The day started pretty abrupt as my roommate’s doomsday alarm went off waking me up in the process. I was nevertheless glad with that since I had to go earlier today anyways to fix the chairs in the lecture room with my teammates. The lecture was very interesting as we went over gravitational waves and the devices used to detect them. The mere idea that we could even detect something as minuscule as gravitational waves is pretty absurd to me. Soon after the lecture which ended early (yay), we headed towards lunch, some a little quicker than others (Gwanpil and Devan).
After some time had passed, the TA talk had commenced starting off strong with Evan. His presentation started off strong with thought provoking questions like why a man regretted his decision to glue glass pieces on a string, which was obviously because he was in a kite flying competition where it was illegal to do. Isa seemed to be the only one with common sense as she was the only one with the correct answer. We started off by going over several interesting and very real fish like the loch ness monster, the loveland frog and many more eventually ranking them. We did the same thing for other types of cryptic beings with interesting attributes/personalities. The talk ended with a task to create our own cryptic monsters, there were a lot of great ideas like the ominous Bathil, and THE Cube but Pierre’s creature, “the average programmer” prevailed victorious.
The second TA talk was a little more content heavy where we learned about Maura’s research where she used the x-ray telescope to make observations on a potential black hole, but it ended off with a nice fun card game that I had never played before. At first I thought the card game made no sense, but after a few games I ended up enjoying it and even winning a few rounds.
The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, mostly consisting of working on the PSET as well as our final report. I’m genuinely content with all the work I’ve accomplished at this program and I’m excited to finish this report and wrap up all the hard work I’ve done into one final complete project.
-Sahil
