Robot Claw

I think I used that title before?

Here’s some shots of our flowers this year:

The first two show the black-eyed susans out the front of the house. The leftmost shot shows plants put in last year; the rightmost shows two two-year old plants and one one-year old. We’re very happy with how these have grown.

The lower three shots show, in order, the morning glories (grown from seeds!), our ‘grass garden’ and the planter out back. I waited too long to take most of these shots, and therefore much of the display is past it’s prime. But everything did very well this year and flowers were abundant. (Obviously the morning glories are yet to reach their true potential…look closely and you can see one flower!)

These last two shots show me wearing a stupid hat, and a tiny laptop connected to a gigantic monitor (a 42″ plasma TV actually, and on a kitchen floor to boot!).

Most of this post was for Joyce’s benefit 🙂

I mentioned this to a few of you recently, but today it was confirmed that I will be teaching this semester.

Since my fellowship expired at the end of last semester, I am now a TA (Teaching Assistant). The responsibilities of a TA typically include grading homework or running a lab, but for the upcoming semester I was asked if I was interested in actually teaching a course. I said yes.

I’ll be teaching (as in giving lectures, setting homework, writing exams etc) a modern physics course, which means an introduction to a slew of concepts including particle physics, quantum mechanics, x-ray optics, relativity and a few others. I have to diligently brush up on my knowledge in the next few weeks since some of this material I haven’t looked at in years.

There are at least 13 students (second years) in my class, which will be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

It’s a little bit scary, and a whole lot exciting. More to follow…

(As an aside, does anyone read this blog any more? Comments are rarely left these days…I wonder if that because people read using their RSS readers?)