moved onto my next topic…

Uniform planar waves are supposedly the simplest solution to the wave equation, a vector differential equation that governs how EM waves propagate through space. So, I’m a little troubled by the fact that I’m not grasping the concepts as easily as I would like. There are way too many equations, accompanying definitions, and shifts between phasor domain and time domain, and not nearly enough pictures (actually, none) for me to try to grasp this on a purely intuitive level before approaching it mathematically. So I have to build a picture of the situation based on the math– but I need a picture to grok the math– a tortured web.

It is fun, though, to have these problems. It gives me something worthwhile to do.

At UH, the incoming students in each engineering department are provided with flowcharts that show what courses it is recommended they take in each semester. They change a bit from semester to semester. This is a fictional flowchart [ 2.6 Mb] for the 1993-4 class of electrical engineers. Maybe you have be in the ECE program at UH to appreciate the humor of it. Maybe not.

Is it possible to determine on the basis of a person’s email, or a corpus of emails sent by that person, that person’s gender? It would be fortuitous if I could compare all the emails I’ve saved to see if there was a difference between those originating from females, and those from males, but all of the emails I have are from males. This is because— and this is a fact that bothers me intermittently— all my friends are male. The last time I had a female friend was in high school; at first, we were really close, but by the time we graduated, we had changed so much, in separate directions that she was the most distant of my friends. She was a lot more material, and I was a lot more cerebral, to put it bluntly.

I think that characterizes the reason I have no close female friends. Friendships start off in people’s comfort zone, and mine is far from most other people’s. I like thinking people, so mine start with pretty bland conversation. In most social environments, people of the opposite sex who don’t know each other don’t engage in bland conversation. So, the problem is, I can’t flirt effectively…

I’m glad no one but me reads this site. Lets me be honest.