10/10/16: Beautiful and Insane, this Life

1. 10/10/16: Beautiful and Insane, this Life
1. Woke bright and early for two tutorial sections. Material is picking up and I have fun. Then StatMech. Work out some interesting stuff as Marcel reviews engines.
2. Hustle to Orin’s Cafe and meet CaC team. Talk about my/Raustin’s idea (gets pretty intense, lots of good pros and cons) and work on “team contract” forms.
3. Back to SPS lounge for lunchbox with Prof. Marcel on the Nobel Prize. Place is packed, pizza is gone. I have this strange sense I’m performing some role in a movie. Marcel talks at a brisk clip about superfluidity in liquid helium. Nobody asks any questions and the silence swells to smother the room, so I ask about the topological insulators thing, (you know, pretzel, coffee cup, that thing) and what a fascinating tale that is! In short, the conductivity depending on only the topological genus of the surface of the object astonished theorists, but (and this won the Nobel prize) fell right out of the math after working with a simplified periodic-potential model. It was thrown into the paper in the last week before publication.
4. I’m sitting on the floor, eating an apple since the pizza is gone, staring intently at Marcel, asking questions in an otherwise silent but packed room--feels surreal. I am a geek in the sunlight of the spotless mind, holding the conch of discourse in oblivious hands. I ask one more crazy question about whether young researchers should go after the most “important” problems in their field as Hamming urged, got interesting answers from both Marcel and Olmstead.
5. Afterwards, hang in SPS lounge with Justin, Jacob W. We plan the first Math Club meeting for Wednesday, and book a hotel for PhysCon. This too feels surreal. Jacob W wants to book the hotel the conference is in, at $260/night; I get on Hotels.com and trade $130 / night for a < 1 mile walk.
6. Put on my HvZ bandanna and run back to 2104, make myself an amazing sandwich. Watch the final episode of April, crazy ending, not plausible but very beautiful.
7. Go to IMA, play some hoops. Play pretty well but there’s not as many people and the standard of play is not as high :) Monday, go figure.
8. Return to 2104, chow a bowl of Raisin Bran, and off to Putnam prep session. Got invited by 2104 dude Evan and swingin’ lady Savanna, so I decided to go. Guess what--half of my Math 336 class was there, in that same tiny review session room in Padelford I thought I’d never see again!
9. We take a 2-hour test (most of the sessions aren’t like this, much more discussion-based, but this one determines who is on the UW Putnam team. It’s a lot of fun, solve 3 out of the 5 problems. Get really bogged down in a stupid way on one of them, but works out OK.
10. Afterwards, discuss problems with Thomas et al. Then end up going to dinner with Will, Thomas, Kelsey (hadn’t met her, in my quantum class xD), and some n00bs from the current iteration of 334. These n00bs knew what was up, though; one of them showed us a simple solution to the hardest problem on the test, that to our knowledge nobody had solved (except this guy). Was able to get that dude on the SPS mailing list #score! Also good to catch up with Will and Thomas.
11. Return to 2104, on way back stop in at Monday dance to say hi to folks. It’s winding down, hang out with Alex and Diego for 15 minutes.
12. Back at 2104, go ham on quantum hw, still don’t finish the darn stuff, have 1 problem left to do in review-y E&M lecture tomorrow morning. But I need to sleep. I’ll do that now, actually!