Super intense lasers and employment

Yesterday Jon and I went to a free talk at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) about lasers. We biked up Sand Hill road and it felt like dying (Biking is perhaps the only activity in which "downhill" has a happy connotation). Before going to the talk we had a celebratory dinner at the Treehouse for my employment at a product design firm (WOOOOOT. I got a job. Sweet Jesus I found a job). I will be working as a design/engineering intern for Compass Product Design up in Pleasanton. The ordeal of getting to the actual firm for the job interview is worthy of a blog entry but I'll just skip over most of that. So the bike up to SLAC was tiresome but the scenery was quaint. Palo Alto really is a great city for bikers.

Jon showed me his office. On our way there, there were three very scrawny, very geeky looking middle aged scientists playing Frisbee on the grounds. They look really excited and happy. This place looked like a haven for nerds! When we reached his building (A&E) there was a sphere concrete "sculpture" with a very crudely painted smiley face on it. It looked rather strange. Like some neanderthal had plopped it there and certainly possessed a quality so starkly different from all the other sleek looking "modern" sculptures smattered across the campus. I told him that SLAC looked and smelled like Caltech. And by Caltech I mean despair.

The talk was sufficiently water down lecture on optics and lasers. I still didnt quite understand most of it, but lasers are brighter than the sun! Also you cannot magnify the intensity of a light source using lenses. The best you can do is actaully just replicate the intensity of the source. For instance, during the process of burning an ant using a lens, while you are still gathering the brightness and heat of the sun, you are not magnifying it. In fact supposedly you can calculate this using math. But who needs that really? Finally, the speaker started talking about his own research and being able to create the ultimate intense light source using the Linear Accelerator and a 2 mile long string of laser beams using short pulses as a way of magnifying their intensities. He says that they could get it to be so bright that the photons will actually destroy each other!

This inspired Jon to come up with theory to explain something in science fiction. Supposedly if something and its anti-thing will collide, they will cancel each other out. For instance, an electron and a positron will cancel each other and become a new particle (?) maybe? Or maybe just annihilate each other. This is why if you can travel back in time you should never touch your you-of-the-past. Because an anti-thing is just something that is travelling back in time, and a thing is something going forward in time. When you collide with your past self, you will just simply.. self-destruct.

Thats enough pop science for today my dearies.

motion

I've never been very facile with motion. By facility, I mean : the skill at which I represent, analyze and even implement movement of all manners and sorts. For instance, I did poorly in Physics 53 (Mechanics). My professor, a very kind, well meaning, articulate, mother-like, (yes she was female (!) woman named Pat Burchat, made every effort to make the transfer of knowledge about the kinematics of rigid bodies as easy as possible. She would stand in the lecture hall of TC Seq, with her giant magnetic Vector arrow and stick it to the board, point it out of the board in all manners and in quite animated ways, but it still didn't work. The vectors looped through my brain in a tangled knot of confusion.

In a painting session that my instructor dubbed to be the "testing moments of our painting careers as we have known it" I did a rather poor representation of a ballerina in Giacomo Balla's painting style. For this event they had hired a professional ballerina and she danced for these lanky painters for two hours with only a five minute break in the middle. She was quite graceful. She had even brought two meter long gauze ribbons in many colors to even further highlight the grace with which she moved. I tried to represent it with a rapid succession of lines representing jaggedly repeated dynamic movement. The Futurists would have rolled in their anarchic graves. My teacher, Charles Parness, a very skilled portrait painter told me, "this is not very good , kid. I suggest you practice more". I agreed with him whole heartedly, promising to myself to never paint moving objects again. "Apples dont move", Cezanne even said. He's a smart painter.

Funny that I work for a virtual reality lab doing just this. My job is to animate dummy people and make them do all sorts of things. My professor likes to study human beings feeling of "presence" during interaction with virtual human beings. My job therefore is to make compelling movements to make these virtual people feel lifelike and human. I tug the "strings" of the virtual puppets adding every keyframe hoping they convey some sort of "human feel" whatever that means."

My friend Jolly says that I walk rather slowly. I told her, "Jolly, poets don't walk , they stroll." I like to look at things. I especially like to look at things that are still. Wouldn't it be great if the entire world were submerged in some type of substrate that would make everyone move 20 times slower. Then everything would be a lot easier to look at.

Spam and Ham

There's a new breed of spam that I am getting these days. They've been using random polysyllabic words to make names from the senders of advertisements for penis enlargement devices, free Viagra and Cialis, and Loan Consolidation programs (shows what Americans care about). For instance, today I got spam from Implementation G. Dishonesty and Imprisonment O. Mammoths. I especially love the middle initial touch. I wonder what G and O is. Maybe Geriatric? or Orthogonal? Wouldn't it be great to name your kid that way? Hi these are my children, Polyamorous Imprisonment and Unctuous Pandemonium. Pandemonium get off the couch right now and eat your broccolli (sp?). I'm beginning to like the sound of that!

Yesterday, Jon and I went on our first grocery trip. I, armed with my TI-83, made sure that our purchase was only a total of 41.35 (including tax). Jon told me that unprocessed food aren't taxable (who would've known?). They had strawberries for a dollar each(!). Everyone run to the nearest Safeway to get strawberries by the truckloads. This is it, ladies and gentlemen, the highlight of my day was being able to purchase my groceries for only a dollar. Isn't that great. We used Abby's Safeway Club card and that saved us 20 more dollars! Wahooo. I sleep soundly at night knowing that my dollars are used the right way (on strawberries and 60 cent canned corn!). Jon says if I like corn so much we should move to Indiana. Well I like potatoes too, so I guess we should move to Idaho!

I saw Lost in Translation again last night. Lip my pantyhose Mr. Hollis. Lip my pantyhose!

Stanford-at-Greer

There is something characteristically French-like about the French house. I'm not sure if its how clean it is relative to Terra, the house where I live during the year, that is unnerving, but there's something definitely French about it. (Maybe cause its called the damn FRENCH house maybe).There is the giant Faux Matisse mural in the dining hall and the really well executed imitatation De Chirico (wasn't he spanish... who knows) that makes it Parisian even.

I biked with Jon through the long and arduous journey through Stanford-at-Greer all the way through the cheerful, flower-lined paths of the Embarcadero through the now filled-with-little-people-and-camp-going-athletes Stanford campus to the French house. The streets that cross the Embarcadero start off as flowers. Iris St., Petunia Lane and what not and then progressively into authors. By the time we reach Louis, which incidentally is not a flower or an author, I got really tired. Its a good sign when we've reached Mark Twain, but then we cross Brett Harte, who I've never heard of. That bothers me , for a second.

I do know another Brett, in fact Abby and I both know of him and have mentioned him quite frequently during our discussions of admirable PRL TA's and dashingly cute-in that I'm- a- really- Gruff-man-and I'm-wearing-a-Jon-Deere-shirt kinda way-"your project is Tits" kinda way. By the way, just a disclaimer for possible boyfriends who might be reading this, that is actually just mostly Abby's comments. It was her project that was characteristically Tits even!

I got tired out when we finally reached the French house. I went to sleep while Jon went off to join to working world. I of course, the unemployed waif, went to bed for two more hours. I got up to the sound of radio noises. You know, the type that makes squeeky noises and you communicate people with (think World War II ), not the radio-in the radio and alarm clock combination that blasts spanish music that Jon has by his bedside. I always wonder how he has such an uncanny ability to know what the spanish stations are. I mean he just moved to Palo Alto! So anyway, someone was on the radio " We need mops at French house, over". "I am at French house, over, be right there with the mop". Anyway, in my half-asleep haze, I sort of imagined myself to be the lady-protagonist in 1984 (yes the book, not the year) with my incognito-not-supposed to be here fear of being caught by the janitor. So I lulled myself into this fantasy and I started hearing footsteps. I could hear more noises and I was sure they were all going to catch me, handcuff me and throw me in the local jailhouse or something. In my hysteria I hid in Jon's walk in closet (the French house has walk in closets? I've been totally jacked with living in Co-ops). After waiting for about 10 minutes, I step out of his walk in closet, pee in the bathroom and ran the hell out of there.

I dont like the word somnolent.

Dragons, Giant Squid and Blue Aliens

Went to play Katamari Damacy today. It was amazing. I had to roll around a ball and pick up various random and sundry things like: giant octopi, cows, pedestrians, jumbo umbrellas, tacks, legoes, mountains all in this giant clump to replenish the stars that the king of the cosmos (the prince of the cosmos's i.e. the protagonists') had destroyed inadvertently in his sleep. It was a brilliant game. Like Super Mario only more irreverent and better graphics in 3d.



Picking up clumps of stuff

I also finished Dragon World on my cellphone. It was a really uneventful end to the game. The only big challenge was killing all those damn lava spewing plant things. The dragon itself was just a head that moved up and down the screen and it was pretty weak. He just kept spewing this lava burst thing straight across the screen. Totally lame.
I have seen a fair bit of good movies this week including: the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Fantastic Planet, Stalker (by Andrei Tartakovsky), Dil Se, Reality Bites and Rushmore.


wonderful cinematography in Dil Se

Fantastic Planet was an animated movie from France made in the 60's that was apparently an "allegory" about something or other. There were humanoid creatures oddly dressed in erotic / s and M like clothing that were under the control, actually kept as domestic pets of these giant blue alien creatures ( I forgot what they were called). Anyway, there were lots of sex/drug/drugs and sex references throughout the whole movie and a really weird soundtrack that sounded like a cross between porn music and 80's video game soundtracks. Anyway, that was the most remarkable of all the movies I think.


Traags enslaving the Oms. Yum
Rushmore is always good though. Jon really likes the "I'm going to pop a cap in your ass" comment. I think its a really great movie. The closing scene with all the characters in the movie dancing was really good.

Jon's my boyfriend by the way. I really like him

hello world