Lehigh Physics REU Day 1

Hi all,
Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but finals happened. Now I have moved in to my dorm at Lehigh for the summer REU program. While I haven't actually met my adviser yet, I have found relevant offices, buildings, shops, etc. I also got an ID and met most of the other students in the program. It looks, oddly enough, like we have more women than men. Which is not good in terms of showering, but is good in terms of the future of physics (at least in my mind).
Anyway, I will actually get started tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow night I will describe my project (aka after I figure out what I'm doing I'll put it here so I don't forget the end goals).
I hope everyone out there is managing the summer job thing alright.

Consider Quebec

Having returned from l'Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec province in Canada and visited my friends at a couple of American schools, I have a few things to say about the education system. Primarily that I like Quebec's better.

That Whole Internet Thing

I got another notice from Academia.edu that someone was searching for me in Google. Now, I have no idea how they track these things, and I'm not interested in learning (yes, I bet all my compsci friends would leap at the chance to consider the problem), but it does mean I think I'd like to link up my various websites as much as possible. In other words, this post won't say much. But, in case you were interested:
I'm at Academia.edu. I'm also on Facebook.

First batch of scientific papers; Insulin Particle Formation

[This post will be edited as I read.]

So, I am going to try to work my way through the 4 papers I have been sent so far by my summer internship. Now, I should be writing essays so I can finish the term, but I'm not having any luck. At least this is more productive than watching tv.
I will give the abstract and journal for each of these papers (one here, then more posts), and then I will be adding definitions to terms that I had to look up, plus my summary of each part of the paper. These are my notes, so that I have a working base of knowledge when I read more papers in the future, but maybe they will be of use to someone.

Insulin Particle Formation in Supersaturated Aqueous Solutions of Poly(Ethylene Glycol)

Lev Bromberg, Julia Rashba-Step and Terrence Scott

Epic Therapeutics, Inc., Norwood, Massachusetts 02062

Biophysical Journal, Volume 89, Issue 5, 3424-3433, 1 November 2005

My Summer Plans and Advice on Your Summer Plans

Hi all.
I am very excited to be able to say that I have my summer plans set. I will be taking part in Lehigh's REU in physics. I will be working with Professor Gunton on modeling proteins self-assembling from solution. I know next to nothing about the topic, but I have a couple of Professor Gunton's recent papers, so I will read them and know slightly more soon.

Khan Academy

My father actually introduced me to this site, http://www.khanacademy.org/. It claims to be the beginning of an educational revolution (though maybe not in those words). There seem to be two goals, the first being to make education accessible to all people, and the second being to allow the possibility of "flipping the classroom". A good introduction talk is the video on their main page, Salman Khan talk at TED 2011 (from ted.com), which is also on youtube. 

Really awesome physics simulator

I was sent this link last summer, and the videos blew my mind. In case the link's not working for you, it goes to an article about Lagoa Multiphysics, a 3D graphics program. Now, I know next to nothing about how physics simulations are done for videos (video games, movies, and all that), but based on how complicated physics is for a two-body system, it blows my mind that people are able to get such realistic models for such complicated motions. I'd love to see the approximations used for all this stuff. Oh, and if you're the type who wants to do this kind of work, friends of mine at RPI have complained enough about programing the physics for a computer game that I'm pretty sure studying there would be a good first step.