Haiku Monday - Invisible Failure

Invisible Failure

I work and I toil

My invisible failure

Time wasted untold

Punk Rock Friday - To Save my Soul

I am having a crappy day.  LBS was a terror this morning - fighting about what pants to wear - even though he picked them out.  Same thing every day this week. I am really just done with dealing with.  Beautiful Wife is under a galaxy-load of stress from work and was not a pleasant women this morning.  This irked me more than usual and we fought.  I was a complete jerk - she reciprocated my kindness.  I only got about 5 hours of sleep - I was working until midnight just like I have every night this week.  I am tired, drained, and feeling a bit thin in the soul.  I feel simultaneously like I need a good stiff whiskey, a gallon of coffee, and twenty nights worth of sleep.

So to try and soothe my soul a bit I thought I would pull Punk Rock Friday out of the dusty corner I put it in.  Here we go:

Ducky Boys - For the Underdogs:


Flogging Molly - The Worst Day Since Yesterday:


Dropkick Murphys - Bar Room Hero:


Rancid - Fall Back Down:

Great Irish Physicists and Scientists - Redux

Note this was originally posted 3/17/2011. Here is the original link: Great Irish Physicists and Scientists

In honor of St. Patrick's Day (my favorite holiday), I thought I would compile a list of great Irish physicists and scientists.  I will focus on physicists but will include a few other scientists for good measure.  Greatness and therefore inclusion in this list will be measured by me simply by my opinion.  How's is that for scientific!

George FitzGerald

George FitzGerald

His claim to fame is the FitzGerald-Lorentz length contraction - the decrease of the length of an objection (along the direction of motion) with non-zero velocity relative to an observer.  This is an important result of Einstein's special theory of relativity.  Born in Dublin, he was a professor at Trinity College.

George Stoney

Stoney, from County Offaly, is the man who introduced both the concept and the word "electron" for the fundamental unit of electricity.  Also a professor at Trinity College.

Ernest Walton

Ernest Walton

Walton is credited to be the first person to (artificially) split an atom and therefore ushered in the nuclear age.  He was a student of Rutherford at the Cavendish lab at Cambridge. Went on to a professorship also at Trinity college.  He won the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Sir John Douglas Cockcroft "for their pioneer work on the transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles."  Currently the only Irishman to have won a Nobel Prize in science.

Frederick Trouton 

Trouton is most famous for Trouton's rule, which states that for various liquids, the entropy of vaporization is same: approximately 88 J/(K mol).  Trouton's rule is typically used to estimate the entropy of vaporization for liquids due to its simple form.  Trouton, born in Dublin, studied physics at Trinity College, where he also received his first academic appointment upon graduation.  He went on to a professorship at Imperial College London.

Sir George Stokes

James Hamilton

Hamilton, born in Sligo, was an early contributor to S-matrix theory.  He went on to make significant contribution to the understanding of the strong nuclear force, specifically in the area of meson-nucleon and meson-meson interactions.  Hamilton held appointments at Cambridge, University College London and the Neils Bohr Institute.

Sir George Stokes

Yes, he is that Stokes - from Navier-Stokes equations (fluid dynamics) and Stokes' Theorem (differential geometry).  Born in Sligo, Stokes was a professor of mathematics at Cambridge.  A contemporary of Lord Kelvin and James Maxwell, Stokes made significant contributions to a variety of fields, including mathematics, fluid dynamics, optics, spectroscopy and chemistry.

William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) 

Thomson, born in Belfast, was knighted by Queen Victoria was later elevated to Baron Kelvin of Lorgs and is best known as Lord Kelvin. He made major contributions to astrophysics, fluid dynamics, naval engineering, but he is most known for his contributions to thermodynamics, specifically that there is a lower bound to temperature.  The kelvin scale of temperature is named after Thomson.

Erwin Schrödinger

Aha!  And you thought he was Austrian.  Well he was, but he was also a naturalized citizen of Ireland.  Schrödinger, famous for his contributions to quantum mechanics (hence the Schrödinger equation) and is in fact considered one of the "fathers" of quantum mechanics.  Schrödinger became a naturalized citizen of Ireland during his 17 years in Dublin, during which he helped to establish the Institute for Advanced Studies and was the Director of the School of Theoretical Physics.

Robert Boyle

Yes, the father of modern chemistry was indeed Irish.  Boyle was born in Waterford County.  He is most famous for Boyle's Law, which says that for a closed system at constant temperature, the pressure is inversely proportional to the volume.  This is something that every high school kid taking chemistry is well aware of.

I am sure there are plenty of others.  Sorry to anyone I have missed!

Happy Pi Day! Fun and Facts about Pi

Pi - you know it from all those boring math classes you had to take in school... But Pi is actually much cooler than math class.  Did you know that?  Also, today, March 14 is international Pi day!  No, not pie.  Though I think it is perfectly okay to celebrate Pi day with pie.

Why is it Pi day?  Well, simply because March 14 or 3/14 is the first three digits in the number Pi.  Technically, Pi day starts at 1:59 pm (since the next three digits after 3.14 is 159 [making the first 6 digits 3.14159]).

So, what is Pi?

Pi is simply defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle (technically a Euclidean circle - circumference is simply the length around the circle) to its diameter.  Remember diameter is just the straight line distance across a circle through its center.  Said less mathy - Pi is the number of times the diameter of a circle will wrap around the circumference.

Pi is also an irrational number.  That simply means it cannot be expressed as a simple fraction (like 22/7 for instance).  Therefore, when you write Pi as a decimal it never ends and it never repeats.  Crazy right?  It just keeps going on forever.

Some interesting facts about Pi:

• Albert Einstein was born on Pi day - 3/14/1879
• Pi has been studied for over 4000 years dating back to the Babylonians in approximated 2000 BC
• Beginning at position 762 in Pi, there are six nines in a row.  This is called the Feynman point.
• In 1897, the Indiana State Legislature tried to "square the circle," and therefore legislate the value of pi.
• Pi occurs extensively in Physics (and other sciences) especially when a formula or problem has rotational or spherical symmetry involved.

Well, I am going to go and find out where I am going to eat pie for lunch today.  I am suddenly very hungry.  I leave you with a math joke:

Spring Break - not so much of a break

No, I actually didn't give any homework.  But they have a midterm the first class after spring break! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

So, I am on Spring Break this week from teaching.  Yeah, it just is not as cool as it was when I was a student.  I never went anywhere warm (I was a poor punk rock kid in college), but I had a week off of classes where all I had to do was work my 3 jobs.  I could catch up on sleep, go out drinking every night (well that wasn't much of a change) - basically just screw around more than normal.

As a professor... now my spring break consists of catching up on all the work I put off because it could wait until spring break, grading all those things I need to grade, tracking down students who are failing, finishing up research projects that get left half finished, finishing up proposals that are due soon, and falling asleep earlier than expected... E X C I T I N G, right?

Teaching has also taught me a lot about statistics.  I have just under 400 students in my lecture.  With 400 students you basically get the full range of types of humans.  Every crazy little nuance in the human character is likely to be present.  And they all come to me with their problems regarding this class... because, well, I am in charge am I not?

So far during this semester I have had:
-students cry during my quizzes and exams (yes, more than one...)
-a student try to cyberbully me by email (it was truly hilarious)
-students asking to stay in my class while in jail
-students try to get me to get them jobs... (WTH... you know me 6 weeks and you want me to try and pull string for you?????)

And you want to know the most frustrating part of it all - I have to act like an adult.  I have to follow the rules.  I have to be the one to do the right thing concerning it every time.  It takes so much more work to be stuck being the mature, responsible one in the student-teacher relationship.  Annoying.

Because I just don't have enough to do...

Oh new year, you make me kinda crazy...

But in a good way, I suppose.  So, with the first of the year, I started not one but two new jobs...  Like I needed any more to do.

I am no longer a postdoc!  HURRAY!  The world rejoices.  I am a Research Professor now, which is cool.  But basically, nothing has changed for my job.  I still do a huge amount of research.  I just get paid to the research by this big name state university.  A Research Professor is not what we call a Tenure Track position.  That is, I am not teaching any classes.  I am just doing research.  I wish I was Tenure Track, but I know I will get there eventually.

However, I have started as an Adjunct Professor at another, lesser big name university.  Teaching an introductory astronomy course.  Which has been a whirlwind, to say the least.  I teach an hour and a half lecture twice a week and a two hour lab once a week.  That doesn't count all the preparation, driving to and from one job to another, and dealing with the insanity that is college students in the digital age.  It appears that simply having an email address is cause enough for them to think I will solve all their problems for them... I am slightly annoyed.

Yesterday, I had my first lab and lecture.  Lecture went fantastic.  It was everything I remember loving about teaching.  Lab, on the other hand, was a sort of fiasco.  There may or may not have been a crying student...

Either way, I am really happy with how the new year has started, but I am so damn busy... I think I dreamed last night about getting a good night sleep.  That is sad.

In little munchkin news, Sweet Little Hellion has started to be hardcore potty trained.  We are probably going to forgo the nighttime Pullup this weekend since she has started asking to not wear it... I am so ready to be diaper free in the Berserker Clan.  S O  R E A D Y !

Punk Rock Friday - Mommy's Little Monster

From the great documentary - Another State of Mind - here is a nice video from 1983 of Social Distortion playing Mommy's Little Monster in Winnipeg, Canada.