Current Interests
The following is a description of some of the stuff that has been occupying my time lately.


Second Year Seminar

 		One of the required courses here at Jhop is the "Second Year Seminar". The class is a proving ground for my fellow graduate students and I to present a topic of interest to one another.

Instead of boring my classmates with a talk about the Standard Model or "My Bitchin' Summer at Fermilab", I prepared a talk on a topic that interests me.

I had several questions about the technology that went into the recording and reproduction of music. I 8researched the technology and physics that are involved in storing music data on vinyl records, compact disks, and mini disks. Although some may call it pseudo-science, I was surprised at how much technology and real physics is involved in getting our music to disk. The presentation slides are below.

I should note (for the linux geeks out there) that this presentation was created using LaTex and a package called prosper. It is a great package and makes a handsome presentation without having to bow down to The Man. I've also included the LaTeX source file for the presentation for those interested in looking at how Prosper works.
Subject Format
Audio Data Storage PDF
Audio Data Storage: LaTeX Source File TEX

Other links to images of CDs and the like are listed below:


Teaching Assignments
Subject Description
Physics for Scientists and Engineers Homepage
Classic Electrodynamics Homepage

Extragalactic Astronomy

 		A group of my classmates and I worked on a project studying the clustering characteristics of quasars using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. My group consisted of Mariko Ninomiya and Urmila Padmanabhan. A postscript version of the study is available here.
Subject Format
QSO Clustering in Preliminary SDSS Data HTML

University of Utah:
Cosmic Ray

 		(from spring 2000)

I am working in the Cosmic Ray research group. I have been mostly involved with atmospheric monitoring in conjunction with the HiRes experiment. I am working with my professor, Lawrence Wiencke and another undergraduate student, Richard Gray.

During the summer of 1999 we attended a couple of conferences. The following are papers that were written for each of those conferences.

  1. SPIE Paper (postscript)
  2. ICRC Hardware Paper (postscript)
  3. ICRC Analysis Paper (postscript)
The papers detail the construction, operation, and analysis relating to a remotely operated steerable laser system that we built and installed at Dugway Proving Grounds, in the West Utah desert. The laser was installed in 1998 and has been running rather reliably ever since.

Another project that I am currently involved with is the simulation of laser tracks using a MonteCarlo simulation. I wrote some code to drive a MonteCarlo simulation program that is currently being used in the HiRes group to simulate Extensive Air Showers. MonteCarlo simulations use random number generators to simulate the scattering of photons through the atmosphere. The HiRes detector and its electronics are carefully modeled in the simulation as well as the characteristics of the propogation of light through the atmosphere. The simulations that have been run to date have been helpful but do not agree as well as we would like to our actual data. In the next couple of months, I intend to focus on a project that is aimed at understanding the current atmospheric models and attempting to create a more accurate description for our simulations.

Filter Wheel Code

I Did some work on a driver for a computer controlled filter wheel. The source and documentation may be obtained here.
fw1_new_v2.tar.Z

Documentation Project
I have written a couple of short TeX documents describing some of the work that I have been involved in with the HiRes group. Each document is available in both Postscript and HTML formats. Documents were converted to HTML from LaTeX using latex2html.
Subject Format
Filter Wheel Driver v2.0 Postscript HTML
How To Process BigH Data Postscript HTML
Matching HR2SLS to BigH Data Postscript HTML
MC97_SLS: Laser Monte Carlo HOWTO Postscript HTML
Atmospheric Horizontal Uniformity at HiRes HTML

Course Work

Dreams in Film

During the fall semester of 1999, I was enrolled in a film class taught by Professor Chris Lippard that dealt with dreams and their portrayal in the cinema. It was been an extremely interesting class and far more complicated than the title of the class might suggest. Early in the class, we read Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. We also had the chance to read the ideas from many great phsychologists and dream specialists regarding dreams: people like Hobson, Baddely, and Eberwien. However, the most rewarding part of the class was the chance to watch many great films.
  • Sherlock Junior (Keaton, 1924)
  • The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1938)
  • After Life (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1999)
  • 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1962)
  • Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1946)
  • Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)
  • Freud (Huston, 1962)
  • Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950)
  • Hiroshima, Mon Amor (Resnais, 1959)
  • Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)
  • An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge (Enrico, 1961)
  • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Bunuel, 1972)
  • Being John Malkovitch (Jonze, 1999)
  • Dead of Night (Cavalcanti, 1945)
  • The Company of Wolves (Jordan, 1982)
  • Dreamchild (Millar, 1985)

I loved watching most of these films. I was really striken by the images and ideas that were presented in these films. I remember watching 8 1/2 for the first time. I thought that it was so long and hard to understand. But, as I watched it again, in order to get more information to write a paper on the film, I was amazed at how much Human emotion that the film consisely describes. Each of the films that we watched were great.

Available below are the two papers that I wrote for the class. The first analyzes The Wizard of Oz and 8 1/2 and how the directory depicts the differences between the dream states and the reality states in the film. The second paper deals with the portrayal of uncertainty in both Pi and Last Year at Marienbad.

Paper Format
On the Division Between Reality and Dreams in Cinema HTML
Modern Uncertainty in the Cinema HTML