Polar Eyes

I spent all day doing work as usual in the lab. That usual work has been especially tedious lately, as I have to go through a few hundred polarization plots and mark down how the polarization of the wave changes as it propagates toward the pole. The tricky part is that each event is not entirely polarized in the same way so I end up having to decide how to slice up certain mischievous events into manageable pieces, thereby creating more events than the two hundred or so that are already in front of me. I would love to find a way to automate this - to write a program that will automatically determine the polarization for a particular event or piece of an event - but, as always, I play the cost/benefit game and at this point I think the cost of designing and writing the program would outweigh the benefit of gaining the time it frees up. However, I hasten to remind my readership that I do not love physics and physics research any less :-)

Some good news is that I have been asked to assist in a physics I or II recitation this (and, I hope, next semester). I get the impression that my main duty would be helping students work through problems in class. This is a great opportunity in three major ways: I reinforce all those first-year basics, I learn a bit about physics instruction and I make some money doing something I enjoy.

On that note, I return to homework.