Thermoelectric and Heat Flow Phenomena in Mesoscopic Systems...DONE.

Super duper crazy happy news!

JASON FINISHED WRITING HIS DISSERTATION. His thesis. His PhD paper. His ultimate Physics final.

Five years of post-grad schooling; countless nights stuck in his windowless laboratory; 215 pages of cold, hard physics.

So maybe this is a bit of preemptive celebration, because there are a few more hoops he has to jump through before he gets to call himself "Dr. Matthews." He has to have a Board of Really Smart People with Foreign Accents and Beards read it over this week, and then he has his "Doctoral Defense" next Thursday. Whoo!

Although he's been working his tail off on writing it all summer, these past two weeks were especially insaneinthemembrane. At first, he was averaging about 5 hours of sleep per night.

At that point he was completely nocturnal. He'd go lay down on the couch in the afternoon, and turn to me with pleading, bloodshot eyes. He'd beg, "April, no matter what I say, I want you to wake me up in THREE HOURS. No 'fifteen more minutes.' Do whatever you have to do... even ice-water. Get me up."

Sorry, buddy, there's no way I could throw ice-water on that.

I'd dutifully wake him up, and he'd open one sleepy eye with a look of desperate anguish. Then he'd lay down the Kryptonite in a cute, sleepy voice:

"Cuddle?"
"Sweetheart, you're supposed to get---"
"Just five minutes?"
"But--"
"I miss sleeping next to you."

aaaaaaand BAM I was in his arms, and he was instantly making happy little snoring sounds.

Oh, MERCY, our future offspring will get away with anything if they inherit those puppy eyes.

Soon, the five-hour sleep average turned into just two hours a night. I'd try to wake him up, and he'd sleep talk something about "anisotropic thermoelectrics in four-terminal ballistic junctions."

The last three days (or should I say day-nights), he really got in a crunch and enlisted me to proofread every. last. page. So I got to dig through THIS for missed apostrophe's and little typos.

(Bahaha I just had to torment all you grammar OCD-ers out there-- apostrophes!!^^ I feel like I need to go wash my hands or something now.)

Anyway, I got to dig through every last page--twice--for little things like this:

I wish you could've seen the look on his poor, sleep-deprived face while he tried to figure out why I was "writing in Russian."

For now, he sleeps all he wants. I no longer have to stress about my failings as a sleep Nazi. Then once he's caught up, it's Power-Point time! Go Jason, Go!


Want to read more about his research? I tried to sum it up in English-for-humans here.

I promise this isn't as bad as it sounds.

We broke our bed.

(I kind of wish it were as bad as it sounds, because that would be super impressive.)

My giant flirt of a husband picked up all of my 140+ lbs, flipped me in the air, and chucked me onto the bed. There was a deafening crack, a moment of wide-eyed silence, and then... nervous laughter. We took off the top mattress, and flipped the bed frame up onto its side:

Within an hour after moving the mattress to the living room, the naked bed frame was covered in Stuff.

Of course, this is to be expected according the The Law of Horizontal Surfaces, which states that "any horizontal surface in a 700-square-feet-or-less apartment must be covered in Stuff."

But moving our mattress to the living room has been the best part of this whole ordeal. Welcome to the Matthews-ers' (Monogamous) Harem -Style Bouncy Fun House! Who needs carpet when you can have foam-covered springs?!

Open the doors and windows, and curl up with a book. Come in through the door and bounce your way across the room. Giggle in the dark for an hour after you turn the lights off because it feels like a fifth-grade sleepover without parental supervision (I guess that's the kind of mentality that got us here in the first place).

Five Otter Pops says it'll stay there until August.

Matthewser Makeover

First of all, I want to thank everybody who's been wishing me a happy birthday! Between facebook and text messages, I feel like I'm in front of some sort of tennis ball launcher that's chucking waterballoons filled with loooove. Truly blown away.

So, THANK YOU, EVERYONE ♥ I'm a lucky lady to have you all.

Aaaand as promised, here's my little present to myself: the new Matthewsers page! Brought to you entirely by kind internet strangers who post HTML tutorials, and my (desperately naive) late night grit and determination:

(click to zoom)

...at least, that's what it should look like. Hopefully.

There were a few blooper reels-- for a while, I thought it would be a genius idea to draw cartoons of us on the sketchbook. After an hour or two of drawing, I got halfway done and decided STRONGLY against it:

(for the record, Jason requested to be upside down)

Can't. Do. It.

Why does it look cool on these guys and cheesy here? I don't know. But I can't bring myself to go through with it.

***

Here are a few tutorials I found especially easy and valuable:

How to make your post titles and widget titles a custom font.
How to make the top Blogger Navbar invisible until you hover over it.
How to make a custom browser icon (favicon).


And, for old times' sake, a screenshot of the original Matthewsers layout:

I'm sure the chalkboard will return again someday : )

A day in the life of the Hubster

Brace yourselves, amigos: I'm going to try to explain what Jason does all day here. And by all day, I mean in his laboratory 9AM-9PM, weekends included. PhD stands for "piled high and deep" for a reason.

So, what is his research here all about?

Short answer: I don't really know.

Long answer: I'll pretend like I know...

gracias, xkcd.com

Once upon a time, there was a field of study called thermoelectrics. We discovered that if you have a wire that's cold on one end, and hot on the other, it generates electricity!!

Okay, I lied. It's a little more than a wire.

This is very exciting.

Stick one end in the ocean, and put the other in the sun-- whammo. Charge your cellphone. Thanks, thermoelectrics.

However, Jason's professor decided this wasn't nearly complicated enough. So Dr. Professor thought to himself, "Hmm, what else is cool and mysterious that we can throw in here that might make it even cooler and mysteriouser?"


And the answer was: Quantum mechanics.

Here's QM in a nutshell: when things get tiny-- really, really, subatomically tiny--  their actions stop happening as specific events, and start existing as mere probabilities.

Huh?

Once things get really small, the certainty of their actions gets very vague. In other words, it sounds like God really needs to get a pair of glasses.

Jason's making really, really tiny thermoelectric "devices" to see if they work more efficiently than their big brothers. Here's a closeup of one of the pieces:

Take a look at a single hair on your arm. That's how wide each of those squares are.

I asked him what these pieces are used for:

"It's the interface between me (the large world) and the device (the small world). It's the rabbit hole."

Wheeeeee.


So... what does the device itself look like?

Here's one part of it. It's 200 TIMES SMALLER than one of the squares. Rabbit hole, indeed.

He says he uses this part "to play billiard balls with electrons." What this has to do with thermoelectrics, I have NO idea. But I'm impressed.



To make photographs like these, he goes into a "cleanroom"--because a speck of dust on these things could potentially cover it up completely!

I'm not allowed in there, but here are some webcam screenshots:

Beyond this, he tinkers with a lot of expensive-looking machinery and occasionally gets really excited about it, or really mad at it.

For example: "The *&^%$#! Needle." All I know about this needle is that when it points to a certain number on a dial, he can tell the computer to start recording his experiment and leave for the night. Alas, it's not that simple. It seems that as soon as it starts to steady around the right point, it jumps somewhere else. Leading to NIGHTLY email correspondences like the following:

(For those of you who don't know him so well: Jason is such a wholesome fella, he'd give Grapenuts a run for their money. Needless to say, he rarely swears. So this is really, really hilarious.) (Sorry, dear.)

That's a frowny-face puking in frustration. I laughed so hard that I drooled a little bit.

On the weekends, I get to go keep him company in his lab. I sit in The Wife Chair, abuse The Miraculous Instant Hot Chocolate Machine, and obnoxiously photograph him for your entertainment.

P.S. He made this for you guys!

Watch out, Sweden...

...I found a bike. Good ol' address-knowing, looks-like-Charlie-from-Lost neighbor let me in on this thing called Blocket (basically the Swedish version of Craiglist). I muddled my way through the website with Google online translation, and this cheap ad caught my eye:

Click here if you want to see what I was facing at that point. (And don't worry, those aren't in dollars!)

Well praise the Blocket gods (and the help of this website), it turns out the ad was posted by a dude in our same apartment complex! Jason & I met him at Willy's the next morning (of course Willy's, you guys know how I feel about that place). The bike only had one working tire, but we shelled out the couple dozen bucks and lugged it home.

Now, this is definitely not a titanium-framed speedster we have on our hands. It weighs the amount of a small car, and every surface has surrendered to the elements in brown, flakey rust. Google should have translated "Retro" as "completely oxidized."

At this point we had several name candidates:
Trusty Rusty. Iron Maiden. The Rusticator. And last, but not least... Ferrous Wheels. (We really crack ourselves up.)

Finally, Jason suggested "Rustito." Although there's nothing "-ito" about this thing, the name stuck to the bike just like all the magnets within its ten-foot radius.

I've had several concerned friends and family members ask me if I'm up to date on my Tetanus shots, just in case. Let me assure you: very few souls make it through Architorture school without a T-booster. Scale-model construction inevitably leads to the savory blend of 1) hallucinatory sleep-deprivation, 2) double-digit espresso shots, and 3) frantically-wielded exacto-knives.* (The university nurse will roll her eyes as she preps the needle and correctly guesses your major.)
*(Just kidding potential employers!!! I'm as punctual as a Nazi meter-maid and never, EVER abuse stimulants. You can also stop reading this blog now.)

Ahem... So having named the bike and confirmed it wasn't going to kill me, I needed to repair Rustito's back tire. The entire internet unanimously recommended (tell me how often that happens) that I'd best sell this bike to a museum rather than track down the needed part. I ignored this benevolent rationale and instead sent my dad a desperate plea for help an email, titled: "rare-foreign-bike-part scavenger hunt YAYYYYY!!!" ...Immediately after which I got an email from Jason, saying his friend had the valve piece I needed. Sorry, dad.

Riding around town, I'm discovering that this bike might not have much of an advantage over walking. If there's any sort of incline, I immediately break out in sweat trying to lug half my weight in iron up the... curb. If there's any sort of decline, the "pedal backward and pray"-style brakes fail against Rustito's massive momentum (p = m•v, my amigos, and there's a lot of 'm').

Those of you who know me (and my beloved car, Mrs. Sputtersworth), understand that all this only makes the bike more endearing to me. I'd check it as luggage on the way home, if only it were under the 50 lb. weight limit.

Here's Rustito in his home with the other bikes. Apparently they think he suffers from bike leprosy. Or they have a healthy fear of Tetanus.

Oh, Rustito. You and I will have many adventures together, during which I will grow the quadriceps of a Himalayan sherpa.