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NOTICE (June 18, 1995): This page is on hiatus until after my qualifying exam in September. Wish me luck. If you need me before then, I'm in the basement.

Currently: waiting for the dewar to cool down; working problems out of Jackson chapter 9; drinking department coffee, which is a crime against chemistry.

Contents

• Who I am
• What I'm working on (in plain words)
• My Geek Code
• Ten reasons Netscape 1.1 beats Mosaic
• Sights of the Web
• The Next Generation, ranked
• Java experiments

Who I am

My name is Eugene Gehring. I'm 27 and a second-year graduate student in experimental condensed matter physics at a Big Ten university, which I will leave unnamed so that my advisor doesn't find this page. I grew up in Ohio, went to a small college you haven't heard of, and wound up here because they had a group that does superconductors and a building with a basement that doesn't shake.

I put this page up in March 1995. As far as I can tell, it's one of the first home pages anybody in the department has made that isn't a course syllabus. My officemate Cheryl Alfaro says making a home page is what physicists do instead of their problem sets. She is not wrong, but she reads it anyway.

What I'm working on (in plain words)

A superconductor is a material that, below a certain temperature, carries electricity with no resistance at all. Zero. Not small, zero. The old superconductors had to be cooled with liquid helium to within a few degrees of absolute zero, which is expensive and annoying. In 1986 and 1987 people found ceramics that superconduct at much higher temperatures. The one I work with, yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO to its friends), superconducts at about 90 kelvin, which is warmer than liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen is cheap. That is why everybody got so excited.

Our group grows thin films of YBCO, a few hundred nanometers thick, a few hundred times thinner than a sheet of paper, on small crystal chips. My job is to measure them. I put a film in the cryostat, cool it down, run a current through it and watch the voltage as I change the temperature and the magnetic field. The interesting part is what happens in a magnetic field, where the field gets into the film in little whirlpools of current called vortices, and whether they stay put or slide around decides how much current the film can carry before it stops superconducting. If you can pin the vortices down, you can carry more current. If you can carry more current, someday you can build useful things out of this stuff.

Most days, "measuring" means waiting for things to get cold, fixing a broken wire, and waiting for things to get cold again. The lab is in the basement because the helium dewars are heavy and the measurements don't like vibration. I see daylight on weekends.

My Geek Code

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 2.1
GS d-- H s+:- g+ p3 au- a27 w v- C++ US++ P L-
E--- N++ K- W- M- V t+++ 5+ j++ R tv b++ D++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

For the uninitiated: a science geek, poorly dressed, tall and thin, glasses, three pens in the pocket at all times, a SunOS user who refuses to learn Emacs, reads too much Usenet, plays too much DOOM, and watches Star Trek with a seriousness that worries his family. If you have a block, mail it to me and I'll decode it for you. Version 3 is supposed to be coming out this summer, and I'll update mine.

Ten reasons Netscape 1.1 beats Mosaic

I used NCSA Mosaic for a year and a half and I was grateful for it. Then I tried Netscape. Here is why I'm not going back.

1. Pages appear while they load. Mosaic makes you stare at the spinning logo until the whole page is in. Netscape shows you the text right away and fills in the pictures as they arrive, so you can start reading.
2. It fetches several images at once instead of one at a time. Over a 14.4 modem from home, this is the difference between reading a page and going to make a sandwich.
3. Interlaced GIFs come in blurry and then sharpen up, so you can tell what a picture is before it finishes.
4. Tables. New in 1.1. Real rows and columns, for data that's actually tabular. (This page doesn't use any, because there is nothing on it that is a table. Restraint.)
5. Centering. See the title of this page. In Mosaic it's over on the left.
6. Background colors and pictures, also new in 1.1. This page is gray because I like gray, not because I don't know how.
7. Client pull and server push. A page can now refresh itself, or a server can keep sending new pictures down the line. Webcams are going to love this.
8. A built-in newsreader. One program for the Web and for Usenet.
9. It's free for academic use. That covers me.
10. The BLINK tag. Okay, this one is a reason Mosaic is better.

Sights of the Web

Things I've been showing to people who come by the lab and ask what the fuss is about. I won't link them all here; if you're on the Web, you've seen them or you will.

• The Trojan Room coffee pot at the Cambridge University computer lab. A camera points at a coffee pot, and you can see from anywhere in the world whether there's coffee in it. There never is. It is, I maintain, the most important page on the Web.
• NCSA's What's New page. When I started, you could read every new site on the Web in one sitting, every week. Not anymore. Those days are gone and they lasted about a year.
• The comet pictures from JPL last July, when the pieces of Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter. I sat up two nights watching new images come in. Real astronomy, as it happened, on my screen.
• The Xerox PARC Map Viewer. Click anywhere on a map of the world and zoom in. Hours of my life.
• Yahoo, the list of everything, run by a couple of grad students at Stanford. I'm told they've taken a leave from their degrees to run it. Don't tell my advisor that's an option.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, ranked

It's been a year since "All Good Things..." went off the air, and I've had time to think. My top five, plus where the finale fits:

1. "The Best of Both Worlds" (both parts). The summer between them was the longest of my life.
2. "Yesterday's Enterprise." Alternate timelines done right.
3. "The Inner Light." Picard and the flute. I'm not ashamed.
4. "Cause and Effect." The time loop one. As a physicist I object to everything about it and I still love it.
5. "Darmok." An episode about the problem of language that actually respects the problem.
6. "All Good Things..." Number six, which is very high praise. They knew how to end it.

As for the movie last November, the less said the better. Voyager has started on the new network. Cheryl watches it. I'm withholding judgment until the end of the first season.

Java experiments

Sun announced Java at the end of May: a language for little programs that come down over the Web and run inside the page, on any kind of computer. Sun's own browser, HotJava, runs them now, and Netscape says it's going to support them too. I have the HotJava alpha running on a SPARCstation in the lab, and I have an idea for a little applet that plots resistance against temperature from our data as you watch.

Java experiments coming soon.

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