Robot Claw – Page 834 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Professor Robert?

August 9, 2007

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?)

Construction Has Begun!

August 3, 2007

I have begun bulding the Lego Death Star II model I received for my birthday. Since it is expected to take several weeks, rather than chronolog the entire process, I will instead save the pictures until it is complete. However I’ll take the chance now to describe the early stages…

Here’s what the packaging looks like. Inside the large box was the spiral-bound manual and 4 smaller white boxes, each of which contained a dozen or more plastic bags of pieces (about 3500 pieces in total):

Notable is the fact that unlike the previous ‘ultimate collectors edition’ kit I assemlbed (the Star Destroyer) the bags are not numbered, and the pieces are not bagged in assembly order. So by the end of the third page in the instructions I had already opened a dozen or so bags.

Much of the time taken so far is simply finding pieces in the seemingly endless sea of gray 🙂

< Every piece, bagged Luckily, I have an assistant: < Imperial Construction Supervisor, Yossie The first part built was the stand, and now I am well into the construction of the outer ring. This final shot shows progress at just over 4 hours total build time. As I said, further details (including many photos) will wait until this beast is finished... < After about 4 hours

Beyonder

July 27, 2007

We occasionally get deer in our backyard, but usually they seem to be simply ‘passing through’. So we were quite surprised the other day when we found they are apparently comfortable enough in the yard to use it as their living room…

< Deer me