The surprise beach trip with Andy last week was pretty darn fun, but it deposited some hefty chunks of dust onto my camera’s sensor. So, now I have to get it cleaned somehow, and it looks like cleaning supplies could run me $150! Since I’m leaving in a few days, waiting for shipping really isn’t feasible; I guess I’ll have to get it cleaned some place in town.
"Zoo-zoo?" A grungy, bespectacled young man to my left shouts across the train platform. A cyclist, rolling idly down the street on what is perhaps the smallest bike I've ever seen, takes notice. "A-zoo-Bomb!" The youth next to me concludes, and the two of them wave to each other.
"You going to the pile?" The first inquires.
"Yeah, I'm gonna hang there for a bit, and I'll be up for the first run," The cyclist drawls.
So, I'm back in town! That was fast!
Managed to get out of school okay: finished my two papers on time, and despite my notes disappearing managed to make it through finals without too much difficulty. The papers are actually pretty cool: for Philosophy of Physics I got to look at two accounts of the mass energy equivalence relation, and talk about how we revise the scientific process for education. I didn't get to explore that thread as much as I would have liked, but I did get to read all of Einstein's work on special relativity. I know it's been said before, but the guy's a genius. The reasoning itself is straightforward, but he makes these intuitive jumps that are very surprising unless you know where he's going.
My roommate for spring term moved out early in finals week. Or at least, he himself moved. Most of his stuff stayed behind, and the friends he said would come pick it up never arrived. Hence, at 22:00 the night before flying out, I found myself reluctantly dropping cubic meters of clothes, games, books, and food down at the Lighten Up donation area. That was kind of a tough break, and I hope his friend manages to save my roommate's stuff in time.
Over the past three terms, I've become aware of a strange connection between sounds and visual images in my mind. When lying in bed and trying to fall asleep, with my eyes closed and thoughts mostly empty, I frequently experience visual patterns in response to loud or sudden noises. The first time it happened, my roommate's Macintosh computer emitted an unexpected and loud 'bonk' noise as an alert. Simultaneously, a diagonally oriented field of wavy white and black lines flashed before my eyes. The intensity of the pattern varied smoothly from black to white, so no clear delineations were perceivable. I estimate that there were about twenty to thirty of these lines visible, to give some representation of their density.
The perception lay somewhere between reality and imagination; not a concrete object in the world, but also not a "minds eye" sort of projection. It's analogous to the experience of seeing whorls and cascades of shadowy color when you press on your eyeballs for a few minutes, except it occurred suddenly, and faded as quickly as the sound. It also feels like there's an extra component to the experience, as well: it's not just a field of lines, but a visual feeling of orientation. That bit is much harder to describe or even verify, but it does seem present.
At first I thought I was hallucinating, or deceiving myself. Yet the experience surprised me time and time again, and has been consistent: it's happened twice this week. Door slamming, alert sounds, even ceramic mugs being set down on a wooden desk: all have associated unique visual patterns. The intensity, orientation, density, and waviness of the lines seems correlated with the character of the sound: the mug, for example, evoked a short-lived, vertical, dense, and straight field of lines. Sometimes I see cross-hatching, or a simple uniform flash. I plan to record these experiences from now on, and will try to characterize the relationship in more detail.
For months now, my friend Justin has been trying to get me up to the cities, and, more importantly, to meet the people on the Equality Ride. While I can't hope to express what the ride is without having been on it, the best story I can offer is that of 50-odd young adults traveling around the country on two buses, going to college campuses which make life hard for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender people. Some universities have policies so severe, students may be suspended or expelled for supporting their gay friends or family. The ride aims to change this by, well, talking. Talking to students about their experiences with sexual and gender identity, explaining how their faith interacts with those, and challenging arguments that these identities are fundamentally immoral.
The other half of the ride is more a public relations effort: when schools refuse the ride access to campus, riders stand vigil at the sidewalk, walk around the campus borders, or deliberately trespass. At one stop, riders carried pictures of their family. At another, they left lilies to symbolize the suicides of LGBT students, and read those stories aloud. "All we want to do is talk," the campaign seems to plead, "and yet we are handcuffed and arrested because the school doesn't want their students to have this dialogue."
While I agree wholeheartedly with the Equality Ride's efforts to talk with students, this method of civil disobedience rests uneasy with me. I think it's disrespectful to invade a private property, especially as a part of an organized group. These colleges have the right to bar people from their property, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the right to determine a code of conduct for students. Surely a college can enforce its own attendance criteria: for example, as a man, I wouldn't complain about being denied entrance to a woman's university.
So last night, Nik, Max, and I were studying for the philosophy midterm, and we got to talking about the Monty Hall problem. It goes like this: you've got three doors, behind one of which is a fun prize, and behind the other two are nothing. You guess one of the doors, in an attempt to obtain the awesome reward, but before you get to see if you were right or not, some punk named Monty opens a different door, and shows you that there is nothing behind it. You then have the opportunity to change your selection. What do you pick?
Well, we figured, being shown that another door has nothing behind it doesn't change what your original choice was, so it doesn't make a difference as to which door you pick now. Either of the remaining two doors will be equally likely to have the prize behind it, right?
Nope, I was wrong.
Wow, that was a good weekend. I'm sore, and twisted my toe on the wrestling mats, but learned a lot. It was fun to be exposed to so many new techniques: all-direction step-in-thrust, a rotating takedown from side strike, and an opposite-hand variant of the fourth-kyu 180-degree pivot shuffle cross-step-under initiation. There was even koryu buki study, and some calligraphy practice! The demonstration itself went well too, although we didn't get to go through all six techniques.
I was happily surprised to see David-sensei and a bunch of other friends from the Portland club at the Genyokan. I miss those guys out here, so getting to work with them for three days was a nice reunion. Looking forward to getting back for summer, and having class with all of them again.
After being sick, it was nice to get back to doing all three classes, and then conditioning the next day. I've started to work on jump-backs with Nik and Sophie, and also jumping over partner. It's definitely difficult, but I'm hopeful they'll get easier.
Two hours after going to sleep, I awoke to a shrill alarm with a start, kicking off the bed and into the air. Three things went through my head in the second or so before I touched down.
- Hmmm, that's not my alarm. It's much too high-pitched, and isn't intermittent.
- Gosh, there's a lot of smoke in here.
- Hey, is that the ground?
"Wow, it must be a fire. As in, stuff is actually burning," my sleep-addled brain mumbled to itself. "I guess if the building is going to burn down, I should probably grab my EM homework. It would really suck if that went up in flames and I had to do it all over again before Friday." Pulling on my bathrobe and grabbing the backpack which contained the precious homework in progress, I checked the door for heat, made my way down the stairs, and out into the cool night air.
The weekend was pretty darn awesome. Sophie and her housemates invited Nik, Max, Rachel, Anna, and I to dinner, where they'd made tons of delicious Jewish food. There was salad, fresh-baked bread, delicious kugel, and a massive roast with carrots and other veggies... it was *soooo* tasty! After weeks of Sodexho, getting to have a real meal with good company made my day. Max and I washed the dishes, and after we hung out on the couches, studying and watching Grey's Anatomy.
The two tests from Monday's classes went okay--I was definitely more confused by the EM material than Partials. Of course, the Partials test didn't actually ask us to solve any PDEs, and that's the part of the course I totally don't understand yet, so I got off easy. Seeing the unusual connections between function spaces and Linear Algebra is mind-bending at times.
This weekend is the Genyokan trip! Ten of us are packing into Sophie's car and Joel-sensei's van, and driving up to Ann Arbor for the weekend. Unfortunately, we're leaving Thursday night, so I've got to get all of Friday's HW done by then. There'll be classes, clinics, and the demo, which we've been preparing for every class of the last two weeks. I'm really looking forward to going--I didn't make the trip last year, so this will be my first time.
I haven't taken many classes lately with research papers. It's all been problem sets, notes, finals... not much in the way of going out and finding stuff on my own. Because of this, it was not until yesterday that I experienced the awe-inspiring mass of documentation that is the U.S. Government Archive, on the first floor of the libe: rows and rows of compressed movable shelving, stuffed full of treatises on every imaginable topic.
They're filed according to some byzantine scheme, with at least six separate fields for each identifier. The notation uses capitalization, slashes, dashes, dots, colons, and even superscripts to index each document, and after perusing shelves of this stuff, I can't ascertain what those numbers mean. On this shelf, a decrepit tome "War" rests sedately on the shelf; thicker than it is tall, it describes the military capacities of the United States decades ago. Here's a report on global warming written in 2005: a thin paper booklet held together by staples, and right next to it: five volumes, over three thousand pages, detailing the threat of Communism to the American public.
There's an org chart of American Communism, with hierarchical boxes and arrows laying out the many attack vectors of the insidious Left Agenda. There are pages and pages of testimony before special investigative committee, in which politicians, actors, doctors, and professors testify that they have not been involved with the Communist cause. There are pages and pages about the Multinational Negro Commission, and the Communist Youth Outreach programs. There's discussion of legal proceedings: laws to outlaw the teaching of Communism or related principles in public schools.
A couple of funny things happened to me today. Over break I got a series of e-mails with tips for taking the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a scenario-based assessment of critical thinking skills. The names for each tip started with the letters B and S: "Be Specific", "Be Skeptical", etc.* However, the e-mail for tip number four was:
TIP #4: READ DIRECTIONS ($5.00 extra to anyone who can come up with a version of this tip's name that starts with an “S”) Check that you’ve done what you’ve been asked to do. If you’re being asked to play a role, think about who you are suppose to be writing for. Don’t assume that your audience knows what you’re writing about.
I fired back a tongue-in-cheek response, suggesting a bunch of S-phrases like "Satiate Curiosity", "Suppose Nothing", "Study Directions", and so forth. I didn't realize they were serious about the money, but a week later I got a response: they wanted me to stop by the Dean's office and pick up the five dollars. That was... rather unexpected. :-)
To sum up the last term:
I took three classes: Ordinary Differential Equations, Japanese 205, and Classical/Computational Mechanics, affectionately (though with a thin edge of nervousness) referred to by many physics majors as "Classy" and "Compy". These last two ate me alive: the average weekly problem set was 18 hours in length, although one went up to 25 hours. I spent a lot of mornings (9:00 P.M. -- 3:00 A.M.) in Olin, the physics building, staring at Mathematica and struggling through Lagrangians. "You know, the windmill is really pretty at sunrise," my friend Max told me. "You can see it through the windows of the Olin hallway."
The last two weeks of the term were consumed by a massive final project: building and modeling a tinkertoy siege engine with the use of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics. My partner and I wrote hundreds of lines of code, and dozens of pages of equations, trying to model the energy transfer between the pendulum falling and the motion of the wheeled base. The problem consumed my life; walking to dinner, waiting in line, even in other classes, I'd think about drag models, wheel inertia, and projectile efficiency. We worked somewhere around 60 hours per person over two weeks.