Being hungover is like winning the lottery, but they pay you in regret

So, it's about time I get back to writing on the little ol' blog.

Well, as many people know, it was my birthday yesterday. I'm officially in my mid-twenties, which is a scary thought actually. However, referring to a certain episode of Mission Hill, "You should have started to get your life figured out by your mid-twenties," I feel that I'm definitely getting there.

So, I treated myself to une petite vacance in Nice this past weekend. The French Riviera is absolutely amazing, I really enjoyed it. No, I did not go to any museums or historical places. Hell, I didn't even go to Cannes or Monaco. What I did do? I sat my ass on the beach, drank Ricard, and swam in the beautiful ocean. Perfect blue, absolutely amazing. Swimming in the ocean feels so utterly natural, I'm sure it has something to do with evolution. I felt very cleansed afterwards, like my problems and impurities were washed out to sea. If it was only for a weekend, it was exactly what I needed. Just forget everything in my usual life, and go to a new life. On Saturday I sat on a beach with fellow backpackers and we drank wine and played drinking games. It's funny how drinking games are universal. It was also nice chatting with an American guy (pictured) who I could have what felt like a normal conversation with. I haven't been able to discuss the Michael Vick, the social/economic situation in the US, or perspectives on Europeans with anyone in awhile.

I also acted very...North American. Yes, you should buy your white linen clothes in Nice, and get a proper summer haircut (even if it's the end of summer dammit).

So I had a very interesting conversation on the way home from work today. My office mate and I take the train everyday, and he is petrochemical engineer from one of the top oil and gas engineering schools in the world (Delph University in the Netherlands). So after talking about everything geophysics and oil, we got on the topic of migration. For those of you who don't know, probably everyone, migration is the process we actually use to image the layers of the earth in their "proper" location. Everything up until then is to get rid of artifacts and the physical problems of acquiring the data (like the fact the sound takes longer to reach recievers further away, how the cables in the ocean are affected by waves, or how dynamite actually makes the ground "roll"). What migration does is consider the sound wavefield that is associated with the sound and take into account the reflectors structure (whether they are at an angle or not), and put them in the proper place. But in a generalized sense, the algorithms we use are applicable to any wavefield. So if you think about it, they are doing the same things your glasses are doing. The rays of light hit the wrong parts of your retina, and the glasses adjust them to the right position.

What we both realized, and I found super interesting, is the applicability to other means of wavefields. Imagine a line of people, eyes closed and each with one ear plugged. Someone stands perpendicular to them, and yells. How the hell do they figure out where this person is? Each person by themselves cannot figure out, because they only hear a sound at a particular time. So, if they all calculate when they hear the sound, compare them, then they can figure out where the yeller is. However, as we all know, amplitude (how loud something is) is also a function of distance. The further away you are, the more quiet a sound will appear to be, so the people could just record how loud the sound was for them. So the wavefield has 2 properties you could migrate with! Based upon time (which is isomorphic/similar to what I do at work) or they could each tell how loud the sound is! Friggin cool if you ask me! I'll have to ask at work now if how we take into account of the amplitude of events in relation to them, as it could damn well be useful as a complementary method of migration or interpretation.

Working in a corporate world is turning out to be pretty interesting, but foreign. I had to go home early on my birthday because I had a big client meeting the morning after. But that was kind of cool in itself, actually meeting with someone and figuring out what was the nature of the problems we in encounter. It isn't just some abstract thing on the computer I work with, but a record of a history of an event with real physical properties. It doesn't sound like a big revelation, but to me it was.

So yeah, there I go. Hopefully I'll run into more interesting stuff soon here to write about. I hope everything is well for everyone.

Joshy Poshy

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Now playing: Nine Inch Nails - Hyperpower!