Friday 27 February 2015

Missed deadline

I've said before that I would try to post every 2 weeks, and if you check the dates you'll see that I missed last week's post, but luckily I have a good reason: I was in Canada! One of my best friends was getting married and I went back for about a week for the wedding and to catch up with friends (it had been about 2.5 years since I was last home). When I got back to Uppsala I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of snow and relative warmth compared to a week ago.

The clock is ticking!
There is no break right now (in fact there aren't really any official breaks at all during the year, but that's another story), so I had to miss some class. Actually quite a lot of class, since I have Quantum Field Theory every day, and Mathematical Methods doesn't have very many lectures so missing even one (or in my case two) is a big deal. I also have an assignment due today for QFT about the material I missed, so the stress is on.

Wednesday 4 February 2015

To infinity and beyond!

Homelessness averted! Since my last post I have successfully managed to secure myself a new place to live. I'll be moving to an area of Uppsala called Eriksberg, which is quite a bit closer to Ångstöm than my current location in Gränby: my commute will go from about 5.5km down to about 3km! Woohoo! I don't honestly know whether I got my place from Blocket or Studentboet (see the helpful links), but it is definitely second hand, which as I mentioned before is the easiest type of housing to get.

There's been a lot more snow this week. It's not overly deep but because it has been coming down more or less constantly it's very hard for them to keep the paths clear, making biking a nightmare. I fell once, but I was going slow and landed on my feet so no big deal. I have been taking the bus to and from Ångström though because it hasn't been worth the trouble to bike the past few days.

So, I don't normally just share cool stuff on the blog but I thought this was worth it. I saw this video today on reddit and I wanted to post it. It's a video (as in, a compilation of actual photographs, not CGI) taken by the Cassini spacecraft approaching Saturn, with bonus fly-bys of a few moons. I'm seriously blown away at how detailed these images are, and just in general by the fact that we as a species are capable of pulling things like this off.