(July 2, 2008)
It really was time to update this page! All semester long I've had up a picture of a snowfall we had late in January... This one, instead, shows what the empty lots of Fayetteville looked like in late June, which has been unusually rainy this year.
One of the things that have kept me pretty busy has been a collaboration with the experimental quantum optics group of Min Xiao, down the hallway. We got a paper published in Physical Review Letters earlier this year, and recently we believe we have seen lasing without inversion in the same system.
I have also finally learned how to use gnuplot, as this picture testifies:
I've also been reading a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh, or, as my family affectionately puts it, "all those Buddha books". Currently I go back and forth between The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching and Old Path, White Clouds, a biography of the Buddha. With all this, a fair amount of repetition is unavoidable, but Hanh is such a nice, sensible person, that it does not matter (it may even be good practice) to hear him say the same things over and over.
Musically, I have enjoyed two Roddy Frame solo albums, Western Skies and Surf. I probably like the first one better, but they are both quite good. (By the way, his fan web site is up again, after a brief but frustrating absence.) I also continue to patronize former guitar players for progressive rock bands. Steve Hackett's To watch the storms has lots of nice tracks and a few rather obnoxious ones. The signal to noise ratio is better (to my taste) in Anthony Phillips's albums, of which I figure I'm still missing at least six important ones. The latest one I got, Private Parts and Pieces VIII: New England is pretty uniformly good.
Rain washed conversations, born from winter blues
Sprung from situations seen from somewhere new
August burned ecstatic, Autumn coming down
Tiny twists of magic, turning the world around
Roddy Frame, "Turning the World Around", Surf (2002)