Terahertz

Blogging’s been a little infrequent of late, and it’ll be at least a week before anything comes up regularly since on Wednesday I head to Edmonton for the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference – both to represent SFU Physics at the Graduate Studies fair and to support my overstressed girlfriend who’s been organizing this event for the past year.

So here’s some news (in no particular order or even semblance of relatedness other than that it all interests me):

• Obama is doing a better job defending our medicare system then most (but not all) Canadian politicians
• On the CFI and accountability issue, I had received an informal response from CFI Transnational a few weeks ago (essentially saying the system works so why fix it), but they have yet to release anything official. I’ll likely come back to this next week.
• In Malaysia, they’re going to cane a Muslim woman for drinking a beer. She’ll be the first woman in Malaysia to be caned for drinking under the Sharia Law there that only applies to Muslims (for now). It’s supposed to be a “ceremonial” caning as opposed to anything painful, but I still don’t think that cuts it. We don’t “ceremonially” spank children because it’s nearly as bad as actually spanking a child.
• I got a new Netbook, and it kicks ass. I also got an external DVD burner and used it to put Windows XP on my old netbook which I plan to give to my girlfriend (so she no longer has to lug around her 10 lb “laptop”). The funds for this were provided by the UofA ECE department for me having the top presentation of the 2009 EE 495 research project.



• If you’re interested in what my research career is shaping up to look like for the next couple years, and don’t want to wait for my inevitable posts that attempt to boil it down for easier consumption, you can try to get through this guy’s thesis [pdf] which somewhat relates to what I might be doing (I’m still not 100% sure since our lab’s not fully operational yet). Short form: measuring exotic micron-scale forces with Bose-Einstein Condensates.
• Finally, North Vancouver is considering an obscure piece of technology to make getting up the steep hills easier on bicycles. See the video below: