Mr. Bungee's Lily Pad

What's snoo with me?

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 09:32:36 GMT

Wow, this has been a busy weekend. Friday I had a chorus rehearsal and went to "A Capella against AIDS". Saturday I went to Sacramento and spent all afternoon trying to record a demo CD (but we sadly only had time to record 2 songs - Shattered Dreams and I Melt With You)...wow, recording takes a looong time! Saturday night I went to the Noteworthy spring concert and after-party. I think I've been sufficiently coerced into auditioning for them next weekend (via Mark -- the group's founder -- telling me to audition in front of members of the group every 5 minutes). Sunday I sang in the big chorus concert (Walton's Belshazzar's Feast), and it went decently well. Such a cool piece with full orchestra and soloist and chorus being together!

I decided not to do Hello Dolly, so I WILL see all y'all at NPL con, but I did sign away my soul during August to do JCS.

Oh, and in other news, recently I signed a lease for a new 4 bedroom apt to live with Seth, Stevesteve, and Jack starting June 1. It should be a good time.

I recently discovered Making Fiends, done by the same author as Muffinfilms. Either these sites will make you laugh, or you should work on your sense of humor.

In other news, 5-d massive fermions are unintuitive.

The end.

Decisions, decisions...

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 09:49:06 GMT

So I was offered ensemble roles at Woodminster Summer Musicals in Hello Dolly and Jesus Christ Superstar. If anyone has experience with the theatre, I'd love to hear about it (this means you, wendyhouse!). They seem to be good (I'd even get equity points and a little money), but it's a nasty rehearsal schedule: tues-fri 7:30-10:30 and sat/sun 1-5, roughly one month per show. I'm leaning towards doing JCS due to it's awesomeness, but I'm still unsure about Dolly. Thoughts from people who have seen the show? How worthwhile would being in the HD ensemble be? (My only exposure is the CD, so I know there are several big chorus numbers, but I have no idea what happens in between them.) The other issue is that if I did HD, I it looks like I probably wouldn't be able to go to the NPL con, since they appear to be very unforgiving about people missing rehearsals, which is making me lean against doing it. Hrmmmmmm.....I have about a week to decide.

Ok, back to eating this HUUUGE pile of pixie tangerines and trying to understand Zeta Function Regularization.</b></a>

Seems about right...

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 07:31:09 GMT

Which Incredibles Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 07:13:38 GMT

Ack, in addition to the previously mentioned auditions, I ALSO just found out that there are auditions for an outdoor musical theatre group in Oakland...THIS WEEKEND. They are doing Oklahoma!, Hello Dolly!, and Jesus Christ Superstar! Darn, it's too bad JCS doesn't have an ! in it's title like the other two...fortunately I can put it at the end of the sentence and say it excitedly.

I should get my act together and figure out something to sing. I assume they'll have people auditioning for all 3 with one song, which is weird since they are such different styles. Suggestions for 32 bars halfway between JCS and Hello Dolly?

Spring break!

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 01:55:53 GMT

Wooo! Break is finally here! Last week's take home quantum midterm was pretty rough in terms of it's learning/tediousness ratio. (I know, I know, EVERYONE enjoys calculating umpteen million clebsh gordan coefficients and troubleshooting nonsensical mathematica quirks). But no matter, now I can start thinking about interesting physics again, like the radion stabilization problem.

However, first some relaxing is in order...last night we had a bunch of people over for general ridiculousness and several games of uber-werewolf (much like mafia, but with 3 factions: the werewolves, villagers, and zombies, not to mention a seer, guardian angel, and occasionally a rampant ninja). After that Seth, Stephen, Krishna, and I stayed around and played a game of Pirates Cove - it was fun, even though I had the worst luck of anyone ever in the entire history of the world. And I, of course, say this with the deepest respect for all of the unlucky people in the world (a fine example being the upstanding citizens of Pompeii).

So it appears that there are a LOT of auditions coming up (in april/may) for musicals in the area over the summer: anything goes, miss saigon, man of la mancha, 42nd street, damn yankees. Hmmm, I must ponder this....hmmm, what roles do people think I should go for? Of these, I've actually only seen la mancha.

I'm also getting excited to see Emmanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman play piano duets next weekend (Program: Debussy/En Blanc et Noir; Ravel/Rhapsodie Espagnole; La Valse; Stravinsky/The Rite of Spring). It should be REALLY good, given that they are both amazing pianists, and these are all very cool pieces.

Okay, off to see Hitch. In the words of tigger...TTFN!

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 08:57:49 GMT

I have re-fallen in love with the Khachaturian piano concerto. I highly recommend that anyone who hasn't heard it go out and buy a recording. It fits one's hands amazingly naturally, and the 2nd movement is perhaps the most gorgeous piece of music ever written. I want to try playing it for the Berkeley concerto competition next fall.

I also think I've realized that I care more about what TeV scale physics the LHC is going to find (electroweak symmetry breaking, supersymmetry, etc) than D7-brane fluxes and string moduli. I wonder if this means I should be a phenomenologist? I've been also lately getting quite interested in things like holographic theories of QCD, as I think it's an approach to hard-to-understand standard model physics that hasn't nearly been explored enough.

I should probably explain what the heck I'm talking about to the non-physics people, but for now it's time for bed.

Oh, the nostalgia.

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 21:59:31 GMT

Does anyone else remember Zoobilee Zoo? That show was SCARY.

Update

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 09:29:08 GMT

For those of you who don't know, I'm in a band named Delorean 88. So far, we're doing the following (new wave 80's) songs, ska-style:

Policy of Truth (Depeche Mode)
She Drives Me Crazy (Fine Young Cannibals)
Africa (Toto)
Dead Man's Party (Oingo Boingo)
Close to Me (Cure)
Who Can it Be Now? (Men at Work)
I Melt With You (Modern English)

Unfortunately, our drummer just decided to jump ship, so we're looking for a new one...and a new PA system (which he was providing). Of course, PA systems tend to be a lot more expensive than drummers (who are generally free when you find them). Ah well.

Now for some random physics ramblings that don't ever seem to be explained well: In quantum mechanics, hbar appears as a central charge in the Heisenberg algebra. This (I think) means that we are looking at a projective representation of the group of phase space translations. This can be seen by noting that when we multiply the group elements: Exp[iax]Exp[ibp] = Exp[-iab/2 hbar] Exp[i(ax+bp)]. From this perspective, if we assume a Hilbert space underlies nature, then having a quantum theory seems much more natural than a classical theory since there are a hell of a lot more projective representations of this group than non-projective ones.

Somewhat unexpected...

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 23:41:10 GMT

Whoa, so apparently I am soon to be an uncle. Craziness.

On classes

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:47:54 GMT

Classes I'm currently signed up for (ie, classes I might end up taking):

221B - Quantum Mechanics 2 (Murayama)
211 - Statistical Mechanics (Vishwanath)
229B - Standard Model 2 (Nomura)
230A - Quantum Field Theory 1 (Horava)
231 - General Relativity (Bousso)
250 - String Theory 1 (Ganor)
Math 275 - Duality and String Theory (Aganagic)

221B I probably have to take because it's a requirement. 211 is also a requirement, but I can probably get out of it if I try. In addition, 231 and 250 are at the same time.

Hmmm....what to drop....what to drop....

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 09:59:08 GMT

So it turns out that Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a terrible terrible movie. Who new?

(I really need to go watch the 3, yes THREE, commentary tracks sometime soon)

Thoughts on mystery hunt

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 23:10:44 GMT

Wow, we won. I wish I could have been there for all the on-site stuff, but I still had a lot of fun hunting with Meta-Physical Plant (the ~8 person Berkeley branch of Physical Plant). Although I wish that the team had been smaller (it's unclear to me just how many people were actually being productive over at Random, and how many were just along for the ride), I was amazed at the team's online organization, which made remote hunting a very pleasant experience.

A very big thanks to all of Setec, for putting together a very elegant and entertaining hunt!

I personally had the most fun with Melody, Bouncy Bouncy, and Junk Mail, and I suppose the low point was the ridiculously long time we were stuck on the orange 2nd meta. (and when I say ridiculous, I mean something like...18 hours) We quickly figured out the country codes and paired the words up, but had completely mentally separated the black store squares on the map as being part of their own puzzle. It also didn't help that all except one of the country lines when drawn on the map made sets of parallel lines, and that there were just 4 shared letters among the pairs that happened to be N, S, E, and W. (Grr...talk about a magenta fish). Suffice to say there was a lot of time spent staring at country locations on maps (of course including world maps, Diplomacy boards, MIT maps, and UN seating charts) and drawing lines/moving in compass directions from them.

Now it's time to start thinking about Physics again...er, at least until PQRST 12 starts next Saturday. :)

break

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 05:43:38 GMT

Wow, this has been a good break so far. Went skiing last week in the Berkshires (very happy to see my sister!), which was excellent. During this time, my mom decided that she wanted to make a real-life photographic comic strip. This means that she posed us in various ways and took pictures, and later on captions and talk bubbles are going to be added -- my sister and I had a fantastic time putting on overly dramatic faces.

This week I've been lounging around at home, doing the following, in no particular order:

reading about strings (Polchinski) and kangaroos named Scrappy (Terry Pratchett - The Last Continent)
playing quite a bit of piano (trying to work up Chopin's Ab Polonaise)
playing civ 3 (I think I managed to get my DAD addicted)
going to the gym and getting hit on by a bald 50 year old highly tattooed man (I was flattered, really)
getting completely hooked on Twin Peaks (roughly 1/4 through the episodes so far)
listening to newly acquired Rufus Wainwright and Sondheim CDs (Want 2 and Bounce, respectively)
doing several crosswords (gotta prep for Mystery Hunt)
watching Magnolia (possibly my favorite movie) and The Big One (Michael Moore rocks my world!)

I'll be in Boston next week, so anyone who wants to meet up, let me know. We'll find something amusing to do!

A realization

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 09:35:10 GMT

Why do I fall asleep during class? Because I go to sleep listening to things like this.

Ed Witten's voice IS the perfect lullaby.

burritos, frat boys, and puzzleuzzlement

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 09:58:35 GMT

After solving puzzles for an entire afternoon, and spending the evening making fun of the ridiculous movie that is Tommyknockers, I decided to get some food at 1am. (mmmm...special chicken burrito and i quickly became good friends...) This is the same time that hundreds of frat boys were trying to live out their drunken fantasies and pick up random girls off the street. Suffice to say, it is a spectacle to behold. Every single block, there is a group of 2 or 3 of them trying to convince a pair of somewhat drunk and somewhat defensive girls that what they really want to be doing this evening is going over to their frat. The point of subtlety has past long ago, and it is just, well...incredibly amusing.

Finally, I leave YOU with a puzzle:

Suppose you have a triangle made out of n coins on each side. How many coin moves does it take to flip the triangle so that it is pointing the opposite direction (as a function of n)?

Neglect

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 23:58:24 GMT

I have neglected you, livejournal. I could claim that I was abducted by friends and made to play the bongo drums (Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat) for hours on end, but that was only one day out of the last two months. I could claim that I spent many nights reading paper after paper on ADS/CFT, but you'd probably just laugh at all the ridiculous acronyms used in physics. I could claim that I'm about to leave in 30 minutes to go sing in Oakland, so I don't have time to write an entry, but you'd just point out that fact that I'd do nothing productive with this time anyways. So I am at a loss at what to say to you - I have no good excuses.

So instead, let me redeem myself by telling you about jelly:

Jelly is a soft, semisolid food substance with a resilient consistency, made by the setting of a liquid containing pectin or gelatin or by the addition of gelatin to a liquid, especially such a substance made of fruit juice containing pectin boiled with sugar.

Jelly goes remarkably well with peanut butter and bread, but tastes very odd when combined with most other foods. If anyone knows of exceptions to this, I would love to hear them.

One can make jelly simply by heating fruit juice, sugar, and pectin in a saucepan. This seems like an ideal way to procrastinate.

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 07:06:52 GMT

Oh man, there was just a blackout in the neighborhood -- apparently a power line started going crazy and catching on fire. For lack of anything better to do (and out of extreme curiosity for what was going on), Joel, Dan, (their roommate who's name I never learned), and I wandered down the blocked off street. Sometimes sorority girl conversations are the funniest thing ever...

"Oh gawd, I sooo need to take a shower."
"Then why don't you take one?"
"Ewww...I can't do that in the dark!"

At least they were offering everyone free ice cream.

Backing up to monday...

Seth, Micky, and Stephen took me out for a birthday dinner! The first place we had intended turned out to be closed, so for a while we randomly wandered the streets of downtown berkeley, looking for a place to eat.
"How about there?" "No...lets keep walking..."
"Well, what kind of restaurant is good for a birthday dinner?"
::pause::
"How about THAT one?"
::points to sign saying 'FREE BIRTHDAY DINNERS'::
::all stare at sign with mouths gaping::

So we found our restaurant. And it had tasty japanese food. And there was much rejoicing (as well as hilarious chopstick incompetence).

After the dinner, I went and sang with the UC berkeley alumni chorus (I had met the director the previous week, and he said i should come check it out). The music was beautiful (especially rachmaninoff's cherubic hymn), so I think I'll keep going.

Sun, 05 Sep 2004 02:12:52 GMT

I never ever EVER want to take that test again. Fortunately, the problems weren't terrible this time around, but 6 hours is still a ridiculous amount of time to be taking a test.

On the other hand...YAY I'm done with prelims for now!!! Now I can get on with a)having fun, and b)learning NEW things.

I found out the other day that Berkeley's musical theatre group is doing She Loves Me in the spring (they only do one a year)...definitely something to ponder. I DO need to find some sort of singing outlet.

I should decide if I'm going to have a birthday celebration monday...maybe go on a food outing? I need to learn more about berkeley restaurants.

A random physics question that I don't understand well. Can Quantum Mechanics be formulated on R^2 rather than C?

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 08:42:16 GMT

So it has been decided today that non-invertible matrices must be terribly lonely. After all, they are excluded from almost every single named matrix group...they are complete social outcasts. Therefore, we must rise above this prejudiced behavior and declare a national singular matrix day!

|===========
|***********|
|***|0 1 0|***|
|***|1 0 0|***|
|***|0 0 0|***|
|***********|
|===========
|
|
|
|
|

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 21:09:01 GMT

Just sat in on math 250 (groups, rings and fields). Ken Ribet is a very cool guy, as is evidenced by the fact that he wears blue tennis shoes with no socks! I should start doing that...

First day of school...

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 02:26:22 GMT

Started classes today! It's too bad that Hitoshi Murayama is such an amazing teacher...I'll now feel too guilty if I sleep through my 9am Quantum Mechanics class. Standard Model also went pretty well, with a good overview of field theory and then a (somewhat boring) review of special relativity notation. But it could be an interesting class, as the lecturer seems to like going off on interesting tangents, and he's full of energy. He kind of reminds me of a japanese version of the micro-machines guy.

I also made a huge mistake at the bank. I attempted to transfer all my money over to Bank of America from my Cambridge Trust account by writing myself a check and depositing it. After the cashier took the check and ran it through the system she told me that it wouldn't be until September 13th until it cleared. Doh! I will now be relatively moneyless for a couple weeks....

Looooong day

Sun, 29 Aug 2004 09:57:56 GMT

6 hour exams should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. The first half went decently well, but the second half was just ridiculous. I'm not even sure that I got any of it's 6 problems fully right, but it sounds like hardly anybody did. Hmm...I think partial credit will be my best friend.

After the exam ended Seth (my suitemate) and I hosted an unwinding party for all the 1st years, and much fun was had! We played cards, ate pizza, and talked about lots of random things. It turns out that I have a knack for uberfast games of spit (or speed? there was some confusion about the proper name...) Of course, as the night went on, we regressed to making lame jokes about badly written prelim problems and playing 52 card pickup, but a good time was had by all.

I've finally managed to post some pictures from Barcelona online, and they can be found here

Note that the strange plant-like thing at the bottom-left of page 2 is actually a fish, and is one of the coolest looking ones I've ever seen.

Exploration abounds...

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 05:35:11 GMT

Today I met up with Jeremy and David (both friends from MIT, now at Berkeley and Stanford - Jeremy is a first year chemistry student and an amazing pianist, David is a brilliant second year physics student), and we went into San Francisco to do some exploring. In fact, after a tasty dim sum lunch in chinatown, we headed to the Exploratorium. It's quite possibly the most well thought out science museum I've been to, and there were a number of really fascinating demonstrations (such as watching the chaotic formation of ice crystals on water through a polarizer). I also discovered that I am able to amuse myself for hours by rolling things onto a spinning disk and observing their path. Angular momentum is oh-so-much fun when you're not doing pedantic mechanics problems! Afterwards, we got some free chocolate at Ghirardelli Square, accidentally stumbled onto the extremely twisty section of Lombard St., and then had a tres garlicy dinner at The Stinking Rose (a garlic themed restaurant). It was decided that we could make millions by publishing a tourist street map of SF in which the street colours indicated their altitude. All in all a successful trip.

And to top it off, upon my return I had a nice discussion with Seth (my suitemate) about Quantum Mechanics textbook cover art. We decided that Sakurai couldn't have spent more than 5 minutes thinking about his ambiguous block diagonal matrix, but that the Griffiths cat was kind of cute. The new edition of Gasiorowicz also has a nice colour gradient behind its lattice. But this leads to an excellent question...if you wrote a Quantum Mechanics book, what would YOU put on the cover?

32 hours and counting...

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 07:10:32 GMT

32 hours until I am on a plane crossing the country...and my books are already on their way. I also managed to get all of my clothes packed today. Hmm...apparently this whole moving to California thing is actually happening.

Today my parents took me out to a really nice restaurant (with very interesting food...french-chinese fusion), and then we spent the remainder of the evening watching the olympics. I'm disappointed that the coverage has such a US team bias, though it could be worse. Have I ever mentioned that I hate nationalism? Well...I HATE nationalism. And patriotism. And anything that presupposes that people born in one country are in some way inherently better than people born in another country. It's simply irrational discrimination. Then again, it's probably also hard wired in human psychology. But I digress.

I officially registered for classes! I'm not sure if anyone besides me cares, but at the moment I am registered for:

Physics 209 - Electricity & Magnetism
Physics 221A - Quantum Mechanics
Physics 229A - Quantum Field Theory
Physics 250 - String Theory

The first two are for napping....er, rather they are 9:00/9:30am requirements, but fortunately with decent teachers. The third is to reinforce my knowledge of QFT (I'm hoping to start working through Weinberg's book more carefully), and the last is to begin the long journey that is properly learning string theory. Hopefully most of my time can be spent on the latter (also known as STuttering).

I'm looking forward to all the exploring that I shall soon be doing. It'll be fun being a freshman again!

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 06:32:18 GMT

First, an update. Second, a crucial definition. Third, some additional lyrics.

The Update
I think I have finally sorted through my books and decided what to bring. For the noble purpose of fitting everything into 2 boxes, I am sacrificing nearly all of my fiction, and most of my earlier physics/math books. However, this still leaves me with such gems as 'The Quantum Theory of Fields, Vol. 1-3' by Weinberg, 'Geometry, Topology, and Physics' by Nakahara, and 'Foundations of Differentiable Manifolds and Lie Groups' by Warner. There is still much to be learned from these books.

I have decided that I am definitely getting a haircut soon. I need hair that is more obedient in the face of laziness.

There will soon be a musical about muffins!

Recent mall fluctuations have made possible the accumulation of very cheap hell ramen. Roughly twice as much of my life is now being sucked away daily.

The Definition
cryptotryst (n.): anything that brings about a common thought or memory in only a group of n people, where 0 < n < 5.

The Additional Lyrics

Save me, and I'll save you
5 seconds of crack-addict watching
Struggling to keep the anti-tears at bay
Crickets are also moist and delicious
Staples are funny until they're in you
No more apologies that aren't apologies
Why doesn't anyone else eat the end pieces?
Are mimsy borogroves like willow trees?
Oh yes master, of course I drool for you
Muffins often develop crushes on metallic robots
Bathtime fun with...DINOSAURS!