Author: azrifleman

It’s a Small Step…

…from robots cleaning your living room to robots cleaning the Earth of humanity.
I’m staying at a friend’s place this week, and there’s an iRobot Scooba driving around the living room cleaning.
As amazing and futuristic as this is, it’s somewhat creepy.

Someone’s planning a party…

NPR reports the following excitement in California:

The news from AP that California Gov.?Arnold Schwarzenegger “has declared a state of emergency in San Diego County following the discovery of what police called a virtual bomb factory in an Escondido-area home,” led us to some startling reports about what’s been uncovered there.
Local authorities, reports FoxNews.com, say they may have discovered “the largest quantity of homemade explosives found in one location in the history of the United States.”

Someone’s planning a party. A hell of an exciting party.
It’s so much stuff that the bomb squad is planning to burn the house down in place (presumably with some sort of protective material around it to capture any projectiles emitted from the house), rather than risk moving the unstable chemicals out of the house.
When they do, I hope they put up streaming video. Should be fun.

Proofreading

Note to self: get someone else to proofread the letters and statements I’m sending to graduate schools.
Somehow I managed to mash together the username for one’s departmental email address and the domain for the main, non-departmental email service from the university (resulting in a syntactically-correct but non-existent) in a cover letter.
I didn’t catch it in my own proofreading, as my brain mentally divided the email into the username and domain parts, and didn’t notice the mismatch. Now I have to write an email to the graduate school apologizing for any confusion and sending them the correct address.
Stupid.

On Cyber-Anything

Once again, the news is blathering on about “Cyber Monday” and how a bunch of online retailers are expecting lots of shoppers.
Whether or not those shoppers materialize is still up for debate (the day is young, after all), but I will not be among them.
This is two-fold:

  • I already have too much stuff. I’m looking at getting rid of most of my stuff, either by selling or donating it to those who need it more, and living a simpler, less-cluttered existence.
  • Things prefixed with “cyber” irritate me nearly as much as describing the internet as an “information superhighway”, let alone calling it a “series of tubes“. Anyone referring to anything as “cyber-something” should go die in a fire.

Brr.

Starting a carbureted engine after a cold-soak of several days, when it’s only a few degrees above freezing, is remarkably challenging. Riding the two-wheeled vehicle propelled by said engine is similarly unpleasant.
In related news, it’s damn cold in Tucson. Denizens of the Great White North may laugh and doff their jackets when it’s 34F outside, but down here, this is We’re-All-Going-To-Die cold.

Small Things

The 21″ telescope on campus recently got an upgrade.
Or, more precisely, the observatory got an upgrade: light bulbs.
Due to various mishaps over the last few years, the incandescent-bulbs-dipped-in-red-paint have burnt out, shattered, or otherwise stopped working. They’ve been replaced with red-tinted CFL bulbs, which run a lot cooler, and have the tinting applied at the factory. Presumably they’re designed to deal with the extra insulation of the red coating without overheating.
That, and one of the PhD students put a red rope light around the elevated platform and steps, so undergrads coming to observe for their classes don’t trip and die on the steps.
Before, it was difficult and dangerous to negotiate the observatory floor due to poor lighting. Now it’s downright festive.
Who knew that such small improvements would be so nice?

No Rest for the Weary

After months of mad studying for the Physics GRE, I’m now applying to graduate schools. One of the steps involved perusing the various university websites getting information about costs, deadlines, etc.
Nearly all of the schools had deadlines in mid-January, while some Swiss schools had deadlines in April. Cool.
About two-thirds of the way down the list, I come across the University of Oslo. Their deadline is the 1st of December. I need to step things up to get the application out and in the mail before the deadline. No pressure, right?