More Paris

So there are just way too many things to talk about so I will try to be brief. We moved into our new living area, "Cite universitaire". The goal of this place is to house international students studying in Paris. Most of the major countries have a house. We live in the German house. The room is somewhat bare bones. We have to walk down the hallway to go to the bathroom and shower. I have never lived in dorm like this but it will not be that big a deal. Honestly, I hope to spend as little time as possible in the room. The cite universitaire campus is really nice. I have taken a lot of pictures of the different buildings. There is also a lot of open space for relaxing or playing sports.

Yesterday, we went to centre pompidou. I am not a big fan of modern art but it was fun to see. One trend that seemed new to me is that the modern art pieces included sound as well as visuals. One of my favorite pieces involved a bunch of mirrors hanging down from the wall and the way that they were situated allowed for you to see multiple images of yourself. I enjoyed reading some of the descriptions of the art work. One of the funniest was something along the lines of: this artist's trademark is to paint alternating white and colored stripes that are approximately 8.7 cm. Then the piece of art was just a wall painted in stripes. But I suppose if this guy can tell a good enough story to sell his art, good for him.

Another cool thing that I did was that I played some frisbee with french people at Cite. They were very nice to me and allowed me to play. They didn't speak very much english but we got along fine. They invited me to play with them again (they play every thursday evening).  In the near future, I hope to go around and talk to more people at Cite. The people there are especially friendly.

Another interesting thing is that Thursday was a holiday so most French people take Friday off as well. There are not that many people in the lab and most of the eateries in the area where I work were closed.

Anyways, onto research:

I feel a bit intimidated by my project because I feel that there has been a lot of work done on it already. However, I know that isn't the correct attitude so I will continue to read more papers. Even if I don't get any results, I think that I will learn how to make progress on a difficult problem. For now, I am playing around with matlab because I want to use some simulated data.   I prefer using mathematica but knowing how to use matlab would be a good skill for me to have. I have spent most of the day wrestling with matlab. At the moment, my goal is to write matlab code that allows me to convert simulated reflectivity data into phase data. I can compare this phase data with simulated phase data. So far, my results are not that good but that is not much of a surprise.