I'm not sure how the last sounds so fresh, after so many years.

Smoke is such a great movie - it's one of those that I stumbled upon on Netflix and both me and my boyfriend absolutely loved it. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something to watch.

I was traveling for work for a couple of weeks, so I've only just seen your reply now. I agree completely with your comments -- graduate training can increase how good you are at other jobs and be character building. I don't think it's a particularly good sole/major reason to go to grad school -- one would probably be better served by working in a particular industry instead, where one can character build and obtain relevant skills.

I sometimes have to program as part of my work. As with any coding, if you're not careful (or, even if you are) you end up with bugs in your code. As I'm often doing coding to get numerical answers, an oft-encountered bug is the NaN (Not a Number) error - something that should be a number is not, usually because you've accidentally divided by zero. I like bad puns -- like the kind of things you'd come up with for a themed bar trivia team name -- and at some point I figure NaN error could just as well stand for "Not another Neil" error (as Neil is my name, and I'm the one making the damn error).

I agree that in general, expanding career opportunities is a big part of education at all levels. However, I don't think that this is a particularly good sole reason for pursuing a Ph.D. -- my general impression from colleagues is that having a Ph.D. can be a hinderance on the (outside of academia) job market. I'd think in general (and of course, your mileage may vary...) that if improving career prospects is your main aim of graduate school, you're better off leaving with a M.S. and getting relevant job experience, instead of spending the additional 3-5 years on a Ph.D. (which is what I usually think of as "graduate school").

Another point to bear in mind, I think, is that if you're interested in academic jobs, it's also really worth being realistic at all stages of your chances. Very few Ph.D. students make it through to full-time academic positions and there is really no shortage of extremely well qualified candidates. I'm not advocating against this path, just it's worth having some back-up plan and gathering "transferable skills" for outside careers whilst in the academic pipeline.

1. Why did you go to grad school?

I liked doing research -- I'd started as an undergraduate and wanted to do more. And I wanted to learn more quantum mechanics and apply it to models to understand some (approaching...) real world problems. I liked the place, the research and the atmosphere and fellow graduate students.

2. When did you go to grad school?

I went straight after undergraduate, age 22. Finished just over a year ago.

3. What is a good reason to go to grad school?

I think about the only reason to go to grad school is that you like doing research and/or learning the subject to greater depths whilst on the front lines, worry about and performing the nitty-gritty side of things.

4. What is a bad reason to go to grad school?

Expand career opportunities. To stay a student. To get "Dr." in front of your name.

5. What is the best state of mind to start grad school?

Be open minded about what you're researching and focussed on the task at hand. Treat it like a job: when you're in the office/lab/library, don't procrastinate and waste time. Do stuff. Take time off; go on vacation. Watch your mental and physical health. Both of these things can suffer in grad school -- if they are, take a step back, take some days off, make time to do fun stuff. Don't work yourself to the bone -- life is short and you should be doing fun stuff and enjoying some of the freedoms that grad school gives you.

6. What obvious and not so obvious things should I look for when choosing a program?

Assuming STEM, as this is my background: supervisor is the most important person. Try to find someone who you get on with; a strained relationship with supervisor definitely makes life more difficult (I had some experience here). Find out about money for traveling to conferences etc. Work environment (will you be in cubicle farm? small shared office?) and atmosphere (is everyone in 14hrs a day, 7 days a week? are people happy? do people look permanently tired/ill?). Talk to grad students 1-to-1 away from faculty to get some honest perspective on pros/cons of the place -- most will be happy to give you the low-down. If profs don't give you time/space to talk to grad students whilst at interview, take this as a bad sign.

7. How on earth am I supposed to generate income while simultaneously committing enough hours to my studies? During the school year in undergrad I worked usually less than 10 hours a week.

Again, from a STEM perspective, you'll be earning money. Probably not great money, but enough to live off. Many places (if you're a full-time grad student) won't allow you/be at all happy with you having another job. I know in my contract that I signed, it explicitly stated I couldn't have a second job. Often you can make some extra money teaching/TAing for classes, although the hourly pay is rough in reality.

I'm reading a graphic novel adaption of Swann's Way by Marcel Proust. I read the book a few years ago, and I'm using this as a reminder before starting the second book in the series. Quite liking it so far, the book is beautiful, both visually and in terms of tactile/quality.

Thanks for letting me know about the members and their other projects -- I'll definitely have to check them out as I've been really digging the American Football album. And I completely agree that this album is so far ahead of its time -- it sounds so fresh, it could have been released last week and I'd never had known any different.

I'm English, but have been living in the US for over a year now.

I've been listening to the self-titled album by "American Football", which was released back in 1999 but is new to me.

I'm about 200 pages in to the Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas.

I read the Count of Monte Cristo last year and absolutely loved it (it has to rank up there in my top 5 reads), and so far I'm really enjoying the TMITIM, although it took me a fair few pages to really get in to it. I've not read The Three Musketeers; despite some of the same characters cropping up, I don't think I'm massively missing out on a lot of the story.

Thanks for the specific recommendations for albums, I checked out both the Hank Mobley and the Sonny Rollins & Theolonious Monk albums and will definitely be listening to both again, as well as checking out some of their other stuff.

Teaching is in a sad place at the moment in the UK, dominated by tedious paper work which don't really have much to do with the actual meat-and-veg of teaching

updating the classroom risk assessments or rewriting schemes of work (again) so that French definitely includes teaching “fundamental British values” (seriously).

I've seen a lot of friends from high school and university go in to teaching and more than half leave after a year or two. Whilst one anecdote doesn't equal data, it's telling when you know lots of people who have similar experiences with their friendship groups.

Whilst undoubtedly some of it can be written off to "people-not-knowing-what-they're-getting-into", I know in quite a few cases people who had extensive class room experience pre-PGCE leaving once the reality of paper work and lack of time to support any students, whether they're the best and brightest or those struggling.

Mostly, this situation just makes me sad. I really wouldn't be where I am today without the influence of many great teachers (even though I went to a "bad" school) who pushed, challenged and encouraged me, opening my eyes to opportunities I would never have encountered from mine and my parents' background. If we're losing this, we're losing social mobility and opportunities for kids.

Edit: also, I've just seen this article

Yes, my partner is a fan of hers - she has a great voice. I love the song 'sweet memory'. Thanks for suggesting!

Thanks for sharing! I didn't agree with quite a lot of what he said, but I think it was an interesting watch and critic of modern art. I'm not sure that I'd agree that the sole or primary aim of art is necessarily beauty (although, it is the case that this is the primary aim of many pieces of art) or that losing this aim is a damning testimony about the state of humanity or modern society. Also, the idea that beauty is somehow the "divine" in corporeal form seems almost laughably outdated as a point of view (although this is presumably highly personal).

If someone else can add a tag, it'd be a #goodlongwatch (if define an hour as long!).

I think #goodlongwatch is a great idea for a tag. Along these lines, there was a thread by magicjespa a few days ago about recommendations for documentaries which didn't get so much attention

and might be a good place to start finding some documentaries recommended by Hubskiers.

Finally, I learned to do more planning when taking on a project, and resist the urge to begin modeling and engineering right away.

I know that feeling! It's always tempting to dive right in and get going, but you'll almost never regret spending some time thinking about things and getting more details, asking questions etc. Thanks for write-up; it was an interesting insight into this kind of engineering project.

I took a look at The Bad Plus last night and really enjoyed them, so I'll definitely be listening to them some more. It was also surprising (in a good way!) to hear them cover some non-Jazz songs, which work extremely well.

Latin Jazz is an area I've never explored, so thanks for giving me a great starting point to dive into it some more!

Thanks for all the recommendations -- I'm especially liking Lenny Breau and Kneebody. I'll be sure to check out some more from all your suggestions!

You should take a look at this link, which seems to discuss in a friendly manner some steps to go through to figure out what you can do.

The basic problem is your hard drive is getting full and you need to empty up some space. Make sure you've emptied your trash folder, if you use iPhoto check out the trash there (see the first comment on the article) and figure out if there's any files you no longer need, can delete, or can move to an external hard drive.

Thanks for the suggestions. Wes Montgomery is really right-up my street and I'll definitely be listening to more by him. I'm not so familiar with guitar-based Jazz, but I liked all the other suggestions you made and will definitely be investigating them some more!

Thanks for all the recommendations! I'd come across Charles Mingus' name before, but I've not listened to him previously. I'll be sure to check out some of his stuff -- from the brief listen I gave it, I think I'll like it. I fee like electronic jazz music is something that I've still not quite got used to yet, it doesn't quite gel with me as much as the stuff I usually listen to. The Herbie Hancock you linked has a wicked funky beat to it though!

Thanks for the reply!

Both are very different to one-another and also to what I'd usually think of in terms of Jazz, but I liked both. Ibrahim Maalouf's song reminded me somewhat of Beirut's music, although I can't quite pin down why -- probably just the tone of trumpet!

Yes, you can come at these kind of questions from both the applications point-of-view and also from a fundamental understanding point-of-view. For example, on the application side I saw a talk recently about a theoretical proposal for light-induced superconductivity in semi-conductors. There, you "dump" energy into your semiconductor by shining a laser on it, causing the fundamental properties of the material to drastically change -- realizing a superconductor in a conventional semiconductor!

From the fundamental perspective, there's lots of questions that are being asked. I guess the most general question is something along the lines of "how does quantum mechanics recover statistical mechanics?" where statistical mechanics is the theory used to describe the behavior of macroscopic objects (e.g., what happens when you heat up a big chunk of metal?). Another question which I think is interesting (and related to the application side) is can one realize "new states of matter" (e.g., new properties or behaviours) by doing something out-of-equilibrium and waiting for this new steady state? Can we get behaviors which aren't realized in equilibrium?

It's certainly an interesting field to be working in at the moment!

One of my best friends growing up was obsessed with cars and mechanics (and is now a mechanic/classic car restorer) and we spent a lot of time tinkering with engines, rebuilding lawn mowers, tuning up field motorbikes, etc. It was great fun and I still look back very fondly on it -- I guess not so many people can say they've completely taken a car engine to bits and put it back together!

Another friends was a massive scaletrix (slot car) fan, and had a great track in his garage, and we spent many hours there shooting-the-shit and racing slot cars.

When I was younger, it was definitely riding my bicycle around and exploring the countryside -- make tree houses and "bases" and running around all day exploring. Great fun!

That's a really good question. And I'll attempt to illustrate it with probably the simplest example, although I apologize if this is too high (or too low) level!

Let's start first by defining quite what I meant when I said

if one leaves the system alone for a sufficiently long time, it should settle and become hot

The lower axis here is the energy (E) minus the "Fermi energy" (E_F) which is defined as the energy of the highest-energy electron at absolute zero temperature (so don't worry about seeing a negative axis!).

Now, lets consider a bunch of non-interacting electrons -- the electrons just float around, not seeing one-another or anything else. Of course, this isn't realistic, but we're theorists, so we can get away with thinking about such things. Imagine now that I "dump some energy" into my system by adding an electron with energy 1; what happens? Well, we have some electrons that float around, not seeing one-another and not interacting. This means that there's no way to reduce the energy of the electron you've added, so no matter how long I wait, there'll be an electron with energy 1, and I'll have a non-thermal distribution (it'll look like the Fermi-Dirac distribution above with a jump at energy 1). In physics, we like to say that there is a conservation law -- the number of particle at each energy is conserved in this simple case. Of course, this isn't very interesting so far as everything is non-interacting and not terribly realistic.

Now, what happens if we turn on interactions between the electrons in our system? Interactions may allow us to redistribute energy: if we have an electron with energy Ea and another with energy Eb we can collide them and scatter to energies Ec and Ed provided Ea + Eb = Ec + Ed, e.g. energy is conserved. Notice now that we only really have one conservation law -- that total energy is conserved. In general, it is expected that such processes will eventually lead to thermalization (e.g., the Fermi-Dirac distribution at a suitably higher temperature, fixed by the energy we dumped into the system).

Now, as a theorist, I want to test this expectation (let's call it a conjecture). So I turn to my favorite interacting model that I know how to exactly-solve (there are not many of these) and test this conjecture. What do I find? I find that my exactly-solvable model doesn't thermalize: when I inject energy into the system I do not recover the thermal distribution. What gives?! Well, it comes down to what I previously mentioned -- conservation laws. These special exactly-solvable models are solvable precisely because they have lots of conservation laws (in fact, they have the same number of conservation laws as particles) and this puts very strong restrictions on how the particles can redistribute energy around and eventually leads to a non-thermal distribution. Figuring out what this non-thermal distribution is and how to compute the values of "measurable quantities" are serious areas of research at the moment.

This comment ended up much longer than I anticipated, and I'm not sure of an adequate tldr!

I'm between books at the moment -- I need to choose between The Journey to the east by Herman Hesse and The Circle by Dave Eggers, the next two books on my reading pile.

Since moving to the US, I've been trying to read through the Bible; I'm not religious, but it's a big part of life and conversation out here, so I feel like it'd be good for me. I also feel that by not having read it I'm probably missing out on lots of literary and art references, so maybe it'll be good for my general education.

Thanks for sharing! I'd never come across this anywhere before and it's a great read -- the guy really writes in a beautiful manner, filling you with his passion and enthusiasm. I couldn't put it down and read it start to stop and I agree that it really does show how easily you can slip into a survival situation without realizing it.

I feel like we're in this weird place at the moment where parents put tons of stuff about their kid (pictures, videos, anecdotes, etc) on Facebook. Now, whilst I think most parents have the best intentions with this, I do wonder about the privacy implications. Would I want Facebook having multiple-pictures-a-day from my earliest years growing up? I'm never quite sure if I should mention this to my sister, who is a prolific poster of pictures/videos of her two young kids.

As to the public spankings, of course they shouldn't be on Facebook. It's pretty insulting, embarrassing and derogatory to their kids -- I think I'd struggle to forgive my parents if they'd done similar to me. There's also something troubling about a parent wanting to film that.