(no subject)
It's so quiet now. Almost everyone went home for the 4th of July 'weekend'. The other REU kids are great and I love hanging out with them, but a couple days of quiet are nice too.
It's also really humid now. We've had rain in the evening almost all week, sometimes heavy thunderstorms. The weather makes rollerblading more of a hassle, but getting to rollerblade again at all has been a fun bit of nostalgia for me.
In preparation for a quiet weekend, I went to the library and took out a few gems: the movie Copenhagen, which is about the meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg that took place there; and three scores: some Debussy, some Liszt, and some Skryabin (that one's called "Satanic Poem". Skryabin's funny like that).
I spent most of this week at an X-ray crystallography short course with some of the REU kids and a few other college students from nearby schools (Washington & Lee, VMI, Richmond, etc). Overall it was well worth the time: not only did we get to run the entire process from mounting the crystal in the diffractometer to solving and refining the structure computationally, we even got to solve the structure of one of JP's crystals. And she got what she wanted (a diphenylated dodecafluorinated dicyclopentadienyl arene ... she was afraid it would turn out to be tetraphenylated).
Today in lab, I got some osciallator strength calculations underway for 2-chloropropionitrile, and then we had a lecture on Second Quantization. Which is just a fancy phrase for using a different type of operator in the expressions for expectation values of many-electron wavefunctions. Some interesting algebra ensues (specifically the algebra of (3N)-dimensional vectors in Fock space, where N is the number of atoms). Good times.
I should also apologize for not being online so much recently . . . the problem is that I am toting my laptop to and from lab daily, and sometimes I'm just too lazy to unpack it after work just to pop online. Yell at me if I am not supplying you with sufficient opportunities for away-message checking.
It's also really humid now. We've had rain in the evening almost all week, sometimes heavy thunderstorms. The weather makes rollerblading more of a hassle, but getting to rollerblade again at all has been a fun bit of nostalgia for me.
In preparation for a quiet weekend, I went to the library and took out a few gems: the movie Copenhagen, which is about the meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg that took place there; and three scores: some Debussy, some Liszt, and some Skryabin (that one's called "Satanic Poem". Skryabin's funny like that).
I spent most of this week at an X-ray crystallography short course with some of the REU kids and a few other college students from nearby schools (Washington & Lee, VMI, Richmond, etc). Overall it was well worth the time: not only did we get to run the entire process from mounting the crystal in the diffractometer to solving and refining the structure computationally, we even got to solve the structure of one of JP's crystals. And she got what she wanted (a diphenylated dodecafluorinated dicyclopentadienyl arene ... she was afraid it would turn out to be tetraphenylated).
Today in lab, I got some osciallator strength calculations underway for 2-chloropropionitrile, and then we had a lecture on Second Quantization. Which is just a fancy phrase for using a different type of operator in the expressions for expectation values of many-electron wavefunctions. Some interesting algebra ensues (specifically the algebra of (3N)-dimensional vectors in Fock space, where N is the number of atoms). Good times.
I should also apologize for not being online so much recently . . . the problem is that I am toting my laptop to and from lab daily, and sometimes I'm just too lazy to unpack it after work just to pop online. Yell at me if I am not supplying you with sufficient opportunities for away-message checking.