theoretically, hard things aren't hard when someone else has done them already

for instance: i am currently an undergrad assistant for some research. my current task is to find "quantum capacitance of an high-electron mobility transistor (HEMT)". for someone 40 years ago, that would've been proper tough. even if software was available then to the extent it is now, it'd take them forever to figure out all the material parameters and what quantum capacitance even looks like. for me? it's as simple as picking out some numbers from my simulation data, plugging them into a spreadsheet in an equation so easy a high-schooler just starting algebra 1 could figure out, and voila. yet, it took me a couple weeks to get everything sorted. granted, i am not an expert in the topic (yet), as i have just recently begun all this semiconductor stuff, but the process already exists. still, my professor seems pleased with my progress. when i apologized for my slowness, he remarked "[guy who wrote the paper i am basing my work on] took one and a half years on that, you're alright." i left it at that, no need to make myself look bad. at least my fluency in software is high, and thankfully he can notice that.

meanwhile, in my "project lab," a class where we make something over the course of a semester, we are making an automatic telescope. the premise is, type in (or maybe soon, just press a button of) what planet/star/moon you want to see, and the telescope will point to it and take a picture of it automatically. the project title is Hans Off! and i have the coordinate calculation script live on the best website in the whole wide world wide web. check it out, if you want to. anyway, but this hasn't really been done to the effect we are doing it (as far as i can tell) so not many resources exist on how to make this work. regardless, it is working out so far. we have a couple more weeks and only a couple more things to polish up. my progress on this has been far greater than the above thing even though i have been working the same amount of hours on both.

strange occurrences.