Post #1 Why *is* it No Work Wednesday?

Salutations internet!

I have decided to start a blog...whether or not it was inevitable I do not know, but anyway it's here now. So prepare yourselves for what will no doubt entail errors in grammar and spelling!

I guess I'll tell you a little bit about myself. I have just graduated from a Masters in Astrophysics and have just started a PhD. I think that many many years of exposure to Star Trek and other Sci-fi shows is what guided me to do astrophysics. And I can't think of anything else I'd rather do. To me it's the best job in the world. You come in and get to think about and imagine all kinds and weird and wonderful things! Thinking about what happens when you fall into a black hole, or how stars are born. Or even things that are more familiar, this may just be me but I find myself getting mesmerised by the swirling whirlpool or a cup of morning coffee which can be described using the equations of fluid dynamics, or of the steam from a boiling cup of coffee, physics is everywhere. And one of my favourite quotes by one of my favourite physicists is "everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough". So I would certainly encourage each and every one of you to sit and stair at your swirling cup of coffee tomorrow morning. Maybe you will see what I mean then :). Or just think I'm talking out of my arse!

I didn't mean to ramble on quite so much then...but I decided to start a blog for a number of reasons. I wanted a way to improve my writing skills. What is import in science is how we communicate our ideas to each other. This is something that I don't think I am particularly good at but would love to be the best!

So to help me with this I would like anybody who has a question about anything 'physicsy' that they are struggling with or have wanted to know about something for a long time to send me a tweet or leave a comment (I have never done a blog before, I am assuming you can leave comments below ??) Anyway send me a tweet @NoWorkWednesday and I'll try my best to explain it to you! It will help all of us out. Win Win right ? Good!

I might as well tell you what I'm doing for my PhD, if people want me to elaborate more I'd be happy too. The specific area of research is Modelling Gravitational Waves from the merger of a binary black hole system. The field is called 'Numerical Relativity'. Which basically means solving Einstein's equations that describe Gravity on a computer. Or you could say, colliding black holes on a super computer! Which just sounds much cooler! There is a world wide effort to make the first every direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples in the very fabric of spacetime, which are a consequence of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. This is our best/most popular/has passed all tests theory of Gravity. I could go on and on talking about Gen Rel but I wanted to talk about something else!

As a PhD student you are expected to do either marking or demonstrating in the labs for the undergraduates who do experiments and write up their scientific method in a lab book which the demonstrators then mark ready for the following week. I chose to do demonstrating. I thought it would be fun, because only 4 years ago I was in their exact same position and asking for help from the PhD demonstrators. I help out in first year labs on Tuesday 1.30 - 5.30. This past Tuesday was the first day and there was no experiment, just an exercise on calculating errors and drawing straight line graphs. During my experience in first year labs I was god awful at errors! So to avoid looking completely stupid I swatted up on the weekend and prepared myself for Labs! So Tuesday came along and it all went pretty well. The undergrads are polite and ask for help when they are stuck. I am unsure of how much help I should be giving them, sometimes I found myself just telling them how to do the work which is probably *not* what I'm supposed to do, but I'll know for next time. Thankfully I have retained some knowledge from 4 years of physics and was able to answer most of their questions, and due to a change in the A-Level syllabus some of them didn't even know how to calculate the standard deviation or partial differentiation, so I had to explain/teach them what it meant to do both. Which brings me back to the reason for writing this blog, to gain experience in communication in science :)

Anyway after the labs they have until 4pm the next day to finish their work and hand in the books to be marked. It's a big year this year and each demonstrator has about 10 books to mark. We get paid 2 hours to do the marking. I was keen and enthusiastic to find out how they got on and to give good insightful comments on their work! Unfortunately the first book I marked on took me about 2 hours to get through about 3/5ths of this persons work!! I was going crazy! Their answers were all over the page, it was very difficult to follow their workings. But I can relate to them, because this is exactly how MY lab book looked like 4 years ago, and no I can empathise with the demonstrators who took their time to mark MY lab book. It must have been hell! Since Wednesday evening I've managed to mark a grand total of 4 books! *Cheers* So with any luck I'll have them all 'red-penned' by tomorrow xD

I think it is probably important to explain the name of this blog before I finish. I've been trying to get this blog and twitter up for about a month now. I wanted it to almost chronicle my experiences as a grad student but couldn't come up with a good enough name. I toyed with ideas such as 'TheSpaceBar' i.e. the bar where astronauts hang out. But that was not original and was taken. But then yesterday it came to me. And it was a phrase I was saying all day yesterday (Wednesday).
   Get to the desk about 9:00 ish, put the coffee on, start reading papers
   Then before you know it it's time for group meeting at 11:00-12:00
   Which quickly spilled over to group lunch 12:00-13:30
   Which then didn't leave much time to work until a meeting about lab marking at 14:30-15:00
   And then it's almost time for the weekly astrophysics colloquium at 16:00-17:00
   And then I need to make a start on marking the Lab Books for next week because I have no idea how long it would take to mark them! That was 17:00 - 20:00 (and I marked...*almost* one lab book)

And so all day Wednesday I couldn't stop saying

 "It's no work wednesday"

 xD

For anyone who made it all the way through my first MAMMOTH blog post then you can reap the rewards of my Nerdy Bonuses!

Nerd Bonus:

This I even have to admit is pretty nerdy, but it's *so* addictive! This is Sean 'Day[9]' Plott, he is a Maths graduate student in California and used to be a pro gamer, a strategy game called star craft. For your information Star Craft and now Star Craft 2 are big...HUGE even in South Korea, it's one of their national sports! They are 24hr TV channels dedicated to showing Star Craft games! And people train all day every day for tournaments for the chance to win thousands and thousands of monies! And it is very much accessible as a spectator sport through the help and guidance of people like Day[9] who 'cast' games, give interesting strategic insight and are just plain funny to watch and listen to :D

So here I give you a video for you to try and see if you like it

http://day9.tv/d/Day9/funday-monday-drop-crazy/

And as my blog post was *so* freaking long today here is another bonus. A video physics bonus this time from one of my all time favourite physicists Richard Feynman, talking about how fun it is to imagine in this old series 'Fun To Imagine' ENJOY!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3pYRn5j7oI

He has a way to communicate science to the masses that is a shame that more people can't do it! And by doing this blog maybe I can get closer to that.

Thanks for reading (if you did)

And don't forget, if it's Wednesday #NoWorkWednesday

Hit me up on twitter @NoWorkWednesday

"everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough" - Feynman