#phd!

The Agony of Sorting My Books

See Life, and all that for my last general update.

Well, it’s been some time. Again. And for much the same reasons I had already shared. Life crept up on me, and work crept up on me, and the future bludgeoned me with a frying pan while I was distracted by the other two.

Progress has been made, though. I know where I will be living, come fall, which is always reassuring. I will have a steadier…

Life, and all that.

It’s been a while, and I’m sorry about that, but I’ve been doing things! I really intended to post here more, it being winter break – I’m a university instructor – but break also seemed like a good time to cross a lot of things off my to-do list, so I did that, instead, and the blog fell by the wayside.

First of all, The Mage is out in both digital and paper forms. [Click!] Hurrah! It was…

So, this is a book. 

I found it while googling.

It wasn’t what I was googling for. 

Pick a science topic. Then go online and grad a bunch of papers about that topic. Read the opening paragraphs. Get a sense of variations on a theme?

I've just started writing the second paper to come out of my main dissertation project. And since I tend to think from beginning to end of the paper, I'm starting with the part that's the biggest pain in the butt: the introduction. My Ph.D. work was on perovskite oxide superlattices. Pretty much ever paper on this topic starts out the same way:

"Perovskite oxides are useful because there are many materials with similar structures but a wide variety of behaviors (e.g. metallic, superconducting, ferroelectric, magnetic, insulating, and on and on). Because of this, you can put two different materials together to make a superlattice with novel properties." 

Ok…maybe the language gets a bit more formal and sciencey than that, but you get the point. Basically to write and introduction, that that paragraph and make it sound slightly different than the introductory paragraph of all the papers you are citing.

I wrote something to this effect on twitter, and @rejectedbanana happily chimed in with a better idea on how to open a paper. This lead to some back-and-forth on both our parts where we came up with opening lines to spice up any Physical Review Letter.

Once upon a time there were a bunch of perovskites and they made a lattice… (@rejectedbanana)

When two types of perovskites love each other very much, a superlattice is born

It was the best of perovskites, it was the worst of perovskites. It was the age of superlattices. (@rejectedbanana)

In a fair vacuum chamber where we lay our scene. Two perovskites both alike in crystallinity…

Four score and seven years ago, our physicists brought forth lattices on these perovskites (@rejectedbanana)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a superlattice in possession of a good interface much be in want of novel properties.

Alright stop, make a sample, and measure. Perovskites are back in a brand new structure. One layers grabs the other one tightly. At the interface new business is likely.

...and today is submitting your dissertation to the university.

I'M DONE!