Opening post

To anyone who stumbles onto my small corner of cyberspace, let me introduce the blog that will soon become a collection of my thoughts, ideas, and attempts at improving my writing. I have no intended audience, which is to say that the intended audience is just myself. For the longest time, I feel as if there's some kind of hole in my mind.

It's quite the uncomfortable feeling, especially when that hole periodically fills itself with infinitely looping music (they call it an earworm). So I thought, "Why do these songs keep playing in my head? Doesn't my brain have something better to do? Has it lost its creativity so much that it compensates by constantly listening to the creativity of others?"

I don't know. I'm just going to assume that the reason is because I don't read or write. After all, it's reading that ultimately keeps the brain sharp, with the brain imagining things and thinking about stuff and all that. Imagination. I'm not just talking imagining silly things that don't matter, like world domination plans or what one should do with super powers, but imagining ideas and thoughts from other people, whether they be in the form of books, novels, or research papers. That is what's missing. Imagination. Reading.

Of course, reading is just the half of it. Writing (well) is just as important. A physics professor once said to me, "Can't write. Can't think." I've always known the importance of being able to write well. But I never took any effort to develop my own writing skill. As a result, my ability to organize my thoughts and spit them out onto a piece of paper has somewhat diminished.

So that explains the purpose of this new blog. It's a place for me to dump my thoughts, to practice my writing, and hopefully to help me redevelop some of creativity that I used to have. Of course, it's not just to regain what I lost, but to build something new. My old creativity has no place in the rational world. To grow mentally, I gotta adapt and bring something fresh to the table.

What should one expect from this blog? I say to one, "Don't expect much." This isn't for entertainment or laughs; it's for mental exercise. I'll be posting about my daily happenings here, things I plan to do, work-related obstacles I encounter, or basically, the things that keep me busy.

And so I start:


Entry 1: Grad school personal statements, surface plasmon resonance, complex electromagnetic field, and Starcraft II strategy

I haven't felt this busy since college, when I actually had to work for a class. Deadlines are approaching. The closest one belongs to tomorrow, when it becomes my turn to present a research paper to the journal club. But I'll first discuss the graduate school applications, since I don't have much to say about those.

I gotta write up a personal statement this weekend and email it out to Troy Carter so he can have some base to write a letter of rec. The earliest grad app deadline is December 14, which is 12 days away. Historically, I've notoriously failed to see the urgency of a 12 day deadline. This time, I must avoid that. There are things that have to be done that cannot take 12 days: sending out transcripts. It sounds almost trivial, but it will bite me in the ass if I don't take care of it soon. Next Monday, probably.

Back to the presentation. Actually, it's two presentations: one about my current research project, and another about Starcraft II strategy.

I am largely unprepared for either (is it 'either' or 'neither'? someone correct me). For my research presentation, I have a decent idea of what is going on, but I don't think I understand plasmons enough both mathematically or conceptually to give a good presentation. I understand the part about my own research, which is just optimizing the dimensions of the nanostructure on a copper cathode to yield maximum field enhancement. Let it be known that the dimensions are indeed optimized (~50 nm width, ~ 85 nm height, ~600 nm separation distance). I found them using equations from a research paper. Maybe I should read the research paper again just for the theory. They talk about some resonance condition that I know nothing about.

Just for reference, here's how I want to outline the presentation.

Gonna be talking about creating a nanometer-scale structure on a cathode to yield three orders of magnitude worth of field enhancement.

Go over: why is there field enhancement? Surface plasmon polaritons? What's a plasmon? How does it couple to an EM wave? Why does this coupling produce reduce reflectivity and increase field absorption? Why does this absorption yield huge ass enhancement?

I gotta find the answer to the questions soon.

I'm much more excited for the Starcraft II presentation. What will I go over? Here's a list:

-Using F1 to split workers and also to dodge Hellions.
-Fighting off a zergling rush with workers, which I will do right now actually. brb
-Back. So it appears that you need 2 or 3 workers per mineral patch (2 for near, 3 for far).
-You get about 1550-1600 minerals per minute, and 480 gas per minute on two bases.
-Gonna hopefully do more testing tomorrow.

Anyway, I need to sleep. Hopefully I can read more about plasmons tomorrow.