Starbucks

OK everybody. To be fair, I do have to tell you the one good thing about starbucks. The people who do marketing for the company are very good at what they do. They really bring in the customers. So if you want to be a brainless lemming and victim of mass marketing; if you want to pay twice the appropriate cost for a coffee drink with no coffee in it; or if it pleases you to have some financial preditors behind big desks trick you into defining your social status and mental state in terms of a low-quality pretentious overpriced drink; then by all means, support Starbucks!

I did overhear one conversation that I really enjoyed about coffee and Starbucks.

I was sitting in Gold Bar working and a bunch of Catholic High School students came in. One student ordered a nice strong coffee drink, then the other one said something really profound: "I'm not a coffee person. I'm a Starbucks person." That comment pretty muched summed up the difference between Starbucks and a real coffee shop for me. I must also say that the guy who says this is the only person I've ever met who has the right to go to Starbucks unashamed, because he actually realizes what he's doing. He is not being tricked by Starbucks. He just likes it, and that's fine.

Gold Bar

Gold Bar Espresso is among the more important institutions in Tempe. H*** in all of Maricopa County. The reasons are a several:

They have jazz on Sunday night.

They have Allann Brothers Coffee.

They serve the best house coffee in the city.

They are very nice people.

They have free wireless.

They are not obnixious like Starbucks.

If you're ever in the Phoenix area, check them out at the northeast corner of Southern and McClintock in Tempe.

Confusing

Okay everyone, this posting will be a bit heavier than some; sorry it it's over the top.

I'm supposed to be doing a project wherein I measure the elastic moduli of simple fluids by simulation--we are particularly interested in the shear modulus. In essence, it is simple. If I put a shearing force on an object, it will push back. For small perturbances, the restoring force (the pushing back) is proportional to how much I deform the solid.

dF/A = -G du/l,

where dF is a differential amount of force, G is called the shear modulus, and du is a differential amount of "strain" (deformation). A is the area over which the force is exerted (ie, we normalize the force with the area) and l is the length between two points in the object, relative to which I measure the distortion (the strain). If you're already lost and you actually care about this, just comment and I'll offer you the explanation specially designed for people with no physical intuition (please realize when I say things like that I don't mean them). For those of you who know some physics, this is precisely analagous to the harmonic oscillator: F = -k x. We just normalize it to make it a property of the substance, rather than the system and/or situation.

So far so good, but I'm reading this paper, and they define the strain tensor as:

u,ij = (1/2)[(du,i/dx,j) + (du,j/dx,i)],

where u,i is the ith component of the displacement and x,i is the ith coordinate of the displacement. It seems like this derivative would always be either 1 or 0.

This had me confused for quite some time, untill I figured out what they meant by those derivatives. Well here's what it is. As I move along coordinate x,j, AFTER the deformation, I will observe that the amount the object is displaced from its former conformation changes as I move through the object. If that last sentence didn't make sense, don't feel bad. It's very hard to explain in words. I finally understood when my friend Dan found a nice article at Wikipedia that actually had pictures to explain this stuff. If you want to understand, go there. It turns out that this derivative is equal to the strain for small perturbations (it's a first order expansion).

I just wanted to mention this, since this work is actually a major part of my life.

A good development

In my life, there has been a good development. Everyone has figured out that I like wine. This means that whenever Christmas or my birthday rolls around, I get wine and wine-related gifts. For my birthday this year, I received a gift certificate for some wine, a bottle of a nice pinot noir, and a very nice book loaded with information about wine. Thank you givers of these gifts; you know who you are.

Once I get the bottles from the gift certificate, I'll have enough white wine to survive the Phoenix summer. I also now have a couple of lighter reds (pinot noir), for those days when I still realize it's way to hot for cab or zin, but I just don't want white wine. My brother's recent alertness and generousity also helped me to acquire a couple of very nice whites, at prices boardering on burglary.

Yes, I will have some relief on those days when it is 115 outside and I can't leave town.