After skiing Louise on a bluebird day we managed to get through the road to Golden and skied there two days. The hill gets better every time I ski it, I feel like I’m just getting used to it. I even discovered a brand new run on the last descent of the day, I’d never bothered doing the little hike to get over to “Terminator” until then but, but boy oh boy it was certainly worthwhile, some seriously soft soft-pack at a pitch steep enough to fly but shallow and smooth enough to entertain the possibility of looking 3 or more turns down the hill while doing so.

We packed in 4 trips down Whitewall in the course of 2 days (it only opened at 2 pm the first day). Another 4 runs in Feuz bowl (accessed from Redemption-Ridge) and I think that’s pretty much all the excuse I need to tell you that my thighs are a bit sore (but not sorry!). The highlights were… Paula’s Line (on Whitewall), Horsefly (lower down Redemption Ridge) and Terminator (furthest south exit from Bowl-Over). Our second day grand total elevation was 35 152 feet. That’s the same as skiing Everest 1.21 times!

I could reiterate my frustration with Hiebert but I’ll refrain from that for the time being, but if I’m back in class on Monday and still don’t have any information on that course, the proverbial shit will hit the proverbial fan.

So, I’m sitting in Golden after *the* sweetest two back to back ski days of my life. Kicking horse had something like 40 cm of snow on Tuesday night, the road from Louise through field was closed due to avalanches so we skied Louise on Wednesday with the hope of still getting through to Golden in the afternoon when the road opened.

Louise was great, I don’t want to estimate how much snow there was because I know I’m going to do it wrong. It was less than a foot and more than six inches. The Whitehorn chutes had a bit more, partly blown in, and I don’t think it had been open the previous day. We did a bit of cruising around at Larch and the six-pack before actually making it into the back bowls. (Have to do a bit of skiing with Mom, it is a family vacation afterall). Anyhow the important thing was that the Whitehorn chutes weren’t open yet and when we arrived atop the poma, the ski patrols lifted the rope. There was already a line up to get in so I wasn’t the very first person down the run but I was probably third. Check out the evidence!

I skied ER face for the first time in my life (It had always been a “permanently closed avalanche area”) and had some sweet powder runs down from the top of Olympic towards the six-pack. Meadowlark was also superb and was really a thigh burner both last run before lunch and last run of the day.

Quotes from PHYS 311 Statistical Physics Fall Semester 2006

• We are always interested in things that are of no interest.
• There is one plus a little bit, but now that little bit is really huge. (Why e^x doesn’t equal 1+x at large x)
• It’s difficult to visualize a billion dollars, but we hear about it all the time.
• If you think you life is a mess, just wait… unless a mess is your normal equilibrium state.
• The fact that we don’t understand 90% of quantum mechanics doesn’t really bother us because we have the means to calculate it anyways.
• My cat and I have 3 legs on average. Now, what have we learned about my cat or me? (noting that the average of the BE & FD distributions (Boltzmann distribution) is pretty much useless)
• Three is really close to two pi. We’re talking orders of magnitude!
• That’s the philosophy of it. Now let’s try to calculate it…. now we have a problem.
• Red eyes are not black bodies.
• If you ask a kid on the street if energy is continuous or quantized he will say “quantized, sir”.
• Let’s assume the cow is spherical and discuss the properties of the cow.
• I will be hiding some things under the rug to get Bose Einstein condensation…
• Well, “now” really means “for the last ten years”.
• We are in the world that we are in, so our mind has learned to think about the world in terms of things of our world – that is, waves and particles.

So I wasn’t completely out to lunch with my previous entry, Hiebert is still rewriting the record books for being the slowest marker on the face of the planet but Drs Dai and Gortel did get their grades onto beartracks today.

I’m a bit choked with my Stat Phys mark =( I guess I had pretty high expectations of myself after pulling out a 106% grade on the midterm and seeing how bad everyone else felt after the final exam. I guess I really did poorly on the “Ice in a Jar” problem, I only managed to do the easy first part and had to leave the bit with V / Vquantum out because I couldn’t remember. That can’t be the sole explanation for loosing so much ground to everyone else in the class so I must have really screwed up another problem that I’m unaware of.

I can’t really complain about missing a 4.0 from Complex calculus because my complete lack of interest in the teaching style and content did hinder my ability to show up for class on time and pay attention once there. I mean, I can evaluate any integral the guy wants to throw at me but when it comes down to stupid tricks and proofs I’m just a few steps behind. I certainly hope that the USRI feedback will step things up for future EnPhys. The other kids in the class seemed to be content with the garbage but I think that covering some real course content would have been a good idea.

I knew that the ridiculously high marks by everyone else in the class weren’t to my advantage. 1.5 marks off on the midterm, a sprinkling of half mark-deductions on homeworks and a single sign error on the final exam could all legitimately add up to an A- when the class average is a whopping 85% or higher. I’d like to hear how some of my friends did, if they’ve all got 4.0 and 4.3 then I’ll be pretty sad.

High class averages (MATH311) are certainly not my style of education but stinking hard courses (PHYS311) aren’t reaping me great grades either. I guess I’m best suited to trivial material (EE280 and EE338) with tricky exams, I certainly collected the trophies there!.

So, It’s three weeks since I wrote my optics test and I still don’t have a mark… Guess my emotion, you’re likely correct.

I’m also not completely happy with Gortel and Dai for not getting those marks done but I’ll admit Gortel had a big class where almost everyone wrote 2 full books. What’s going on up there in Edmonton? I mean I leave for a week and no-one in that city can manage to get any work done?