A Walk in the Park and an Exam That Was Not

Today was quite the full day! I woke up at half past nine to the sweet sounds of repeated hammer blows. When I poked my head out the door, I saw that a caretaker had arrived to change the broken air heater in our laundry drying cupboard. Tried to doze a little bit, then got up at about ten. Since the exam was at three, I had a slow breakfast, read some news and chatted some while admiring the fine weather outside: Freshly fallen snow and sunshine. When Jorinde said offhandedly that it was a pity to sit inside on such a day, I asked if she had time to take a walk. Turns out that she did, but only on the condition that we spoke Norwegian, to make up for the lost preparation time for her Norwegian exam on friday. We ended up taking a marvellous two hour walk in the sunny winter Trondheim. Admire the pictures in the [url=http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~andrstef/pictures/]gallery[/url].

After we got home again, I just had time to have a light lunch (two pieces of bread, a pear and a glas of milk) before it was time to leave. On arriving in the lecture hall, I had to sign in on a sheet of paper, then take my place. The oddest thing was the paper we had to write the exam on: It is triple-layered. The upper, white layer is the main sheet. The middle, blue layer is a backup copy for the university. The last, yellow layer is a backup for the student. Well, I write with a fountain pen and rather little pressure, so reading the blue is torturous and reading the yellow is impossible. Should not be a problem though.

The exam itself was… a nasty surprise. We had three exercises: 1a)-b), 2a)-d), 3a)-d). 1 was about time independence of eigenvalues when your potential in the Schrödinger equation is a wave, 2 was about probability generating functions, something we had never even heard about, and 3 was about the Lorentz system. Sounded like tough stuff when I read it. Well, for the first ninety minutes it was. My argumentation in 1a) was rather shady, but fortunately I managed a satisfactory 1b). 2 required some major rethinking; I have heard of generating functions before, but not in the context of probability. It was like some huge, non-linear Markov chain, except in polynomial form. I managed a) and b) mostly by grace of some drawings, but c) and d) completely failed me. It didn’t help that I mistakenly thought the problem could be rewritten as a matrix multiplication, and spent twenty minutes trying to make that work. Fortunately, 3 was a breath of fresh air. There are a lot of complicated questions you can ask about the Lorentz system, but there are also a few simple ones, which were all we had to answer. Encouraged by this result (and by this time utterly annoyed by the inane triple-layered paper), I turned my attention once more to 2c)-d), and lo! enlightenment came over me. In the end, I solved each in less than five lines. Unfortunately, I was not able to fix my 1a), so I left it at that and handed in half an hour before the deadline.

Motivated by my surprisingly good results, I went home, packed my bagpack and walked straight of to Judo. Training is great after sitting in a tight chair for three and a half hours. We trained quite hard today, but other than being really out of breath at the end, it was great! I cannot match up to the more experienced higher belts, but I am sure that will improve with practice. Tomorrow I will resume learning for chemistry and sensors (not too hard, because those are rather soft subjects, to be honest). Today, however, I am going to be lazy.

Last Day: Relaxation

Tomorrow is my first exam, and bar the quantum optics assignment in january, the most difficult. After working 3-5 hours a day since mid-november, I decided that taking the last day off couldn’t hurt. All topics have been learnt and practiced, four old exams have been completed with varying degrees of success (everyone a pass, but not all excellent) and I have really had enough. Under these circumstances, I hope that taking today of has helped me recharge the batteries and enter tomorrow’s exam with renewed motivation. Besides, the old exams are the more frustrating the older they are, as subject matter and emphasis start to diverge from our lecture, making it rather difficult to do better than “decent.” The only thing I am worried about for tomorrow is that I make an oversight or a calculation mistake sending me down a wrong path. I will be extra careful tomorrow and read the questions well.

Today, however, was spent in leisure. I woke up at ten o’clock, had breakfast and read the news, then proceeded to read my Go book on opening strategies. After that I read some manga and continued with another fifty pages of Inkheart, a very nice book that I loaned from the public library. During the afternoon, it started snowing again (first time was yesterday). It seems like winter might finally be here for real; it’s certainly more snow than the last two times.

Since the Go club seems to be out of session for the rest of the semestre, I played two rounds of Go against Tommy, both of which he won, but with increasing quality of play on my part. My greatest weakness is the late midgame, when I tend to make mistakes in the connection of my groups or miss possible escapes left to his. Well, only practice makes perfect. Afterwards I went shoppingg, enjoying the snow on my way to the store. Then, I engaged in another session of experimental cooking, this time involving pollack (a type of fish), lentils, beans and bulgur, the entire thing spiced with some coriander and hot pickled lime. The latter I had gotten from a vietnamese store on Fjordgata, and it turned out that the hot pickled lime was extremely… well, hot. I asked Werner if he wanted to come over, and we had a nice meal. Fortunately, I had kefir to cool our poor throats a little bit.

Work and Random Thoughts

[h4]Work[/h4]
The past days have been filled with work. Not because I have assignments, mind you, but because I don’t want to have trouble with my exams. Actually, since I don’t need the credit for anything I have done this semestre, I don’t really care that much about the exams, but I want to confirm that I have absorbed and understood the subject matter. That’s the reason I have spent 4-5 hours every day on revising non-linear dynamics. Yesterday became more industrious yet when I received a mail from Bo-Skure (my quantum optics prof), telling us that there would be a lecture today and that we should please look at the handouts from tuesday, all sixty pages of them. I spent two hours looking them over. They are mostly things copied together, patched up by pages of Bo-Skure’s handwriting and spiced with publications. I read three of those and then decided to stop because my head was spinning. Quantum optics, is, as expected, rather a challenge. Switched back to non-linear dynamics for some rote calculation practice and called it a day around 22:00. Tommy and I had a nice game of Go (which I actually won due to a little oversight on Tommy’s part), after which I retired to my room to read a little before going to bed.

Today I had a nice hearty breakfast and after that two lectures. First, quantum optics. We talked a lot about interference. What causes it, what we can learn from it, and how it can be used for measurements. We learnt that photons do not actually ever have to meet to interfere. Interesting. But appearantly, interference can only tell us about our apparatus, not so much about the photons themselves (most different photon states produce the same interference pattern because the apparatus forces the electric field into certain modes).

[h4]Random Thoughts[/h4]
1.) I noticed recently that Norwegian, English and German all have different words for the little balls of dust and hairs that accumulate under beds and desks.
English: Dust bunnies
Norwegian: Hybelkaniner = room rabbits
German: Wollmäuse = wool mice
Next time I vacuum my room (today?), I’ll know that an entire zoo is being sucked from my floor.
2.) Sometimes when you browse the web, you see something truly amazing. [url=http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/cubegoodies/71a4/ new=false]Behold![/url]
3.) Today I saw a piece of blue sky through the clouds, and wondered for a couple seconds what caused this unnaturally bright colour, before my memory caught up and told me that blue sky is actually quite common outside of Trondheim.

Exam Period Begins

Today is officially the beginning of my exam period. The last bit of homework for this semestre was finished today, when Nico and I held our presentation on organic LEDs. The presentation was a success, everything came off nice and fluid. I think our audience was happy with us. Since that was also the last lecture in Functional Materials and Anorganic Chemistry II had its last lecture last week, I now only have to go to university this friday for the last measurements & sensors and then every tuesday for quantum optics. My lecture load ist thus greatly eased.

<sarcasm>Of course, all this free time must be filled; we cannot, after all, succumb to sloth, oh bless me no.</sarcasm> Instead I should really get busy preparing for my three exams: Non-linear Dynamics on the 30th of novembre, Anorganic Chemistry II on the 6th of decembre and Measurements & Sensors on the 7th. After that, I can relax 2-3 days before starting on Quantum Optics. My main attention is focussed on NLD, since AOC2 and MS are probably not going to be that difficult. Chemistry can be treacherous though; misremembering a little detail can wreck an entire exercise. Measurements & Sensors is lowest on my priority scale. Not only can I not get credit for it in Aachen, but also it seems very simple. The math cannot be beyond what our mechantronics people could solve and I am quite familiar with the practical applications as well.

As such, I am now going to take “Non-linear Dynamics and Chaos” by Strogatz from my shelf and start reading. Of course, exercises will have to be done as well.

More Fun With Microwaves

Tommy and I continued our microwave experiments today. We began with a halogene bulb (movie #5), which unfortunately did nothing. Next was an energy saving bulb (#6) which emitted a very bright white light and a stinky gray smoke. Time to air out the kitchen. Our little experiment broke the light bulb, but that was really to be expected.

The remaining experiments were conducted with two paper clips bent into various shapes. First, we tried placing their tips together with the still curled rest serving as a foot (#7). This backfired when the feet proved to be the main point of discharge. The glass plate actually had small trenches melted into it!

So we once again used a tea light to stick the paper clips into. The first experiment was with both wires parallele (#8), the second one point to point (#9). In the last one, one of the wires fell back against the covering beaker and inflicted two melting points and cracks on our borosilicate beaker. Those things are explicitly for laboratory use [i]because[/i] they withstand heat so well. A Bunsen burner does nothing to them!

See our exploits documented in the form of quicktime movies in [url=http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~andrstef/mikrowelle/ new=false]this subdirectory[/url] and some of the results in the [url=http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~andrstef/pictures/thumb17.html new=false]picture gallery[/url] as usual.

Judo Tournament

Yesterday was the date of my Judo club’s seminannual internal tournament, Pilskubben. The name derives from the fact that the winners usually receive a sixpack of Dahls Pils as a prize. In any case, it is the largest social event of NTNUIjudo and not quite as serious as one would normally expect Judo tournaments to be.

We started at 18:00 in Gløshaugen Sports Centre in our usual training place, a small gallery over the main hall called “hylla,” which means “the shelf.” The name is adequate, since the area is roughly 5×25 metres, which is not really roomy. Unfortunately, our club does not seem influential enough to gain a time slot for the main hall. First step was laying out the mats. We had a 1×5 row of red mats to mark the main fight area and a puffer zone of green mats around it. The walls and the ballustrade where also cushioned with mats. While we could only hold one fight at a time, that fight would have sufficient space to develop normally. Warming up with everybody at once on that space was a different matter, though.

The 28 participants were devided in four cathegories: Beginners, Big Boys, Not Quite So Big Boys, and Girls. Some considered it impolite to put girls in a seperate class, but I am sure that if they had felt seriously offended, they would have managed to effect a reorganisation. Of these cathegories, the first three had enough members to split them into two divisions each. The members of one division, which ranged from four to five people, would fight every other member of their division. The two best of both divisions would then enter the semifinals, and the winners of those meet in the final for the cathegory. Sounds complicated, but its actually quite logical.

What did this mean for me? I was ranked in the Beginners, Division A. This meant that I would have to fight three people. How did my fights go? Well, mixed bag.

1.) Ground fight against a rather tiny beginner. I manage to wrestle him to the ground, but incur a small penalty for accidentally getting my hand inside his suit (not allowed). Unfortunately, I can’t get him into a good hold, and by the end of the fight neither has managed to score and I lose because of the penalty (a shido, if that means anything to you, the lowest penaly possible).

2.) Standing fight against medium-sized guy. We push and pull a little bit, and he manages to get me in a quick hip throw. Nicely done, he was quite fast.

3.) Ground fight against. Push&pull, then I can lever him over my leg and get him in a solid hold, one that it almost impossible to get out of. I win.

So in the end, my record is 1:2, which excludes me from the semifinals. The first loss is a bit frustrating, but my opponent in the second fight really deserved that win; it was a nice throw.

So I spent the rest of the time watching other fights. Some of them were serious, but often the informal character of the fights shone through. Bribery was rampant; the best scene was a guy starting the fight by handing the referee a chocolate bar and getting an instant win for it without even touching the opponent. Playful fights were also quite common. The funniest thing was the three girl fight: A blue-belt against two beginner girls. She actually managed to hold them both in a hold at the same time. Kudos. Actually, I missed the ending to that one because I fell over laughing.

Our only black-belt, Torbjørn, showed some of his moves as well, although in my opinion he won his fights not so much by superior technique as by agility and smooth flow. That is actually more impressive, since effective elegance is more difficult to achieve than knowing thirty different ways of throwing someone. I think that he lost in the finals against a green-belt, but I don’t believe for a moment that that wasn’t deliberate. I have never fought against him, but in my experience, black-belts are virtually unbeatable for anyone below brown-belt.

We also had the obligatory casualty: Heiko, a german brown-belt, caught his hand inside his opponent’s suit and broke the ring finger of his right hand. Luckily, he’s a lefty. It will take a while to heal, but after his return from hospital he seemed in good spirits and no pain.

When the tournament had finished after two and a half hours, we moved to the sauna, where we relaxed our muscles, drank beer (actually, I stuck to mineral water) and sang norwegian songs which we didn’t really know. It was nice in the beginning, but after the first hour it got a bit tedious, especially since I was starting to feel sauna’d-out. When everybody had had enough, we left the sports centre and moved to the flat of one of our members, where food and drink awaited us. The food took the shape of a dozen jumbo-size pizzas (diametre guesstimated 60 cm), which we attacked with great fervour. Ultimately, the last two pizzas proved too much for us and were spared. I talked with quite a few people and had a good time, but I was getting very tired, mostly because of the sauna marathon, so at 3:00 I finally called it a day and walked home together with Tim, one of the other germans in NTNUIjudo, whom I’d met that evening.

One thing I noticed was that my Norwegian is not good enough to join a normal conversation between norwegians. I still need them to speak slowly and be patient waiting for my answers. I also noticed that such conversations often centre around what Germany/German/germans are like, which becomes a bit one-dimensional after a while. However, from observation it seems to me that that is quite common for exchange students. Maybe with time my Norwegian will become good enough to join even in the fast-paced conversations of not-quite-sober-anymore norwegians at 2:00

Fun With Microwaves

There is a lot of fun to be had with you average kitchen microwave. It can do so much more than just warming your leftovers.

Last weekend, Tommy and I got into a discussion on states of matter, and what plasma is, exactly. We talked about putting a lightbulb in the microwave, or a toothpick. However, one thing one really should have for that is a beaker made from borosilicate glass to cover the experiment; otherwise, your microwave can end up pretty badly fried.

Well, today my chemistry class spent the last thirty minutes in the lab watching some nice tricks and explosions (dropping gummy bears in melted KClO3 was certainly interesting). When we had finished, I asked Karina, our lecturer, about buying such a beaker. She replied that they had to throw them out after a couple of uses (they scratch and collect impurities), and that I could have an old one for free. Said, done! I had now acquired the missing piece.

After getting home, I showed Tommy, and we decided to use a glass plate for bottom and the borosilicate beaker for the top part of the cover. We tested different objects. The tealight did not produce any particular effects, but the toothpick and the lightbulb were marvelous. Fun with physics, indeed! Tommy used his digikam to make quicktime movies. If you want to see, here is [url=http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~andrstef/zahnstocher1.mov new=false]the tooth pick movie[/url] and here [url=http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~andrstef/birne.mov new=false]the lightbulb movie[/url]. These require Quicktime to watch!

I was a little surprised that the lightbulb didn’t shatter, but I can’t say I mind. Cleaning up that mess was not something I was looking forward to.

Tuesday Hates Me

Man, what a day! Tuesday is by far the most closely packed day I have: I leave home at ten, and return shortly before nine. What makes the day so long and wearying is no single thing, but the coincidence of many things. I’ll explain my schedule, and you will understand.

[h6]10:15 Advanced Anorganic Chemistry[/h6]
Off to a slow start, with my interesting (but easy) chemistry lecture. My knowledge in solid state and atomic physics usually gives me an almost unfair advantage over the other participants, so this is still relaxing. Today we continued with transition metals and their binding rules (slightly more complicated than normal metals).
Finish: 11:45

[h6]12:15 Quantum Optics[/h6]
Now we’re frying bacon! This is by far my most challenging lecture. However, the object seems to be to “keep up,” not to “gain full understanding and then some” as in some other lectures. This is only fair, because honestly, gaining full understanding is something many graduate students who work in the field have not yet accomplished. Today we talked about squeezed states, entangled photon generation, single state preperation and black holes. After the two hours mark, my mental capacity usually drops so far that I struggle just to keep taking notes. A true brainteaser if ever there was one.
Finish: 15:05

[h6]15:15 Functional Materials Presentations[/h6]
After our project deadlines in Functional Materials, it is now time for the presentations. Prof. Samuelsen requested that we all appear, so I thought I would go for once. I was treated to two presentations, which, for all their physical merit, painfully showed a lack of experience. You can’t just announce a talk about solar cells and have the first slide after the title headlined “PN Junction”. Timing and flow issues were also appearant. I spoke to one of the presentators afterwards and learned that they had very little practice, and were quite aware of it. Selfconsciousness and too much material in too little time made it even more difficult.
Finish: 16:15

[h6]16:15 Meditation Course[/h6]
This course starts at 16:15 at Dragvoll, thirty minutes on foot and ten by bus from Gløshaugen. Needless to say, I came to late. Today was the last session, so we were mostly wrapping up, taking about further steps, giving feedback, and so on. All in all I don’t consider it wasted time; I really find meditation very useful in regaining energy and concentration ability. However, I struggle somewhat with giving it a daily 30-45 minutes. That is simply more than I usually want to spare from my precious free time. I haven’t decided yet what to do. If I am serious about meditating, the daily 30 min. are probably necessary.
Finish: 17:55

[h6]17:30 Go Club[/h6]
I am always to late to this one, since it overlaps with meditation. I arrived today at 18:30, watched a game and then got to play against a fellow beginner. It was my first real game on a 19×19 board; the usual practice sizes of 9×9 and 13×13 are much less demanding when it comes to overview and strategy, although they also offer far less possibilities of development. In the end, we both made an incredible amount of mistakes (the more experienced players were watching our game and having a lot of fun), but I made two crucial mistakes (stupid ones, too) and lost by 36 moku because of those. Well, better luck next time.
Finish: 20:15

After that, I went straight home, shoved a pizza in the oven and went to the Bunnpris to get some bread and jam for breakfast. I am currently enjoying my pizza and a glass of kefir while writing this entry. The evening is going to be dedicated to relaxation and maybe a little work.

Easy Going – The Great Illusion

Remember when I blogged about the three projects I had to do simultaneously? Back then I thought “it’s a lot of work now but afterwards I will be able to take it easy.” Which brings me to the topic of why that was an illusion. You see, while all three projects were finished to my satisfaction and handed in with success, I am far from unoccupied.

Now that we have breached november, the lectures are winding down and the exams are approaching. This means two things for me:

[h4]1.) Finish up the semester work[/h4]
This is particularly appearant in Målesensorer og Transduser with Prof. Naqvi. He has set several close deadlines for handing in reports about things we did during the semester. I spend most of yesterday doing a homework assignment on the Vermeer forgeries by Han van Meegeren and which scientific methods were used to prove the fake. It was actually surprisingly interesting, and if you want, feel free to read my [url=http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~andrstef/vanmeegeren.pdf new=true]five-page PDF[/url] on the topic.

Another thing I have to work on is the presentation for my project on Organic LEDs. While so short that very little substance will be presented (twenty minutes for two people and a 23-page paper), it is nevertheless work that must be done. I consider it vital to practice a presentation at least once (better twice) before holding it. This is to avoid fatal, embarassing errors and mistakes. My motivation is curtailed a little bit by the fact that the other presenters always commit these anyway, so I feel like an overachiever.

[h4]2.) Start preparing for exams[/h4]
The four exams I have will be on 30.11., 6.12., 7.12. and 9.1.. The last one is quantum optics, which will be quite difficult, but of no immediate concern. The two on the sixth and seventh of december are chemistry and MoT, both of which should be rather easy. I will still practice, especially for chemistry, since I lack routine with that subject. More important, however, is the non-linear dynamics exam on the 30.11.. I consider the subject fascinating and challenging, but did not find the lectures to my liking, so I stopped going and started learning from book and script. This is always a risky move and makes me feel a little bit uncertain how well I keep up with the knowledge level of the lecture. In order to ease my mind, I have spent 2-3 hours each day working through the book, thinking closely about the theory and its implications and solving several exercises for each chapter.

The [url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0738204536/002-0948737-4218425?v=glance new=true]book[/url] we are using has turned out to be surprisingly helpful. It combines a solid grasp of introductory dynamics with many very good examples and models. The exercises reinforce the key points of the respective chapter and the chapters build logically onto one another. A nice thing that I appreciate particularly is that it often refers back to the basics. Too many books lose sight of their introductory modes of thinking when going on to more advanced topics, often causing the reader to wrestle with complicated problems while having forgotten how to even deal with the simpler ones. The process of evolving complicated and beautiful things from simple principles has always held a certain fascination for me, and nowhere does this happen more clearly than in dynamics.