physicsphddiary

[physicsphddiary]

2024 Week 9

UGhdf

I went to a conference recently. It was in New Orleans. A long journey on two planes, I had to be at the airport at 4am... I got to present a poster on my paper I'm writing currently, and I think it went well. I met a lot of people whom I only knew from their names on papers I've read. I'm trying to write that paper now. Tomorrow a strike possibly starts. My shift is at 9am :/. I kind of hope that a strike is avoided because it's kind of a pain.

I tried to stick to eating local food in New Orleans, but I'm afraid to say I didn't really like it all that much. Jambalaya was good... I found everything else kind of beige and too heavy. I missed vegetables. I really liked the beer though, we went to this tap room that specialised in sour beers and I think it's worth visiting just for that it was so nice (Urban South, there is one in Houston too).

First year PhD students need to do a qualifying exam. I need to schedule mine soon. I'm currently practising for it with some derivations and reading. I need to think of a good plan for my project and I think I have it, I need to do some exploratory maths to check some things but I guess that can be part of the project.

I'm really slacking on Japanese study and it's upsetting me. I've gotten so rusty and I can't really just read stuff anymore. I'm trying to get back into it but I just can't find the motivation for it. I think I'm going to sign up for some kind of class if I can find one. There's an anime convention here later. I'm going in a cosplay. I think I wrote about it before, but I'm finally finished with that. It's Testament from GG Strive. I think that I did a good job and I'm excited to go :3

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2024 Week 5

I'm currently on the train to go see a friend. This is the furthest away from downtown that I've been since I go here.

I've finished my poster for the conference. I'm making a presentation now for the student seminar series. My flight for the conference is at 6am which is pretty dire.

I bought a new keyboard because mine was annoying me, I also got some nice keycaps for it.

I've been enjoying messing with smaller simulations trying to make pretty pictures for the presentations. I'll post one later when I can get on my pc

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2024 Week 2

Hello,

Belated holiday update. I was recently ill and had to move my surgery so I'm annoyed about that.

Christmas was alright. I kind of regret going back to my parents' I don't think I will do that next year. It's a bit stressful, I missed it here immediately, jetlag was brutal, I got sick as soon as I landed and as soon as I returned, etc etc. The coffee machine I got was cool. I brought a lot of things back from the UK, but then got concerned about some of the food so threw it away after only eating a bit.

I'm a bit annoyed that I am ill because I'm very busy. I think it's going okay but I feel very stupid sometimes. Got a poster to make for a conference, a presentation to make for later, need to start writing properly.

I've gotten some cards that I had left at my parents' graded. They haven't come back yet but I'm hopeful. They are doing alright considering I got them when I was 10. Perhaps one of them (the most valuable one :( ) is a bit worse then the rest.

I'm going to sleep now because I'm still ill.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023 Week 50

I think that putting my work notes into weekly pages has helped a lot with keeping it consistent. They are quite nice now.

The paper derived from my Master's thesis was just published (13th). I'm not the first author because my supervisor took over after I was too busy moving. Still, it's weird to see something that's like 70-80% stuff I wrote over a two week mad rush at the end of my degree be in a journal. I guess I can call myself a scientist now (though perhaps would like to leave that until I have a first author paper aha).

I'm going home on Wednesday, so today will probably be the last day I do any work. I think I'm wrapped up though. I've planned out my paper, got every figure that I want, I just need to write it now. I have a meeting with my supervisor on Tuesday to let them know what I'm going to do and make sure I've got a complete story, but I think I've got something nice about the behaviour of fronts due to instabilities.

I suppose while writing I have to think about what to do next. I've got a couple things I'm thinking about, but will likely wait until after my conference in February to hear what people have to say. I still need to apply for a funding thing for that. I have until April. I still need to prepare a poster and presentation.

Anyway, if I can get this paper properly drafted by around late January I think I'll be on quite a good pace for my degree, that's a paper and a conference before I've even qualified and officially become a PhD candidate. That happens in April or so too, I have to assemble a committee by the end of January (did I mention this before?). I've already got one member, my second one is someone who is joining the department next year and is probably the closest to what I do right now.

Here's a nice (unlabelled) plot that I think contains the lead of my paper, that the flow around a strong enough front behaves as a trapped inertial wave forced by an initial instability. It's not entirely a realistic setup but it's a response to a paper from someone else that used the same setup, and I'm trying to explain what's going on in a more lucid way (they didn't simulate for long enough to capture this behaviour). I want to look at more realistic setups of the same thing later, that's probably the way I want to go. It would be cool to simulate the evolution all the way from large to small scales, and I can use this tool I spent a while thinking about in like August/September to do it. I could also try writing my own simulation code that does these two-scale simulations. (I don't really know how to explain what it is that I think is possible to do, and I also don't know whether it's even a useful thing.) That would be a lot of coding though and I'd have to get a lot better at debugging than I am now (not very).

I got some locally roasted coffee to take home yesterday. Hopefully it's not too long after it was roasted (I think it was the 5th). I hope I'm done with presents now. I just want to sit in my room all weekend.

I'll try to update while I'm at home.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023 Week 49

I got my wisdom teeth removed on Tuesday, so most of this week is a write-off. The top ones were simple but the bottom had to be broken apart and removed. It was a bit stressful, the sound of it. I was all sweaty after them aha.

I've been making plots mostly with the aim of showing that the front is symmetrically unstable and that this instability is important. This one is pretty suggestive. The big green peak shows that there is an instability at short times that removes energy from the vertical shear of the down-front flow. This is exactly the behaviour we would expect for SI.

Here is the rate of change of the secondary circulation (pink line) and the terms that contribute to it (blue, yellow, green). The blue line contains all the turbulence terms, and coincides with the shear in the previous photo. If you really look you see that the blue line preceeds the pink for the first positive peak, but the other few peak in the pink first. I'm wanting to explain this as follows. The role of turbulence is to kick off the secondary circulation only, then afterwards it just provides a friction. I'm hoping to show this with a simplified simulation, where I just take the turbulence as a forcing then have a constant drag.

Anyway, that's all I have. I'm going to clean up some things over the next week or so.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

Update because I suck

Why haven't I written anything? IDK. I want to start doing this again so I will try once more. I've started organising my research notes into weekly journals rather than daily (Obsidian is so good); I will try to summarise the week every Friday.

Today I will just provide an update to things.

Research is going okay. I think right now I've got enough to write a paper. Above is a video of the fronts (it's very high-resolution). I think I've explained what it's showing before, the black lines are the temperature contours, the blue and orange lines are the stream-function, they show the flow direction (and distance between the lines show flow speed) in the z-x plane. The heatmap is the vertical vorticity, for an average here that's just the change in the x direction of the along front (y direction) flow.

A shitty edit in paint of a diagram from Nature just to show the directions. The video is an average over the y direction of an "ideal" filament. We are interested in the mechanisms by which the filament evolves, particularly what the evolution of the horizontal gradient of temperature that defines it looks like. It's important for the resulting vertical transport of heat, momentum and chemicals, etc. The ocean components of full climate models (i.e. the whole Earth) are reaching horizontal resolutions of about 10km (largely thanks to the GPU), which is the typical size of these structures, so they represent the "biggest thing that the models can't model" and good parametrisations for them are important.

I will explain more in my update tomorrow, but I think I've reached the end of this line of attack that I'm doing right now, and hopefully can put together a draft paper before the year ends. Next I want to work on more realistic simulations than the kind of ideal stuff that I do.

I'm going to a conference in February, presenting a poster. It's exciting but I'm very nervous of course.

For me myself life is going well I think. I've got a new bike because the old one was a bit temporary. I still have it and keep it in my office, perhaps for emergencies. I got some kind of award recently. A whole $5k. Was pretty nice. I saved most of it but I just bought a new Surface Pro because mine was from 2017 and was the cheapest model. It was nice just to splurge on a computer I've never done that.

Unfortunately I had to also buy a new phone recently because mine (also from 2017, a release OnePlus 3t) kicked it. I got a Pixel 6a. I was very happy but then Black Friday happened and it became $200 off (I paid $500) so I feel bad lol.

I had some BANGING sushi last week. I went the first time because it was a free meal due to a department thing, and then immediately changed plans with someone to go to the restaurant instead two days later; we were gonna get sushi, but at a cheaper place (dw I paid). It was sooo good yum. First time I went I got a roll (and loads of takoyaki and alcohol because it was free), but with the friend we each got this special nigiri set. HOW do they do it. Like you know it's just raw salmon or whatever but it just tastes so good. Power of freshness I guess.

I'm going back to the UK over Christmas. I'm excited. I didn't go last year so it's been 1 year 3 months and 7 days since I last had a Greggs sausage roll (shocking). I bought some bottles on Aliexpress and hopefully they get here on time, I want to fill them with maple syrup and give them out to people I see. I'm staying in London for a day to see some friends then going home. It's going to be the unhealthiest two weeks of my life I'm gonna eat and drink so much. I really miss making cocktails. I can't really do it here because I just can't justify buying all the stuff, I never have friends over and my roommate doesn't drink. Looking forward to seeing my uni friends again, it's been a long time.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023/08/15 - Tuesday

I've been writing a report for what I've done this year. Not much it seems... It's a pain to write. I kind of like writing papers but my least favourite thing by far is creating and arranging the figures. I don't know what the next steps for me are. I spent the last month or so working on a wave-mean flow decomposition method that only kinda works right now.

Next year I am mentoring some undergraduates in this directed reading program the department does. I've had to change the assigned students a bit because one of mine originally was someone interested in climate modelling and I don't do that. I moved them around a bit so now I have one person who wants to do like fundamental fluid mechanics and a couple of people who would like to do it but they also have seismology listed and I know just enough of the theory of that to give them something that is useful I think. No seismology researchers signed up for the mentoring aha.

I have to get two of my wisdom teeth out. Pain.

I just bought a rice cooker and not to sound like a white woman who visited Thailand on a spiritual retreat but this has changed my life. I don't know how I didn't own one until now. I use it everyday. I'm making sushi today.

I included a video of my simulation right now. It's the vertical relative vorticity in my filament over time. The black lines are contours of the buoyancy (density) and the orange and teal lines are contours of the secondary circulation streamfunction (the flow goes clockwise along the teal ones and anticlockwise along the orange ones). Eagle-eyed readers will notice that the units for vorticity on the right are wrong, should be /f. I didn't notice until it was made... a new one is on my todo list...

The filament kind of falls apart at later times (I posted an image a while ago about it I think) due to instabilities. That's expected but I'm going to run one that's 2d (no along-filament direction) now, just to see what happens when it can't fall apart like that. I did do this before but I did it wrong lol.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023/7/7 - Friday

I was sooo busy last week due to having to make a presentation for someone at another uni. I'm a terrible speaker I hope I get better at it.

I've been thinking of trying that decomposition method again. It didn't really work last time but I'm going to try it a different way here. I've been messing around with it today.

I did a lot of reading this week. A later goal is to look for evidence for/against self-organised criticality in this system. I've been reading some books about how this is done and the history of it.

The "criticality" refers to a system being near a critical point, like water that is at boiling temperature. This has a few interesting properties, for instance if you perturb the system then the response to the perturbation affects the whole system, there's no well-defined length or time scale. The self-organisation just means that this state is reached without having to tune the system externally (like if you didn't have to keep the temperature at 100°C in the water example) the system just sort of does it itself.

A motivation for this being here is that if it is then it's simpler to find quantities like energy dissipation, which is typically very bad in climate models for these sorts of scales.

The state of this topic is really interesting. There is a super strong bias in papers towards it being present in whatever system they are writing about. I think just because it's a very nice thing to want to happen. I've seen this in papers from people in this department. It's quite an extraordinary claim and people don't seem to bring forward the necessary standard of evidence. I have an idea of what to do for mine but it's likely not going to be conclusive either.

My friends have started a Minecraft server and it's all I think about now. Trying my hardest to actually do work today before going home and playing Minecraft for twelve hours.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023/06/26 - Monday

Late night, I need to stop doing this.

Pretty tired today after I put all the packaging for my bike into garbage bags. I had to spend hours cutting it up.

I didn't do that much work, just started some simulations. I've got to organise things for the meetings on Friday, first with my group then with someone from another university. It's terrifying.

Things are coming along though, I want to try a couple methods for initialising, which is what the external meeting is about.

Been a bit worried about my weight. I think I need to do some proper exercise. Hopefully my new bike helps. The previous one was single speed so you couldn't pedal at the fastest speed. This one I find myself pedalling more, it goes much faster too.

The replacement controller is coming for the old one. I need to make up my mind about what to do with it. I could sell it.

Speaking of broken things my phone buttons are not working. I've put on screen buttons for now. This phone is from 2017 and I've had to replace a few things but I don't think I can replace these buttons. Luckily I thought to bring a backup from home, I've spent far too much money recently to justify buying a new phone.

If I did it would be a flip phone though I'm getting kind of sick of smartphones. I've stopped taking my phone into the department with me which is good for concentration but means I might miss important calls. The only thing I need on my phone is whatsapp and some feature phones have that.

A lot to say today, I'm just avoiding going to sleep...

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023/06/22 - Thursday

I went to the department on my new bike today it was cool very fast.

I was trying to fix the error my simulations had. I think it's sorted now, hopefully I can run them all tomorrow. I need to do one of them 512 times so I need to use GNU parallel for it I think. I need to read some more about the energetics of the fluid instabilities that are pertinent to my project. I feel like I don't know very much at all and I'm struggling because of it.

I've got an appointment tomorrow and I think they don't bill my insurance directly so I need to figure out how to make a claim. Annoying. I already have so much money that I buy things with then get reimbursed it's so stressful.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023/06/21 - Wednesday

There's a bit of an error in my simulations idk why. I'm going to spend today trying to fix it. Afterwards I need to do some maths.It feels like I do less and less work every day.

The first pass of TA appointments have gone out for next year and I have the exact same, which is dissappointing. I wanted to do something more interesting than first year crap.

I'm sat at home waiting for my bike to be delivered.Hopefully I don't miss it. My previous one will get fixed I think but I'm going to just sell it; I can't deal with it breaking again. It's going to be nice to have a more proper bike. (it goes faster too).

When It arrives and I've set it up if it's not too late I'll go into the department. If it is I'll probably hang out in the public library nearby. It's newly built and it's actually quite nice.

I keep staying up really late and getting out of bed at like 11am, I really need to sort myself out.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023/06/19 - Monday

Since my bike is currently out of action I had to walk today. It was painful. I got milk and cookies on the way too and it was too much to carry it took an extra thirty minutes. This was after being out all day on Saturday so I was still a bit tired from that.

I worked on some processing for my data files. I needed to combine some in a certain way. Now that this works I've just got to make some plots tomorrow. Hopefully the simulations I ran today are doing okay, i just checked on them and they seem alright.

I started playing Cassette Beasts. It's a persona-pokemon kinda mix. First impressions are very good I like it a lot. I have it on switch though and there are some performance issues, hopefully the upcoming patch will fix them as they say. The default player name is very good indeed. I'm late writing this because I was engrossed in this damn game lol.

It looks cool

Cass

[physicsphddiary]

2023/06/18 - Sunday

gay ass

I kind of got swept away recently. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff both for the department (we recently had a big summer BBQ event) and for my work.

We’ve gone back and forth a bit trying to figure out what is causing some things in our simulations. My advisor thinks we have a result soon. idk..

It’s late right now. Will try to get back into this tomorrow.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023/03/15 - Wednesday

I keep thinking it’s Thursday. I’ve had a lot of stuff to do recently which is nice. I’m reading some stuff and trying to make nice plots/videos of simulations. I think that I’m starting to get the hang of what I’m doing.

This morning I had a blood test and just didn’t go lol. Stayed in bed. I have to reschedule. The cashier at a store said that they liked my voice which was nice. I don’t.

I’ve been really into cream cheese on bagels lately. Had a lot. It’s so good it’s just the perfect food item.

Almost finished with Octopath Traveller. I’ve started a new model and it’s taking a while but I’m really looking forward to finishing. I’ve spent so much money on bits for it aha.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023/03/08 - Wednesday

I just had a supervisor meeting today and it went well. I think I know what I’m doing now. Afterwards I opened the coffee hour and such then had a walk. It felt quite good I hadn’t really taken the opportunity to appreciate my surroundings yet. I got a crepe pan because I needed one.

My paper from earlier is pretty much done. I think it’s just been submitted for review. I don’t really want to have to answer any questions about it because I forgor

Stayed up late tonight doing some modelling for something I’m a bit late for. I gotta paint it tomorrow.

I didn’t really do any work after the meeting I just goofed off. I tidied my office instead here is a photo of my stuff.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023/03/03- Friday

Free of coursework for a while. I’m currently trying to recreate this instability in a paper for my supervisor. I’m not sure that it’s working too well. The paper has a strange initialisation method though, and mine doesn’t exactly copy it, I’ll give it a look later.

TA this morning. I quite like it, I like the students. I feel we are bonding over our shared experience of not really liking how the course is run that much. 

Afterwards I bought some supplies for an event later and replenished my stash of snacks in my office. I get a lot of cereal. I can’t eat it early in the morning because eating anything substantial then makes me a bit ill; but I find it’s a really good snack food for when you are just a bit hungry. Got some fruit snacks and sesame bars also. I wish there were more low sugar cereals here though. Coming from the UK which has had a bit of a war on sugar recently I’m scared I’m going to eat too much of it. I wish that low-sugar (not the disgusting artificially-sweetened) drinks were available too. I don’t drink soda except when I’m having some spirit mixed with it and I still feel that it’s too much sugar; and it ruins the flavour too.

I’ve started going to Tim Hortons instead of the Chinese bakery for Friday coffee hour. It’s less hassle for me and it’s the same price. Morale is boosted a lot too people love doughnuts. It’s very fun to walk in there and demand thirty of them aha.

Today’s coffee hour is going to be very good. There are three huge pizzas leftover from an event last night. I managed to save them by asking the caretaker staff, who likes me a lot because he likes the free coffee, to put them in the fridge in the locked kitchen when the event is over. Connections connections. Genuinely excited to see people’s reactions to three party pizzas and thirty doughnuts

There should have been a delivery today but I don’t know if there is.

Cassi

[physicsphddiary]

2023/02/27 - Monday

It was my birthday on the 23rd :) I didn't really do anything.

Last week was reading week and dispite that I didn't get any work done. I'm going to try to do some today but the cluster is down for maintenance. I really want to rewrite the code.

Got loads of doughtnuts on Friday for the coffee hour.

Cassi