Gonna Fly Now

Well, it's begun. I've started to go semi-hardcore studying at night. I also find myself whistling parts of the Rocky soundtrack throughout the day. Though I am getting mentally pumped, not as much studying is going on as I'd like. I have bought extremely large index cards along with an extremely large box to hold these index cards. I plan on putting many a mathematical formula on these and drilling myself, but so far I've made two cards and not done any drilling.

We also recieved our part III topics today (for the uninformed the structure of the exam is that you give a mini-presentation about a predesignated topic to three brilliant and intimidating professors, and the remainder of the time is taken up by them asking you pretty much anything they want and you trying not to break out weeping). My question to talk about is: "In the standard model CP violation is encoded in the CKM matrix. What are the experimentally observed examples of CP violation? How are the experimental observations related to the theoretical parameterization?" It's nice because its a topic about which there is tons of literarture. On the flip side, this also means they could have hundreds of questions which I wouldn't have covered while studying. One thing I do know is my presentation with definitely include the mighty unitarity triangle! I've been punished during many a colloquia by having to see this ubiquitous 3 sided polygon and now others will feel my pain.

On another note, I've begun hanging out in the library. I've decided that the bathroom in the basement is pretty much the scariest place ever. There's no lighting, it's constantly dirty and everything is colored this odd seventies pastel. Also, its got lewd graffiti all over the walls of the stalls which leads one to question exactly what kind of MIT student still thinks its funny to draw, in magic marker, a large anthropmorphic penis with a smiley face.