I checked the Rice University library page today and they finally put up the listing for my doctoral thesis. Took them long enough. You can do a search for "Kontur" if you want to see the listing.

Well, it's official. I got the teaching job at the Academy! Starting on July 6, I will be an assistant professor of physics. And, well not to be crass and talk about money, but I'm also getting a surprisingly hefty bump in my pay. So that's nice too. I'll be teaching four sections of introductory physics, which will be tons of work, but it'll be worth it, I think.

I don't know how many people who read this blog live in Colorado, or within driving distance of Colorado, but someone on the 14ers.com forum is organizing a full moon hike on June 30, and I'm definitely going to try to be there. It'll be right after I get back from Peru, and I'll have about a week off between when I finish up my old job and when I start my new job right at the end of June and beginning of July, so I should be in a good mood and have lots of time. However, it'd be nice if I knew a few other people there.

Posted at 8:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well I haven't posted anything from YouTube for a while, so here's a favorite of mine below-- a particularly randomly crazy lip synch party to the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann". This video is actually pretty close to the original spirit of the song. In the fall of 1965, Brian Wilson was working on the album that would become Pet Sounds, which is often ranked behind only Sgt. Pepper as the greatest rock album of all time. But the studio wanted to have an album ready in time for the Christmas season, so Brian, who didn't want anything to divert his attention from Pet Sounds, put together a Party Album, made up of covers and recorded virtually unrehearsed in the studio. When they were recording "Barbara Ann", Dean Torrence, of Jan and Dean fame, happened to be in the studio, and he ended up singing lead vocals on the song. According to this website, when Jan heard they were covering "Barbara Ann", which had first been done by The Regents in 1961, he commented that the song "would never be a hit again". The recorded version of the song sounds like a crazy, confused affair. After the second verse, someone finishes up the Ba Ba Ba with "black sheep!", rather than "Barbara Ann". During the bridge, you can hear in the background chatter someone say "Hal and his famous ashtrays!", presumably referring to Hal Blaine, the studio drummer for the band, and then you hear ashtrays clinking together along with the beat. Then, before the last verse, it sounds like someone is asking about the lyrics -- "Saw? Tried?". So, the whole thing was basically a loud, wacky karaoke party that became one of the most famous songs of all time.


The new Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up is coming out this weekend. You've probably never heard of Judd Apatow, but he's the creator of underrated short-lived TV shows like Freaks & Geeks and Undeclared and most recently directed the movie The 40 Year Old Virgin. In 2002, Television Without Pity had a long interview with Apatow and the rest of the creative team behind Undeclared. Part 1 of the interview is here and Part 2 of the interview is here. This week, the NY Times Magazine published a long profile of Apatow. Kim Masters of Slate magazine has heard that Knocked Up is hilarious and could be a surprise blockbuster this summer. So, I'm pretty excited to see if it lives up to the hype.

Posted at 6:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I didn't have to work today, so I got to sleep in (sort of, I actually got up around 7:30 anyway and went hiking in the morning), which meant that I was able to stay up late and watch Turner Classic Movie's Silent Sunday movie special. Unfortunately, this Sunday's movie was a bit of a clunker, D. W. Griffith's Battle of the Sexes. While D. W. Griffith is the most prolific and arguably the most innovative and most well-known silent film director of all time, he is now largely forgotten today. He is best known for the classic film The Birth of a Nation. While Birth was admired for its epic storytelling and innovative cinematic techniques, it also created controversy because of its sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. Hurt by allegations of racism stemming from his controversial film, Griffith's response came in a follow-up film, Intolerance, which examines bigotry and intolerance through the ages. Film critic Pauline Kael called it "perhaps the greatest movie ever made and the greatest folly in movie history." Unlike Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, The Battle of the Sexes is a relatively minor movie, about a gold-digging adulteress who entices a wealthy man and breaks up a happy family-- a basic morality play. My favorite parts involve the lothario boyfriend of the gold-digger, a mustachioed smoothie played by Don Alvarado. The conservative businessman target of the gold-digger develops an instant dislike of the lothario, and every time they run into each other, the businessman sneers and calls the lothario a "jazz hound". Hee, I want to get all indignant at someone and call them a jazz hound. Like if someone cuts in front of me in line, I'll say, "Hey, back of the line jazz hound." But since it's not 1928, they won't know what I'm talking about.

Posted at 7:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I tried hiking to Sentinel Point on Sunday. I tried the same hike last summer and made it to Sentinel Point but got hopelessly lost on the way down, eventually ending up coming out of the woods six miles down the road from my car, which I had to hitchhike back to because I was too exhausted and dehydrated to walk anymore. Anyway, this time I was hoping I'd do a little better. But it turns out that when the trail went into the woods, there was a crapload of snow all over the place. The trail was completely covered, and the snow was up to my waist. I tried veering off the trail and climb straight up the hill to Sentinel Point, but I was worried about getting lost again, and even on the hill, there was still snow everywhere, and I kept having to veer left and right to try to avoid it. I decided that there was a good chance of getting myself in trouble, navigation-wise, so I just turned around. Unfortunately, I got back on the trail about a mile down from where I left it, and I ended up having to wade through the craploads of snow to get out of the woods. My jeans were soaked for most of the walk back. But it was actually a nice hike. I feel like I'm in a lot better shape this summer than I was last summer, which is good since it won't be long (two more weeks) before I'm in Peru embarking on a 4-day high altitude hike to and from Choquequirao. Anyway, if you want to see the rest of my pictures from Sunday's hike, I've posted them here.

Posted at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I know it's been forever since I posted. I'll have some things to say about that and about what's going on with the teaching job I was trying to get and maybe I'll also have something to say about turning this blog into a, well, blog... That'll come soon. But for this post, let me just say what's going on with me right now. I'm at Purdue University in Indiana. It's a long story, but basically I ended up agreeing to do a talk on a subject about which I know nothing, negative index refraction. One of the other guys in my lab works in that field, and I agreed to give a talk for him. He wrote up the talk, and I practiced it last week, and whenever I practiced it in front of him and the boss of our lab, they were both like, "Wow, you did pretty good." I said, "Sure, but if they ask me any questions, I'll have no idea." But they told me that my talk was the last talk of the day, so most everyone will have left by then, and if I get one or two questions,to just say that I'm only filling in and that they should contact the guy I'm filling in for if they want answers. I said that sounded good. So, I gave the talk today, and I even studied up a little bit so that I thought I could answer some questions that might come up. It seemed like about half the people had left when I was ready to give my talk, but I don't know, I think they all came back by the time I was talking, because it seemed like the room was full. The talk went fine, but then when I asked if anyone had a question, half the room raised their hands. One guy asked me about taking the derivative of the permittivity, and I was like, "Um, I don't really know. You should email the guy who was supposed to give this talk." And then someone else asked me if I didn't think the technique I talked about was just like liquid epitaxy. And I was all liquid whoitwhatsit??? So I acted like I was thinking real hard, and then I said that I didn't think I knew enough about liquid epitaxy to make a good comparison. Maybe she'd like to email the guy who was supposed to give this talk. Luckily, the moderator stepped in to save me, saying that that was it for the questions. I felt like a little bit of an asshole, because you are supposed to be halfway educated about the field when you're giving a talk, but those questions kinda came out of left field. Anyway, I'm just glad I'm done with it, and I think I basically did the best I could have given the situation. I should have been all Unfrozed Caveman Physicist with them. "I am confused and frightened by your Powerpoint slide projectors, how could you expect me to answer a question about liquid epitaxy? Sometimes when I get a message on my fax machine, I wonder: Did little demons get inside and type it? I don't know! My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts. So please don't expect me to know about the derivative of permittivity." *Sigh* I'm just glad I'm done. I feel like going out and getting a beer, but Veronica Mars is on pretty soon, so I think I'll just hang out in my hotel room for now. I fly home to Colorado tomorrow.

Posted at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's post is just a couple of quick blurby things, since I don't have much time to write (and by couple, I mean "more than a couple", but couple sounds nicer than threesome or foursome, and will also result in me getting less hits from questionable Google searches, although now that I've written "threesome" and "foursome", I will be getting those hits, *sigh*).

* Still no word on the teaching job I applied for. My inclination is that that's a bad thing, since if they wanted to offer me the job, there's no reason not to do that ASAP, but if they're not telling me anything, that probably means they've offered the job to one of the other applicants and are waiting to hear back from him before telling me anything definite. But that's just speculation, and I'll be finding out one way or the other within the next two weeks.

* After my diatribe about the ethics of author order in journal publications, it's only fair of me to mention that my former research group at Rice published another article this month based on my doctoral work, and I am first author on it. It still doesn't mean that what they did on the last article wasn't bullcrap, but at least I've been given proper credit on 2 out of the 3 articles that came out on my PhD thesis. Here's a link to the new article.

* I have a new favorite website - The Comics Curmudgeon. Sample quote: "When Mark Trail punches you, you stay punched."

Posted at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)