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Yeah, I failed at microblogging. That’s kind of sad. But anyway, I’m finishing up my finals week (I have to complete this essay and take one more final), and then heading back to Philly for a short break. Hopefully, I can finish the essay by the end of today…
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This week has been pretty exhausting already. For this term, it looks like Wednesday nights are my only “free time”. So far, I’ve been working almost non-stop from Monday to 6PM today on various assignments and this really tough Ch 21c set that took about two whole days to complete. Well, at least I can rest just a little bit until tomorrow.
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Well, it looks like I’ll have to give a poster presentation at the upcoming MSC conference held by the Goddard research group every year. I have roughly less than a day to put the abstract and poster together and get it printed. So I better get to work…
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Completed all of my finals today. Now I’m on break! I think I’m going to try to pick up Ruby on Rails.
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After much research at Caltech, I’ve recently made two important discoveries:
- In order to keep shirts from coming out of the dryer from being wrinkly (and thus causing people to think that you sleep in your clothes all the time), I realized that one must: (1) Use less detergent. (2) Use less fabric softener. (3) Put a smaller load into the dryer (so that the clothes come out fully dry). (4) When you load the dryer, try to pack it by clothes density type. This means putting the jeans, rougher stuff, and wrinkle-okay items (like socks, boxers, etc.) towards the back while putting the shirts closer to the dryer door. The result is less folding and distortion of the shirts. (5) When you unload the dryer, put the jeans, rougher stuff, and wrinkle-okay items in the hamper first. Then put the shirts on top (sometimes, it’s good to even to a semi-quick folding of the shirt). This minimizes compression on the shirts.
Now I am finally able to get wrinkle free shirts.
- Dust wipes commonly sold under names like Swiffers or pledge wipes are just made to be disposable microfiber cloths. Well, the companies seem to want you to throw out the cloths after using them so that you can continue buying from them. However, there’s no reason to suggest that they cannot be reused. And thus, I’m here to report that they can be reused!
The trick, I think, is to use hot water and soap/detergent to wash the cloths. The heat is necessary for the microfibers to expand (hereby releasing the dust and other stuff trapped in there).
I tested this idea on a very small piece of dust cloth (like 2 in. by 3 in. area), and I reused it 4 times before I decided to just throw it away (mainly because the fibers in the cloth were becoming scratched up). The dust trapping ability doesn’t seem to decrease much at all in between washes. I daresay that one can reuse such cloths for >10 times if one is careful with it.
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There’s this guy who’s part of the Goddard Research group at Caltech, and after listening to his lectures and observing his personality, I really think that he’s a genius-level scientist.
Not only is he tackling some of the toughest problems (ie. theory of high temperature superconductors) in physics and chemistry with good progress, but he can also explain them in a very clear matter. When he lectures, he’s calm and his voice is instructive. You get this feeling that he really knows what he’s talking about. You can ask him any question, and he can answer it.
He’s like the perfect role model for a scientist: Without ego and with the ability to solve just about any problem given time and interest. I’m so impressed by him that I felt a need to say it on my blog.
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Sigh, I spent a lot of time yesterday and today writing a file monitoring script in python that was tailored towards my computational (chemistry) simulations on large clusters. Then after I finished the glorious script, I realized that I didn’t really need the monitoring feature if I had a way to copy files from the node in one command. Well, I wrote one line of bash code that allowed me to do the file copying. So I just spend a lot of time coding this elaborate script for nothing.
On the bright side, I did learn a lot more about python.
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I’m really grateful for have such awesome research mentors here at Caltech. One is a director of force field development and the other is a post-doc. Both will soon be professors so right off the bat, I have access to some pretty important people! Even though I don’t interact with the Professor of the group that much, he is also a mentor, and he is very accessible and friendly. They all manage to somehow put up with my stupidity and slow progress.
So far, I’ve compiled a bunch of results on EtOH reactions with TiO2, and my mentors think that I can work on writing up the results for the goal of publication. They commented that it would be helpful when applying to grad school to have some publications under the belt so they are really looking out for me!
If I ever mentor other people, I will definitely repay my mentors by following their examples.
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I was up until 5:20AM yesterday-today completing a Ch 121: Atomic simulations of molecules and materials assignment. In addition, I was running a lot of simulations for my research. Unfortunately, I was running about 25 simulations at once which generated like 10 MB of data every 5 minutes. This quickly filled up my free space of about 3 GB and all of my simulations crashed! Ugh, I’ll have to figure out some ways to clear the space…