deutschland ist toll… aber Kirksville ist auch gut?

Hey!  I haven’t posted in a while so get ready to read way more stuff about me than you actually care about!

First off, do you guys remember when Truman hosted that awesome party that over a thousand people came to and everyone had a really fun time for many hours?  Oh wait… that only happens in Germany!  So yeah, that happened here.  The party was in a large field and there were no less than three soccer tournaments going on.  There was volley and sac racing too, and lots of slightly overpriced (but still tasty) german beer.  There was also a beer crate stacking competition where you had to climb on top of the crates you’d already stacked to put more on top, which was super awesome!  Then there was a dancing/break dancing/other stuff show which was really cool and had really different creative stuff.  I was there from 6pm to 430am which was really fun, and there were tons of people there when i showed up and tons still there when i left.

Then, last weekend, some of the other RISE students and I went to Koln, or Cologne.  It was really fun!  On the first day we saw the dom which is a giant church.  We also saw an old nazi prison that had been converted into a really interesting museum.  My favorite part was the writing scratched on the wall of the tiny tiny cells (which held 30 people, 28 more people then i had guessed by looking at them!!).  Among the best were “Nazi Assholes”, and “Dear prisoner, you can endure through anything, and thus you can endure this.  Keep your head high!”.  The guy who wrote that last one must have been awesome.  From here we ate some food at the Rhine, and noticed the German phenominom that is the ‘beer bike’.  A bar with wheels and petals!  We walked about town, lost track of time, and had to run across the whole town (with me jumping walls because i fell behind to take a picture of a mr t poster) to catch a boat.  We took a really cool tour of the rhine, which i slept during.

This was followed by making our way back to the hotel we had booked, which was literally in the middle of a field out of the city.  We had to walk through the woods to get to it.  Then, around 11pm we made our way back into the city!  We enjoyed the German tradition of buying beers at corner stores and walking the streets drinking them while looking for bars and getting lost.  Okay, I don’t know if its a German tradition, but we did it anyway.  The next train back to our hotel was at 5am so we stayed out until then to avoid the cost of a cab, but we accidentally took a train in a circle and got confused so we just took a cab anyway.  In the course of the evening we spent a lot of time just walking around, met a homeless man with a giant joint who was frustrated because someone took his “rook-bag” and he hoped he could randomly see that person tomorrow so “I… I will push my fist so hard into his face!”, and some cool british guys, one of which said to me “you have the coolest beard and haircut that I have seen the whole past 2 months I’ve been in Germany,” so it was a pretty fun evening i guess.

The next day we got up and went back to the dom.  We looked at the underground caverns and stuff it has.  Building it began in the 1200’s and didn’t finish until sometime in the 1800’s!  We also saw a fancy box that is said to have the remains of the 3 wise men in it, which was cool.  Then we proceeded to climb over 500 stairs in a tiny spiral staircase (it took a LONG time) to see the worlds largest free hanging bell.  The bell was closed so we didn’t get to see it… but it was still a super cool view of the city!

We then finished off the trip by visiting the chocolate museum!  It was actually really interesting but we didn’t get as much free chocolate as I would have liked… Then we traveled back to Giessen and went to sleep!

Well, during this time I’ve also been going to work.  As always I’ve just been programming away, which is a lot of fun!  While I really don’t like FORTRAN very much, I do like programming a lot!  I’ve pretty much finished the program that I had been working on.  We have a file with the parameters for different nuclear models, and I have the program set up to take whichever models the user specifies and create data tables for density, effective mass, effective chemical potential, energy density, free energy, entropy, chemical potential etc for each particle (there are 8 particles, include particles with strangeness /neq 0) for given ranges of total density and temp.  It works really well and it is fun to look at the 3D graphs in gnuplot.  Using this program we found a few behaviors that were not expected including an area which had a continuum of solutions.  Andreas was able to theoretically explain this, and it was really cool!

Since then I’ve been working on a new program concerning neutron stars.  Neutron stars can be described by the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equation, which is a first order pde expressing d(pressure)/d(radius) in terms of enclosed mass, pressure, and radius.  I am using the 4th order Runge-Kutta method to numerically evaluate the equation.  It is kind of a pain because M is expressed as an integral in terms of radius and energy density which we also needed to solve numerically.  This is even more of a pain because we don’t have an analytical way to obtain energy density from p so we have to use newton’s method to find rho (total density) for the given p and then use that rho to find energy density.  Well, i actually finished this program today, but it basically took me all week and a lot longer than I had hoped.  The program uses a given pressure for r = 0 and evaluates pressure at different r, until reaching p = 0 (the surface of the star) and then returns the total radius of the star and its total mass.  I just finished it before leaving work today, so I haven’t had a chance to check the results at all.

Oh!  There was another program I wrote sometime that I totally forgot about.  In between writing these two I spent a few days  writing a program which takes certain facts about neutron stars to act like my first program but not require rho as an input.  It was really cool and uses Newton’s method in 24 dimensions, which was kind of a pain, but not too bad.  It works well and turned out good I think.

The PhD student which is my mentor said that he wanted to give me my own side project, and I’m glad that he did.  It has been cool acting mostly on my own doing research which is important to his, but somewhat distinct.  That being said, once I finish this neutron star program I will be done with everything which he had set aside for me, so we don’t know what I’ll be doing…

Now lets stop talking about physics again.  I think that I will be going to the Alps tomorrow, but maybe not, I haven’t decided.  I really want to go somewhere but I don’t know where… I suppose you, dear reader, will hear about it in my next post!  I really should post more often, because this one seems very long…

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So I have been thinking about my schedule next semester a lot lately, and I think this might be a good place to get some opinions.  I’m afraid I might be doing too much and I’d like to especially hear from anyone who has taken these classes.  My classes, in order of probable difficulty, are:

MATH 465 — differential geometry with Easley

PHYS 580 — quantum mech with Edis

CS 460 — computer graphics with Neitzke

MATH 564 — adv linear algebra with garth

PHYS 490 — senior research with goggin

PHRE 186 — intro to phil with chad mohler

Let me know what you guys think!  Any input would be greatly appreciated!

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Well, I think I did a good job conveying all of the interesting stuff I’ve been through without being too long-winded… Anyway, everybody keep up the good physics and good luck with everything!

have fun!

-joey