Yeah, that was very funny, thanks. It sounded like Alex Doonsebury selected this college, and after a steady diet of ideal current sources and gedanken wankin' has just been tasked with making a real measurement. Ouch.
I remember taking a biology course as an undergrad; we had to dissect something and all I could discern was a blob of undifferentiated muck. My lab partner had a nice collection of little organs on his tray. I then proceeded to take all the old creature parts laying about the lab and build up my own new creature, at which point I realized I was really better suited to some kind of engineering than the life sciences. K. -----Original Message----- From: Stephen A. Lawrence [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, May 12, 2006 11:57 AM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Xss OrionWorks wrote: > This is for anyone who's ever struggled through a physics lab: > > http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html > > I love the graphic. Especially the line drawn through the data points. First-rate, front to back! I loved this quote: > This is how they treat undergrads around here: they give you broken > tools and then don't understand why you don't get any results. It was explained to me, back when I was in college, that the biggest barrier to a physics degree was the "junior physics lab", which one took in one's junior year. In that lab, one did things like demonstrate the Hall effect (non-trivial!), using nothing but outdated, obsolete, and/or broken equipment. The reason wasn't any lack of money (not at _that_ school). The reason, I was told, was that there were Too Many Physics Majors and Not Enough Physics Jobs. In consequence, the undergraduate physics program was made intentionally distasteful. And if, by some miracle, you got through the first two years without getting the message, you ran smack into the horrible h*** of the Junior Physics Lab, and if you got through _THAT_, then by golly you were *dedicated* and were eligible to be one of the chosen few. Me, personally, I wasn't, and I didn't... I gave it up as a bad deal halfway through the undergrad quantum course, which was awful. > > Regards, > Steven Vincent Johnson > www.OrionWorks.com > www.Zazzle.com/orionworks > >
