Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Pseudonymous Naming Schemes

Since I'm not blogging under my actual name, I've decided I need a cute naming scheme for everything (because I can!).

Undergrad institution: Since GEARS has dibs on SnowU, I'll call mine SnowTech. Unless he's in Alaska, or SnowU actually is SnowTech, I'm pretty sure we got more snow...

Grad institution: I'm now at a very large R1 university, henceforth to be known as GiantU

Significant Other: I'll be marrying Mr. ME this summer. He's a mechanical engineer at a large manufacturing company (we'll call them Employer) with an obsession for cars, Doctor Who and and our kitty. The kitty, by the way, is named Kitten. We attempted to give him an actual name, but pretty much failed.

Periodic Boundary Conditions: While my undergraduate program was very much based in classical metallurgy, my current research is in atomistic computational simulations. In order to make the system seem larger, periodic boundary conditions are critical, where if an atom tries to move out of the simulation box, it will reappear on the opposite face, making our solid effectively infinite (assuming you start with a decent sized box). I'll attempt to come up with how that's a metaphor for life later.

... and now back to reading papers.  Woo.

4 comments:

  1. I suspect it's very easy for people to figure out who I am. I'm mainly waiting until i'm officially on staff at SnowU to decided (haven't made up my mind).

    So it would indeed be interesting to see if SnowU=SnowTech or if SnowU > SnowTech :p

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  2. To be fair, the only places that get more snow than SnowTech are in Alaska, or the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They're at 148" on the year so far, which puts them at a below-average year.

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  3. Is it a fair assumption that you know where I'm going and I know where you went to UG?

    :-D

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  4. Pretty much: there's only so many schools that get that much snow and are that proud of it. Buy a snow blower, or get a 4-wheeler and plow now. Your back will thank you.

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