I managed to snag food at local burger place Murderburger earlier this week. The city of Davis, known for its incessant fastidiousness and generally sticking its nose where it isn't wanted, mandated that the restaurant change its name years ago, so the owners simply reversed the first six letters forming Redrumburger. Of course, no one calls Murderburger by the artificially imposed name that is bares on its signs and legal documents; after eating there but once, I too now bear Murder in my heart.

A appreciate everyone who has helped keep me appraised of the Orioles acquisitions lately, as I've been a bit confined for time. They will certainly be a fun team to watch this coming year.

A quick list of pun-derived fantastical creatures (hopefully to be augmented later):
-Dungeoness Crab: An evil shellfish that lives beneath the darkest of castles
-Veracious Tiger: Huge, predatory cat that cannot tell a lie
-Argyledillo: An ugly, ugly beast that is hunted for its rare hide

I'm finally done with my work for the semester, and will soon be heading home to Virginia for Christmas. These last few days were incredibly busy, but really show that like any language, you can learn a TON about Physics if you immerse yourself in it and do virtually nothing else for an entire week. My Mechanics and Math Methods finals were pretty easy after gorging myself on information, and I also ran a review session for my Intro Physics students that basically involved me solving problems on a blackboard nonstop for two and a half hours. After this session my officemate said that I came into the office, "with a cloud of chalkdust billowing behind me." But what would a Physics marathon be without a climactic end? A finale for the ages? A test to end all tests? Today's villain provided this apt conclusion, and his name is Hsin-Hia Cheng:

Don't let that smile fool you. In the above picture, Professor Cheng is no doubt plotting the demise of the photographer who dared to capture him on film while at the same time calculating the spin precession of a graviton in a relativistic, time varying magnetic field in the frame of the simultaneous angular momentum and energy eigenstates of a n-dimensional quantum mechanical oscillator. You see, this man is brilliant and as such his lectures are fantastic, but his genius comes at a cost. They say that baseball great Ted Williams was a terrible hitting coach; he just couldn't understand why other players couldn't simply hit the ball. Similarly, Cheng has trouble understanding why his students can't immediately leap joyfully from answer to answer, shrugging off immense complexities and penetrating the very ineffable shrouds that baffled even the greatest minds in history. Anyway, Professor Cheng is my Quantum Mechanics professor (I shudder with a certain masochistic glee to report that he fill the same role next semester) and the reason he is today's villain is because he dropped a bomb of a final exam on us yesterday. The exam was handed out at 3:30 in the afternoon and he claimed that we would "easily" finish within 2 hours. I understood what was on the test, and yet I worked on it (without pause) until 2:00 in the morning. Most people gave up earlier, but some forged on through the night. One problem in particular was especially unbelievable. Let me put it this way; take another look at the blackboard behind the maniacal smirk of Cheng: just the answer (less the pages upon pages of derivation) to the first part of this problem would not fit on TWO such blackboards.