Canto XLIII

Well, school-wise, there's not much to say. Actually, there was one really interesting set of lectures (the ones by David Kutasov) on constructing Supersymmetric Quantum Chromodynamics (SQCD for short - physicists love acronyms) from an intersecting brane scenario in string theory. But I've promised this to be a more personal blog to keep those not so near me up-to-date on the comings and goings of my life and not a geek-driven physics blog. Also I don't think I could keep that up. Anything really cool will probably pop into the New York Times Science section eventually.

For the weekend I met up with Steph again. She had been up visiting her Aunts in Fort Collins, but came down to pick me up. I guess they went to the Celestial Seasonings tea factory and took the tour, and had a great time. The mint room was something else! She picked me up, and we visited a Meadery here in Boulder before heading back up to Fort Collins to stay with her Aunt. (I have discovered that whenever I type Fort Collins, I first type 'Collings' then have to go back and fix it. -ing is just too common of a suffix.) We watched Happy Feet, the animated penguin film, that night. Very cute, but I think I liked March of the Penguins better. Penguins are just sooo cute, animation doesn't really make them much cuter. Almost makes me want to do B-physics... But not really.

The next day we went for a run in the morning and saw a coyote up close and personal. He saw us and ran the other direction, occasionally looking behind him to make sure we weren't following him. But I guarantee that if I had had to fight him off, it would have been a 500-lb Siberian Wolf that escaped from the local talk show. (She gets upset at loud noises. Loud? That's the secret word for the day!) Ahh, season 4, greatest of them all. Anyway, after that adventure, we hit up the local microbrews. Fort Collins is well known for two major breweries, New Belgium and Budweiser. But we took the breweries less traveled and hit up: Fort Collins brewery (damn it! did it again!), Odell Brewery and Coopersmith's Pub & Brewery. All of them were quite good, some of the lagers in particular were nice and tasty. We then had dinner with Steph's Aunts & their dogs. Very cute and funny dogs, but constantly working for something from the table. She flew out this morning and is back in Boston, while I have to ride out the next 2 weeks worth of lectures all by my lonesome. There look to be some good talks, though, so hopefully it goes quickly. Of course, I'll keep everyone apprised of the situation.

I think I would enjoy getting into tennis, if the sport weren't dominated by cyborgs. I was really rooting for Federer today, if only to give him the calendar Grand Slam chance. They always show the career record of Rafa vs. Federer, but it's really skewed since they've met 12 times, 7 of them have been on clay, Nadal's strength. I thought Hard Court was suppose to be the dominant (most common) surface in tennis? They're even (2-2) on hard court, and the only time they've met on Federer's dominant surface (grass) he's 1-0. It's kind of ridiculous how dominant Federer has been, though, and at least it shows that the overall tennis cyborg can be beaten by the clay-court cyborg.