Posted in 2012
Crux Delft 2012
I have attended today the meeting of christian scientists of our University, something I did not do for a while. Well, the time of Great Lent is approaching, this is perhaps why.
There was very interesting and enthousiastic presentation of Martine van Veelen. She is busy with organazing science, and also is a program director of ForumC, a forum for science, faith and society.
She presented the results of a questionaire organized by Forum C. About 2000 Dutch profs have been asked about their beliefs, this has produced a set of interesting numbers. We have mostly discussed two of them: 44% of Dutch profs are atheists, 20% treat the colleagues who show their faith “less seriously”.
Anton Akhmerov
has been visiting the department today. Guess it’s been quite a preparation for him since he conquered many hearts of our faculty. His talk was prepared in a color scheme that I by the lack of experience regarded as gothic: However, the students have corrected me.
Anton combines intellegence and ambition with a great deal of flexibility and does not drink alcohol. I foresee splendid future for him.
Second Lecture Quantum Transport 2012
It is so that I still enjoy the audience which is unusually interactive and motivates me to explain more, perhaps even going lower than their level. It also creates time problem. So far we’ve done 1.5 lectures. No way I can catch up next time since the third lecture is overloaded with the material. Not sure what to do, perhaps I need an extra lecture this year.
However, I think it is the first time I could explain the details of Levitov formula. An achievement…
Second Lecture Advanced Statistical Mechanics 2012
To start with, I was pleasantly surprized with a number of students attending. It was the same as at the first lecture. I think I did not manage to explain last time how difficult the course is.
We went through the rest of thermodynamics rather quickly: even I had to make a break five minutes ahead of time. I got a resonable feedback. I was caught with minus sign and my unability to make a distinction between the work extracted from the system and put into the system. Otherwise, the presentation of thermodynamic potentials was better than a year ago.
Second half was the intro into probability. I guess my introductory story was too much aside the subject and was difficult to follow. I must devise something better. It was also long, so I had a time problem in the end and could not talk about Lagrange multipliers. Pity, I will have to do them next time without much preparation.
First lecture Fairy Tales 2012
has also happened today. In addition to this, there was a long real-time bureaucratic meeting and an organizational skype meeting, that made my day complete.
The interaction with the audience was somehow similar to that during the first lecture of quantum transport, and, being rather unprepared for, I’ve found a physical overlap between the audiences. It did not happen last year, if I recall correctly. So I went slow, did not say anything about inverse scattering matrix technology (could do this for sine-Gordon), yet we’ve explicitly done all simple variations of the Lagrangian: was nice.
It’s inspiring that there is still a group of students sufficiently charmed by theoretical physics.
First lecture Quantum Transport 2012
has taken place today. I felt something strange about the audience: it stirred me to go slower, talk calmer, and give more details than usual. We did not progress much with the stuff of the first lecture: basically, we had to stop at Landauer formula. However, I feel reasonably satistfied with the contact. I hope they liked it as well.
First lecture Advanced Statistical Mechanics 2012
The semester has begun. Today I gave my first lecture in Advanced Statistical Mechanics.
I enjoyed a rather big audience, typical for the first lecture. I’ve been honest about the level and manner of the course, so, thinking logically, the audience would shrink soon. From the other hand, why should I be logical? I was just glad to see and welcome new faces. Two students had to go earlier to catch the train to Leiden to attend some bio-directed course. I guess they were a bit dissapointed when I revealed that statistical mechanics is not meant to serve bio-sciences, but were polite not to show this and took active part in the lecture.
To compare with the last year, the audience seem to be a bit more active in general, I saw many people attending and questionning. I went faster than a year ago. Although I have not covered the whole thermodynamics, I made quite some progress. We are almost done with the laws.
All right, we’ll see how it’s going. The problem solving session will be given by Alina on Monday. So far all presentations are booked.
The dentist was joking
The story of yesterday had a happy end after all: my computer was pronounced clean, and I was admitted to internet. Perhaps I was overreacting as usual. I am sorry. Anyway you recognize I’m afraid of dentists…
Rootkit: what’s rotten?
Today I was deprived from the biggest and most fundamental priveledge of modern man: internet at working place. Another click lead me to an internal TU Delft web page which stated that my computer was infected with a deadly virus and has been quarantined indefinitely, at least till I clear it up and produce convincing proof that it has been indeed cleared. This given the fact that the TU computer administration runs a real-lime virus protection program at my computer, prophetically called F*-secure, that I cannot stop, that swallows 30 % of CPU power and has so far found two adwares for time period of four years.
So the day was ruined. Thinking back, there was something on Friday afternoon that could justify the warning. My comp has been doing strange things. I had to opt for an inspection where I’ve found a trojan and removed it with SpyBot. Was not the fist time for these years.
So today I’ve checked all over again, produce clean scan reports and submitted to the authorities hoping to have internet again. Guess what? I was kindly proposed to have my hard drives wiped and sys reinstalled… Looks like it was the only TU Delft ICT solution to supposingly identified rootkits.
Imagine a dentist who works as follows. He hears from an informer about your light tooth pain. He lures you to his practice, locks you in his working room and suggests you to solve the problem yourself. Since he is very insisting, you do your best and upon his return proudly demonstrate an unrooted bloody tooth. No, he doubts your pain is over. He produces a machete to chop your head off.
I wish to be wrong, yet so far I am not able to provide a better description of TU Delft ICT services.
Electronic Agenda Madness
Do not write much to the blog during January: a sign of “busy inactivity” state where activities are directed to things not needed and accomlishments remain to be completed. A part of non-needed activities was devoted to sweet art of scheduling.
While I has been dreaming of writting regular daily notes and making things done in a scheduled way since my early childhood, I did prefer the dreams to reality for most of my life. It is a slow intellectual degradation that came with age that lead me to an important discovery: the scheduling itself is an occupation worth the time spend, the occupation a way more pleasant and rewarding than the occupations to be scheduled. It gives a thrill of knowing and mastering the future, living life on full thrust, and immediate sense of accomplishment. It is about four years that I got mad about electronic agendas.
I’ve tried out several dozens of various PIM software titles that left me unsatisfied for one or another reason, mostly reason of taste. Most soft treats you as an idiot not able to customize the prog neither aware of advantages of such customization. They would suit if you are in jail, or feel like being there. Few softs really offering customization do offer too much of it, you tend to constanly change the colors of your appointments and end up missing them all. I was only satisfied with a wiki-style prog that I made functional with a dozen of home-brewed python scripts.
The crisis came when standart electronic agendas become wide-spread to the degree of being compulsory. It is already a year I feel a pressure to use TU central agenda, to synchronize my activities with those of society. I decided to give up this month. It gave me a head-ache of solving the compatibility problems between my custom things and — could not belive this — Microsoft Outlook. I have solved them today, it was interesting and gave me some programming fun, yet what a waist of time…
that could be devoted to proper scheduling.