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Well, I just finished up dinner and a big bowl of ice cream, and Ben (yes, Ben!) and I are watching the presidential debate. If I can dodge questions as well as George, I should be all set tomorrow. ;)

A surprise greeted me when I came home today — a smiley chimpanzee named Jake, who apparantly bumped into Clyde in Colorado (who, Jake reports, is enjoy climbing the slopes in Vail — albeit rather slowly) and got recommended a good home here with us. He’ll be there to greet when when I finish my exam tomorrow. He’s very cuddly :)

Wish me luck! My exam’s at 1:15 tomorrow.

Guess what … the Hail Mary I threw last night actually worked! Well, it didn’t COMPLETELY work, but it’s as close as I’ve ever come to correctly fitting the flume data with my river simulator. Here’s what the plots look like:

(Red = 108 cm [the whole flume is 130 cm]; orange = 53 cm; circles = flume data; lines = model prediction.)

Furthermore, when I followed Jean-Philippe’s suggestion to re-write my new idea a certain way, it started to make *physical* sense, which means I actually have both quasi-results *and* theory to present. Yay!

AND when I was talking to Jean-Philippe today, he brought up the research I proposed at Long Valley Caldera. He said he heard about some new measurements up there that are very interesting and he’d like to sit down and discuss it, and also that he’s going up to give a talk at the USGS in Menlo Park next month and he’s going to talk to the Long Valley guy up there — a really nice Caltech PhD whom I’ve been emailing about the possibility of doing work up there.

I bumped into Lee Silver (the geologist who trained the astronauts to go to the moon — he’s retired now) and he said I could come by tomorrow to practice my orals presentations on him. That would be great.

Thanks to everyone for all your emails of support! They really brightened my day :)

My house of cards caved in today. My friend Juliette magically found a sign error that’s been lurking in my theory for months. This TOTALLY SUCKS. It doesn’t fix my model; it just means that now, in addition to a crappy model, I have NO theory to talk about to back it up. I could probably present the data as it is and nobody would notice the sign error, but that would be fraudulent. AAAAAAHHHH.

Update: it’s 3:15am, I just re-wrote a large portion of the model, and it gives somewhat reasonable results. I better freaking pass this stupid exam.

The Caltech Kick-Off Carnival offered some a fun, somewhat nerdy break from studying. I met Ben by Homer and Bob, Caltech’s DARPA Grand Challenge robots:

Just like last year, Tom Mannion arranged some GREAT food at the carnival. There was fresh kettle corn, cotton candy, all-you-can-eat fresh strawberries and homemade whipped cream, and new this year, Coldstone ice cream, delivered straight to campus! Ben and I made the rounds, collected our alloted 4000 calories each or whatever, and horded it in Jorgenson, where I studied and Ben slept and worked on installing his new work computers.

After an afternoon of studying, we left Chaco in the office and headed back to the carnival for dinner — real southern BBQ ala Tom Mannion and the Meat Club. Yes, Caltech has a Meat Club. They figured if the Vegetarian Club got Caltech funding, they should establish a Meat Club to subsidize some of their food expenses. They get together and grill stuff, as I understand it. Last year they had a booth with a George Foreman Grill; this year, they were the main course. They’re really moving up in the world.

When it got dark, we were treated to a fireworks show above Beckman Auditorium. We had front-row seats, and the fireworks looked especially beautiful set against the bright white of the “wedding cake building”. They were electronically choreographed so they fired in perfect time to the music; it was really neat!

Ben’s family has a tradition of celebrating the last day before school starts (classes begin tomorrow), so Ben and I went to Islands for dinner tonight, then ate fondue while brain-rotting to Cops. They had a great segment on tonight about feuding wedding chapels in Las Vegas. The chapels, and the limo drivers etc who try to get business from the newlyweds are in fierce competition, and in this one particular section of Vegas the chapel owners get particulary nasty and the police have to come diffuse bomb threats and beatings. How ironic :)

My exams are on Friday. I tried to write my final presentations today, but I realized that one set of boundary conditions I used for my river model is really wrong. Moreover, I don’t understand exactly WHY it’s wrong. That totally sucks, because I was planning to compare the effect of different boundary conditions on the model predictions in my talk; now, I’m down to one set of BCs that even make any sense at all (and the model predictions using those BCs stinks). I tried to implement a new set of BCs tonight — actually, a new partitioning law, if you really care about the distinction — but it was not a fast fix, and I think it’s not a good idea to attempt that before Friday. So, now I don’t know what to write in my talk. Hopefully Jean-Philippe will have some advice tomorrow. If it were totally up to me, I’d say “I worked really hard on this model, but it totally stinks”. Jean-Philippe has a knack for phrasing things slightly more optimistically.

I am terrified.

Ben and I enjoyed the GPS Division Picnic this evening. We ate another free meal (yay!), watched a mammal and reptile show from the zoo, and were awed by the magic show. I also beat Ben at horseshoes.

Ben had to work tonight. I maybe should have worked, but I just can’t. I was not at all productive today. Instead, I stayed home and imported all my old blogs and added a Dumont Dunes gallery to my website, touched up my Fine Art gallery, and weeded the junk out of my filing drawer. (Doesn’t that sound exciting?)

Nothing much happened today. I worked on my paper (due tomorrow) for my orals. I wrote some abstracts. I compiled my academic summary, which is a record of all the courses I’ve taken in graduate school and the grades I’ve gotten, which aren’t altogether BAD but are significantly lower than any GPA I’ve ever had before. I learned about tandem accelerator mass spectrometers that allow researchers to alleviate isobaric interference from molecules. I drank a Jamba Juice with immunity boost because I sneezed today and I don’t want to get sick before my exams. I watched the gate to the parking lot in our apartment complex smash into the side of our Subaru as Ben pulled into the driveway. (It wasn’t his fault; the gate is dumb. It should have a weight sensor on both sides of the gate so it doesn’t close on your car as you pull in, but it doesn’t. Ben stopped to say hi to me when we met up in the driveway, pulled in 20 seconds late, and WHAM!) I tried to study and surfed the web a lot instead. I ate chocolate. Now I’m going to go watch Cops. Chaco still smells.

Today I accompanied my undergraduate research group, the granular flows folks over in ME, on a media field trip to Dumont Dunes. Normally, we go to take measurements and observations on the booming dunes; this time, we took Caltech media relations people, reporters, a photographer, and … a crew from the PBS show NOVA! I got hooked up with a mike and everything. It was very cool.

Melany and Chris did most of the interviews, which suited me fine. One day, I’d love to be on a show like that, but today I was sleepy and incoherent. I made a great butt-surfer, though! You’ll probably see my rear end featured prominently in the documentary.

Here’s Melany answering some science questions:

The dunes were silent our first slide down. That made us pretty nervous … we didn’t want to have dragged all these people out at five in the morning and then not even hear the dunes boom! Fortunately we figured out what was wrong. The wind reversed direction as of late, so all the loose sand, the prime booming material, had been blown off the top of the dunes. The bottom half of the dune boomed just fine. We were glad to get that problem solved, but then the wind picked up. You can get really sandblasted when you’re standing on top of the dune and thirty-mile-an-hour wind pelts you with particles. I had to wash my hair three times to get the sand out, and I’m still trying to get it out of my ears.

Here are some of my more artistic shots for the day:

On an unrelated note, Ben came back from Frosh Camp today — yay! Chaco and I have been a little lonely. It’s been pretty cool out, so I left the balcony door open last night to enjoy the breeze. Chaco likes the smells that waft in from outside, I guess, because when I came to bed last night I found him looking out from behind the curtains like this: