Hi kids, here is what my life has been like for a while:

I took a vicious little 26-problems-in-4-hours exam to prove that I haven’t just been dicking around in college. I put in work and either just barely passed or fucking destroyed it, depending on which perspective you want to go with. I still wake up with the smoke of some insoluble eigenvalue problem in my eyes and will be pretty happy when that stops happening. But the bottom line is that I don’t have to take it again and I get to be a senior/write a thesis next year, and then I get to graduate.

And that’s about it. College is relatively boring to hear about, and that’s basically what I’ve been doing. Lots of college and not a whole lot else. My friend has an MV Augusta. I play soccer on Mondays and Fridays. It was fucking frigid here for a while. I went to a reading of Howl. I miss my dogs. I have a thumb drive where I put PowerPoint presentations and papers about Electromagnetically Induced Transparency. On clear nights I go to the telescope. We’re trying to take spectra of stars but it’s way more fun to look Saturn and the Moon. The Moon is ridiculous. I’m working on a lab about chaos in optoelectronic circuits. I’m in a non-physics class about the history of the scientific revolution. I heard a rumor from a former student that another former student told them that all I do now is get drunk and scream in the pool hall, so last night I got drunk and screamed at people in the pool hall. I played When The Levee Breaks and Mack The Knife on the juke box. Someone else played DMX and when everyone started screaming “Stop; Drop; Shut-em down open up shop” I screamed that none of them were Rough Riders; and just to prove me right, they all shut up. I drink an average amount of coffee and I get an average amount of sleep. I get out of bed just before I have to be at school. I’m really feeling baked macaroni and cheese these days. My brother is a vegan. I miss my dogs. I don’t shave as often as I’d like to. I work in a coffee shop. I make lattes. I make tea. I play just the right music so that people are intrigued and they say “who’s this?–playing now?” because that’s pretty much your job when you work in a coffee shop. But I gave up most of my shifts for the last few weeks because I was studying for that qualifying examination that I wasn’t so sure that I’d destroy as destructively as I destroyed it. But college is relatively boring so I’m sorry about that. I am going to post a photo of the Tarantula Nebula and one of Duncan and then I’m going to use Ehrenfest’s theorem to show that in fact, for free particles, it is the case that the expectation value for momentum is a constant for all time if you start from an initial wavefunction where that is the case.