State of the Student address

Hot ("lukewarm" to be fair) on the heels of Salvador's post follows another State of the Student address.

The second year of my Master's here at the astronomical institute began with intensive PhD application preparations, into the nitty-gritty of which I'd rather not go prior to finding out their effect. Suffice to say, I'm excitedly looking forward to what the future has in store.

At present, I'm working on numerical modeling of the structure of protoplanetary disks, supervised by professor Carsten Dominik and Dr Michiel Min. These disks, which consist mainly of gaseous hydrogen and of roughly one percent "dust" (complex molecules sticking together to form little grains) are found around many young stars. At left, we display an example of such a star[1], obscured by the dust in its disk, which we happen to see edge-on. Our Solar System would fit comfortably into the central region of this disk.

Over a surprisingly short time of a few to ten million years, protoplanetary disks give birth to planets - other solar systems! - and the remaining matter dissipates. Generally speaking, studying the formation and characteristics of planetary systems around all stars improves our understanding of our own origins, placing the Solar System and especially the Earth in their proper context, and furthermore is vital to contemplations of and searches for other life in the Universe.

(New readers might be interested in an earlier post concerning the state of our understanding of planet formation, and another one describing an exciting discovery of an Earth-like-but-not-quite planet around an other star.)

To round this off, a general and important lesson I've picked up during the past semester: the role of good programming and computational limitations in modulating the advancement of our understanding of the Universe is huge. Not only does one have to know one's Universe (i.e. observations) and one's physics, one also has to know one's programming languages, and to be really good and make the most of one's abilities, one has to understand the limitations of computing that technology places on one (and one's peers). It's all ones and zeros.

References:
[1] Hubble Space Telescope image of a protoplanetary disk in the Orion nebula, (c) NASA/ESA/STScI

With apologies to our readers

Yes, it's been quite a very long while since Mihkel or I posted here in our Amsterdam blog, and I'm sure I speak for us both when I take this opportunity to apologize to our readers (all three of them). Instead of explaining what's been keeping me so busy since May and just making this a "sorry for not posting, but so it goes" post, I thought I might as well actually give some information to my reader(s) about what I'm doing at the moment.

As far as work goes (and yes, I get to call it work instead of school: I'm receiving a monthly scholarship for this, which means some people, though possibly crazy people, think it's worth paying me to do what I do; so there you have it), these have been particularly exciting months. At the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) I've been working with Prof. Jeroen Groenendijk on a rather revolutionary approach to the meaning of natural language questions. 'Revolutionary', of course, doesn't entail 'correct', but that's beside the point. Right now, he and I (and everyone we've talked to about it) are very excited, and think it's a truly promising line of research. As soon as things start being published, I'll stop being so vague and actually post something in concrete about it. Besides questions, I've been reading on and thinking about alternative semantics, the quite heterogeneous set of semantic theories that argue that natural language disjunction (the operator or in a sentence like "John or Mary have the tickets" and, more interesting, "Julia may be in Paris or in London") cannot be analyzed as the Boolean join operator, as classical semantics would have it and has indeed had it. Again, I may post something more on that subject in the near future, naturally in very light doses, so as to not cause indigestion. The tricky thing in talking about one's research is presenting it in simple enough terms that it becomes understandable, but not in such a trivial way that it comes out as something utterly uninteresting. Some other day, in any event.

Other than that (and overlooking, for today, my academic excursions to the realms of natural language syntax and, believe it or not, phonology), I'm working on my PhD applications. 'Tis a sinuous path, I know, but one very many fine people have taken before me, and are taking at the same time as I am, and will take in the years to come.

Since there's no such thing as a GRE Subject Exam for linguistics, PhD applications in this field consist essentially of a writing sample, which is what I'm working on. In actuality, I'm working on a number of writing samples, in different fields of linguistics, and then I suppose I'll choose one or two to send in. Maybe I'll just send them all, I don't know yet. As for which universities I'm applying to, it's probably wiser for me to only disclose that information after this academic year's PhD applications saison is over. I can however say that I'll be applying to some six linguistics programs in the US and to Amsterdam.

As a matter of fact, Mihkel is of course also applying to a number of schools this year, though on terms somewhat different from mine. But that's for him to write about (and I certainly hope he will).


Hopefully, this text will prove to be an efficacious icebreaker. If so, and counting on the pages of inspirational writing Mihkel still has to offer, I can already predict that, in a few weeks, Masters in Amsterdam will take its rightful place amongst the most influential blogs in the world.