Saturday, April 30, 2016

Getting into the grove of things

It has been a while since I have tried to keep up a blog, so I am still not quite back in the habit of posting regularly.  Though, to be honest, I am not sure my other blogs were updated quite as often as they should have been either.

At any rate the past month has been quite interesting.  I had a set of interviews up in Madison, WI for a job that I am interested in this past week.   There are still a couple more candidates left to interview so it should be a few weeks before they make their final selections.  One great thing about being in Madison was that I was able to get caught up with some IceCube collaboration friends I haven't seen in a while.  There are a ton of wonderful people in the IceCube collaboration and in my time there I made many friends, but unfortunately, I haven't been able to see many of them in over a year.  We still keep in touch on Facebook, but there is nothing like being able to sit down and visit and have a face to face chat with a good friend you haven't seen in a while.

I have still been trying to get a bunch of reading done.  I have almost finished a few more books.  One I did finish was Black Holes And Time Warps by Kip Thorne.  I think I started reading this book years ago, but I kept getting distracted so I never finished it.  So I recently restarted it and was able to get through it in about a week or so.  It really is a great book for someone with a physics background.  I loved reading about the history of the development of various topics in physics and how so many branches and researches were intertwined.  That much of the book should be enjoyable with any interest in physics at all.  The physics was very basic for me, but could end up being a little difficult for others without much physics experience.  Overall, I really enjoyed the book.

I have also been reading a lot of physics papers.  I still have a ton I want to read.  One project I think I would like to do one day is to build an online collection of papers for grad students in particular.  A listing of papers that are important for students to read as they enter particular research subjects, historical papers and review papers that are important to gain the basics of a subject or group of subjects.  I think that would have helped me as grad student.

I also have a few other computer/physics projects floating around in the back of my mind that I might try to work on soon, but I am not ready to even try to put down any real plans yet.  I'm going to have to let them float around a bit and see where they land.