July 12th

Yesterday was 7/11 so the store Seven Eleven was giving out free 7.11 oz slurpees. Since Seven Eleven is only 2 blocks away, we all walked there and got our free slurpees. They were small but good anyway!

This past week we emailed the author of one of the papers we read because we had a question about what was in the paper. We got a prompt reply and attached to the email was a program the author had used and it was very neat! You could draw graphs and select the information you would like to know about the graph and it would tell you! One of the choices was Energy! Unfortunately it did not give all 4 kinds of energy we are working with but it is still very cool! Even though it didn’t give the energy for all 4 kinds we are studying, it does give pieces of information we could use to calculate 2 kinds of energy. Other than that it has been the same old same old. I have found some interesting patterns but the type of matrix that the patterns fit into, Toeplitz, are really tricky to work with and I have been trying to read up on them but unfortunately I haven’t gotten anywhere and no one else in the groups knows how to work with them either. I took a break from the confusing pattern I found and found a different one but I didn’t have any time on Friday to try to get information out of this pattern - I’m hoping I can in the next week or so. The main focus of this coming week will be to tie up the loose ends that we have and work on our presentation some more.

On Friday night most of us went to the casino. I had never been to a casino before so I was excited! It was nice because since it was my first time at this casino they gave me $10! Everyone got $10 free (by signing up for their casino players club) and one girl got $20 since it is her birthday month. We spent about 2.5 hours playing penny slots and had a good time. I left with $5.07, not great but considering that I walked in with $0 I was happy! And what would a carful of college girls do with free money on a warm summer night…go to McDonald’s for ice cream treats! Yum!

Yesterday was another party at a professor’s house. This time it was at my advisor’s house. He is from India and he made us some Indian food, it was good. In the past, when students have gone to his house for the party, they stay LATE-the record is 5am! It started at 3 pm and none of us wanted to stay that late. About half the group, including me, stayed until 12:45 and we could tell he was a bit disappointed that we didn’t stay later and everyone else left earlier. I played 2 games of Monopoly, catch phrase, SET, watched a movie and chatted. It was a fun day but by 12:45 I was getting sleepy.

Have a great week everyone!