Christmas is tomorrow

It feels like Halloween is today and Christmas is tomorrow. And then already close to Christmas Eve we should be prepared for New Year's Eve.

Hamburgers and popcorn for Christmas trees.

Looking at a calendar helped me to get the events in a more sensibly timed way. But even today there were already more officers around then usual: Some of them were even riding horses. The cause of this increase in surveillance is Halloween and it is accompanied by a huge fence around the graduate housing structure, including highly limited parking and a non-visitor-policy (nobody else then the residents are allowed to stay overnight). Post will be delayed during this time. This is all part of keeping everybody save during the Halloween weekend as we were told. On the Sunday morning after Halloween there'll be a voluntary cleaning and if you belong to the first fifty people joining in you get a free "halloClean" shirt! :-)

And don't forget to buy Christmas presents! There's already a lot of Christmas tree stuff out, but maybe that's a continuous business ;)

Heroes

On Tuesday I presented the research from my Bachelor's thesis and everything worked well! (After the projector decided against giving the presentation a strong yellow touch...)

During preparation time for the talk I didn't go rowing so I had to get rid of all my chocolate-I-can-make-the-talk-motivation-calories in some other way, which turned out to be indoor-soccer in the evening. It's really important to register until a certain date if you want to play during a certain session, be on a sports club or the like and this Tuesday was the last possible date. I got there and it was absolutely great - and exhausting (I haven't played soccer for quite a few years).

Right now, I don't have a soccer styled image, but Santa Barbara in the morning.

I often thought that baseball, basketball, hockey etc. are more popular in the US, but around here, soccer is a huge deal. The UCSB men soccer team is very successful which catalyzes this effect.

The match on Tuesday was "just" intra-mural and for no greater competition. The teams name is "Soccer Heroes" which caused the post title.
However, there's a quote for girls and if you drop below three girls on the field, your team has lost. Only three girls were left at half time, so we played during the entire match... But without us, we'd have lost ;-) (and by the way: we won!)

Sports clearance

To be allowed to participate in club sports on campus everybody has to pass an physician's examination. I had got my appointment today and I (tada!) passed. (No worries, you're not asked for the Latin names of your forearm ;)) But I had to do several stretches and move my hands and my head in various directions. In some way that looked so funny, that I actually started laughing (and I was so glad that the physician laughed as well!).

Health Center Website.

But, what's in general different: The clearance is covered by the insurance every student has to have around here (about 2000 $ / year!). You can book an appointment online and get an e-mail and a text message reminder a day / an hour before your appointment starts. That's very useful because an missed appointment will cost you about 50$.
Once you've arrived on time, you check in 15 minutes early and you wait for this very exact time until you're called into a room, any examination or whatever is done, and you usually don't need the time your appointment is supposed to last (e.g. today I was done after 10 out of 15 minutes). In Germany I experienced a waiting time of up to an hour or even longer, even if I had a scheduled appointment..."German efficiency" ;-)

Physics is amazing!

And again I realized how wonderful physics is. In condensed matter theory we talked about graphene and the different band structures which develop, how we can describe a one-dimensional layer and a two-dimensional one. Well, the 2d-model is the homework and you get a nice four-band-structure plot :-)

Upper and lower electron bands (in momentum space) in graphene, touching at an infinitesimally small point.

Yes, what am I talking about... You can imagine a band for an electron as the orbit around an atom where the electron is approximately located. Electrons have got very special properties and two electrons with exactly the same properties should not be at the same place (Pauli's principle), for example, so you have to be careful with the calculation. Anyway, there's a point where the band structure of the upper layer of graphene touches the lower one, and that's what people call the Dirac fermion. Thus, with some tricks you can get an electron hopping to the other layer :-) That's cool and you can calculate it!

Boat house reward

"You're crazy!"
"I know, that's right!"

People think I'm crazy when I tell them about the time commitment and the actual practice times in rowing, that's Monday to Friday 06:15-07:45 am. Today's Saturday and we met again at 06:15 am to go to the boat house which is at Cachuma Lake where I'd been hiking before! Also, parts of the drinking water for Santa Barbara come from there. There are quite a few boats, e.g. the tips of some of them here:

All the names are either connected with a person affiliated with rowing or to some story or both. We didn't go rowing today, but there'll be more Saturday practice, yess! (To be honest, my muscles have been sore for nearly two weeks now; thus, the boat house trip was a reward and less exhausting. But professional rowers get sore muscles as well, there's now way around it ;))

Gone with the lightning

The sky yesterday was slightly cloudy. In the early evening the school's soccer team started their training just next to the apartment complex as usual. But then... there was this tremendous, never-heard-before sound of thunder! It developed into one of the loudest thunderstorms I ever stayed in. The soccer people were tough until the rain was so heavy that the field was turned into a slum hole and the lightning got close. Did I say rain? There was even hail around! After about half an hour everything it was over.

But just imagine! A strong thunderstorm here, in paradise! In Southern California! It didn't happen for years, I was told.

During the storm the lights went off for about five seconds - I was so glad that they just went on again. But when I got up early in the morning (for rowing ;)) there was no electricity and we started training in the dark. Even at work at about 8 am, the computers etc. didn't work. Fortunately, this was a shut-down on purpose so all cables were fixed, and there was an emergency supply in between, but this all happened "just" because there was a short thunderstorm!

A not trivial matter

I've worked for about a month on the same image processing problem. And I feel that's a very long time. Of course, most people take about 5 years to do their PhD, but one month for a few images...

 

 The outline we want to detect from a fluorescent image.

 

... and then my supervisor talked to the experts in image processing on campus. And if you want to find a circle in an image, that would be easy, they said, but our shape would be "not trivial" which is great!!! What a relief that I am not stuck on adding one to one! Apparently, even entire PhD theses consist of image processing programs and there's a lot of software just for image processing.

In brief, my actual problem: There's some slightly noisy data, so if you see the image with your eyes, you think, hey, that's easy, the outline of this cute sea urchin is here, here and there, looking like the bisection of an apple. And then the reproducibility knocked on the door accompanied by the time you need to process quite a few images and they are friends of the common ghost called objectivity and you had to write a program.

The challenging point is the varying intensity of the image. In the middle part it gets nearly lost, but the outer part is bright and clear. By thresholding you get an image which only contains the outline, but the inside is relevant as well. So you adjust the threshold, get the inner part and lose the outline to noise... yay. And so on ;) But now it's solved!!

Where the image comes from? Actin is stained with a fluorescent dye and we want to observe the actin activity of sea urchin embryos during cell division :) But that's worth another post, sorry! ;)