Winter’s Haven

A paper, “Determination of Inter-Phase Line Tension in Langmuir Films”, which I wrote with Lu Zou and our many colleagues will be in the next issue of Physical Reviews E! You can grab a non-gated copy here or from arXiv.org.

Nigel Johnson-Hill has a farmer friend who received a £3000 payment from the UK government for not raising pigs. Nigel decided that he wanted to enter the business, and he wrote a hilarious letter to the Secretary of State to request information:
In your opinion what is the best kind of farm not to rear [...]

I had been using Akismet to filter out spam comments, but it seems to produce too many false positives. My apologies if you posted a comment which got thrown out by the spam filter.
I’ve now moved to using a CAPTCHA system to prevent comment spam. Also, comments no longer need require my approval before appearing; [...]

My laptop has been having power problems. Again. In the past, power problems have caused the plug (the one on the end of the AC adapter which plugs into the back of the laptop) to become very hot, causing the plastic part of it to melt. This has some bad effects: (1) it coats part [...]

I’ll be heading to Albuquerque in the fall to begin classes in the math department at University of New Mexico.
I also had an offer from the University of Delaware. In my judgement, UDel actually has a somewhat stronger math program than UNM does; however, I was very impressed by the quantum computing group at UNM. [...]

I’ve now worked at Chair & Trellis for three weeks.
Week One: Moved heavy things, assembled furniture.
Week Two: Started working on the store’s fledgling e-commerce site. Spent most of my time doing data entry to upload products.
Week Three: Learned regular expressions and wrote a bunch of Python code to import data from a [...]

After months of being ignored and rejected (mostly ignored) by everyone from Boeing to Starbucks I have finally landed a job. Not a good job, mind you, but at least I won’t starve to death. I’ll be working at a store in Kent which sells fantastically overpriced interior decoration stuff. Anyway, I’m going to stop [...]

Our first publication on the dynamics of Langmuir domains made it to print in the January issue of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and we submitted a second paper to Physical Reviews E. Also, I made a very pretty movie which shows off the striking agreement between observation and the simulation’s predictions.
Last but not least, [...]

You may have noticed that it has been quite a while since I last posted. As far as my own life is concerned, I’m still unemployed and broke. And cursed.
I am actually starting to make some improvements to the website, however. As you likely noticed, I got rid of the long-standing “Under Construction” notice on [...]

One of the first things I plan to do once I become fabulously rich is to hire a personal orchestra to follow me around and play appropriate background music. For example, I am, right now, handily knocking out nasty technical math problems. And while math is certainly its own reward, think how much better it [...]