Prometheus Bound, Neutrinos, and tiny Anderson Cooper

 Hello Reader!  I hope the last…erm…almost 20 days have treated you well.  I know! I know! I said I would be better about blogging, and I’m working on it, but there has been much to do and travels have taken place.

My best friend’s birthday is today (and the world is better for it!) so I went to Buffalo to visit last weekend for a pre-birthday celebration.  It was fantastic (Niagara Falls, David Tennant/Catherine Tate Much Ado About Nothing, Blazing Saddles, drinks, good food, baking, nervous driving around [dude. Buffalo drivers are terrible!], other lovely Buffalonians…um…Buffalites…Buffaloers…well JB and EG,  and just great sbf time).  Tiny Anderson Cooper is a wonderful sbf joke – and AC is just pretty damn dashing!  So giggle some and enjoy the itty-bitty handsomeness that is bookmark Anderson Cooper.

So, school things.  Well.  Calculus III is still not my favorite – partial derivatives and tangent planes have been better than other parts though.  I think I may have to resign myself to the fact that The Math and I will never be in a loving relationship…and The Math don’t know what it’s missing out on! OW!  Physics is going well.  We started RC circuits this week.  Electronics have been very agreeable.  I am worried that I am being lulled into a false sense of security though – we will be starting the magnetism chapters very soon.  We read Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus this week in  my Greek Lit class.  I think it is my favorite reading so far.  I’ve always found Prometheus interesting.  I mean, he is a Titan, but doesn’t really fit in with the Titans.  Depending on the myth, he could be of the same generation as the Olympian gods.  But he doesn’t fit in with them either.  He helps mankind and is punished for his actions.  Being helpful and having to be responsible for your actions is not really something Greek deities do…ever.  In Prometheus Bound he is portrayed in a very human manner – which brings up questions of why.  Is this nostalgia via Hesiod that people always wish they had been alive during the past or in the future but not during the present?  The time Aeschylus was writing was very full of change (Athens coming to power, end of the strongmen rule and the move to democracy, the Persian Wars) – nostalgia makes very good sense.  But! Who knows!

Also.  News about neutrinos!

CERN: The press office of CERN issued the following statement today about last year’s finding by the OPERA collaboration that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light:

The OPERA collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino’s time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the OPERA collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May.

(via physicstoday.org)

The current word is that faulty wires could be responsible for the faster than light speed…so I guess we will know more in May.  Until then, this meme has been very popular:

Alright! On that note, have a lovely weekend my dear Reader!  Promise I’ll write soon!

Supernovae, Vectors, and Rainbow Rebellion

Hello, darling Reader.  I hope you have had a lovely week.  It has been another busy week.  I had my second Calculus exam on Friday!  Eh…but we are having exams every two weeks, so one not so hot one doesn’t matter too much (e.g. “You may have one this battle Calculus III, but the war has just begun! I shall master the vectors!” and so on…).  We are moving on to Presocratics in my Greek Lit class…like Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Anaximander (which I think is one of the coolest names ever!!).    It should be alright (not as floral as pervious things).  Also, Anaximander had delightful ideas about the universe, like aperion and this:

Illustration of Anaximander’s models of the universe. On the left, daytime in summer; on the right, nighttime in winter.

I also turned in my first response paper (I wrote about The Odyssey) for that class on Tuesday.  It was one of the most fragmented, babbly things I have ever written (and if you are reading my blog, you understand the amount of babbling I do on a regular basis!).  I am kind of nervous about getting it back.  It’s always difficult to do the first paper for someone – you aren’t quite sure what they want, how they are going to respond to your ideas, etc… so! It will be interesting to see how/if he liked it.

My first physics exam is Friday (2/10).  It should be alright!  I’ve also realized that I am not very effective at being rebellious.  I was unhappy about the lack of directions from my lab instructor on ambiguous parts of my lab, so I drew all of my force lines with colored pencils so that my lab report was rainbow (I would include a picture, but I’ve already turned the report in).  I mean, nothing screams discontent like rainbow colors!  It did make my lab report very beautiful though.  So. I have no regrets.

And, dear Reader, as I promised a couple of posts ago – GOOD NEWS!  Last semester I applied for the REU (Research Experience for Undergraduate) at my university and I have been accepted.  I will be spending 10 weeks of my summer studying supernovae!  This will be all sorts of good.  It will give me my first real lab experience (which will hopefully lead to a more permanent lab opportunity during the school year).  At the end of the summer, I will have research that I will be able to present at conferences.  So! It’s pretty rad and I am very excited.