Posted in May 2010
Weird printing jobs
Our printers are centralized for several years already, this includes paper, technical services, printing costs and printer access: our printer is in principle can be used by anybody at the University, from student to rector, essentially anonymously. Counter expectations, this system usually works rather normally. Well, you need sometimes to wait for half a day for paper refill, but this does not happen very often.
Today was a bad day, it did not work for whole morning and calls to central maintainence have not immediately brough a relief. By applying random button-pushing and cross-cursing, we manage to reboot it. Wow!
And it gave out a huge number of delayed printing jobs. Mine was in the middle, so I had to review the printouts. Most of them concerned the subjects of this technical university (or physics). But what would you say about an article entitled:
Introduction to Narrative Violence in Africa
Weird enough? Not at all. Another printing job was just an empty search form of Google as seen at www.google.com. Did anybody want to frame it and mount in his/her bedroom? Interesting people we scientist are. Especially on conditions of anonymity.
Some simulation fun
Today is a day off, Liberation day. I was up to some scientific fun in the afternoon. It came in two kinds.
Science in question concerns the current in overheated transistor (http://yuli.weblog.tudelft.nl/2009/12/15/fully-overheated-sigle-electron-transist ) that we study with Matti Laakso. We have concentrated on current fluctuations and recently have found a regime where these fluctuations are really wild. The distribution of current values is of Patero type, and it so happends that the average current is parametrically bigger than its optimal value. This suggest that the time-line of these fluctuations must be rather amusing: most time current is low, but occasionally it gives a giganitic surge that drops quickly to the low level. The average current is determined by surges. I wanted to simulate stochastic dynamics giving rise to such a time-line.
Recently I fall in love with python programming language. Being invented by math student Guido van Rossum, it’s certainly a biggest contribution of the Netherlands to world culture for at least last thirty years. Too bad Guido could not find the job over here. I’ve made a draft simulator in python within an hour, and rather advanced and reliable one within another hour, and the prog text is still 48 lines ( six of them are blank). So I could see these miracluous surges, up to four orders of magnitude above the normal level.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed.
Proposal FOM projectruimte
was submbitted today. It was Queen’s birthday yesterday, it is Labour day today: to ultimate irritation of my family, I’ve spent both days in office. As usual, I would need some more time, for instance, to format the text in a readable way. Anyway it’s too late today, and I was too much exhausted and disgusted with the project contents to read it one more time.
This is by the way quite a slavonic attitude, an unfavorable heritage of my ancestrors: to work hard for a long time and get sloppy and negligent in the end. I know it’s better to do otherwise, but I cannot change my birth place. If I would, I’d certainly be a Polynesian: I’ve heard this is the most privileged minority in US.
The project is in nanoelectromechanics, its title is: " Devising polarons in carbon nanotubes". I really hope much for sucsess. I will publish a link to this proposal soon.