now picnic

Sometimes in my physicist day, I don't do anything really physicisty. I kind of sit in front of a computer and work on crappy C++ code and make graphs of stuff. On those days, it doesn't really feel like I'm helping Discover the Secrets of the Universe or anything. And I never get to wear a lab coat, so if I were on television, I don't think anyone would believe I was a real scientist. ;)

Other days, though, I do feel like I'm doing something interesting and fun, and sometimes I feel especially badass, like when I can solder things together. Today I had a funny moment of scientistness when I was writing an equation in my thesis and I wanted to put in a few numbers to make sure that it made sense. I started looking around for a bit of scrap paper and grabbed an envelope left over from some junk mail. Then I smiled. If you google "back of the envelope" there's 460,000-some entries describing "back of the envelope calculations" (a term coined by Enrico Fermi, says wikipedia) which are rough estimates you use to see if something's working, or figure out the basic idea. And today I did a quick "back of the envelope calculation" on the back of a real envelope.

It's not much, but somehow it felt cool. Sometimes working on computers makes me feel so far away from paper and it was nice to see my old friend, paper, again.

// posted by kc @  11:51 PM   1 comments