As always, the thrill and excitement of the New Year is upon us once again, where promises are made and broken (often simultaneously!) and the gym is packed with hopes and long, long queues. At least it forces the more "modern" of us out into the wide world of nature where we may run amongst the trees and...etc.... Yes :) Though I would actually love to do so if there happened to be snow here. As miraculous as it seems to me, there is no snow this winter in Uppsala! (okay, there was a little that lasted for a short two days but that doesn't count).
But why, you ask? I have no idea. I keep Googling it, hoping to see the words "Heavily Thunderous, Incapacitatingly Voluminous & Copiously Covering Amount of Blizzard-like Snow Approaches Uppsala for the Forseeable Future (And It Will Be Fantastic)" appear, but I see nothing. Either I'm the only one who cares that winter isn't freezing this year or Googling no snow uppsala :( aren't suitable keywords.
EDIT: (I'm actually editing this while I'm writing this, but my search has turned up GOOD news!) This Friday, the 10th, it's expected to snow. The actual numbers I can't confirm because I'm certain meteorologists just make this stuff up (that's not true, I just don't understand meteorology very well and I'd rather blame them, than my ignorance, for this lack of snow... Human nature, eh?) Anyway, Google predicts -11 C that night... Mmm... Delicious. Other sites say -2 or -4 with some light snow... which is OKAY because it's always colder than what they say. Will definitely take pictures to celebrate :) It would have been nice to have it for Christmas but oh well, better late than never!
Now that the mandatory weather discussion is out of the way, what else has been happening? Well, neither Peter Higgs nor François Englert would come to Uppsala for the annual Nobel Lectures due to "prior engagements" and "senility"(http://www.unt.se/uppsala/nobelpristagare-forelaser-i-uppsala-2743775.aspx). Disappointing, I know... For those who don't know, those gentlemen were awarded the prize for their work contributing to the mechanism by which particles acquire mass (previously, nobody knew. The theory "predicted" that particles shouldn't have any mass because it would violate certain symmetry properties needed in the theory for consistency. They found a way of keeping the symmetry in general but "breaking" it temporarily such that a field, called a Higgs field, interacts with itself and other fields to gives particles mass (that's a sloppy explanation but I'm not talented enough to explain it without mathematical concepts like Lagrangians and Gauge Symmetries). It would have been really cool to hear a description of it from the horse's mouth.)
I would also like to take a short moment to congratulate my good friend Andrea Palaia for recently (14th December) acquiring his Ph.D in Accelerator Physics (originally titled Who Screwed Up my Beam?). Now that he is onto bigger and better things, I wish him all the best in the future :)
Oh, one very cool thing that is a consequence of cold weather is that there's an ice skating race from Uppsala to Stockholm (the course is supposedly 80 km long!) called Vikingarännet. There's even a shorter "family friendly" version that is only 15 km long which I'm considering very heavily of doing, despite the fact I've only done ice skating once in my life, 12 years ago, and that memory is vague at best. But I have done quite a bit of rollerblading (a mere 8 years ago) and ice is just the new tarmac... Right?
Anyway, we'll see how cheap blocket can sell smelly old ice skates :P The site is here for anyone who is interested... http://vikingarannet.com/en/training-and-equipment/equipment/ That will be my New Year's Resolution - trick my friends into skating 15 km! Misery deserves company :P
Till next time, Gott Nytt År! :)
Sunday, 5 January 2014
Monday, 25 November 2013
The Return from a Long Hiatus...
I'm still alive, not to worry...
Has it really been two months already?? Time is flying by far too fast.... where to even begin?
Firstly, I got married, which is fantastic, of course :) then I went through the nightmare that is the accommodation hunt here in Uppsala, or all of Sweden, for that matter... But we eventually found somewhere by pure luck - a response from an ad a family placed on studentboet.se. A lot of people have had success there so if you're hunting for somewhere, it's a good place to start. Better than blocket.se in my opinion, but since my first place was found through blocket.se, I can't really judge...
Right now I'm crazily busy with college work. It's never ending, unfortunately, or otherwise... (or I would be without things to do, right?). I took Analytical Mechanics & Special Relativity in the first period, a course I should have taken last year but what harm. It was good enough but I felt it wasn't thought through as clearly as it could have been. It was a little bit... messy, for want of a better word. Particularly the Special Relativity section but I enjoyed reading Joeseph Minehan's notes and I learnt that Maxwell's equations are magically and manifestly Lorentz invariant (and how to derive them based on the principle of minimal substitution and demanding Lorentz invariance, which is pretty cool!).
I also took Joe's course on String Theory. Really interesting! Really hard... Despite the fact there were only 3 assignments, they were tough. I'm only finishing it now and even though I don't regret taking it in the slightest (despite having no interest in studying it academically), it soaked up more time and energy than a black hole, (lame) pun fully intended ;) But I would recommend taking it (or his course on General Relativity) if you're interested in that area because he's a really talented lecturer; very enthusiastic and interesting to listen to. And it's fun to see where smart people are trying to combine and progress different areas of Physics. And then compare it with more established theories, like the Standard Model.
Which brings me to Stefan Leupold's course on Hadron & Quark Physics. Pretty challenging, but he's another excellent lecturer so, despite the work, his classes are enjoyable to attend. And the material is so fundamental and the theory (Quantum Chromodynamics) so fascinating, it's a joy to study. So definitely consider those two :) I must say after this course, I have a new found appreciation for the Standard Model, which I gave far too little credit previously. I also have less appreciation for String Theory but that's probably because I didn't understand it very well :P
So that's the gist of what's been going on with me lately, mainly college-stuff and marriage-stuff, so only "stuff" that is exciting to me, really :P but the Nobel lectures should be coming up soon, "sometime in December" where hopefully we'll hear Peter Higgs give a lecture on winning his Nobel Prize :) They're broadcast online so I'll hunt down the link and post it here :)
Edit: I'm trying to fix that header but no luck so far :( The options seem somewhat limited here so I have no idea how it "broke". Thoughts anyone?
Has it really been two months already?? Time is flying by far too fast.... where to even begin?
Firstly, I got married, which is fantastic, of course :) then I went through the nightmare that is the accommodation hunt here in Uppsala, or all of Sweden, for that matter... But we eventually found somewhere by pure luck - a response from an ad a family placed on studentboet.se. A lot of people have had success there so if you're hunting for somewhere, it's a good place to start. Better than blocket.se in my opinion, but since my first place was found through blocket.se, I can't really judge...
Right now I'm crazily busy with college work. It's never ending, unfortunately, or otherwise... (or I would be without things to do, right?). I took Analytical Mechanics & Special Relativity in the first period, a course I should have taken last year but what harm. It was good enough but I felt it wasn't thought through as clearly as it could have been. It was a little bit... messy, for want of a better word. Particularly the Special Relativity section but I enjoyed reading Joeseph Minehan's notes and I learnt that Maxwell's equations are magically and manifestly Lorentz invariant (and how to derive them based on the principle of minimal substitution and demanding Lorentz invariance, which is pretty cool!).
I also took Joe's course on String Theory. Really interesting! Really hard... Despite the fact there were only 3 assignments, they were tough. I'm only finishing it now and even though I don't regret taking it in the slightest (despite having no interest in studying it academically), it soaked up more time and energy than a black hole, (lame) pun fully intended ;) But I would recommend taking it (or his course on General Relativity) if you're interested in that area because he's a really talented lecturer; very enthusiastic and interesting to listen to. And it's fun to see where smart people are trying to combine and progress different areas of Physics. And then compare it with more established theories, like the Standard Model.
Which brings me to Stefan Leupold's course on Hadron & Quark Physics. Pretty challenging, but he's another excellent lecturer so, despite the work, his classes are enjoyable to attend. And the material is so fundamental and the theory (Quantum Chromodynamics) so fascinating, it's a joy to study. So definitely consider those two :) I must say after this course, I have a new found appreciation for the Standard Model, which I gave far too little credit previously. I also have less appreciation for String Theory but that's probably because I didn't understand it very well :P
So that's the gist of what's been going on with me lately, mainly college-stuff and marriage-stuff, so only "stuff" that is exciting to me, really :P but the Nobel lectures should be coming up soon, "sometime in December" where hopefully we'll hear Peter Higgs give a lecture on winning his Nobel Prize :) They're broadcast online so I'll hunt down the link and post it here :)
Edit: I'm trying to fix that header but no luck so far :( The options seem somewhat limited here so I have no idea how it "broke". Thoughts anyone?
Thursday, 29 August 2013
Aaaand back to reality!
A new semester has begun and the usual yearly stresses settle in. Courses? Accommodation? Winter? For help in finding accommodation, I recommend a blog post I just came across: http://studyingatuppsala.blogspot.se/2009/09/how-to-get-roof-over-your-head-in.html. It's just a list of different housing companies and sites to check out if you're stuck for somewhere to stay. Have hope! You will find something, and "something" is always good enough for now :) It is really frustrating so I recommend to anyone who either is here or is even thinking of coming here, to create accounts with all the housing companies to collect queue points (köpoäng). Even if you never use them, they're good to have just in case. And scan www.blocket.se a lot. But enough about that, there is plenty of information on accommodation online (you need more perseverance than information), unfortunately.
But about some Physics! This year I should say for anyone who doesn't know (I didn't until recently) is that Uppsala University has changed their timetabling software system. You used to have to go to http://www.schema.uu.se/ but it seems okay now. Anyway, if something goes wrong, that site should have all your timetable provided you input the courses (it's important anyway if you intend to do courses you aren't currently registered for).
A funny thing about that, actually.
According to antagning.se (or universityadmissions.se), I apparently don't meet the requirements for Analytical Mechanics & Special Relativity (Linear Algebra II, Calculus II, etc) and Space Physics (Mechanics III, I think). So, formally, I didn't get accepted to those courses. But I do meet the requirements for String Theory and Hadron & Quark Physics (courses which you would expect to be more demanding)!
But it's usually not an issue, at least for Physics courses, which don't really fill up. I just have to go to the first lecture and sign up there and it's not a problem. Though there may be some scheduling conflicts because of this but again, those can usually be resolved relatively easily. It was pretty funny though... My guess is that the whole process is automated and is meant to "translate" the requirements from other universities into the Swedish equivalent, but since the naming of courses rests on the whims of the one teaching it, the system can become easily confused.
Before I forget, I finally discovered the lake (Lake Mälaren, the 3rd largest in Sweden) this summer everyone keeps talking about! It's really easy to get there. Go south on Dag Hammarskjöldsväg until you see a bridge over a river - take a right just before that bridge and left at the bustop Mälarvägen. You can also take the no.20 bus there directly from Uppsala centre. It will take 20-30 minutes. Why is it so reveled, you ask?? Well, during summer (or "summer", as my Italian friends like to joke...), it's a great place to swim, sun bathe, hike and cycle around. Then during winter, it freezes over so you can go ice skating on it (which I have never done but definitely doing this winter). So if you're reading this, the forecast is rain this weekend, which pretty much guarantees sun (always do the opposite of the Swedish forecast).
Lastly, I should mention that I will be giving a 20-minute talk on a student's perspective of the Master's programme sometime in September. So if anyone reading this wants to come along (and ask really awkward, mentally challenging and morally ambiguous questions), feel free! I will leave details here when I know more :)
But about some Physics! This year I should say for anyone who doesn't know (I didn't until recently) is that Uppsala University has changed their timetabling software system. You used to have to go to http://www.schema.uu.se/ but it seems okay now. Anyway, if something goes wrong, that site should have all your timetable provided you input the courses (it's important anyway if you intend to do courses you aren't currently registered for).
A funny thing about that, actually.
According to antagning.se (or universityadmissions.se), I apparently don't meet the requirements for Analytical Mechanics & Special Relativity (Linear Algebra II, Calculus II, etc) and Space Physics (Mechanics III, I think). So, formally, I didn't get accepted to those courses. But I do meet the requirements for String Theory and Hadron & Quark Physics (courses which you would expect to be more demanding)!
But it's usually not an issue, at least for Physics courses, which don't really fill up. I just have to go to the first lecture and sign up there and it's not a problem. Though there may be some scheduling conflicts because of this but again, those can usually be resolved relatively easily. It was pretty funny though... My guess is that the whole process is automated and is meant to "translate" the requirements from other universities into the Swedish equivalent, but since the naming of courses rests on the whims of the one teaching it, the system can become easily confused.
Before I forget, I finally discovered the lake (Lake Mälaren, the 3rd largest in Sweden) this summer everyone keeps talking about! It's really easy to get there. Go south on Dag Hammarskjöldsväg until you see a bridge over a river - take a right just before that bridge and left at the bustop Mälarvägen. You can also take the no.20 bus there directly from Uppsala centre. It will take 20-30 minutes. Why is it so reveled, you ask?? Well, during summer (or "summer", as my Italian friends like to joke...), it's a great place to swim, sun bathe, hike and cycle around. Then during winter, it freezes over so you can go ice skating on it (which I have never done but definitely doing this winter). So if you're reading this, the forecast is rain this weekend, which pretty much guarantees sun (always do the opposite of the Swedish forecast).
Lastly, I should mention that I will be giving a 20-minute talk on a student's perspective of the Master's programme sometime in September. So if anyone reading this wants to come along (and ask really awkward, mentally challenging and morally ambiguous questions), feel free! I will leave details here when I know more :)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)