Droplet + Laser = Awesomeness

Saw this awesome video of a droplet getting hit with a laser pulse linked to on what-if.xkcd.com.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRbHDtPbHe0

UW Daily Update Sunday Nov. 16

1.     UW Daily Update Sunday Nov. 16

a.     Sleep in a bit.

b.     Do physics postlab.

c.      Read posts for ed class and post a few short replies.

d.     Eat lunch buffet at Jewel of India, continuing Sunday tradition. While there, catch up on Ian and Monica’s blogs. There’s actually some overlap there, since they’re both posting about Nanowrimo. Then I read some Wise Man’s Fear.

e.     Return to dorm and do physics homework. This homework warns students that it will be “henceforth known as the hard one”. It’s pretty interesting—not absurdly hard, but definitely more difficult than the average homework.

f.      Meet the family and the McGuires. Give them a short tour of Haggett. Then we head off to visit our friend in the Children’s Hospital. Things seem to be going fairly well.

g.     My family, the McGuires, and the family of our friend all eat at an Italian restaurant and chat.

h.     I hustle back to the campus with Dad, say goodbye, and rush over to a meeting with Jessica and Christian from ed class. We meet in one of the study rooms in the business library and have a very productive conversation. Everything crystallizes nicely, and we come up with a timeline for moving forward.

i.       I walk back to the dorm and grab Rick’s. I read the next chapter of physics textbook, then write this log.

UW Daily Update Saturday Nov. 15

1.     UW Daily Update Saturday Nov. 15

a.     Sleep in.

b.     Work a little bit more on my rover code; realize it’s irretrievably messy and start writing a class to manage the details.

c.      Head to the lounge to watch the football game. Manage to get it playing, but nobody is there to watch with me and I’m hungry, so I head to Which Wich and grab a delicious sandwich. The game is playing there, so I camp there until halftime. At halftime, I run to Trader Joe’s and grab some fruit, then walk back to the dorm. I call my uncle Mike while I walk and we chat about Thanksgiving preparations, football, and college.

d.     Watch the rest of the game in the lounge. The Huskies made a disastrous mistake at the end leading to a loss we neither deserved (we outplayed our much higher ranked opponents the entire game) nor were able to afford given our post-season chances.

e.     Went to the IMA and played badminton. It was nice since there were 8 courts open as opposed to the usual 4 on weekdays.

f.      Showered and ate dinner with Xin and Brandon from physics.

g.     Returned to the lounge and watched Catch Me If You Can, a true story about a brilliant young con artist and forger who, after being captured, worked with the FBI to secure checks and catch financial criminals.

h.     We were going to watch Dead Poets’ Society afterwards, but it had been taken off Netflix. Any one of us could have bought it off Amazon for $3, an option I supported and put money behind, but the diversion opened an avenue for other movies to be considered, and we ended up watching the King’s Speech. I at first was bummed since I already had seen it, but I ended up really enjoying it.

i.       Went to bed (it was late!).

UW Daily Update Friday Nov. 14

1.     UW Daily Update Friday Nov. 14

a.     Wake up early and left to get breakfast at Motosurf before attending physics. Got the Moto Combo of eggs, potato, and sausage, jogged over to the physics tables, and chowed down.

b.     Go to physics; drew more free-body diagrams and did more interesting applications of Newton’s second law (a force F causes an acceleration a proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass; F = ma. We clarify how “the tension” in a string is defined.

c.      Do phys homework outside.

d.     Go to the IMA and played basketball. The only gym with enough people for a game was Gym A, the gym inhabited by all the hardcore players. Play two games. It was fun, but there were some really good players. If I hesitated with the ball, my defender would try to rip the ball out of my hands, and he succeeded several times.

e.     Grab my ticket for the next home football game (Saturday after this Saturday)

f.      Eat lunch at the HUB, then go to computer science. Discuss interesting next homework assign, where we write a program that builds a tree representing a set of questions to ask in playing 20 Questions and learns after every game it loses by prompting the user for a question that distinguishes the object the user is thinking of from its best guess and then uses that question to create another branch on the tree.

g.     Return to the dorm and took a shower. Decide to work on improving the brute force algorithm I wrote for the programming competition I did a month ago that wasn’t efficient enough (where I tried to figure out how close a rover with restricted moves could get to a given point in a given time; see Update Oct. 11), using some ideas I’ve had since then and what I’ve learned about recursive backtracking. Unfortunately, I get lazy and don’t create a class to manage all the details of my rover’s state, and get into an awful mess. I’m convinced my idea will work, I just need to do it right.

h.     Set up Skype with Grace for following Wednesday.

i.       Eat dinner at 8 and read.

j.       Play poker with floormates and amass enormous fortune.

k.     Do computer science homework and go to bed.

UW Daily Update Thursday Nov. 13

1.     UW Daily Update Thursday Nov. 13

a.     Woke at 5:50 am to register for classes.

b.    Although my registration date was early because I have junior status, and I didn't have to worry about getting into my classes since I wasn’t taking classes in high demand, but I still used the method recommended by my peer instructor—armed with my prebuilt schedule from yesterday, I hit the study room with my computer. I hit the refresh button on my registration tab like 300 times until the powers that be opened registration (they were actually about on schedule, and registration came online at 6:00 am), then switched tabs like a ninja to my schedule builder and hit register. And true to my peer educator's word, the website crashed a couple minutes after successfully registering me. Apparently, there's a big difference between 6 sharp and 6:03 :)

c.      I went back to sleep and reawakened at 9:30. I hustled out to get breakfast at the Motosurf food truck before breakfast closed at 10:30.

                                                 i.     This idea is another perk of having too much money on my dining card J

                                               ii.     Unfortunately, they were out of everything but fried rice and bacon.

d.     Fortunately, this was pretty dang good, enjoyed at one of the tables on the terrace outside the physics building overlooking pretty trees and some water.

e.     Went in to tutorial, where we argued about how tension worked in a rope and didn’t get the tutorial done.

f.      Went to CS section. We did some interesting recursive binary tree problems. I got my actual midterm back. I already knew my score (I’m happy with it J ) but I got to see how I did on each problem. I had been sure the points I lost were over an actual mistake in how my recursive method passed information from one level of the process to the next, but I realized when I looked at the midterm that I had actually fixed this problem in the few minutes I had before time was called to check my answers. My only mistakes were some stupid blunders in tracing method calls in an inheritance tree, and calling the .size() method where I should be asking for the attribute .length, and vice versa. (Due to historical reasons, in Java if you want the length of an Array of items, you ask it .length, but if you want the length of a String of characters, you ask it .length(), and if you want the length of  a list of items, you ask it .size(). )

g.     Walked back towards dorm and decided to sit out in the sun and answer email. As I sat in thoughtful contentment, a Frisbee crashed into the bush next to me. I used this as an excuse to join a game of catch, which was relaxing.

h.     Afterwards, ate lunch in the HUB and read physics.

i.       Returned to the dorm and finished CS homework.

j.       Worked on ed post. Got caught up in side tangent relating to a book of short stories about the Vietnam war, The Things They Carried, I’d read for an English class at Whatcom.

k.     After doing a lot of homework and answering some email, I finally met with Jamie for dinner at the 8.

l.       We went to Film club for “Best Worst Movie Night” and watched one of the worst movies of all time, Birdemic. It was so bad, it was almost impossible to believe it wasn’t a parody, but apparently it was made by an earnest director paying for its $10, 000 budget from his day job. It had ridiculously overt environmental overtones, completely flat characters that interacted in completely obvious ways, and an absurd plot involving terrible animated birds and explosions that reminded me of Trogdor the Burninator, AND AK-47s. Man. It was BAD.

m.   Did more work on ed post.

n.     Got ice cream at Ricks, hung out in lounge.

o.     Talked to my floormate Issa Rice (guy) for the first time. Realized I’d mistook him for someone who wore the exact same hat that Issa usually wears.

p.     Finished ed post, wrote log. Went to bed.