Links
Undergraduate research opportunities
I participated in several very different research projects as an undergraduate. They were deeply meaningful in terms of helping me chart my career path. If you are an undergraduate and considering a career in science, it would be a great idea to get involved in research. This will help you see if a career in science is right for you. The first step is to see if there are any research opportunities at your school. At my undergraduate institution, the University of Washington, undergraduate research was heavily promoted and supported; chances are, it is at your institution, too. However, sometimes it's great to get away for a summer and go somewhere completely different to try out a research field. This is especially important if you go to a small school that doesn't have much of a research program. The following links will point you to some excellent summer research possibilities.
- National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program list: The National Science Foundation funds summer research programs in a large number of scientific fields. If you are accepted to one of the programs on the list, you will get a housing and living stipend and participate in some pretty cool research. I spent two summers doing research on the NSF's dime, one at UC San Diego learning about neutrinos and big bang nucleosynthesis, and one at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory learning about the X-ray properties of LINERs. The former lead to a poster presentation at a conference in Williamsburg, VA, and the latter resulted in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
- Caltech SURF: Caltech runs a massive summer program for undergraduates. While many of the undergraduates involved in this thing are also enrolled at Caltech, a number of students come from other institutions.
Astrophysics, Physics, and Computing
- arXiv preprint server
- ADS Seach: Search for astronomy, physics, math or geophysics articles.
- NCSA Cyperinfrastructure Tutor: The National Center for Supercomputing Applications has a set of very nice tutorials on a variety of advanced computing topics. The MPI tutorial is one of the best tutorials on the subject I have found.
- GNU make manual: Makefiles are a lifesaver if you have complicated, multi-file code. Learn how to write them here.
- Unix command help
- sed (Stream EDitor):A useful UNIX tool to edit files.
- awk: A text processor. Easy to use, practical for simple problems.
- Shell scripting: This link sends you to a tutorial on Linux shell scripting. Useful!
- rsync tutorial:rsync is a UNIX utility to copy files from one hard drive/computer to another. It can work over networks. The neat things about it include only copying over updates to files (and not entire files); preserving the directory structure; and preserving permissions. You can also use this to automatically back up your hard drive at specified frequencies.
- Particle Physics Glossary: If you really need to know what a barn is.
- Numerical Recipes in C online book (1992 version): Sure, the C code looks like someone who was dragged kicking and screaming from F77 wrote it. However, the algorithms in this book are extremely useful. This should be the first book you hit when trying to figure out how to solve a problem numerically.
- CUDA Training by nVidia: The future of scientific programming is graphics processing units. Thanks to your nerdy video gamer next door (or perhaps you should look in the mirror yourself), GPUs have gotten super fast at calculating certain problems. I myself have made a dumbed-down Monte Carlo program run about 6x faster on my unsophisticated laptop GPU than the nice CPU, and I am far from an expert. CUDA is an extension to the C language that allows you to make the CPU and GPU work together. Try it and be amazed.
- Fortran 90 tutorial: At some point in your physics career, probably as a grad student, you will encounter "legacy code" written in the monstrosity that is Fortran 77. You will think to yourself, "why would anyone use this ancient dinosaur of a language when modern languages suitable to scientific computing, such as C, exist?" And then you will find out that someone tried to introduce Fortran 77 die-hards to 21st-century programming, to such delights as pointers and dynamic memory allocation, by repackaging one of these useful modern languages and labeling it "Fortran 90". This is a vast improvement over F77. Although I myself will probably not make the switch from C to F90, I have come to appreciate some of the nice features of F90, such as the module format. F90 is to F77 as the iPod Touch is to phonographs: there is some sort of overarching theme that might let you call them both "music devices", but that is where the similarities end.
- Perl is awesome.
Miscellaneous Science-Related
News
Square One TV
Square One TV was a ca. 1990 show on public television with the purpose of teaching children math in a fun and memorable way. It was a well-done show. As evidence, I have linked some of the more memorable musical numbers from the show below:
- Change Your Point of View:The theme of this song bears an uncanny resemblance to what I do in my office all day. I especially like the part about "If it's a difficult problem, try and solve an easy one. Simpler but similar problems help you see just how it's done." Or "A graph makes things clearer."
- Mathematics of Love: This is my current favorite of all the SquareOne songs. In this song, we learn about Roman numerals from Cassius and with Tony and the Togas.
- Less Than Zero:A fight song for all the losers out there (or at least those people who are really bad at sports).
- Neighborhood Super Spy: All about alphanumeric codes. This was my favorite SquareOne song for a while when I was younger.
- 8% of My Love: A song about how some jerk can only give his girlfriend "8% of his love" because apparently his leather jacket occupies 18% of his heart. Would you date someone who valued an article of clothing above you? I think not.
- Angle Dance: Learn about acute and obtuse angles from this slightly disturbing faux-punk band.
- Triangle Song: An elevator-music description of equilateral, isosceles, and scalene triangles. Also, learn that all angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees.
- Nine Nine Nine: Learn some interesting facts about multiples of nine.
- Palindromes: The palindrome tango.
- Patterns: Weird Al's classic song about patterns. This was my first exposure to Weird Al and to polka music.
- A slightly creepy song about Archimedes
- One Billion is Big: Indeed it is.
- Fat Boys Burger Pattern: Defining sequences using hamburgers.
- Draw a Map: Make your own map based on verbal directions!
- Combo Jombo: Combinatorics! Not too complicated for elementary schoolers.
- Ghost of a Chance: Another song stuck in my head for the better part of two decades, this time about probability.
- Mathnet: Treasure in Monterey Bay: I think this is the only Mathnet series on YouTube, and one of the few you can get on DVD. Topics addressed in this particular series: buoyancy, ocean currents, and why you should not wear a tuxedo-themed wetsuit.
- Mathman tries to eat multiples of 6: A mathy version of PacMan. I knew about Mathman before I had ever heard of PacMan.
- Metric Electric Lover: Features arena rock and a boxing ring.
- Action at the Fraction Bar: Somewhat reminiscent of the bar scene in Star Wars.
Truly Miscellaneous
- Genealogy of the Peter (Pierre) family: This was a project originally started by my dad's second cousin David Peter to trace back our common ancestors. He traced back the Pierres to Luxembourg province, Belgium in the mid-18th century. The project and website are now maintained by Deanna Peters Denk.
- German-English Woerterbuch-Dictionary: Comes in handy when composing letters to the German half of the family.