The SEM+EDS machine in one of my school’s materials labs ran 98 and there was exactly one thumb drive on campus that was allowed to be used if you wanted to pull data. The lab coordinator had to pull the output file to his computer and email them, but made it sound like the biggest inconvenience in the world if you, ya know, wanted your data.

My goal for the summer was to finish my PhD. I defended on Friday and am now Dr. Drail, so I actually accomplished my summer task for once. I sacrificed all my sleep and sanity to do so, as I was told at the 11th hour to redo a major analysis that made up 1/4 of my dissertation, but I fucking got it done.

Everything should just be in eV. Particle physics natural units are the best.

I always hit the one in Garden Grove, it was in a mini vegan plaza. Still a Loving Hut and a vegan pizza place in the same plaza. Never got a chance to go to the Santa Anna one.

Former chain of vegan subs out of SoCal named Subvegan had some of the best sandwhiches I have ever tasted, vegan or otherwise. Vegan deli meat and vegan cheese quality vary, but this place had the hookup for the best of both. A 9in sub was $12, loaded so fat it barely closed and was two meals worth for any normal person.

Their italian sub, the Godfather, had (vegan) turkey, ham, salami, provalone, cheddar, pepperoncini peppers, tomato, arugula, olives, onions, mayo, and italian dressing. The bread was always the perfect ratio of crunch to fluffy, their sauce portion was always on point, and their veggies were fresh as fuck. I salivate even just typing it out.

My fiancee and I would order in advance to have a sub waiting for us whenever we visited her family in Anaheim. It was the best. We started making plans in June to move out there so she could live near her parents and they closed their doors in July. Good vegan subs are a rarity, let alone vegan subs that stand out in quality against their non-veg counterparts. I am still in mourning.

Not to dunk on word, if I need slightly more flexibility than a native .txt reader, it will do in a pinch. That being said:

Word: Oh, you want a table? Good luck getting your excel sheet to cary everything over properly, and god forbid you change a formula. You want to write it natively in word? Lol no.

Latex: tabularx goes brrrr

Word: Equations? Have fun properly tracking equation numbers and manually formatting your text to center justified every time.

Latex: $ $, \( \), and \begin{equation} go brrrr.

Word: Figures? Hope you anchored everything properly, it would be a shame if your entire document layout got shifted…

Latex: What the fuck is an anchor? top, here, bottom, those are your options. Add an exclamation mark if you’re feeling spicy.

My former colleague and I both decided on the same template for our dissertation, but hers looked wonky with the default margins. Sacrificing that lamb to have slightly tighter margins was worth it, even if the eldritch ramblings keep me awake at night.

I did all my Quantum Field Theory homework in Latex, the professor required it. My classmates would write everything out by hand and then transcribe it, meanwhile my officemate and I could think/write/math in Latex, so we only had to write our homework once. The prof lifted the requirement halfway through the semester after everyone else complained, but I never looked back.

The only thing that prevented a 100% Latex-only semester was the goddam section where we had to draw Wick diagrams. There just wasn’t a reliable way to draw them on my computer, as the Feynman diagram tools stuggled with the nuances of Wick diagrams. I still included the hand-drawn versions as figures in Latex, but it felt like cheating.

I did figure out how to write the Wick’s theorem bracket notation in Latex though (not that I’ll ever need to again), so that made up for it a bit. I wager that I spent more time researching obscure Latex packages than actually solving the problems that semester.

I love Latex so much, I even made a template for generating profesional looking DND item cards for my table that I submitted to overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/d-and-d-item-card-template/ndfdspmmxnrn

I had a bad flea infestation after taking in a stray puppy for all of 1 day before I got it to a rescue. I went from noticing one flea to noticing a couple to seeing them everywhere in a manner of days, about a month after the puppy left us our present. It was a pain in the ass and made me hyper paranoid, so I learned how to handle it the proper way.

I agree with what others have said as a first step: Flea Bath and/or nitenpyram to remove the fleas on the kitty, flea preventative to keep them off. Wash all the fabrics and surfaces, especially near your cat’s hangout spots, and dry on high heat.

Vacuuming daily is a triple threat at reducing the numbers: Sucks up the eggs/larvare/pupae/adults, the vibration and warmth tricks pupae to emerge (they can be dormant for up to 6 months and their shell acts like velcro, making them hard to remove) which speeds up the cycle and reduces the risk of reinfestation, and cleans up the grime that the larvae feed on before pupating. Just make sure you use a bagged vacuum or seal the vacuum waste somehow before tossing it. If the infestation is minor, keeping up to date on the preventative and regular vacuuming should be enough.

If you find more, especially down the road a few months, it probably means an infestation started under your nose. If you can afford it, a pest control pro is the best solution. If you can’t, the best flea killer spray for whole home infestations is Precor 2625. It is a whole home premise spray that kills the fleas at all stages, both on contact and by disrupting their reproductive cycle. You’ll want to either kennel your kitty for a day to apply it, as the contact kill chemical can make cats sick, or at the very least quarantine them and do the spray over a couple days away from them. Get a coverall suit, N95 mask, and spray all low surfaces, all fabrics that can’t be dried on high heat, under couch cushions, all corners and crevices around the floor and your bed, literally everywhere below knee height and anywhere your cat might like to climb or hide.

The preventative is supposed to last 7 months, slightly longer than the longest normal pupae duration, so that multiple flea generations will be affected. I do recommend a second spray 1 month later, just to be safe, and continue daily vacuuming over the entire premise for at least that first month to expedite the lifecycle as much as possible.

My boss read the first chapter I turned in, decided I know what I am doing, gave me some basic feedback, and has completely checked out since then lol.

I am half way done with mine, which means I only have 3/4 left to write, then I will be 90% done.

Neutrello sounds good, but it is actually pretty…

weak

Rimshot, crowd moans

In physics- Like “quart” with a k In the Joyce novel- rhymes with park.

Gell-Mann said it sounds like “quart”, Joyce rhymed it with Park, it is a silly word and the pronunciation is as fluid as you desire.

Physics is a mixed bag with this stuff. Gell-Mann came up with the name quarks after a line from Finnegan’s Wake because Joyce referenced them as coming in three. It was a nonsense word inserted just to rhyme with Mark, Park, etc, so its pronunciation in physics isn’t even correct, but it was fun and physicists were just having a good time with it.

Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

Then we got the strange/charm and top/bottom (which was originally the beauty/truth, so bullet dodged there) so the quarks really got all the fun names. Strong Force physics in general gets the good stuff: Axions were named after a detergent because they helped “clean up” the strong CP-violation problem of the standard model. Fantastic, no notes.

Neutrinos (my field of study), had so much potential for fun, stupid naming that was squandered. The neutrino was originally proposed with the name “neutron” by Pauli, but then the actual neutron was discovered and observed first, so the name got pinched. To remedy this, the electron neutrino was dubbed “neutrino” or little neutron (they didn’t know that other flavors of neutrino existed). Meanwhile, the muon neutrino was originally supposed to be the neutretto (before they realized that the neutral leptons were related by the different particle generations), so we could have had a world where each generation of neutral lepton was just another combination of neutron + diminutive italian suffix.

1. Neutrino
2. Neutretto/neutronetto
3. Neutrello/neutronello

Then, when the mass eigenstates were confirmed, we could have diversified and gone with big suffixes to indicate that neutrinos have mass.

1. Neutroni
2. Neutrachione/neutronachione
3. Neutrozzo/neutronozzo

But noooooo, particle physics decided to just give neutrinos the lamest possible names, electron/muon/tau neutrinos for flavor states and m_1/m_2/m_3 neutrino for mass states. I am ashamed of my predecessors for what they’ve done.

Don’t even get me started on the J/Psi debacle…

As one of the most senior grad students in my dept, holy fuck this hits hard.