To my hard drive,

I thought we had something special. I know our relationship was short-lived - a mere three months - but I felt that we had really connected. You were there for me, retrieving my files and storing them without question. I felt safe putting you in charge of my photos and my music. I really felt connected to you, hard drive.

But, alas, our relationship was not to be: there are bad sectors on you. I really wish I had seen this earlier. How could I have been so stupid to be lured by your 7200 rpm?

Don’t worry about me, hard drive. I’ll be ok. You were still under warranty, so, as Beyonce says, I’ll have another you in a minute.

With fond memories,
Nicole

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As someone who makes semiconductor devices, I’m still in awe when processors and memory work. There are God knows how many layers in these things and if one small part fails, the whole system is shot. Companies like Intel and AMD have hundreds of engineers working for years to design and optimize new hardware. It’s really a small miracle that anything works at all.

But still, when my own hard drive dies, grrrrrrr.

Collaborations are great. Really, they are. You take a bunch of experts in different fields, throw them onto the same project, and see what cool stuff emerges a few years later.

I currently work on a large collaboration in which we’re trying to make electronic-photonic integrated circuits. It’s a nifty idea and has the potential to fix some of the problems with our current electronic-only systems. The problem comes when you have meetings. (By the way, I thought one of the perks about grad school over “real life” was the chance to avoid being stuck in meetings. I was wrong. Very wrong.)

I had a meeting today in which we, the materials folks, got up and said (roughly), “Yo, optics people, we have a fundamental problem over here. Please alter your designs by doing blah and blah to help us fix it.”

In response, the optics people said, “Yo, materials people, the solution you propose is far more complicated than you realize.”

“Yes, but we’re up against fundamental laws of physics here. You need to budge.”

“We’re also up against fundamental laws of physics. What do you want us to do?”

“Our laws of physics are stricter than your laws of physics!”

And this continued for a good 20 minutes. Neither side could really understand the difficulty that the other side was describing. Why couldn’t we just change one small thing? Because it’s hard! Really, really hard!

Why couldn’t the optics folks just incorporate this one change? Because it’s hard! Really, really hard!

Sometimes these meetings can be frustrating because it feels like we’re all talking past each other. But sometimes I walk away with a greater appreciation of what we’re up against. It turns out that these optics folks are actually quite good at what they do. If the solution was as easy as I thought it was… they would have done it by now.