Today, in a serious of fascinating and adrenaline-filled adventures (misadventures?), I’ve finally learned how a toilet works. To spare you the hazards of plumbing, an experimentalist’s overview (very detailed) is here:

http://home.howstuffworks.com/toilet4.htm

Of course there’s a lot of extra information in there, details of experimental apparatus and such - well experimentalists do need that kind of stuff. From a theory standpoint it’s rather superfluous, of course. Here’s how it works: there’s a single parameter, call it \phi, and it’s equation of motion (determined experimentally) appears to be:

\frac{d \phi}{\dt} = \frac{\lambda}{b-a}\left( \theta(\phi-a) - \theta(\phi-b) \right)(b-\phi) + \lambda\theta(a-\phi)

where \theta is the Heaviside step function, b-a is fairly small, and a<b. \phi is a classical parameter, not a quantum field, that experimentalists say describes the “water level” of the toilet reservoir; all we really need to know is that it’s a real-valued scalar, and that the classical approximation is okay here (no need to quantize anything). Of particular concern is the region of phase space \phi << a, wherein \dot{\phi} remains at +\lambda for a substantial interval of time and one is concerned about bathroom flooding. A proper understanding of the E.O.M. shows that such fears are groundless.

(The Hamiltonian from which this motion dervies is fairly trivial, and is left as an exercise.)

bat.JPG

I’m not writing any more posts unless someone starts reading the posts I will never write for lack of audience.

Here’s another photo of an ibis:

The small details tell the whole story.

Uneventful 22 hours of travel, most exciting moment being TSA’s confiscating my miniature toothpaste (4.2 ounces exceeding the bureaucratic limit of 3.4 ounces). Thus inadvertently converting my breath into an instrument of chemical terrorism…

Too busy wasting time in real life to waste time in blog life… no post today.

Okay, so I meant to keep this blog apolitical… well so much for that.

We are working with other governments to secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, and to strengthen global treaties banning the production and shipment of missile technologies and weapons of mass destruction.

(From the 2003 State of the Union address) .

Clearly, American politics lives in its own colorful, illusory dream-world. This was four years ago (one year after the US bailed out of the ABM treaty); Bush was capitalizing on the fantasy that East-West cooperation would secure or eliminate the loose nuclear targets floating around from the fall of the USSR. As much a fantasy then as it is now - four years on, and just look - weapons-grade HEU is flying around the ex-Soviet bloc like so many drunk bees! From a story in today’s NYT:

Georgia Says It Blocked Smuggling of Arms-Grade Uranium

TBILISI, Georgia, Jan. 24 — Georgian authorities intercepted an illicit shipment of highly enriched uranium last January, the second seizure of weapons-grade material here in two and a half years, officials here say.

The interior minister, Ivane Merabishvili, said in a recent interview that agents had arrested a Russian man carrying 100 grams of uranium, a little under four ounces, into Georgia from Russia. The authorities had previously reported that they had arrested a man in 2003 trying to cross the border between Georgia and Armenia with 170 grams of uranium…

The 2006 smuggling case, which has not been previously reported, is expected to be noted in a report from the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency on illicit nuclear activities, agency officials said. That report is expected to be released this week…

He said that agents had learned about the raw uranium from sources in the criminal underworld and that the investigation was continuing.

The Georgian officials said they believed that corrupt law enforcement officials in Abkhazia had helped ensure the safe passage of the shipment…

(New York Times)

HEU on the black market, as predicted decades ago! Admittedly, the quantities here are about two orders of magnitude short of a viable weapon, but it’s proof of principle. Ex-Soviet nuclear materials simply ARE on the market, and they ARE for sale, and you CAN buy them, no matter how much empty rhetoric the politicians will spew in your direction saying otherwise.

So how is this coming about? I’m not a proliferation expert, but the basics are pretty obvious. The nukes become loose in the early 90’s the USSR fell apart; corrupt, understaffed, underpaid security not only fails to protect HEU in countries like Georgia, it’s open for bribes as well (see the NYT article). Of course this was never in the military interests of the US, which has been on-and-off paying the Soviet bloc countries to dispose of warheads currently in storage. A nice article by Charlie Savage at the Boston Globe laments the lack of US commitment to these efforts, from back in 2004:

…While the United States has spent more than $7 billion to remove all nuclear warheads from three former Soviet republics — Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus — and has destroyed hundreds of missiles, the task remains less than half done. Defense Department figures show that fewer than half of the 13,300 warheads slated for deactivation had been destroyed by the end of 2003, with prospects for finishing the task stretching out more than a decade…

(Boston Globe)

Of course American politicians have been cripplingly weak on this issue, from Clinton to GWB. That’s the moral hazard of democracy; we rely greatly on trusting politicians to take initiatives and go through with them. But as long as we’re mostly apathetic and content, not actively forcing the politicians’ actions with threats of voting, they’ll inevitably cut corners on us. Clearly there just doesn’t seem to be much political pressure here, cause nothing much is happening, regardless of what GWB may or may not have said in a speech in 2003.

And there you are.

My computer will be disconnected and locked in a closet all day Sunday… I will not be blogging, nor facebooking, nor browsing, nor email-checking, nor critically analyzing comic strips, etc., etc. I resolve to complete no less than three problem sets tomorrow, including the Jackson.

See you on Monday!

Which I will proceed to rigorously prove by means of a counter-anecdote. I was having dinner with a friend at a fancy restaurant…

Hehe, rigorous anecdotes…
(from Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance)

I’ll tell you: it tastes like soap! F*@#&! broken dishwasher.

No, this isn’t a post about NMR. I’m talking about the nice happy feeling as all my classes come into perspective, settle down, and my study-habits relax into their proper minimum-energy ground state (by spin-lattice interaction… no wait, that’s the NMR…)

Of my six initial classes, I dropped the easy and boring one - Matrix Analysis (as one might expect). A ton of it was review for me, and the approach was rather lazy and applied; there are however some lectures I plan on sitting in on later in the year, especially those having to do with eigenvalue-crossings.

I can’t say much about Statistical Mechanics, I don’t think it’s really started yet. So far it’s been mostly undergraduate thermodynamics review, which is of course a poor indicator of what the course will eventually be like. First problem set was almost a joke, there were some problems which I remembered doing in Dr. P’s sophomore thermodynamics course. Wtf? Anyway, Thursday’s lecture seemed to mark the beginning of serious stuff, exploring the (q,p) phase space and it’s evolution under Hamiltonian dynamics, leading to the usual derivation of Liouville’s theorem I think (not sure, I left 30min early with a bad headache). Basically straight out of Pathria ch. 2, I guess.

Algebra 2 is going well, ridiculously easy problems though (this coming from someone who hasn’t taken undergrad Algebra nor graduate Algebra 1!). Does anyone know if Dummit&Foote is an undergrad or grad textbook, it seems like the former. Anyway I’m avoiding it in favor of the primary reference, Atiyah & MacDonald’s “Commutative Algebra”. Dense, concise, and closer to the lectures than Dummit&Foote. The presentation of topics is a bit weird, like his using the Hilbert Nullstellensatz several weeks before he plans to prove or even discuss it, but whatever.

E&M is naturally the hardest course of the bunch, supposed to weed out the weaker physics students early on in their grad programs. I hope I’m not looking green and leafy… anyway I’m at the moment diligently working on Jackson problem set #2, due Monday. I’ve just figured out how to solve 7.16, it’s a fairly trivial exercise in linear algebra, just takes a bit of careful writing.

QM2, well, what can I say? It’s QM2. I think we’ve spent a bit too much time on parity symmetry by now…

Analysis 4, geometry of Banach spaces and such, is a fun seminar-level graduate courses. No tests, no turn-in homework, all fun and games and lp-spaces. Awesome professor with genuine style at the blackboard, really knows how to teach and do it elegantly as well. Great sense of humor as well: “the coro-llary, or if he’s a close friend and you know him well, just plain ‘lary.” lol! There’s more where that came from. Keep it up, Dr. L!

Well, it’s back to anisotropic dielectrics for me. I’ll finish off with a nice picture of snow: