A few notes on "awesomeness" (plus a little bit of awesomeness)

Here are a few "awesome" things from yesterday. (I wanted to post them yesterday, but I was busy helping to make ping pong shirts.)

Well, one of them is that my Screamer arrived on Monday. I set it up in the entry room in Sloan Annex. The building's residents just assumed I was the one responsible, so I obviously have the right kind of reputation. Also, Mike Cross is teaching Phys 106, so all the students picking up or turning in homework assignments or exams will be seeing the Screamer every time they do so. (Mike has now officially sanctioned this.) A couple of amusing picture ideas got thrown around yesterday: An 'I love this #%!$ing school' shirt and other Caltech memorabilia will be worn, beer mugs will be held, and at least one person broached the subject of being somewhat tipsy (which apparently only takes half a beer) for the picture. OK, so only two of us were discussing this while we were both avoiding work (yeah, flicking), but if done correctly, I forsee an extremely awesome picture.

Yesterday, I had a work meeting with the prof with whom I'm collaborating on the solitary-wave-through-beads project. This was right before a faculty meeting in which people were slated to officially approve the choice of this guy for the Applied & Computational Math department (with an IST affiliation). My collaborator told me about the meeting and I asked who was decided up. She mentioned the name, so I googled the guy. Check out the picture on his professional web page. It's "awesome." As I told my collaborator, his picture looks like he's trying to get a date, so we had some fun mocking him (keeping in mind that she was going to go cast her vote on him in a faculty meeting in a couple of minutes... so this was all really tactful).

Also during the meeting, something fell out of my hair that apparently had fallen in there during lunch time. I need a haircut really badly right now, and this whole thing reminded me of a comment Wendell made many years ago (when my hair was similarly long or even longer) that I shouldn't cut my hair because the family of birds living there would have to find a new nest. The thing falling out of my hair was simultaneously embarrassing and amusing. I told my collaborator to pretend it didn't happen. She agreed to do this as long as I also pretended she hadn't laughed at me hysterically. Clearly, it's a win-win situation. (Hmmm... I almost made a "Wendell" tag because of this paragraph.)