# It Snows!

It was December 1st today. And finally, we got a good dump of snow here in Ithaca. I always enjoy the first big snowdump of the year, even if it is wet slushy snow. It just changes the scenery completely, and never fails to put a smile on my face. It’s supposed to snow pretty much continuously for the next couple of days, too, with temperatures hovering just above freezing at most. Hopefully there’ll be enough snow to go skiing on sooner rather than later!

Otherwise, today was spent reading, sleeping, working, going to a meeting, going to another meeting, working, and reading again, in that order. Another productive day, work-wise, although I’ve managed to confuse myself as to the effective field theory aspect of what I’m working on (and in particular, the meaning of the cutoff scales). That’s ok though, that’s what I have an advisor for, right? I want to have a little more work finished before meeting with Eanna tomorrow though; I’ve got some index gymnastics to sort out.

For those of you who are interested, I have an action functional that looks something like the following:

$\int d^4 x \sqrt{-g} f(\phi) (\nabla^\mu \nabla^\nu \phi) (\nabla_\mu \nabla_\nu \phi)$

I need to integrate by parts and play with the indices to get it into the form of $(\square \phi)^2$, $\square \phi (\nabla \phi)^2$, and $(\nabla \phi)^4$. I’m fairly sure that a Riemann tensor is going to pop out of the index manipulations though when I commute the covariant derivatives, and although I suspect that it will vanish under one of the antisymmetries of the Riemann tensor, I should prove that to myself. Anyway – enough physics!

You lucky people get two posts today. Honestly, I don’t know how some people manage to make multiple posts a day – that would just eat up far too much time. I’ve been pretty good about posting once a day (give or take a few hours) for about a month and a half now. Indeed, November boasts 33 posts. Not bad for a month with only 30 days in it, no? We’ll see how long I can keep it up, I guess.

One of the funny things about writing a blog like this is I really have no idea who is reading what I write. One of my brothers comments every now and again, but other than that I really have no way of telling who’s peeking into my (admittedly quite boring) ramblings. WordPress does however come with functionality to look at how often your blog is being read and a few other bits and pieces, and there’s some funny stuff that occurs. For example, I tend to average around 10 hits a day. Except for two days, which are really anomalous – 23/11 I had 64, and 1/12 I had 62. I have no idea why.

The other interesting stat that I get comes from what search terms people use to find this blog. There are some interesting ones. Apparently somebody typed in “the physics of massage” in google. I know I made a post with a title vaguely linking the two, but still, that’s a little weird. “dodgy jolyon” has also been used. Go on, if that was you, confess. A few people have found here by asking for “australian in america blog” or some variation thereof, and a fair number of people have found us here by using “dodgy fysix”, which I guess is a good thing. I don’t think there are all that many other dodgy fysixists around.

Ok, enough of my ranting for now. Hope you’re enjoying the snow if it’s snowing for you; else, enjoy the sun!

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### 3 Responses to It Snows!

1. Jolyon says:

On the bright side, “dodgy jolyon” does bring up my blog as the first hit 😉

2. niroz says:

There’s a website that makes use of the wordpress API to randomly show blog posts as they update. If you make the first sentence or two interesting enough you might have gotten them to click though onto your website. You should be able to see the referrer links and at least the day of the hit, so it isn’t very hard to figure out.

3. Jolyon says:

Nup, the only referrer links I’ve ever gotten have been from facebook, from when people actually look at my profile 😉