Written prelim

I've gotten the grades from two of my committee members. Both passed me. I made some pretty egregious mistakes, mostly due to my poor communication skills (at least that's what my wife tells me).

When describing Matthiessen's rule, I said that the deviatory components came from the resistivity due to interaction of the dislocations and the phonons, and that for low dislocation densities, and moderate temperatures that electrons and phonons don't interact. I'm sure that 99% of people reading this (including anyone in my family) has no idea what I just said, but I'll let you know that the last five words are patently false. I felt like a moron, but I really meant to say that the electron-phonon and electron-dislocation components do not interact. It's not a fine distinction, its the difference between a good assumption in most cases and being wrong. Anyhow, I still passed and thats something.

Strangely, my last post was titled "this process is hell", very similar to "the thousand thicknesses of hell" used to describe the Exum ridge route by Glenn Exum. I didn't find this out until after, but as I'm planning to make this climb in August looks like I've scheduled two trips to hell in one calendar year.

I leave you with this: