Okay it occurs to me that I haven’t let your shamboteers know what’s up for a long time. Leaving you with the impression that I am having no fun here. So basically I’ll give you an update but not before starting with a complete non sequitur:

I can’t believe the Supreme Court did not side with the Alaskan Student who was suspended due to the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” poster at an OFF-CAMPUS event. (Wikipedia) Granted the poster was sophomoric, and I would understand if they held the banner at a school assembly. I guess the event was school-sponsored, but it was a public place. I love Justice Clarence Thomas’ argument for siding against free speech, “In light of the history of American public education, it cannot seriously be suggested that First Amendment ‘freedom of speech’ encompasses a student’s right to speak in public schools.” The sad thing is though this statement is unfortunately accurate, this wasn’t even at school! Some people are speculating any website accessible from school could be interpreted as ‘school-sanctioned’. Therefore if you put anything on a blog or social networking site that the school disagrees with you could be suspended. Man. I’m glad I’m high schoolers don’t have important opinions. Otherwise we could be seriously stunting the ability for high schoolers to critically think about this world. Although perhaps critically thinking is no longer the goal of No Child Left Behind Schools. It doesn’t help to critically analyze the questions on multiple choice tests. Justice Stevens had it right when he asked what the court would do if the banner was ‘Wine Sips 4 Jesus’. Honestly I think that banner is a million times more clever. Of course administrators wouldn’t touch that due to the Eucharist even though underage drinking is a serious problem.

Sorry that turned into a rant. This is why I think teenagers should only allowed to have opinions given to them. I plan on installing shock electrodes into my brood to prevent them from dissenting. THE CRUMLEYS ARE A PROUD PEOPLE! Life update after the jump!

Well I will say that State College has gotten a lot better. I finally got my bike and there are miles and miles of bike paths for me to ride on. It’s a lot of fun and it’s nice to clear my head after being in a stuffy lab all day. We have been working on a broken sputtering machine for almost 3 weeks now. I really don’t know how to work it and there is a ton of down time, and I have basically been filling that time reading books and the comics I received in various care packages. But today I was kindof sick of not doing anything productive because I basically have been half-assing this internship. Just really screwing and unscrewing stuff they tell me to. So I told myself that I was just going to read the manuals cause I have no effin clue how to work on fixing a power supply (what my mentor was doing). So I sat down and read almost all of the power supply manual and everything the 3 books we had on thin book deposition had to say about DC Magnetron sputtering. Anyways, we knew that the fact that we had a nickel target could be a issue, but I found the theory that actually showed why Magnetron makes a difference, and a few numbers that show the difference between magnetron and regular sputtering. It turns out that if you have a magnetron and want to work at 1 kW you only need 300 V to get like around 3.3 amps, whereas with regular you need 10kVs to get like .1 amp. Anyways, not to get all sciencey, but my theory is the Nickel(which is magnetic) is shielding the magnetic field of the magnetron and basically forcing our target to act as a regular diode, the voltages and currents we are getting agree with this hypothesis. So I showed my mentor all the passages that would point to this idea in the books and he was really impressed. He like told everyone in the building I figured it out and started calling it Patrick’s law. It’s kindof stupid, but it still managed to make my day. Let’s hope it was right, otherwise, my face will be red.

IN NON-NERD NEWS:

Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is quite possibly the best book I have ever read. Or at least the most enjoyable of them. I cannot recommend it enough to all of you. A masterpiece. Just make sure you read it slow because I read the first 400 pages in a day and then I really started to hate it. But I took a week off and went back and finished it. It is one of those books where you really can enjoy every sentence. If you don’t get yourself a copy I know what I am getting you guys for your birthday. Today I went back and re-read the first chapter, and Murakami definitely knew what he was doing. Thinking about how good it is makes me regret writing this crappy post. Please SOMEONE read it so I can talk to them about it.

Also I bought 2 Cds: The Frames’ The Cost and The Polyphonic Spree’s The Fragile Army. Both are highly recommended. I want to buy the new White Stripes but I am still afraid. Someone tell me if it is worth it!

Wow this was a long post, but I guess that’s what happens when it rains.