Week's End
It's been a busy, but all-around pretty decent week. Halloween concert on Tuesday went well, with a good 150-200 people showing up (which is quite a good turnout for one of our shows, although it looked pretty empty in the 700-person concert hall...). I reckon I should probably include some pictures, eh? I brought my camera along, and got a few good shots.
Me. All gross and stuff. My costume consists of...dun dun dun...a bathrobe and red Games Workshop paint. The kind you use for Warhammer.
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's....Priyanka the Spork!
Snow White and the Seven Dwarf Cellists.
The octopus on the bassoon kills me every time...
The GES 102DEATH midterm the following morning went quite well. I've promised myself, though, that I will not look at my grade when I get it back. I'm going to pick it up, put it upside down in my binder, take it home, put it in the bottom of some drawer, and not look at it until well after the quarter is over and what exactly I got on it doesn't matter any more. I know I scored high enough to do very well in the class, and that will have to do for now. In other news, the second half of 102DEATH looks like it might just be 102LIFE, or something like it. From what I hear, the labs get harder, but at least not much longer. But the lectures...aaah, the lectures. Professor Brown is finished for the quarter, and I couldn't be happier. I have no notes at all this first half of the quarter, because his lectures usually involve about five minutes of on-topic-ish material interspersed with 15-minute stories about his former graduate students or his exploits horseback riding on the ranch of some rich high-profile person or another, making it absolutely impossible to take lucid notes on what goes on. But in the two lectures we had this past week, I took a good 7 pages of detailed, crisply organized, legible, even pretty notes! And the person responsible for that is...Chris Mattinson. He's a postdoc here at Stanford, having earned his Ph.D. last spring, and is teaching the second half of this class for the first time. But he's doing an absolutely stellar job, in my opinion. His lectures are well organized, on topic, involve no stories about acquaintances past or present, and make so much sense. He can even ask those of us (notably me and Julie Padilla) who tend to answer all his questions, without making it seem like a put-down.
Research is also going really well. I've taken to spending most of my spare time in the lab (soon to be pictured below), either working at one of the computers or the drafting table. Yesterday, for instance, I was there from 10 am to 5 pm, working on about four different things - all of which will soon be described in great detail over at mariahelga. The best part of it is that I love my labmates. The two people who spend the most time there (aside from George, whose office opens directly into the lab) are Katrin, a graduate student from Germany, and Miles, a research assistant in the group who graduated from Berkeley a few years ago. Katrin is working on some similar things to me at the moment, so we've been helping each other out (or mostly, she's been helping me, and I've been offering moral support when she accidentally deletes all her data at 4:30 pm on a Friday after George the computer guru has gone home). Because a lot of the datasets we're working with are very large, and we have to perform fairly cumbersome operations on them, the three of us actually spend a very significant portion of our time sitting around and waiting for the computer to finish processing - which means we spend a lot of time talking about this, that or the other thing, ranging from Halloween costumes to existentialism to misadventures in computer land. Quite a few other people drop in and out, all of which I really like too, so it's all told a very pleasing situation.
The staircase in GeoCorner (the main geology building on the quad, where I seem to spend almost all my free time these days, to my great joy.) Isn't it pretty?
My lab. Three super-powerful computers and a drafting table. This is where I camp out between classes and try to move my research (yes, I promisepromisepromise I will tell you what it's about - I'm working on the entry right now) forward in any way I can. Or do homework. Or procrastinate. Or chat with Miles, Katrin, Liz Clark, and whomever else may wander through.
In other random news, I can confirm that I am at least mildly lactose intolerant. My sensitivity doesn't seem to extend to cheese, thank God, or I would DIE, but I get sick to my stomach with diarrhea and other fun stuff whenever I have ice cream. Well, fooey. :(
Me. All gross and stuff. My costume consists of...dun dun dun...a bathrobe and red Games Workshop paint. The kind you use for Warhammer.
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's....Priyanka the Spork!
Snow White and the Seven Dwarf Cellists.
The octopus on the bassoon kills me every time...
The GES 102DEATH midterm the following morning went quite well. I've promised myself, though, that I will not look at my grade when I get it back. I'm going to pick it up, put it upside down in my binder, take it home, put it in the bottom of some drawer, and not look at it until well after the quarter is over and what exactly I got on it doesn't matter any more. I know I scored high enough to do very well in the class, and that will have to do for now. In other news, the second half of 102DEATH looks like it might just be 102LIFE, or something like it. From what I hear, the labs get harder, but at least not much longer. But the lectures...aaah, the lectures. Professor Brown is finished for the quarter, and I couldn't be happier. I have no notes at all this first half of the quarter, because his lectures usually involve about five minutes of on-topic-ish material interspersed with 15-minute stories about his former graduate students or his exploits horseback riding on the ranch of some rich high-profile person or another, making it absolutely impossible to take lucid notes on what goes on. But in the two lectures we had this past week, I took a good 7 pages of detailed, crisply organized, legible, even pretty notes! And the person responsible for that is...Chris Mattinson. He's a postdoc here at Stanford, having earned his Ph.D. last spring, and is teaching the second half of this class for the first time. But he's doing an absolutely stellar job, in my opinion. His lectures are well organized, on topic, involve no stories about acquaintances past or present, and make so much sense. He can even ask those of us (notably me and Julie Padilla) who tend to answer all his questions, without making it seem like a put-down.
Research is also going really well. I've taken to spending most of my spare time in the lab (soon to be pictured below), either working at one of the computers or the drafting table. Yesterday, for instance, I was there from 10 am to 5 pm, working on about four different things - all of which will soon be described in great detail over at mariahelga. The best part of it is that I love my labmates. The two people who spend the most time there (aside from George, whose office opens directly into the lab) are Katrin, a graduate student from Germany, and Miles, a research assistant in the group who graduated from Berkeley a few years ago. Katrin is working on some similar things to me at the moment, so we've been helping each other out (or mostly, she's been helping me, and I've been offering moral support when she accidentally deletes all her data at 4:30 pm on a Friday after George the computer guru has gone home). Because a lot of the datasets we're working with are very large, and we have to perform fairly cumbersome operations on them, the three of us actually spend a very significant portion of our time sitting around and waiting for the computer to finish processing - which means we spend a lot of time talking about this, that or the other thing, ranging from Halloween costumes to existentialism to misadventures in computer land. Quite a few other people drop in and out, all of which I really like too, so it's all told a very pleasing situation.
The staircase in GeoCorner (the main geology building on the quad, where I seem to spend almost all my free time these days, to my great joy.) Isn't it pretty?
My lab. Three super-powerful computers and a drafting table. This is where I camp out between classes and try to move my research (yes, I promisepromisepromise I will tell you what it's about - I'm working on the entry right now) forward in any way I can. Or do homework. Or procrastinate. Or chat with Miles, Katrin, Liz Clark, and whomever else may wander through.
In other random news, I can confirm that I am at least mildly lactose intolerant. My sensitivity doesn't seem to extend to cheese, thank God, or I would DIE, but I get sick to my stomach with diarrhea and other fun stuff whenever I have ice cream. Well, fooey. :(