Evan Erickson, 2024 NIST Research Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Evan Erickson is a rising junior majoring in math and physics at MIT. He always had a desire to gain a deeper understanding of how the world works. This led him to math and physics competitions in middle and high school, culminated with him getting gold medals at the 2021 and 2022 International Physics Olympiads for the US team. His current plans are to pursue a PhD in physics.

Internship

Host: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Internship Blog

What’s in a name? That which we call a dorm, by any other word would be just as jank.

What makes a dorm a dorm? Researchers are still looking into the defining properties of the structure. The two most prevalent schools of thought are the Copenhagen and the Everett interpretation. The Copenhagen interpretation states that the defining feature of a dorm is the fire alarms being in a super-position of silence and blaring, which collapses into one of these states whenever someone thinks about smoke too hard. The Everett interpretation instead argues it’s the state of the overpriced laundry machines, which split the universe into two branches depending on whether the machine you picked decides to be broken or not.

Hi, I’m Evan Erickson. I’m a rising junior at MIT majoring in Physics and Math. Some quick tidbits about me. I was homeschooled. I’m the fourth of five siblings. I’ve been happily using eduroam wifi for four years since doing dual enrollment in 11th grade. I’m double-jointed. I’m a fan of dark, saturated colors (green and blue are my favorites). And, I’ve had about six ultrasounds (love the warm jelly they use).

I will be working at the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. In short, my project is analyzing shiny trampolines with lasers. The shinier and bouncier the better. As of the writing of this paragraph, I have only worked three days, most of which were spent completing lab safety training, connecting various things to my government computer, and setting up my voicemail.

(INSERT CONCLUDING PARAGRAPH HERE)

Connecticut Casual is a thing that exists

They say you learn something new every day. I haven’t proven them wrong yet. Mostly learning that 1) “Casual Cocktail” attire is a thing, 2) it is not “Business Casual”, 3) you can achieve a lot of these codes by some combo of a pair of jeans/a pair of dress pants/two button-ups/and a blazer (data inconclusive on the double pants), and 4) I’ve been wearing my suit wrong for about five years.

I’ve also confirmed why I will never take a computer science class (aside from the ones I took freshman fall; I was young and foolish then). Why waste time sitting in a class to then look up the functions and modules you need when you can just look up the functions and modules you need? This week, I taught myself more Python making a little GUI for getting data off an oscilloscope than I did in the aforementioned classes I took in a moment of weakness.

Speaking of weakness, I didn’t get to celebrate National Doughnut Day. I did not have the strength within me to make the two-mile round trip to Krispy Kreme at 9 PM. I have failed you, my love. Next year, next year I will be strong.

Other things I learned: It takes up to two weeks for a background check for a badge to be completed, but now I’m a certified not-terrorist. There is a surprising amount of overlap between a DJ’s song lineup and insurance ads. Always check back on the catered food at the end of an event, lots of free food (this technique got me a free burger, seven chicken kabobs, and a tub of aioli across two occasions). I’ve never had a good plantain until this Thursday. I can eat a bag of chips in 27 hours. And, finally, exploring DC and loafing around can become a bit of a dichotomy when you have only a weekend to do so. Oh well.

A Quick™ and Easy™ Recipe™ for Dinner™!!

It was a dark and humid night, the last of my pork carnitas was used up in one final batch of tacos. I was faced with a dilemma, what to eat tomorrow. That’s when I remembered this Quick™ and Easy™ Recipe™ that I will get to right now.

First, you will need ingredients. While there are many ways to procure ingredients, the most reliable way is to head over to a store and buy them yourself. It is highly recommended not to bring bags that will disintegrate a block from your dorm. This can easily cause you to lose your onion powder (of which you will need a few teaspoons for the recipe). You should also have a kitchen. Very useful prerequisite. Bonus if it has a working oven, stovetop (which you will need for cooking the pound of beef and cabbage), and refrigerator. If you can only get two out of the four burners working, that’s fine, you only need one burner to have a favorite burner.

Okay, enough delaying, let’s get to the Recipe™. I had to get the Recipe™ from my brother as the physical copy of the recipe was closest to him. I would have done this on my 70-minute commute back from my work after a long day of setting up interferometers and getting data off oscilloscopes, but my internet connection is very spotty. Thus, I often spend this time staring into nothing, contemplating random things, thinking about how I will need flour, sugar, butter, yeast, and eggs for the dough, and making notes about what I should do in the five hours I have before I go to bed, like creating a shopping list for this Delicious™ Recipe™.

One of the few perks of working full-time and having a hefty commute is that you avoid the worst of the DC summer weather. The hot and humid conditions during the bad days, comparable to the 350 oven you need to cook the Food™, can make even existing outside a chore. However, on the nicer days with less humidity, it is nice to get out for a few hours, during which time the enriched dough you made will rise in the fridge. After learning that it is cheaper to fence off several blocks of road and charge 10 dollars for entry rather than letting people walk freely, the nearby Smithsonian Gallery of Art might serve as a good alternative to plans involving said several blocks. Before you wrap the beef/cheese/cabbage mixture in the dough, you can look upon some very nice oil paintings, wonder why sculptors keep making naked people, and get told to back away from a painting by staff and the automated security system, before making a 30-minute commute back which is the same length as you want to put these dough pieces in the oven.

Once you pull the Delicious™ Food™ from the oven. Let sit for a few minutes and enjoy!

(The author prides himself in making very straightforward recipes that are not at all filled with obtuse anecdotes about his week)

That’s it, I’m out of ideas, we’re closed

Much of life boils down to making decisions. Pay ten cents to get new shopping bags or risk catastrophe by reusing bags? Cookies or ice cream bars? Drop two bucks to get a physical subway pass card or spend twenty seconds every time you take the subway trying to get the card reader to acknowledge your phone’s existence? Another wanton? Stay on the subject or have multiple non-sequiturs because you can’t come up with an overarching theme for your blog post? Raspberry or strawberry jam?

(Channel Static)

I love potlucks. Grew up with them as a kid. Always fun to get a bunch of variety in food. It’s always a surprise what you’ll eat. Oh, people you know are there too, that’s another bonus, I guess. But back to food. It’s fun to be part of a food assembly line. Where did these things come from? Where will they go? Beats me, I’m just baking these little things in a toaster oven.

(Channel Static)

Restaurants get weird about pizza. It is an inherently common food. The pizza crust is the easiest thing to make. With some flour, water, salt, yeast, and time, you can make some incredible bread to slap some pizza ingredients on. Yet these highfalutin places come along with their charbroiled bland bread with one expensive thing on it and then upcharge. Most of the time, I’d rather eat Domino’s pizza than that.

(Channel Static)

Have you ever been to some science booth event and thought to yourself “You know what this is missing? Some rave music cranked up so high that I can’t hear any conversations.” Standing for three hours is tiring, and talking to people is tiring, but the constant synthesizer noise is the icing on the cake.

(Channel Static)

You inevitably miss things growing up. You can’t catch every single trend, show, book, game, movie. Some just slip by. Luckily, nothing is stopping me from backtracking timewise and live a decade or two in the past. Mostly from binging Adventure Time (almost through season 5) or playing Half-Life 2 (being from MIT, I feel like I’m required to). Yes, this does put me in a cycle of Cool Thing™ happening, I’m busing doing Other Thing™, and years later I discover Cool Thing™, but it does help me avoid Disappointing Thing™.

(Channel Static)

I love frosting. I don’t get people who hate frosting. It’s concentrated sweetness with a nice texture. It’s like ice cream that’s solid at STP. Cakes should have a good layer of frosting. We should find something additional to put on cakes to get some texture variety. The only downside to cakes in our current technology is that their texture is a bit too uniform. Brownie/cake combo is one way of approaching things. Surely there must be others.

P.S. Not sure why I kept going back to food. I guess I’m a little hungry at the moment.

Pains, Trains, and the Entire Spiel

My time in this internship may be cut short because I seem to have broken the cardinal rule of Washington, DC: showing my knees on a weekday commute. My clothing is very practical. If it is cold, I wear long-sleeved clothes. If it is hot, I wear shorts. I have learned this is an exception, and I am extremely grateful my job doesn’t enforce the “no knees” rule.

Another observation from my three-ish hour round commutes is that I can doze off easily in a moving vehicle. Just close my eyes for a long enough time and I will be on the cusp of sleep. I can never go beyond the cusp of sleep because my neck muscles will try to clock out when I clock out. Being in an upright position, causes my head to swing around and usually bonk into something. Probably for the best, since when you are six stops out from your transfer, it’s probably best not to be out cold.
In other news, I have caught a disease, very minor, mostly a stuffy nose and muscle aches. To aid in my cure, I have given my immune system something to fight for: a dozen doughnuts (also some advil).

One of the upsides of cooking for only yourself is that you don’t go through much food. A single batch you cook can easily last a week. One of the downsides of cooking for only yourself is that you don’t go through much food. Parting with some aioli or some salsa because it took you weeks to get through your backlog of other food to get to recipes that involve those ingredients is a tragedy. However, making a dozen doughnuts last for three whole days is a massive perk that overrules the sadness previously felt.

Halfway through the journey of the internship, I have nailed down my bread recipe. The biggest issue with my first couple of batches was the flour-to-water ratio. What I’m used to is a 2:1 ratio, but that consistently leads to super sticky/unworkable dough, easily fixable by dumping more flour in, but not until after you’ve given yourself a case of epidermodysplasia verruciformis (for your own sake, don’t look it up, you’ve been warned). However, in my latest batch, I bumped up the flour to a ratio of 2.7ish:1, which let me get a perfect dough first try. Not sure why the water here is wetter than usual, but it is what it is.

Fermenting Fomenting Convictions

I’ve had a lot of time to think over this long weekend. With this long weekend, I’ve been able to formulate my words about a subject I feel strongly about. Celsius is stupid. Let me first back up and say something slightly less controversial. Celsius is stupid for everyday use. Talking about the temperature of a room? A single degree Fahrenheit can make the difference between chilly and nice. Hey, even half a degree Fahrenheit can be useful if the temperature is slightly off. Do you want to adjust the thermostat by 0.2 degrees Celsius? Stupid. You are going outside, what’s the temperature? 70s? Nice weather. 50s? A touch chilly, should probably wear longs. Try doing that in Celsius. You go from perfect weather to warm weather in about 7 degrees. I don’t mess around with fireworks on the fourth, I don’t have seven fingers.

July 4th: Fun day. Stayed inside. Procrastinated until fairly last minute (by that I mean two hours before the fireworks started) to locate a good location. The elevator lobby was perfect. The firework show, however, was kinda underwhelming. It’s been a while since I saw a fireworks show (given how late they usually have to start), but I remember them being longer than 20 minutes. That was part of why I rarely went, it started late and went late: a tiring experience. Also, I think some of them misfired causing the area to be shrouded in a thick smoke. Fun.

Okay, you may be asking, but Celsius is metric, and the metric system is better, yada yada yada. What makes the metric system better? Easy conversion between units of the same type. No weird factors of fours and twos between pints, quarts, and gallons, just nice factors of ten. Do you know what doesn’t have conversions like this? Temperature. The only temperature scales in metric are Celsius and Celsius plus 273.15. Same with Fahrenheit, you got the standard and it plus 459.7. The only thing stopping a transition to Rankine is scaling things by the right powers of 5/9.

July 5th: I don’t care where I’m working, but if I get Thursday off for a holiday, I’m not going in on Friday. It’s just a non-negotiable. One skill that I’m recognizing is useful is multitasking items on shopping trips. My meals for this week and the next are pretzels and burgers. I was going to just get some cheese sauce for dipping my pretzels, but then I realized a Dijon mustard would double for a dipping sauce and burger sauce. Win-win.

But, but water boils at 100 degrees Celsius? Let me paint you a picture. You are defusing the bomb, as part of the bomb manual you need to know the boiling point of... ethanol. You’re toast either way. (It’s 173 F) It takes only two points to define a temperature scale. Since it’s only two points, the times these points are relevant are few and far between. And when they are? It’s only two points you have to remember.

July 6th: Zoos are fun. It’s nice to see animals and slowly come to the realization that they lent out all the animals in the current exhibit you are wandering about. It’s also fun to find some tucked-away location while an ungodly number of people stand in line to get into one of the indoor exhibits.

Logging in to write these blogs is always a fiasco. I don’t forget my password, no no, it’s my username. Most websites let you use either your username or the email you used to register, but not here. Coupled with the insanely aggressive CAPTCHA (I may be a robot given how much it hates me), it sets the tone of my writing sessions (unbridled rage).

July 7th: I have a wide range between what will satisfy my hunger and how much I can eat. Yes, two soft pretzels are enough for dinner given I have a cookie afterward, but I could also down five pretzels with no hesitation. However, I would like to make the pretzels last a decent time so that I don’t have to whip up something from scratch in my preciously short weekday evenings. Counterpoint, five pretzels.

Relationship Struggles

Things started all fine and dandy at the start of the internship. Carrying it out of my mentor’s car, placing it into my new office, plugging in USB cables, setting up a square wave, it was the start of something special. As the weeks passed, I got to know the Oscilloscope better, really appreciating it as an instrument. Writting up a little user interface for the Oscilloscope was the best moment of working together. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from a maximum. The signs were there from the start. The first time booting up, no longer how long I waited, it would throw an error when asked to do anything. Odd, but just restart the program, and things would work out. Always me restarting, and never the Oscilloscope.

However, our breaking point would swiftly come. I was jimmy-rigging a microscope with a laser, a positioner, and the Oscilloscope. I wanted to set the range of the Oscilloscope from my computer, so I found the command and ran it. Didn’t work. Doing what everyone does in that situation, I ran the command again hoping for a different result. For the first time since the dawn of the universe, that worked. Odd. I experimented. The first time adjusting the range, I get total nonsense. Try it again immediately after, it magically fixes itself. An annoyance, but a predictable annoyance. I could work around that. Just run the command twice when it should only be run once. Always me rewriting, and never the Oscilloscope.

When it came to running the microscope, I was distracted by the positioner’s issues. The little snook had the attention span of a hamster that went through a spin cycle, forgetting where it was and screaming until I put it out of its misery. I put in a timeout by putting it on a timeout, but then I was faced with the reality that had been floating over my head since the start of the internship. I fix up my code and run it. The little positioner that could worked its way through its tasks, but then disaster struck. Everything froze. The Oscilloscope stood there, unblinking, unphased, unresponsive. I restart the Osciloscope, I restart my code, and nothing. In the second such occurrence since the dawn of the universe, repeating these steps yielded the desired results. But the issue remained. The chance was small, about one in several hundred, but when I asked for a measurement, the Oscilloscope would refuse, grinding everything to a halt in its fit. There was little I could do, I looked up the error code, nothing. I tried giving the Oscilloscope time to do its thing, nothing. In the end, I just had to accept it. The good times with the Osciloscope were on borrowed time. The truth was it couldn’t be trusted to run anything consistently. Always the Oscilscope crashing. But not me.

So, anyway, I learned why powdered sugar is always in recipes for icing. You need too much liquid to dissolve regular sugar, so you would end up with either cereal milk or a grainy icing. But, an icing is an icing. Scones are good. Planning on finishing up my infinity gauntlet of bread items with bagels.

Stairs: A Comprehensive Guide

Have you ever faced a series of flat surfaces regularly offset from each other in a horizontal and vertical displacement? Have you wondered about the best techniques for handling these stationary escalator devices powered solely by you? I have had a good share of stairs, climbing about 888 floors last semester. As such, I would consider myself an experienced chair connoisseur. So, worry not about these tiny, open-walled, inoperational elevators placed in close proximity, we will cover all the important features of good stair handling.

Downstairs: This notably, is a lot easier energy-wise. It’s a lot less power-intensive to stop yourself from flying into a wall than it is flying into a wall. However, knees are difficult. Improper form can exert undue wear and tear. There are several techniques to approach this discretized hill.

First, The March. The most common approach involves putting one foot in front of the other at a regular tempo and coming to a stable position after each step. While it may seem basic, there are a few things to watch out for. Not having some give in the knees will cause a significant impact on the knee whenever the foot makes contact with a step. You can also adjust this technique to The Controlled Fall where you don’t take the time to come to a complete stop and let your center of mass move continuously down the stairs. This approach requires more bend to the knees to accommodate for the fall of the center of mass.

Second, The Skip. This involves breaking free of the standard walking rhythm by putting some syncopation into your steps. You first replace a simple lift step with a small hop on each foot. You then offset each jump by about an eighth of a cycle. This delay is important to be able to properly gauge the velocity of the hop. The hop should take you down exactly one step. Attempting to go farther will increase the risk of miscalculating the jump and causing injury. The advantage of this one is that it has a nice flow to it. Its unique pace is also helpful if stuck behind someone as your clip-clopping will politely inform them to get out of the way. However, make sure to change the foot you start with with. Most of the impulse to stop your mini-fall comes from the second foot. By swapping which foot leads, you can ensure that you will need symmetrical knee replacements when you’re 70.

Third, The Diagonal. When you climb down as many steps as I have, you start setting goals for yourself to keep things interesting. A classic goal is speedrunning steps. Not only is this practical in terms of the time you save, but also opens up a chance at the forbidden staircase to descend, the up escalator. To accomplish this technique. Angle your feet at a sixty-degree angle to the stairs. They should be turned away from the edge of the stairs. Then, quickly enact The Controlled Fall. The advantage of The Diagonal is that you don’t have to move your feet as far beyond an edge to clear it, allowing your feet to be falling sooner. This technique once mastered can let you on stairs to outrun The March going down a down escalator. Remember to bend the knees as the rapid-fire collision could be a quick trip to your nearest orthopedic surgeon without it.

Upstairs: The issue with going upstairs is that you are going upstairs. It’s exhausting. Thus, usually, the most energy-efficient approach is the preferable one. The March. The upside of the march is the variable speed you can achieve with it. This allows for flexible ascension depending on your exhaustion levels. This can be further customized by bypassing stairs. This is technically also doable with The Downwards March, but the risk of fall makes it undesirable, just use The Controlled Fall.

The Upwards Slide: The Spirtual Successor to The Controlled Fall. It operates on a similar principle, keep your center of mass moving in a straight path smoothly. This involves some decent bend to your knees to accomplish this. The advantage of this approach is the speed. By not having jarring steps and stops, you can use your momentum to help you push forward. Decreasing the effort needed to get appreciable speed, allows you the possibility of beating a down escalator. The increased energy requirement though does make this unfavorable for a long climb with shorter flights.

My Penultimatum

My commute to work is very straightforward. Walk to the nearest subway station. Get on the subway train at said station. Ride said train to the first transfer station. Use said transfer station to move from the aforementioned train to a new train. Ride said train until I get to my final stop. Simple, no real optimization possible. Sure, it is theoretically possible to run to the transfer station, it’s only 1.5 miles away. But unless I could do a six-minute mile, I wouldn’t beat the first train, much less catch an earlier transfer.

Other people’s commutes, however, are not as simply optimized. A common predicament is trying to get to the yeen lines from our local station. There are two ways. The most common is riding the glorange line to L’enfant plaza (the plaza already surrendered, typical) and then hopping onto the grellow line. This is straightforward, just one transfer. However, three stops before L’enfant is the metro center, which has the red line. One stop further on the red line is Gallerly Place, which contains a grellow transfer station. This would add a transfer, but eliminate about five stops. By the clairvoyant powers of backseat driving, it seemed like this transfer would improve times, but a test needed to be performed.

After training back from getting free pizza (sure there were also some archives too), the test was performed. From Gallery Place to home was 13:19 with an average red line transfer, for the other route, it was 17:30. Now, the timing difference is only advantageous if you can get an early oley line train. Those come every three to four minutes, as evidenced by the timing delay. The gralow line transfer on the double transfer route was very tight. So this double transfer may not always be strictly better, but it is not a downgrade.

An alternative approach would be to walk from Gallery Place to Metro Center. It takes roughly 6-10 minutes to get there via train, but it is only a five-minute walk from these stations. By simply fast walking, one could easily beat both methods of trains. This method has yet to be implemented in a real-world setting.

I think the worst application of AI is in resume readers. All resume advice is setting up all your achievements and experience into little boxes of premade sentences so that the stupid little reader can not auto-toss your resume. When using a thesaurus is the only variance allowed, something’s up. Might as well just have chatgpt write out your resume with how formulaic people want it to be.

Summer has come and past, but I’m stuck in the frigging airport for 6 hours because of a thin line of rain.

(Written on my phone’s notepad while stuck at the stupid airport)

Lightning crashes, my flight is delayed:

Let me start by airing my grievances. Things that require you to upload money to a balance should let you have full control over the money you add. I’ve been robbed 8 bucks from laundry and transit due to this. Oh, I forgot prices increased in July. I just need to add a dollar. Nope, the minimum amount to add is $4. I have a balance of 90 cents, I’d love to add $10.10, but noooooo. The only way I can end with an even amount is by adding $19.10.

The adults are yapping:

I have developed the ability to just do something. Jump 20 feet into the water? Mind off, just jump. Something that claims to be hyper-spicy? Mind off, consume. Giving a public speech. Mind off, I know what I’m saying. Now, this probably isn’t the most healthy mechanism, and one consequence is that I went through an entire eight-minute presentation without actually making eye contact. Yeah my eyes were looking at eye level, and yeah, my vision swept side to side (I was presenting), but I did not connect with anyone’s eyes.

It was adorable how optimistic the symposium schedule was. We had 8 minutes for our spiel, 2 minutes for questions, andthen the next person was scheduled. So those two minutes had to hold the time we went over, questions, and transitions. So yeah, we finished 30 minutes late.

All these things that I have baked:

Lots of baking. Almost exclusively, only bread products could hold their shape. I thought of making English muffins or brownies, but I would need more cooking infrastructure to handle these batter-based substances. I have made bread, cookies, sweet bread, biscuits, bagels, and scones. These covered three different types of dough whose real names I won’t bother looking up.

Bread dough: mix everything to get her what andneed. Cookie dough: mix sugar into butter, and some egg, then flour, minimal need. Biscuit dough: incorporate frozen butter into flour, andadd milk.

I sorta like it right here, but I cannot stay:

I probably could have gone outside more, but I definitely hit the highlights. Museums, zoos, chili dogs. DC is a nice little town.

However, I can’t stand these stupid prices for everything. Why is everything twice as expensive on the coast? Why is 20 bucks for a single person’s meal commonplace? I swear it’s probably cheaper to buy seafood from Illinois than anywhere on the coast.

This is my life on holiday:

I have one month at home after this internship (assuming I ever get out of this flipping airport). Not much travel for me. Just toured some abandoned railroad tracks and a concert. Bagels will be baked. Cookies will be cooked. After that, I will officially become a pirate.

P.S. On the flight, I look out at the sea of stars. Points of light speckle the dark ground below, interlaced with threads of gold.

That’s all folks.