Becca Stareyes

I am currently reading, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann. For those who don't know, Richard Feynmann was a famous physicist, and Surely You're Joking is a book of his writings. As it happened, the last essay I read last night was called "Monster Minds" and was about Dick Feynmann as a grad student at Princeston. He had come up with an interesting idea, and so his adviser had asked him to give the weekly seminar. And then started mentioning, "Well, I mentioned this to Dr. X and Dr. Y, and oh, yeah, Dr. Pauli is coming in from Europe, and Dr. Einstein doesn't normally come, but I asked him to this time", and Dr. Feynmann mentions being well and truly freaked out.

It makes me feel better. It's just my A exam. At least I don't have to talk about physics in front of Einstein.

(The essay had a nice conclusion -- Dr. Feynmann mentions once he started talking, he just focused on the physics and forgot about all the smart people in the audience.)

My A exam is at 10 AM. Expect a post around early afternoon my time telling people how I did.

So, I passed my exam. My committee did ask me to do an outline for my thesis, with some dates, and we discussed whether or not an earlier project I did should be included, but I passed.

Today also marked the beginning of the Cassini Extended Mission. I celebrated by heading down to a toast with all of the Saturn people (except the summer student, one researcher and Steve Squyres, whose life has been consumed by the Mars Rovers, and, thus, has done very little with the moons of Saturn). I then fell asleep and decided that heading home for the day would probably be good.