Life Update

Life in Provo.

1. Classes

- a. Physics Classes

- i. Quantum Mechanics
This class is fun. My teacher is French, so that adds to the flavor of the class.

- ii. Electrostatics and Magnetostatics
This class is math intensive. My professor is Dr. Mason. He's cool. I really enjoy this class.

- iii. GRE Prep
So I am going to be taking the Physics GRE on Oct. 9. I need this class.

- iv. Careers in physics
I haven't actually started this class yet: it is a block class and is in the next half-semester.

- b. Other Classes

- i. Writings of Isaiah
I really enjoy this class. I am learning a lot from Dr. Ludlow, my teacher. I recommend it.

- ii. Social Dance
Who could have guessed that I would like dancing? :)

- iii. Matrix Analysis
So I am a little crazy, as this is a graduate level math class that I am taking voluntarily.

2. Temple Work
The temple is really nice. I work on Saturday mornings now. I feel that I am learning a lot. If any of you are in the temple with me, I would be happy to share some things that I have been taught by our temple presidency.

3. Ward
I am a co-chair of the activities committee. We recently had our ward opening social, and people tell me it was a big success. I was kind of stressed out at the time, so I don't consider myself a good judge of it. It seemed as though people enjoyed themselves, though. The next party we are going to have is probably going to be in October sometime.

4. Research
At 4:00 today (Tuesday Sept. 14) I am going to go to my adviser's office and submit my first paper, myself being first author. Yeah, I'm pretty excited. It is about exploding balloons as demonstrations for graduate level acoustics classes. If anyone wants, I can explain it to you.

Well, I hope that this outline is better than the nothing that I have been posting recently. Enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of things not koala related. :)

For Our Loved Ones in Maryland

Stuff, gunk and whatnot

Sadly, I can not get my pictures to load onto the campus computers, so I will just have to barrage you all with them later. As a note, I actually have been taking more pictures as of late, even if they are all research related.

Speaking of research, it might be interesting to some to know what exactly I am doing this summer. I'll say it first in jargon, which makes more sense to me, and then I will try and clarify what I said. I am studying non-linear acoustics, in particular shocks in a plane wave tube. Dr. Gee has an awful lot of stuff that he wants to look into, but I don't think that I will have time to do much more than just one, which is shock coalescence.

Ok, before I go on, I should clarify that last paragraph. I am studying sound waves that are very loud, which means that we can't make a lot of the approximations and simplifications that are usually done. One example is the small angle approximation is no longer valid. When amplitudes of sound are that large, it turns out that the speed of sound is different for different parts of the waveform. This means that the shape of the wave can change, like this:
When the wave is perfectly vertical in any given position, it is said to have formed a shock. As anyone with some good calculus background could tell you, perfectly vertical slopes are pretty hard to work with in a mathematical sense. And shocks do some pretty funky things in the real world. For example, they eat each other. Usually sound just passes through each other, which means that if two people are talking to you at once, theoretically (I can't do it) you can get what both of them are saying. However, if they were talking with shocks, we have no idea what you would hear right now, especially if there was some nonlinear (very, very loud) noise with it. This eating process is called shock coalescence.

Ok, if you are still reading this, I congratulate you on your perseverance. Finally, I am studying the noise aspect of this shock coalescence. Very smart people have been able to show what happens if you have just one tone at these very loud levels, but people aren't really sure what will happen with random noise (like the noise off of jet aircraft...). Thus, I am building a tube which will allow us to play noise into it at very high levels (today I pumped up to about 155 dB sound pressure level) and see what will happen. However, we want to to this right, so I am spending a lot of time making sure that I build this tube correctly.

Any questions? Please ask them!

Let's see, anything else...? Here's this. While working I have been listening to Pandora, and I heard a song that I hadn't before, which I really like. It is called That's All by Genesis (it's a British rock band that has Phil Colins in it). Look it up, if you don't already know it.

Alaska

Well, I must say that I had a wonderful time in Alaska. The weather was great, the company, too, and I got to see Beluga whales. How awesome is that?

Here are some pictures that I was given of our trip.

My blogs need more inventive titles. Any ideas?

So that everyone will know, these pictures are in reverse chronological order.

This is Zephne Larsen. She is sad because she has not put on her previous researcher's name properly on his box. Her sad face is supposedly saying "Sorry Joseph!!!" This past Thursday night Jessica and I plus one more friend went down to her lab to help her finish getting data for the spring research conference yesterday. A little last minute flurry ensued. We finally left with some crude initial data that looked not too horrible and left at 2:00 am. What fun! I personally presented at 9:30 am yesterday, and don't think that I did too bad!
Ducks! I found a bunch of ducks on the lawn outside to the JSB and they were all asleep, and I thought it was cool enough for not just one, but two pictures!

Jessica is taking a music class and needs to attend several concerts. She was also allowed to go to mass at the Cathedral of the Madeleine and count that if there was a live choir. So we went! The choir was very nice and I learned a lot. The bishop presided over the meeting. It just so happened that that day was also the day that they were going to place a time capsule in the corner of the cathedral. Here is a picture of the bishop putting the time capsule in the corner.
This is Jessica Morgan. She is resting on the wire mesh in the anechoic chamber. I took this picture because she kind of sorta not really looked like she was floating in the air. This was during one of our 5 minute breaks from homework. Homework and research basically govern our lives right now.
So we were doing optics in my Physics 245 class and for some reason, our batteries wouldn't work. So I pulled the batteries out to change them, and low and behold I found the reason that they weren't working.
Yep, the acid had leaked out. Not the prettiest thing that I've ever seen.

In addition to the dance that Jessica and I went to at her ward, my ward also hosted a party. It was called the Cinderella Ball, as those of us who don't have significant others would pick the shoe of one of the girls at the party beforehand, and then they would find out whose it was and they would become their dates. Interestingly, Alicia formerly Steagall and her husband Dan came as well. A little different for a singles ward, but hey, why not.
This was the first time that I had ever been in line for a test that reached out of the building and all the way to the JSB. The reason for it, however, was because of a printer problem, not excessively many tests.

Dance!

Recently Jessica's ward had a formal dinner and dance, and I got to go! We had a wonderful time, even if dancing isn't really what we did. We had a nice lasagna dinner, and then the dancing started. Being a single's ward, I get the feeling that they might have been straying from couple-dance music. The songs they played were really cool, but not for ballroom dance, which I have been practicing a little bit with Jessica. So we ditched the dance and found an unoccupied room and we read the rest of A Study in Scarlet, which we had been reading slowly at the time. Good book, and even better with good company. After we finished, we were going to go back to the dance, but the other couple in our group (Zephne and Chris), thought we had abandoned them, and were ready to go when they found us. So we decided to go as well. We went back to Chris's apartment and watched IQ. It was entertaining, especially now that I am mostly through my physics undergraduate classes. I think that Jessica and I found more things funny than the Chris's roommate and date, who were there also, because we knew that the physics they were referencing was really basic quantum mechanics, but puffed up to sound complicated.

Anyway, that was our dance night! Just like a high school prom they were taking pictures of the couples, and here are some that they took of us!

A day in the life of Michael

Well, life has been going well for me. School plus research plus temple plus girlfriend plus ward equals constantly busy. For example, yesterday I got up at 10:00, as I was somewhat sleep deprived, and I find Saturday and Sunday mornings to be ideal for catching up for the next week. I then took my roommate Andrew to the temple because he is also a temple worker and doesn't have a car. He often walks, but he was running late, so I drove him. It is good for me, as it gets me up and going. Then I went to campus and proceeded to work on my thermal physics homework until I needed to go to my ward service auction. A nice thing about working on homework is that Jessica, my girlfriend, has many of the same classes as me, so we get to work together. That makes me happy. :) Then we had our service auction, and that was nice. I left early (and didn't get to see my service, a Japanese dinner, get sold) because I heard my homework calling to be done before midnight. I didn't quite get it done, but I am really close with only a really easy problem left!

There you have it, a day in the life of Michael. In particular, a (somewhat typical) Saturday in the life of Michael.

Life

I decided that I should post something, even though not a whole lot is going on right now. Let me tell all what it is that I do do.

I'm taking seven classes here at BYU. The classes that I am taking are Basic Vocal Skills, World History until the Renaissance, Statistical Mechanics, Introduction to Mathematical Proofs, Optics, Computational Partial Differential Equations and Experiments in Modern Physics.

I really enjoy all of my classes, but they keep me on my toes. For example, yesterday I spent about 13 hours on my thermo (statistical mechanics) homework. Thermo tends to take a long time to finish. In my history class we have been reading selections from world literature, and I have found that I really enjoyed reading parts of the Illiad and the Ramyana. I even enjoy discussing their implications in class. This makes me think that a literature class might not be such a bad idea, as I had supposed when I first came to BYU. High school English class didn't give me warm fuzzies.

In addition to class work, I am also doing research. My current research is on exploding balloons. I work on high speed video of various exploding things. We want to post some to YouTube sometime, but we aren't there yet. I also am working on finding an analytic mathematical model for the balloon bursts. I am also still looking for a senior thesis, so my research could very well change soon.

I also work at the Provo Temple as an ordinance worker. That is a wonderful thing to do, in my mind.

Finally, if I have time left over, I usually spend it with my girlfriend, Jessica Morgan. It helps that she is in many of the same classes as me (particularly the long homework ones), so we get to work together a lot.

Here are some pictures!

Here is a picture of the snowman that Jessica and I built. A friend named Chris came over and help us on the cleaning up portion. We named him Calvin, and we found out that he is from Morocco. We also found out the next morning that he is fatally allergic to sunlight. He didn't last very long.



This picture is of my home: the homework lounge for physics majors. This is Zephne Larsen being attacked/hugged by friends.

I hope that you enjoyed the post!

Not the Route

An interesting and varied life

This blog is devoted to pictures I have taken (somewhat) recently. After a picture I will give a brief explanation of it. If further details are desired, please comment!

This is just a really pretty scene I saw coming home one night. I usually come home at times when there is no sun.
This is me doing an experiment for class.
We were measuring current through salinated water.
We were trying to find out whether electrolysis depended on amount of surface area and distance.
We tried a couple of methods of showing this.
Our conclusion was that it does matter.
You can tell which side made hydrogen and which side made chlorine gas by the color of the water.
It was an interesting experiment.
And the crowd came a tumbling down...
BYU vs. UofU. I like the sea of blue and the oasis of red feeling.
Thanksgiving pies at the Oxboroughs!
I like ice cream. I like liquid nitrogen. I don't know if you can get much better than this!
This is a pretty scene that I saw. I'm not sure, but I think that it was coming back from the temple.
I have always wanted scriptures in a raisin box. Not really, but I really liked the idea. Maybe Kathryn could do something like this...
This is having too much fun with liquid nitrogen. This is the result of a wrench, water, nitrogen, water, nitrogen, water, nitrogen, water, ... , ... , ... , and then a torque. You can see the layers of ice if you look carefully.
This is a picture of a different experiment involving superconductors.
The great 2 meter stick balancing act. Sometimes the tutorial lab got kind of slow.
Provo temple.
Isn't it pretty?

Well, that's it for my brief summary. Let me know if more details on any of these are desired.