Jeremy flew back to Minneapolis to lobby in an actual lobby. He’s been discouraged the past few weeks because he’s “losing”. In MN, he’s being fought by both the Koch brothers from the right and the Sierra Club on the left. Unbelievable. Honestly. Anyways, he’s fighting the good fight and saving the world with Garchomp as his wing man.
Jeremy really, really wanted it to be a one day trip – catch the 7 am flight, home by 10 pm (for a three minute speech), but his grad advisor was winning that big prize at the APS meeting, which, this year, just happened to be in Minneapolis and on MONDAY night was the dinner celebration. I had to kind of nudge Jeremy to go. What are the chances, honestly? So he went and he was glad that he did.
The text was like – oh, my office mate has retired and spends his free time thinking about physics. LOL. And it’s pretty funny to chat with a bunch of folks who live Ising models so much. I love Ising models because I was literally failing all my graduate courses one after the other (like not even understanding what the Greek letters stood for, let alone how to manipulate them mathematically) – never ever feeling so dumb in my life – when I handed in my Ising model homework (the first problem set of my grad statistical mechanics class) which I worked on with Olga and we had to painfully step through some crazy unhappy programming for the Ising model and when we got it back, Zhen-Gang, complimented us on a job well done. I couldn’t believe it! So I love the Ising model too. But not too much. But I still love the ideal gas law better.
The small and mighty alumni group at dinner!
