All eyes on me will be met

PhD application has been lodged. Now I shall seek motivation under rocks etc.

The prospective supervisor is due back on Saturday so I'll try to get hold of him on Monday and try to organise starting something.

Holy crap Tuesday was a haze of drunkenness. Only have about 5 images in my head to figure out the rest of the night with. One of which is Hoogendork on the bonnet of the car going through the maccas drive-through. Two more are of him and Rach barfing.

Gotta be somebody

I finally got a reply from my prospective supervisor for my PhD. By the looks of the email I think he may have already though he spoke to me about a PhD because he gave me a list of possible project ideas. So I have to have a look at them and write a short research proposal asap.

1. spherical EYM with non-vanishing electric fields (SSEYMe)

2. spherical massless scalar field (SSEMSF) - are the critical solutions
singular?

3. Quasi-local mass with matter (Maxwell, YM coupling etc)

4. geometry and applications of spherical coordinate choices for space-time


He also commented that topics 1 and 2 would have a substantial computing aspect, 3 would be rather geometrical and 4 would be more of a review and he said it "would be marginal but could suffice". I think that rules out 4. These are just ideas though so I'm free to start with anything in between and outside (to a degree) and then let it change into something completely different over the first year.

3 leaps out at me as extremely interesting so I'm going to hopefully do some reading on that today and tomorrow and hopefully write my research proposal on that.

For those interested; Local mass/energy in general rel is something that still isn't well defined because if you take some area of space and ask the question 'how much energy is there in this area?' there is no clear cut way of answering it. A major problem is that there is gravitational contributions via the curvyness of space-time which is a global property. There have been several (less than 10 though) definitions of a local mass in G.R. which usually are either impossible to practically calculate or have flaws such as admitted negative mass or adding two things together and getting less than both individual masses or they only work for particular regions such as spheres. The reason I would think looking at mass would be good because my supervisor defined one (impossible to calculate though) in 89 which often pops up when you looks for anything to do with mass in G.R. Other people who have defined such masses include Hawking and Penrose who I'd hope most people have heard of.

(This paragraph also for the interested.) The incorporation of matter into the mass I think (based on the content in parenthesis) is that he wants to look at coupling Yang-Mills gauge theories to G.R. and try to make a mass definition still work. This bit is quite unclear to me right now though. Yang-Mills gauge theories are rather strange geometric interpretations of fields (or matter).


Back down to earth now...

Read this. Quite entertaining, especially reading the quotes.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=651937

I'm 22, for a moment

I've had enough.

Spent far too much time waiting around to start this PhD. I don't even know if that's what I want to do anymore. I want a life.

All I have been doing recently is sitting around watching tv and playing guitar.

Now I am off to write a research proposal, hopefully.

Impossible to find

Just a short post to inform the masses that lucky me got to spend the night waiting in emergency at Frankston hospital. Copped an elbow in the head at basketball and I now have 4 stitches in my forehead (thank god close to my hairline). Spent 6 and a half hours all up in hospital, 4 of which I was still bleeding in the waiting room.

Updatination

Well, bball started so that's one of my goals done. W00t.

I'm considering buying a windsurfer as my extra hobby but then i'd need ugly roof racks :S so we'll see.

On that note here is a recap of my goals I set a few months back.

"
Start my PhD or a career.
Get a basketball team organised for next season.
Learn guitar better.
Start some other non-academic regular activity.
Organise getting out of home.
More to come...


With the exception of getting out of home, the above are all short term goals. Basketball obviously has it's own deadline for next season which is a little over a month I think. As for the other's I'd like to get them (the goals with a definitive completion) together by say 18/10/08 as a somewhat arbitrary but sufficient deadline.
"

I guess as usual I've been slack. I have started the basketball at least and I have an idea of another regular activity. Guitar isn't really getting anywhere fast, though I guess I've kept it up and haven't given up on it. The PhD I've not been able to talk to anybody, but I got word this morning that it should hopefully be sorted soon and I've just got myself some references for the application so I'll finish that today. I guess in reality I haven't done too bad. Getting out of home will still be a while from now though.

Another call; anybody feel like moving in with me early next year? Ideally I'd like to be with Amanda longer and fingers crossed all goes well and end up moving in with her, but she needs to get a place soon so if all goes well with her it'd be a long time for that to happen. I'm not saying I'd move in as a major commitment either, I mean in reality renting a place with somebody is pretty easy to get out of if things went shit. But as I said that's not gonna happen anyway cos she needs to find a place soon and it still might be a few months too soon for it :P So any takers?

Also another option for a non-academic activity is indoor soccer. Would anybody be interested? (I'm determined to get fit and sports are the best way to go)

Punderful

I just heard there is a musical comedy about the Beaconsfield mine collapse. All songs are in A flat minor.