Condensed concepts

 I have recently been doing something that many of you are probably already doing thanks to online teaching in the pandemic: using PowerPoint to make a video recording of a slide presentation.  Particularly for online courses that are not live this can make a lecture more engaging. First, I will share a few helpful things I learned. To get the best quality video it is best not to use regular room lighting and the camera on your laptop or desktop monitor. It turns out, for reasons I still do not fully understand, that generally, the quality of the video from your phone is much better than from your laptop camera.  So I am using my phone with free Irium software to do the recording. I have the phone mounted on a tripod that includes a ten-inch LED ring light.  The picture quality really is a lot better. Now, I come to the weird, frustrating, and random problems that I am having. At first, ppt would not do video recording on my regular MacBook, but it would on my old MacBook, even though

About twenty-five years ago I became interested in how the Fermi surface of the metallic state of organic charge-transfer salts could be mapped out by measuring the interlayer resistance as a function of the direction of a large applied magnetic field. [ A nice review from 2004 is by Mark Kartsovnik]. Later this technique was used for a range of other metals including strontium ruthenate, iron pnictides, semiconductor heterostructures, and finally cuprates, mostly in the overdoped region. For the cuprates, it was discovered that one could not only map out the shape of the intralayer Fermi surface, but also anisotropies in the scattering rate and the interlayer hopping integral. Of particular interest was the finding that the overdoped cuprates were not simple Fermi liquids, as usually claimed, but more like anisotropic marginal Fermi liquids. It should be stressed that the Fermi surface information is extracted indirectly by comparing experimental curves of angle-dependence to calcula

Every scientist is a person. They have a unique personality and a unique life story. Their family, friends, education, hopes, romances, cultural background, past disappointments have shaped who they are today. This past has had a significant influence on their current motivation, fears, ability to work with others, confidence, sense of identity, and manner of communication. It is important that we grapple with all this complexity if we are to appreciate and respect others, and to help them be successful. Graduate students are not slaves, robots, or all the same. Graduate students are people. These complexities are too often overlooked. But we must engage them if we are to personally care for students and colleagues, and relate to them in a manner that helps them be successful. These issues were  brough t home to me recently reading the novel, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi . I thank my daughter for the gift, particularly as it was not the kind of book that I might normally have sou