Skip to main content

Goodbyes

It's hard saying goodbye. A good friend of mine is leaving Duke to return to Paris. He was fed up with the physics program here, and after securing a position in France, decided to return home. It's unfortunate that the department here could not do more to help, as he was genuinely bright; unfortunately he was suffering from depression, probably induced by the stresses of the PhD program as well as the dull boring city of Durham.

In general how does one say goodbye? You don't really, especially if you're good friends. You just end up saying hello less often. At least that's my take.

Unfortunately, more on goodbyes, it's goodbye to Duke's NCAA hopes for this year. We were outplayed by LSU. Sure the refs were really not entirely fair (from our point of view of course), but they closed our top scorer down. It was a fun run, and I enjoyed watching them play, especially since I thought they played such great team basketball, but it's over.

Such a somber posting. I'll balance it with this fun pic...street sculpture in some city in China. I mean, I love sculpture. Just a little more taste...especially if it's so in public? In a museum anything goes..on the street..c'mon!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Leadership

Check out the parody of Memoirs of a Geisha by Bobby Lee. Hilarious. Here's stuff on America's best leaders . Speaking of leadership, what makes a great leader? Do you have to be the smartest on the team? Or the best coordinator? It must really depend on the organization and job, but in general all leaders have to share similar traits. For example, I saw a brilliant basketball game today, Duke vs. Wake Forest. It's clear that Duke's leader is JJ Redick. That's because he is the most effective scorer, but also I think his will to win leads the team to achieve. Of course he is putting in perhaps the most work by scoring and playing nearly the whole 40 minutes. But he is defintely not the best defender on the team. So a leader needs to certainly be very skilled, but not necessarily the best at everything. The vision and determination is what makes a leader. Not everyone is a natural born leader. Some are better than others, by talent and nature. But I think leadership...
Post a Comment
Read more

Yes, Taiwan Can!

I saw this image somewhere, and I thought it was nice. I hope we can spread it around! I apologize for not giving full credit, but if it's yours, let me know!
Post a Comment
Read more

Of Mice and Men

Here's an interesting story, mice sing ! Check out the sound clip at the bottom of the page. Apparently during courtship male mice sing. This was discovered when researchers let male mice sniff on female or male mice urine, and though the original intention was to see how the male brain differentiates the pheromones, they noticed a rather complex ultrasound pattern erupted when hetero (whether there are homo mice is a question) male mice smelled female pheromones. This places mice in the same league as some other complex singing beings such as birds and dolphins! This is interesting for many reasons, but one I can think of is since mice are relatively easy to manipulate genetically, and the fact that they utilize complicated vocal patterns to court mates means perhaps mice have some simple language abilities. So we may be able to understand how language and vocal abilities develop and play such a crucial role (obviously as in birds better singers get to procreate!) in animals. We a...
Post a Comment
Read more