Smuggled Food

It's been another fairly uneventful week in Oxford. To spice things up a bit, last night I broke out my box of jello. The Brits sell jello as a brick of superconcentrated gel that is lacking in all of the delicious artificial flavoring I crave. Luckily, over Christmas my momma gave me a box full of real Jello, which I smuggled into the UK. My East Coast friends think I'm weird since they don't understand the brilliant concept of Jello salads, but I'm sure all of the other Midwesterners are jealous.



On the academic front, I've been reading some tensor calculus lately. It sort of makes me angry that I didn't even have to study it at Tech. It's pretty sad that I was 23 years old before I realized that tensors would allow one to just write down all of those handy div, grad, curl relations in different coordinate systems. Why were Christoffel symbols not included in Core somewhere? Tech's obviously become too easy. I'm also trying to read a little more Condensed Matter Field Theory before I start up research (up until this point I've just been pretty free to read books without doing research). Technically I'm supposed to start working on a project around April, but I'm visiting with a few people this week to throw around ideas.

I still need to get out and do a little more traveling this term. I am hoping to visit Green's windmill in Nottingham (yes, this is the Green of Green's Theorem, Green's Functions, etc. fame). Apparently he was a miller who studied math(s) on his own and didn't enter Cambridge as an undergrad until he was 40 years old. I think I may also take a short trip to Cambridge next weekend.