Saturday, April 20, 2013

it finally happened!

So spring has finally, after so many seemingly endless days, reared its ugly head. This I know by two sure fire signs. First of all, my dad has begun sneezing. That means a southerly wind, from places over yonder where the trees have already begun to reproduce and make many baby trees via awkward long distance tree sex, as they are wont to do. And the second sign is first better illustrated and then elaborated upon.
These strange men are painting the curb. Alternating - black stone, white stone. And this is not the only thing they paint. All the fences are painted green and yellow, or blue and red, and all the trees are painted white (you can actually see one in the background.) and as if it wasn't eough, all the benches are painted, and (Oh, dear God, why?) the trashcans. Let it sink in. They are paid to paint trashcans... 
Why they do this seemingly pointless thing? My best guess is that there are so many of them, and they are paid to do something, so they use their immaginative powers to the fullest to come up with just one more poinltess task for to do so they can pretend that they are highly useful and none of them are dispenseable. I cannot, for the life of me, think of any other reason for this yearly invasion of the painting squads.

Well, that aside, on Tuesday I'll be going to the Ukraine. officially for some sort of seminar/school thing. But I'm really going just to see Kiev and have a bit of a vacation with the boyfriend, which I think will be a most welcome diversion beore the carnage begins at semester's end. I'm hoping to take some good photos, if not many, and I might even get around to posting them to fb. We shall see. But before I get to go play, I have so much work to do. I have an exam on Monday (read tomorrow, as it's almost 23:54 on Saturday). If that weren't enough, Tuesday morning, just before I leave I have to do a mini presentation on my bachelors thesis, which is totally, completely, and unfortunately lacking in actual original content. And the cherry on top of this miraculous banana split, is that the bf's birthday is on Monday, and since I'll be home then, passing exams, and feverishly trying to finish up my presentation, I shan't be able to see him. (On the other hand, he didn't come to me for my birthday, why should I make it so hard on myself? Of course, he was also in another town trying to get the army of his back. But same difference.)

So since I have some more time before the bf comes back from his weekly DnD session (yeah, he plays dungeons and dragons. Story of my life... no matter wher, you always end up with the same kind of people) I'll continue my ramblings. For lack of a better thing to talk about, I'll just tell you about my thesis. Here I give a heads up to any and all of you who hav no wish to know anything about Theoretical Physics as it's not really needed for anything except to predict whether thing A worts this way or that way, or some other unknown way.
So anyways. Like I said, theoretical physics. The group (2 people) I'm working with, are currently trying to advance the theory of charge transfer in condensed media. Sounds, fascinating, I know. Right now this is being done within the scope of some trans-russian OLED project. The main idea is that using the Fermi golden rule an equasion giving the reaction rate constant can be derived as a function of the density of states by energy. Similar theories have already been developed, however, the spin-boson theory, looks at a model consisting only of the initial and final states, and it does not take into account the local modes (the other energy levels). The generalized spin-boson does take into accound the local mondes, and better yet has the Marcus Theory as the high temperature limit, but the medium there is the same for all possible transitions, which is obviously not quite how it is in life. Therefore this new approach is being developed. It has the electron interacting with the local mode, and the local modes affected by the medium, and all should turn out just wonderfully. And it does. With the one exception, that we are trying to see what is happening at the low temperature limit. It is an experimental fact that reactions still occur at near 0K temperatures, though all models state that the limit of the rate constant as a function of temperature, as the teperature aproaches zero is zero. And we're hoping to kind of squeeze a sort of plateau out of our formulas. Except, that hasn't properly happened yet. So I'm a bit screwed for that presentation...

1 comment:

  1. You lost me at the physics discussion... o_0

    But anyway! At least the painting squads are there in the first place to make things look pretty.

    ReplyDelete