Writing

The Technical Infrastructure team at Google Cloud recently came to our school with a question about the scale of its biggest competitor, Amazon Web Services…

Greenhouse gas emissions originating from wealthier nations are causing desertification that’s making land in the tropics infertile and, in some cases, outright unlivable.

I just started business school at Duke University two months ago, and it’s been amazing! I feel like I've already made lifelong friends, and there are lots…

Last summer, I moved into a cramped Airbnb in Pasadena with two roommates to work at Caltech's amazing Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) . I tinkered with an…

Hi there! Long time no see.

Saturday, June 30th 11:46 PM

It’s generally pretty hard to find analytical solutions for properties of complex crystal lattices—by complex, I mean really anything outside the scope of…

Happy new year! A month late, I know, but the thought is there. I've got t wo quick updates to start: First quick update: At the time of writing this, I…

The Ising model is an idealized statistical mechanics model of ferromagnetism—the general mechanism that explains how materials can become permanent…

Preface What makes rubber bands stretchy? It seems like a question with an obvious answer, but perhaps obvious in the vein of answers to questions like…

Write a short story based on those four keywords. Seriously (prompt suggested by a friend).

What is your favorite quote of all time? What gives it that status? Being satisfied with my response, I decided to ask her, “So what’s your favorite quote?”…

x = lambda d,r,R,theta: (R-r)*np.cos(theta) + d*np.cos(((R-r)/r)*theta) y = lambda d,r,R,theta: (R-r)*np.sin(theta) - d*np.sin(((R-r)/r)*theta) Let's set…

A Coarse Description of Physics Thermostatistics lies at the intersection of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Thermodynamics is the study of the…

Like every field of physics worth its salt , thermodynamics has, at its heart, some fundamental, unchanging principles dubbed “laws.” Thermodynamics has…

Introduction It can be argued with some vehemence that thermodynamics is just about the most boring field of study in all of physics. With all due respect…

[dropcap]T[/dropcap] here’s a well-supported theory in psychology called “decision fatigue,” which predicts that your decision-making ability goes down as…

First, a quick life update: for the past two weeks, I've been working as an intern for the Chemical and Biophysical Instrumentation Center at Yale. This…

A lot of social media platforms have a bad tendency to give out your personal data to advertisers. Luckily, they’re usually kind enough to give you some of…

[dropcap]Lots[/dropcap] of English words have more than one distinct definition. You probably already know these words as homonyms, but we’re going to be…

I finished finals today, and I’m pretty glad; it’s been a long, grueling spring semester and summer should prove one hell of a reward this time around.

[caption id="attachment_805" align="alignright" width="209"] *Chomsky’s linguistics ideas and philosophy deserve textbook-sized analyses in their own right…

Note: This is a follow-up to my post on the Madelung constant (it's for NaCl). If you don't know what that is yet, take a look at it here . I wrote the…

What’s the best word ending for maximizing the number of single letters that could go before it? I made a list. So far it looks like -at is the winner here,…

Movies and Role Models I saw Fargo the other day (now one of my all-time favorites), and while the movie was full of enduring moments, one scene in…

If you’ve done any physics work before, you might have noticed that the formulas tend to include a lot of constants : the speed of light, Planck’s constant,…

I remember watching a video a while back that poked fun at how uncomfortable people were wi th the idea of a machine having control over their immediate…