Rumney Report

I headed up to Rumney with Dunbar, Keller, their associated padres, and some of the newer members of our club yesterday. It was my first time back to Rumney since last season and it was a gorgeous day. I wasn't climbing that well, but I did find I was mentally really focused, which has been a problem for me. Instead of wasting time being scared, I was quite calm and thinking about the climbing. I tried my first 12 at Waimea, the ultra-classic Technosurfing (12b). It's no joke (obviously). There's a big dynamic move off a sidepull and a very low foot to a crazy move where you have your hands matched on this slightly slopey rail. Then you have to heel hook above your head and make these powerful moves on these little crimpers, slopers, and one really big pocket. It's a little heady to be doing all these moves with a foot above your head, to say the least. I also tried to onsight Goldbug (10d) at Main Cliff, and blew it when I got the wrong hand on a clipping hold. But I was still pretty happy about that. I'm generally not a very good onsight climber, and Rumney is notorious for very beta-intensive climbs. Everyone else seemed to have a good time as well. Dunbar got up Flying Hawaiian (11b). Karen on-sighted Junco (8+). Lauren onsighted Lonesome Dove (10a) and took some impressive whippers on Poly Purebred (10b). Rikka managed to do the crux on that same climb, which was pretty impressive. And Keller literally fell on the last move on China Beach (14b). I heard there were other impressive things going on, but that's all I remember. I'm taking a week off to rest and let my sore shoulder fix itself. I'm trying the 3 weeks bouldering, 2 weeks endurance, 1 week rest cycle that Eric Horst says you should do. And since I'm also taking a break from cardio (good for me, but it's just too mentally gruelling for me to be a grad student, train for climbing, *and* do cardio all year round), I can relax a little this week.

I've been teaching myself all about the product operator formalism for NMR spectroscopy. It's quite cool, but very complicated. But beyond being complicated, they're really difficult to get a good physical intuition for, as they are mostly abstract symbols, rather than moving objects I can picture easily. Of course, on some level, you have to regard these quantum mechanical equations as magical widgets which let you predict things. Certainly, I can competently manipulate the operators and maybe even speak sensibly about which part of the density matrix they're from and what they mean. But as for a deep understanding? I think that's going to have to wait. I need to review some of the "basics" first: lots of linear algebra, some differential equations, and lots of quantum mechanics. At this point, my poor math skills are just holding me back. I just got myself this book by Tannor which *says* it's an introduction to quantum mechanics, but really isn't. It takes a really interesting approach to quantum mechanics. Instead of going through the usual rigmarole of "define the potential, write the Hamiltonian, find and sketch the eigenfunctions," it talks about time-dependent phenomena, which are easily the most interesting bits of quantum mechanics. It talks about femtosecond laser pulses, coherent control, and all sorts of other goodies I know basically nothing about. But I want to post-doc in non-linear spectroscopy, so it's got the double bonus of being super interesting *and* relevant to my life. How many people can say *that*? There sure are a lot of horrible, mean things about being a grad student in this department, but at the end of the day, I'm learning cutting edge science in an ultra-modern laboratory. There's people all around me doing cool stuff. Most of them are smarter than me. What more could you possibly ask for in life?