11/1/16: Quantum Questioning

1. 11/1/16
1. Quantum is neat.
2. Walk with Jacob and ask questions of Prof. Cobden; eventually end up in his sweet 5th-floor office.
3. Return to SPS lounge, do math with Jacob (we develop a new, much improved notation for wave variables that I’m going to use from now on that brings out the correspondence between the time variables like frequency, period and the space variables like wavenumber, wavelength). Jacob really likes it :)
4. Eat lunch.
5. Work out another weird thing from quantum that mathematically is very simple but whose implications are really neat (it explains why large objects move at the expected, classical velocities even when exposed as the high-space-frequency waves they are). It relates the speed of a wavepacket whose momentum representation is pretty tight (we know from the wavefunction the momentum is within some small region of momentum space) to the derivative of the space-frequency with respect to the time-frequency (instead of just being the ratio of the space frequency and the time frequency, as it would be for a single wave).
6. Go to Cafe Solstice to meet this girl Melina, who’d asked my number at the crazy packed party, I went to after the Lavin party last Friday.
7. Go to CaC. Neat panel of entrepreneurs, one of whom worked on this really cool, simple-to-understand product named KickStart.
8. Talk with team, get a few things sorted out; talk with the KickStart woman Chie, who’s trained as an engineer, but mostly worked on marketing. Interesting story; the product engineering and approval was pretty fast, but figuring out that a) they needed to price low enough to get covered by insurance and b) they needed to market to patients was tricky.
9. Glee!
10. Return to 2104; Xin and Brandon are cooking dinner. Unfortunately, they got the wrong kind of curry paste. So I bike to QFC and get the correct kind, then sit and do E&M hw while they make dinner.
11. Dinner is tasty, Evan joins us for a bit. Afterwards is pumpkin pie :)
12. Head up and finish E&M. Also read the first chapter of “Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes, which is already very awesome.
13. Hit the hay! ‘Night y’all :)