Pi...

4:35 AM, re-state my assumptions. 1. Life is meant to be enjoyed. 2. This enjoyment should directly affect those surrounding you. 3. This shared enjoyment should improve the overall quality of life. Conclusion: Fun Jamie should stick around for as long as possible.

I spent most of the day stressing about small things in the grand scheme, and entertaining perspective graduate students. I'd like to think that honesty trumped entertainment value in both these situations, but we'll have to wait and see. With the latter it is pretty apparent that these students need answers that are to the point and above all not BS. I think that our department showed that life as a graduate student is not "all work and no play".

Underdamped dating...

Turns out that my interactions with people can be roughly approximated by an underdamped harmonic oscillator. This is especially true when it comes to interacting with the opposite sex. Below is a plot of my typical response when dating.

Characteristics such as the degree of overshoot and number of oscillations can vary significantly depending on external factors (e.g., how much I've had to drink, how cute the girl is, etc.), but eventually I'll end up at a response level that is mostly appropriate, mostly.

P.S.: My apologies for the crappy excel plot. I don't have a proper plotting program on my backup computer.

P.P.S: I realize that the fact that I've distilled my love life into a plot pretty much confirms that I'll be alone for the rest of my life.

Maf can be purty...

While I'm trained as an experimental scientist/engineer, and have a visceral rejection of pure mathematics, every now and again something worthwhile (in my narrow view of math) appears. Actually as I've touched on before I don't think I have the capacity to have a visceral reaction to anything as my logical side generally overwhelms more low level reactions, but I digress.

While cruising /. I stumbled upon this interesting bit on the search for a 3D Mandelbrot set. A 2D Mandelbrot set leads to pretty stunning images that have a fractal nature, and the 3D "equivalent" is pretty mind blowing. the overarching basic concept of a fractal is that is comprised of smaller building blocks that are of the same form, this is self-similarity. This patterning holds at any scale so as you "zoom in" the structure is maintained. A classic example is the Sierpinski triangle.

The Mandelbrot set is a more complex fractal, and someone has tried to create a 3D analog. This is what it looks like:

While this is a pretty interesting looking "thing", it gets better as you zoom in:

Checkout the rest of the site to see some other really cool images that are found by zooming in on different parts of the rendering.