We Survived!!

Success!!! The LCH (Large Haldron Collider) was turned on this morning!!! And no one died!!!! Which is a good thing, b/c my emergency preparedness kit DOES NOT cover what to do in the event of a microscopic singularity growing large enough to engulf the eastern hemisphere! You know?

And the craziest thing (next to not destroying the planet in one fail swoop) is that they'll need 60,000 computers to analyze all the data they'll collect from this nifty atom smasher!!! Can you imagine? Computers all over the world sifting through 15 petabytes of data each year trying to figure out how the universe started. Crazy! How much is 15 petabytes? Well... it's 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes!! Of data!!! Gah!!! So much data!

I can't be the only nerd who cares about this stuff... right???

Coolest Thing I've Seen In Quite Some Time

Mmmmmm Pi

Yes, everyone's favorite holiday is here again... Pi Day! (3.14)

Happy Pi Day!!!!

I know I've been a terrible blogger as of late... I have stories to tell, I do, I swear!!! I've picked wedding colors, and bridesmaid dresses. I've got stories of skiing, and wigs, and surgery. (oh my!) And then there's Kitchen Dream 2 that I've been meaning to share. And there are pictures! So many fun pictures to post!!! But I seem to have lost the cord for my camera, so they're currently trapped in my camera... but I swear, they're coming! Ugh. Things are a bit hectic right now... but they'll calm down after Monday, which by the way, is the day I take my very last final exam EVER for my Master's Degree!!! Woo-hoo! So please bear with me just a bit longer.

And in the mean time... Enjoy Pi Day!!

p.s. In 2015, Pi Day is going to be OFF THE HOOK!

The Great Debate

My mind is engaged in a great battle... with itself.

What to do? What to choose? How do I decide?

These thoughts keep me up at night and tear at my brain. Is there one right answer? Will I ever know it? There's the choice I want and the choice I want to want. And once I choose, I fear there will be no turning back.

The war rages on, but no longer will the conflict be solely internal. Today I cast my question out to the masses* and ask for help.

Do I go Mac or PC?

-------------------------
*my 12 loyal readers.

Freaky Friday

Does anyone else think it's weird that the first friday after super lucky 7/7/07 is friday the 13th?

(insert twlight zone music here.)

For You, Grandma

When I was little, my grandmother made me a joke book. An elephant joke book, no less. Filled with elephant jokes that she had painstakingly cut out of some newspaper, likely over several months. I never understood why she cut out, saved, and then glued all these little elephant jokes into an old photo album, but I remember LOVING it. Hmmm, maybe that's why she did it. Grandmas are good like that. Anyway, so now I have this ridiculous fetish for cheesy elephant jokes. It's one of my quirks, and it's endearing, darn it.

Today, while reading my daily comics and jokes (from Acramax) I stumbled across as terrible an elephant joke as I had ever seen. I was instantly in love and knew that I MUST share it with the world.

Enjoy!

How To Catch a White Elephant:
Go to an place where there are white elephants. Bring with you a muffin (with raisins).
Climb a tree. When the white elephant is close, drop the muffin (with raisins) in front of it.
The white elephant will be happy, and eat the muffin (with raisins). White elephants like muffins (with raisins).
Repeat this procedure for five days in a row. After the fifth day, the white elephant will be used to its daily muffin (with raisins).
The sixth day you climb the tree, bringing with you a muffin (without raisins). Drop the muffin (without raisins) as usual.
When the white elephant finds out that the muffin (without raisins) lacks raisins, it will darken in anger.
And then you catch it the same way you catch an ordinary grey elephant.

:D

They See Me Mowin'

I'd heard the song before, but it was my lovely friend Katrina who introduced me to the video. Quite frankly, I think it's awesome.

Enjoy!

Very Scientific

I picked a class. Quite literally. Out of a hat.

You just can't argue when Energy Systems I: Thermodynamics comes out of the hat 3 times in a row. I suppose it was meant to be.

Besides, the Materials class was basically for undergrad students. And I wasn't nearly nerdy enough for the Airplane Design class.

Back to school. Weee!

This Is My New And Improved Blog

What do you think?!

:)

Stupid Stupid Stupid

Well, now I've done it. I've started reading Book 6. (Harry Potter, duh.) I didn't want to start reading it (not yet anyway)... I certainly don't have time to start reading it... I don't even OWN the book that I'm supposed to be reading for my book club. Not good. Not good at all.
I was stuck at work for EIGHTEEN hours yesterday running a test. Well, mostly I was just watching a test, occasionally adjusting some knobs and whatnot, you know, generally making sure that nothing catastrophic happened. Fun. So what does one do while staring at a test fixture for 18 hours??? One typically reads. Except that I forgot to bring a book. Doh. And there is only so much web surfing a person can do. Luckily, the other girl running the test with me did bring a book - she's so smart - and she let me borrow it - she's so nice - and it was Harry Potter - Damn her!

So now I'm hooked. Can't eat, can't sleep, certainly can't read other books. It'll be all I can do to keep up with reading blogs... and writing? Please!
So forgive me if I'm a bad blogger for a while.

Stupid J.K. Rowling and her stupid fabulous books. Grr.

Fantastic

http://moon.google.com/

Zoom in all the way.
(I'm so easily entertained.)

Fort

So my roommate, Glenn, bought a 61-inch television. By the way, it's fantastic, size does matter.... but that's not the point... The point is that the TV came in a box... a really big box... a box, shockingly, large enough to hold a 61" TV. So what does one do with a box that big??? One builds a fort! No? Am I alone here? Glenn got his TV a while ago and has been saving the box. I assumed that said box was being saved for some serious fort building. I assumed wrong. Glenn's plan is to just throw a perfectly good fort box away. :( This saddens me. Are we too old for forts? Have we become so jaded in our adult lives that fort building no longer holds the awe and splendor that it once did? It's such a shame. I'm finally to a point in my life where I could probably build a pretty kick-ass fort (years of engineering training coupled with the fact that I can play with scissors without adult supervision) but now I'm stuck being a grown-up - read: too old for forts. Bummer.

This Is Why I Love My Friends!

I have the funniest friends ever! The following is from my friend AJ's blog-type-thing... (Yes AJ's an engineer)

How Big Is A Google?

Dan, Britt, Laura, and I started trying to figure out how big a google is. A googol is "1" with a hundred "0"s. That is a lot. What's there a googol of on earth? Ants? Grains of sand? Dan said nothing; said there aren't even a googol atoms on earth. The rest of us politely disagreed. Not a googol on all of Earth!? A mole is 6.02x10^23 molecules, and a mole of salt is nothing. Surely a googol atoms exist on Earth. After much googling, Dan found that there are only 4x10^79 hydrogen atoms in the UNIVERSE. And hydrogen is 90% of the universe. So we lost. There are a googol of nothing on Earth.

But that is almost a googol hydrogen atoms...right? We next considered the parts of the atom. There are about 10^9 photons and neutrinos for each hydrogen atom, more googling tells us. That gets us to 10^88 photons, neutrinos, and hydrogen atoms. Sounds close, but it's not. We still need one trillion universes to get a googol of those atom parts!!! DAMN! That order of magnitude stuff really messes you up. No wonder they invented log-log paper.

Next we got a little abstract and counted time. How many nano seconds since the beginning of the universe? 10^9 nanoseconds per second * 10^2 seconds per minute * 10^2 minutes per hour * 10^1 hours per day * 10^3 days per year * 10^10 years since the creation of the universe = 10^27 nanoseconds. NOT EVEN CLOSE!!! And that is overestimating. Then, the geniuses we are, we figured it out. There are a googol one-googoliths of a second in one second. In the time you read this, about 45 googol googoliths of a second went by. You can read our paper in the next issue of the journal Nature.

What will they think of next! :)