Training Log Archive: AliC

Started with Tom, intercepted Ueli and John in Sellwood and decided to reverse the loop and run back the way I'd come with them.

Beautiful day one one of both John's and Lauren's last lunch runs. Lauren is moving on to work for Portland College of the Arts and John is joining the peace corps, taking off in June.

And did it! Gave my last lecture this morning. I had fun- deriving the mass-radius relationship for non-relativistic white dwarfs and the Chandrasekhar mass for relativistic white dwarfs. Learned enroute that the Lame-Emden equation of stellar structure is finicky to solve numerically. Mostly because the boundary conditions you'd like to use don't start in a good place for the typical way differential equation solvers work.

Oh, and then for the last 15 minute I brought up the 2nd law of thermo and the claim that it decides the arrow of time. Also fun stuff.

C • Team Giggles. Why not? 4

Riding with Suzy and Derek (both of biology). Gigantic stop on the way home, lots of laurels about. [Seniors earn their laurels by submitting their theses.]

Evening- talk on exoplanets by Debra Fischer, new thing I learned was about the Kepler-444 system, a 5 planet system around a very old (11.2 of Universe's ~13.6 Gyr) star. Interesting, because there weren't so many heavy elements yet (those get made by stars) in the early Universe.
NASA press release