Sat - July 30, 2005
Don't call me Shirley.
Welcome to my cubicle! Here is what I do
all day.
A little while back --by which I mean over a year
ago-- my supervisor looked at a plot that I made, wrinkled his nose, and said,
"That looks like some sort of parametric resonance, doesn't it? Surely that
makes sense, and it should be easy to show on paper why that happens.
[pause...] Don't you agree? [pause...] Do you know what parametric resonance
is?"
yeah.. Every time that man says the word "surely", I know I'm in trouble. Months and months and months later, and after a million to-do lists where the line "Figure out param. res. shit" was left un- crossed out, I know this much:
I know that you get PR when you have a differential equation that looks like this:
I know that the problem that I've been staring at for nigh 3 and a half years produces an equation like this:
The similarity is that, in the first equation, one of the parameters is a periodic function (the cosine function), whereas in the second equation, that expression in brackets has a several periodic components to it (there are cosine functions, but more importantly, that x-bar term oscillates in time).
In the first equation, the magic happens if the frequency of the parameter (\nu) is an integer multiple of the natural frequency (\alpha) of the system -- the solution grows quickly because of parametric resonance. It only works well (whatever that means) if this integer multiple is 1 or 2 (and 2 is better). You can solve that equation numerically, and it looks like this:
Whoo, exponential growth!
In the second equation, it just so happens that the frequency of the periodic parameter (x-bar) is an integer multiple of the natural frequency (\epsilon^-1), in fact, they are the same. This means that the integer multiple is 1, which is almost as good as 2.
So, if you wave your hands around in the air a bit and mutter some shit about asymptotic limits, the second equation should also have crazy growing solutions that are totally explainable, thus enabling me to write another paper, graduate earlier, and move to Rome to become a superstar at the European Space Agency and ride a Vespa to work every day and drink wine in the cafeteria and take romantic walks past the Colliseum.
Unfortunately the second equation has a whole lot of other shit in it (the C's and phi's), which makes it kind of an ugly cousin of the first equation. If you take all that shit out and integrate numerically, you will get this:
Mmmhmm, that smells like PR to me. Woot.
But it turns out all that other shit is kind of important, so you might want to stick it back in. Integrate that mofo, and you get this:
Yaaa!! Could this revolutionize the world of atmospheric data assimilation?? Maybe. Except that if you change your initial conditions a wee bit, you get this:
Do you see the exponential growth? I sure don't. I see a bunch of shit that lost its connection to physical reality a long, long time ago. What the crap gives?? While writing this whole thing out has made me feel pretty smart, I still don't have an answer to the bossman. I want a beer.
yeah.. Every time that man says the word "surely", I know I'm in trouble. Months and months and months later, and after a million to-do lists where the line "Figure out param. res. shit" was left un- crossed out, I know this much:
I know that you get PR when you have a differential equation that looks like this:
I know that the problem that I've been staring at for nigh 3 and a half years produces an equation like this:
The similarity is that, in the first equation, one of the parameters is a periodic function (the cosine function), whereas in the second equation, that expression in brackets has a several periodic components to it (there are cosine functions, but more importantly, that x-bar term oscillates in time).
In the first equation, the magic happens if the frequency of the parameter (\nu) is an integer multiple of the natural frequency (\alpha) of the system -- the solution grows quickly because of parametric resonance. It only works well (whatever that means) if this integer multiple is 1 or 2 (and 2 is better). You can solve that equation numerically, and it looks like this:
Whoo, exponential growth!
In the second equation, it just so happens that the frequency of the periodic parameter (x-bar) is an integer multiple of the natural frequency (\epsilon^-1), in fact, they are the same. This means that the integer multiple is 1, which is almost as good as 2.
So, if you wave your hands around in the air a bit and mutter some shit about asymptotic limits, the second equation should also have crazy growing solutions that are totally explainable, thus enabling me to write another paper, graduate earlier, and move to Rome to become a superstar at the European Space Agency and ride a Vespa to work every day and drink wine in the cafeteria and take romantic walks past the Colliseum.
Unfortunately the second equation has a whole lot of other shit in it (the C's and phi's), which makes it kind of an ugly cousin of the first equation. If you take all that shit out and integrate numerically, you will get this:
Mmmhmm, that smells like PR to me. Woot.
But it turns out all that other shit is kind of important, so you might want to stick it back in. Integrate that mofo, and you get this:
Yaaa!! Could this revolutionize the world of atmospheric data assimilation?? Maybe. Except that if you change your initial conditions a wee bit, you get this:
Do you see the exponential growth? I sure don't. I see a bunch of shit that lost its connection to physical reality a long, long time ago. What the crap gives?? While writing this whole thing out has made me feel pretty smart, I still don't have an answer to the bossman. I want a beer.
Posted at 12:00 PM
Sharing the love.
I'm feeling inspired to make stuff
again.
Yesterday the wedding
flautist and her husband came over to be guinea pigs in my first
attempt at replicating Indian chai, and also because we are putting together a
care package for a mutual friend who is at camp. I'm pretty pleased with the
swag she's getting from me, especially my (finally
finished) SoX
Nouveaux!
If you stare at them long enough, you can see 3D dolphins.
I always have a hard time overcoming the "do people really want this shit?" barrier when I make stuff, be it garments or food or whatever, for others. Nonetheless, the chai turned out well, and somehow hanging out with an architect and a musician all afternoon left me feeling creative. I decided to paint my living room tangerine, but since the hardware store was closed, I instead started knitting a secret gift for one of the many couples I know who are getting married this year. By the time I got going on that, I was way late to the birthday party I was supposed to go to, and big-time on a using-my-brain-for-good roll. So I skipped the party and sat down and wrote some code (hell ya...) and came up with some good ideas for my research, and then I knitted up a storm till like 3am. Yeah...I'm cool.
If you stare at them long enough, you can see 3D dolphins.
I always have a hard time overcoming the "do people really want this shit?" barrier when I make stuff, be it garments or food or whatever, for others. Nonetheless, the chai turned out well, and somehow hanging out with an architect and a musician all afternoon left me feeling creative. I decided to paint my living room tangerine, but since the hardware store was closed, I instead started knitting a secret gift for one of the many couples I know who are getting married this year. By the time I got going on that, I was way late to the birthday party I was supposed to go to, and big-time on a using-my-brain-for-good roll. So I skipped the party and sat down and wrote some code (hell ya...) and came up with some good ideas for my research, and then I knitted up a storm till like 3am. Yeah...I'm cool.
Posted at 11:34 AM
Sat - July 23, 2005
India pictures
When I was a kid, my weird chain-smoking aunt and
uncle used to make us all sit down for hours and look at slides of their
vacations. They'd go to exotic places like Bavaria or Baden-Wuerttemberg, and
most of the pictures were of them sitting in lawn chairs outside their trailer.
This is kind of like that, except a thousand times better: my pictures from India. I came up with 3 nifty ways for you to enjoy them.
1. To get the photo files straight up, in full size, go here:
2. To see a spiff quicktime movie slide-show of the highlights of my pictures, go " target="NewWindow">here" target="NewWindow"> :
3. To see a handy photo album of my pictures, with the occasional caption, explanation, or sassy remark, go here :
This is kind of like that, except a thousand times better: my pictures from India. I came up with 3 nifty ways for you to enjoy them.
1. To get the photo files straight up, in full size, go here:
2. To see a spiff quicktime movie slide-show of the highlights of my pictures, go " target="NewWindow">here" target="NewWindow"> :
3. To see a handy photo album of my pictures, with the occasional caption, explanation, or sassy remark, go here :
Posted at 08:32 PM
I can be let out again.
Okay, enough pity party for me; things is
lookin up.
So I took care of the lice a second time, and
then I went for the art-drop in at Sanctuary and made some jewelry, and then
Rebekah took me out for a drink. So it was a pretty good day after all, even
though I started it off full of
rage.
Also, I got not one but two sources of income. The first is continuing the tutoring job with which I raised $500 for India in March. I can't believe parents will pay that much to additionally-educate their brainiac youngster, but I'm not gonna complain. The second job is babysitting a satellite instrument that will be in our department for "testing" (do I know what I am talking about? No.) next week. It's sweet: you just sit there all night, knitting and writing code for your own research, and you take the instrument's temperature every half hour. Come sunrise, you've earned yourself a hundred bucks and can pay your rent. And that is wicked.
If you get a chance, listen to the despair of my talented and hilarious friend Marshall , who had the fortitude to walk away from a shitty (non-paying) job this week.
Current song: Such Great Heights by the Postal Service
Also, I got not one but two sources of income. The first is continuing the tutoring job with which I raised $500 for India in March. I can't believe parents will pay that much to additionally-educate their brainiac youngster, but I'm not gonna complain. The second job is babysitting a satellite instrument that will be in our department for "testing" (do I know what I am talking about? No.) next week. It's sweet: you just sit there all night, knitting and writing code for your own research, and you take the instrument's temperature every half hour. Come sunrise, you've earned yourself a hundred bucks and can pay your rent. And that is wicked.
If you get a chance, listen to the despair of my talented and hilarious friend Marshall , who had the fortitude to walk away from a shitty (non-paying) job this week.
Current song: Such Great Heights by the Postal Service
Posted at 02:06 PM
Scarved
Well, since you
asked...
Yes, I do realize that I really have no right to
call myself Lisa the Knitter, given that (a) I haven't finished a project in a
million years, and (b) I don't really blog much about knitting. I wonder if any
of these catty
dweebs have noticed and reamed my ass for
it.
But anyhoo, I really have been knitting. India was pretty much too hot / humid / dirty to knit, except for the long flight out there and back, where I made one and a half socks, and Darjeeling. Darjeeling gets pretty chilly, not to mention foggy-pretty, so, shortly after my friends and i realized that we couldn't get on a train out and were stuck there for two weeks (this, by the way, is why I still haven't seen the thing I've wanted to see since I was 17 ), I hooked myself up with some green yarn and a set of Ponys, and started this:
Look familiar? Yeah, it's the same pattern as the scarf I started in Vienna and have yet to finish. At the time I scrawled the lace pattern into my little orange notebook, and thus it was the only pattern I had on me. Anyways, the green yarn is acrylic but it feels nice and reminds me of this:
and, besides that, the yarn and needles together cost 45 Rupees, which is just under a buck-fitty. Yeeeah.
Since I was in idiot mode all week and thus unable to work on any of the more complicated projects that I started a million years ago, I went back to my fiery red manos scarf. Now, however, it looks like this:
Yeah, it's a lame 1x1 rib rectangle, and it's kinda stiff because the needles I'm using are kinda too small. I stole this idea from my stylish friend Lisa, who knit a scarf like that while still learning to knit, with the only needles she had, and switching colors partway through just because (like me) she ran out of yarn way before the scarf was long enough. And it turned out freaking fabulous, so I copied the idea. I'm almost out of the red, so I'm going to do the second half that wicked sage green Lamb's Pride that's going to be leftover once I finish this .
My model there is Nalle, the Ikea Chastity Bear. He is called this because (as a friend of mine suggested) you're s'posed to clutch him while sharing the couch with a potential suitor...you know, so the young man keeps his hands to himself. Heh... I should have such problems.
Current song: Everloving by Moby
*Rebekah tells me that Ponys are actually made in India...cool, eh?
But anyhoo, I really have been knitting. India was pretty much too hot / humid / dirty to knit, except for the long flight out there and back, where I made one and a half socks, and Darjeeling. Darjeeling gets pretty chilly, not to mention foggy-pretty, so, shortly after my friends and i realized that we couldn't get on a train out and were stuck there for two weeks (this, by the way, is why I still haven't seen the thing I've wanted to see since I was 17 ), I hooked myself up with some green yarn and a set of Ponys, and started this:
Look familiar? Yeah, it's the same pattern as the scarf I started in Vienna and have yet to finish. At the time I scrawled the lace pattern into my little orange notebook, and thus it was the only pattern I had on me. Anyways, the green yarn is acrylic but it feels nice and reminds me of this:
and, besides that, the yarn and needles together cost 45 Rupees, which is just under a buck-fitty. Yeeeah.
Since I was in idiot mode all week and thus unable to work on any of the more complicated projects that I started a million years ago, I went back to my fiery red manos scarf. Now, however, it looks like this:
Yeah, it's a lame 1x1 rib rectangle, and it's kinda stiff because the needles I'm using are kinda too small. I stole this idea from my stylish friend Lisa, who knit a scarf like that while still learning to knit, with the only needles she had, and switching colors partway through just because (like me) she ran out of yarn way before the scarf was long enough. And it turned out freaking fabulous, so I copied the idea. I'm almost out of the red, so I'm going to do the second half that wicked sage green Lamb's Pride that's going to be leftover once I finish this .
My model there is Nalle, the Ikea Chastity Bear. He is called this because (as a friend of mine suggested) you're s'posed to clutch him while sharing the couch with a potential suitor...you know, so the young man keeps his hands to himself. Heh... I should have such problems.
Current song: Everloving by Moby
*Rebekah tells me that Ponys are actually made in India...cool, eh?
Posted at 11:50 AM
das bin ich:
german-born, american raised, canada-loving aspiring scientist / cat lady.
Categories
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
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Published On: Jul 30, 2005 04:03 PM
Published On: Jul 30, 2005 04:03 PM