Bad mood.

Storytime is delayed until I can figure out where to go with it that isn’t boring. Meanwhile, I will rant because I am angry with myself.

Our most recent physics homework assignment covered a portion of mechanics called “statics.” This is, literally, the study of things that do not move (i.e. different from static electric charge and stuff). At first this seems kind of stupid because what’s the point, but the point is that it is applied to engineering – where we don’t want a bridge or a building to move around. So studying statics gives engineers a way of figuring out how to build bridges so that all of the forces balance and the bridge doesn’t collapse or explode or something.

Normally mechanics (the entire field of which statics is but a small part) bores me because it is intuitive in the boring sense – once you get an idea of how stuff works then it’s just playing around with equations. This is why I love physics for things like relativity and quantum mechanics: there’s still room for figuring out how stuff works, not just moving numbers around. Mechanics has been around since Newton essentially founded mathematical physics in the 17th century, and as a result is pretty much all fleshed out.

The problem is that I CANNOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME UNDERSTAND WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS GOING ON IN THIS ASSIGNMENT. I want desperately to blame it on the book because although it has some examples NONE OF THEM apply to what the problems want me to do, but I can’t because I am too busy being mad at myself for being incapable of understanding something as PEDESTRIAN as mechanics! AUGH then I feel worse because I know that people devote their careers and lives to things like engineering and mechanics, and I know it’s personal taste, but honestly it just isn’t intellectually trying enough for me and then running into problems I can’t do is AGGRAVATING.

So now half of my homework assignment is half-assed guessing and thinly veiled hostility toward all that this unit stands for. And I do not care. The midterm on Friday will cover this unit, but I care even less because in that class the lowest exam score is dropped and I am quite happy with my first two scores. So it will not matter.

It doesn’t give me an excuse to be so confused though, and as a result I am angry.

Storytime!

Today’s post will not be a recap of recent events because I don’t feel like recapitulating (I only know that that’s what “recap” stands for because of music…) today. Instead, I will expound upon a discussion that Elliott and I had today because it is infinitely more interesting.

The setting is a number of years in the future, and we follow Professor Wilhelm Christensen, who teaches physics at the University of Washington and who recently became quite famous for discovering a Unified Field Theory, uniting all forces under one big model.

Even more recently, he engineered a device that allowed him to sense fluctuations in the various fields permeating space and thus essentially know what was happening at any given moment. This device was implanted in his brain by neurosurgeon-engineer extraordinaire, Elliott J-W who also performed the first brain augmentation surgery.

We join the professor at a small park on campus, surrounded by a small crowd: some students, and a noticeably larger group who were just there to wonder what in God’s name was going on. The professor, who everyone knew was a few marbles short of a handbasket anyway, was crouched slightly, bubble pipe in mouth and duck on shoulder, waving his arms in roughly the fashion of a goose as it lands in a pond. He was muttering things under his breath and for some reason appeared at times to be conversing with the duck. The students, who were holding writing pads and pens, were looking rather bored with the whole procedure when suddenly the duck let out a quack.

The crowd jumped a little, except for the students who simply raised their writing pads and acted like they had seen it all before – which they had. This was a typical Monday lecture – the professor would quote off some numbers about the field at any given point and the students would set about deconstructing the equations to predict weather patterns, or prepare telescopes to watch an impending supernova in the Andromeda galaxy.

The students raised their eyebrows in anticipation, but the professor simply remained there, crouching, brow furrowed in concentration. His fingers wiggled slightly, sensing the ebb and flow of the universe. “That’s odd,” he muttered. “But that means if I take a step this way…” The professor did a slight hop onto the other foot—which to the students’ trained eyes was carefully calculated to adjust the field’s tumultuous quivering just so—and something rather unexpected happened. The professor’s feet lifted off the ground slightly, and he appeared to flatten out into a disk, rotating slightly, and parallel to the ground. The duck stood in the middle of the disk, looking rather dazed.

At this point the students were writing so furiously that passersby feared the clipboards might spontaneously combust. The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences came bursting out of nowhere in particular, yelling about the professor’s latest procedure as per usual. “I thought I told you to find somewhere off campus to perform your—what in GOD’S NAME has he done now?!” she screamed. The students were too intent trying to figure this out themselves to notice, and by this time the disk had begun rotating faster and faster, until it looked rather like a large galaxy dressed in a lab coat. The duck let out a somewhat more apprehensive quack and suddenly the disk collapsed in onto itself with a sound somewhere between a rip, a boom, and the groan of a previously respectable section of spacetime being made to do things that were never considered proper in the old days.

And then nothing seemed to happen. The duck floated to the ground with what appeared to be an air of confused success. While the dean stood agape at the possible ramifications of having a tenured professor do…whatever just happened, and the students wondered if they would have to forfeit their tuition, the duck looked up at them.

“Students,” it said with a suppressed quack, “I appear to have melded my consciousness with that of Quackums the duck. You can take the rest of the day off while I work out how this affects the lesson plan. Also, if somebody has some bits of dried bread I am rather famished.”

To be continued! Dun dun dun dunnn!!!

Thoughts for today

1) I am actually rather a fan of cabbage, under the correct circumstances. Most of these involve Chinese food.

2) I am rather happy because I came up with a new implication of the physics theory I've been working on, which I won't burden you with because I don't even understand most of what I'm doing.

3) I am beginning to realize that this will be a very short post.

4) NEW LADY GAGA ALBUM COMES OUT TODAY [ahem] hmm, it appears that all of the people who are actually into that kind of music will be purchasing that. Indeed. *shifty eyes*

Speaking of which, I hereby subject you all to the youtube video whose link follows. I must first issue a disclaimer: I am aware that the first time you watch it it's really really weird.

Because it is.

But after it gets in your head (which it will) and you go back to watch it again after a time spent denying that you just got hooked on it (which you also will) it gets progressively weirder in the GOOD way - i.e. unique as opposed to crack-smokingly freaky like it appeared the first time you watched it.

I know because I've watched it a total of about 15 times in the last three days.

Stop laughing at me.

Also, if you notice the 17 million views it has received, it is interesting to note that the video hasn't even been up for 2 weeks yet, which translates to over a million views a day. Gasp.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACm9yECwSso

PUG POST

Because these are the cutest dern dogs EVER.


LOOK AT THE FACE AND BE SMOTHERED IN CUTENESS




Saw this and thought of Rosemary the pug XD

Because it's true.


Some of these kind of freak me out with how expressiony their eyes are.


What a dog having an aneurysm looks like. XD

That's all for now but I think I'll be putting more on eventually. :D

I'm going to anyway. XD

I won't subject you to quantum mechanics because I'm not even sure how much I understand it, but I have decided that I shall inundate you all with a Brief Overview of Relativity.

Mostly because I feel like it. And the times that I've tried to explain it to my mom left me unsatisfied (hi mummy!) so I'm going to see if it works better in writing.

Oh, and it might be helpful to adopt a thoughtful pose as you read the screen.

Anyway, the general setup goes thusly: James Clerk Maxwell discovered some extremely fancy equations for how electricity and magnetism work. [For anybody who knows some calculus: they're partial differential equations that relate EM fields to current and charge density.] Anyway, when you put these equations together, you come out with the equation for how light travels.

At this point physicists widely believed that light traveled through the "ether" - just like water waves travel through water and sound waves travel through air (or whatever else), physicists believed that light waves needed a medium to travel through. However, experiments around the turn of the century (that is, the 20th) showed that the Earth was stationary relative to the ether - i.e. it's not wooshing past us as one would expect as we orbited the Sun. Several people (such as Hendrik Lorentz) came up with reasons this might be, but the physics community wasn't really satisfied with this approach because we don't really like making excuses for our theories when things don't turn out how they should have.

ANYWAY, this is the state of the theories for electricity and magnetism at the time Einstein came around. Einstein was a huge fan of Maxwell's equations. He decided to approach the problem from a different way: if we take Maxwell's equations as the absolute reality, rather than the ether, what do we come up with?

The first thing that comes up is that light will always travel at a constant speed: c (about 300,000,000 meters per second, or 671,000,000 miles per hour). At first this doesn't seem like much of a "miraculous discovery" but the thing of it is that you will measure light going at this speed no matter how fast you're going.

The most popular way of getting people to be confused by this (because if you're not confused by the end of this post, I'm not explaining it right :D ) involves a tennis balls, but I'm going to step it up a notch and use a cannon.

Because I can.

So for some reason, you've acquired a cannon and want to find out the speed at which it fires the cannonballs. So you set up the necessary equipment, fire the cannon past the equipment, and get some number out. Not extremely exciting. Next, you put the cannon on a truck (you can never have too much heavy machinery) and have the truck drive at high speeds, then fire the cannon again. This time, the cannonball will be going faster: it will be traveling with its original speed PLUS the speed of the truck. Not so bad, yes?

Well, now we get interesting. Because you are in a scientific mood (this happens to everyone, right?) you want to modify your equipment to measure the speed of a light beam as it goes past. So you do. Then you take a flashlight, shine it past the equipment, and it will say that the light passed by at about 670,000,000 miles per hour. For the next step, since a flashlight really isn't very exciting, you decide to go all out: strap the flashlight to a car that can go at half the speed of light (You were so fascinated with this experiment that you created an engine capable of attaining such a speed. Just play along.) Now, taking the cannon example above, one might predict that now the light beam will travel past the detector at 670,000,000 miles per hour PLUS the speed of the car: 335,000,000 miles per hour. Lo and behold, when the number pops out of the machine, it is once again 670,000,000 miles per hour.

At this point you might be tempted to think that there must be something wrong with your machinery (since you designed and built it in the space of one sentence.) So you double check all of the connections and programs, crank up the car to travel at 99% the speed of light, and run the experiment again.

Still 670,000,000 miles per hour.

This is the conclusion that Einstein arrived at. No matter how fast you're going, the speed of light will always be constant. But he didn't stop there. The reason that relativity was so controversial, and why it is such a monumental theory, is the implications it has. This is the point where the author has to be reassuring and yell dramatically, "STAY WITH ME!!"

So what happens is this. That conclusion, which is known as the Second Postulate of Special Relativity (we are ignoring the first postulate because it doesn't really add to this conversation) makes absolutely no sense in the traditional way of explaining things (i.e. the Cannonball Principle). So the point where Einstein really freaked everyone out with his genius is coming up with why light would act that way. What happens is that for someone standing on the ground next to the detector and looking at the car as it speeds past at 99% of the speed of light, they will see that time is unfolding inside the car more slowly than what they measure - that is, the driver of the car's watch will be ticking about a tenth as fast as your watch as you stand at rest by the machine. That effect, called time dilation, ends up exactly compensating for the speed that the car would add to the light from the flashlight - time goes slower, so it takes the light a longer amount of time to travel the same distance - which explains how we measure it to have the same speed.

At this point somebody stood up and said "Why my good sir, that is simply preposterous! Suppose we have two twins - if one travels around the world at nearly the speed of light, surely one will not age slower than its twin! Then one would be older, even though they were born at the same time!" The people sitting nearby (for we are imagining this taking place in an auditorium.) nodded conspiratorially and looked to Einstein for his rebuttal. His rebuttal was this: "Yeah, isn't that weird?"

The author at this point will assure his readers that all of this has been thoroughly tested. For example, at one point a pair of atomic clocks, accurate to the nanosecond, were created. One was put on a very fast plane, which flew around the world. Even though the speed of the plane wasn't even close to the speed of light, the effects of time dilation would be evident simply because of how accurate the clocks were. Lo and behold, the clock that was on the plane was lagging behind the one that remained on the ground by precisely the amount predicted by relativity.

Taking this consequence further by leaps and bounds, Einstein then showed that lengths will also contract at high velocities, mass will increase, and all sorts of other things. At one point, the equations fell out in such a way to produce that ever so clichéd relation: E=mc². The gist of this is that mass is just another form of energy; from this idea sprung the atomic bomb, which works on the principle that destroying some of the mass releases a COLOSSAL amount of energy (since the speed of light squared is, in fact, a very large number).

So that is special relativity in a very inadequate nutshell. Perhaps at some point I'll also add general relativity, but for now I will leave you alone. Have fun mulling these over :D

Things and diddles and stuff.

Today, I decided with Elliott that I would make it my quest to get onto every roof on campus by the time I leave. The issue there is that the roofs are all authorized personnel only. Students are allowed to check out keys to get into these buildings after hours and stuff, but I think that I need an actual reason...so that particular plot needs to get some stuff ironed out. Sigh.

Also, I have decided that I want to specialize in relativity in grad school, probably going into string theory postgrad. Reading stuff about quantum mechanics and relativity (for people who don't know, these are the Two Main Pillars of modern physics - relativity from Einstein and quantum mechanics developed by many people, Schrödinger and Heisenberg notably) relativity just seems prettier. If people want me to I can try to summarize stuff and kind of explain where I'm coming from but not if y'alls don't really want to hear me rant about physics.


ANYWAY on other fronts, I'm looking at rationalist philosophy and stuff trying to smack some labels on some of my thoughts. It's that thing where chances are that somebody before you has thought of that idea before...that concept is the bane of philosophy students because in IB Philosophy we would be discussing something and somebody would go "well that means that blah blah blah!" and McQueen would say "Well 200 years ago you would have been hailed as a genius. Unfortunately, Kant already said that" or something. That's how we were supposed to write philosophy papers - develop the ideas on your own and then go back and comb for stuff people have already said. I kind of like that approach because otherwise you're just writing a history paper...the only problem is that it's bad for one's ego to find out that all of the ideas that you came up with on your own were already discovered.


I suppose that's why Newton was so miffed when Leibniz published his discovery of calculus...Newton had quite the temper and it makes sense that he would be rather annoyed that somebody else came along and "stole" his masterwork.  (it's in quotes because most historians do think that Leibniz invented calculus independently - Newton went off on a MASSIVE smear campaign against Leibniz saying that he stole it. And it worked because he was in charge of the Royal Society XD)


Anyway, I ramble. I will leave with a quote, which I love to death just because having a reason to have an inflated ego is always really fun.

"Nearly all physicists at some time feel a desire to stand God-like above all creation and view the wheels of nature turn as one would look into the workings of a clock." -Evan Harris Walker, The Physics of Consciousness

 By the way, that's an awesome book for anyone who wants to get a nice overview of modern physics and all of its tasty philosophical implications. I should warn people though that there's a little side story that goes along about the author's girlfriend/wife (I'm not sure which one) dying from leukemia. That forms the premise of the book - he was always a physicist, but after her death he set off on a quest to find room in the equations of physics for there to have been more to her than just quarks and electrons. I don't really want to spoil it for anyone, but suffice it to say that there really is - it's another one of the quirks that comes out of quantum mechanics. All sorts of fun. It's quite a brain-turner of a book.

Righto, I'm off. Let me know if anyone wants me to try to give a really quick overview of QM or relativity - there are books written on it, so I couldn't do it any kind of justice, but I could try to do a little summary if anyone is curious.

Another thing to add to the list of traits I inherited from my lovely mother. (Hi there!)

I'm glaring at you through the keyboard as I write this, Madre. Just to let you know. XD

So I was walking back to my dorm with my umbrella out (also, Madre, I recant my comment to you about how I don't need an umbrella...the novelty of walking around without one wore off about the second time I got home drenched.) and going through the physics plaza when I saw someone from my physics class there. I had talked to her a couple times so I waved and she waved back.

At this point I should mention that a) I had my umbrella out primarily because of the wind, not the rain, because for whatever reason I like the feeling of having an umbrella out in the wind. We already know that I'm weird. Also, b) the physics plaza is between the two buildings with a long staircase on one end which faces the water so wind comes up the staircase from the water and is funneled through the plaza rather quickly. Finally, c) as I've mentioned before my umbrella is engineered to take a large amount of wind before it turns inside out so when it does the force is nearly enough to put Mary Poppins to shame.

Can you see where this is going?

Events conspired in roughly this order: I waved, and as my brain registers her waving back suddenly this HUGE gust of wind flies up and hits my umbrella, which rockets back into my face, flips over, and flies off into some corner where it sulked and looked all forlorn and inside-out. Meanwhile, I scream "FLIBBERTIGIBBET" which isn't even an expletive, let alone a manly one, and proceed to run around and gather my stuff up while simultaneously trying to be somewhere else.

This always seems to happen around girls.

Oh dear, here he goes again...

Since absolutely nothing interesting has happened in the last few days except for me getting a headache (I'm looking at you, Madre. You and your genes.) I'm going to complain about people again!

I get about 4 emails a week from one of my relatives in Spokane, who is really into the forwarding of chain letters. This is kind of annoying of itself, but all of the emails are super-conservative anti-Obama stuff that occasionally is bad enough to make me ANGRY RAWR. So here is William's Top Pet Peeves with Anti-Obama People.

1) "OH MY GOD OBAMA'S A MUSLIM WHAT'S HE DOING TO THIS COUNTRY"

These bug me mainly because the email will invoke such entities as the Constitution and how Obama is destroying the Christian ideals that the country was founded upon. This would make more sense if THE COUNTRY WASN'T FOUNDED ON CHRISTIANITY. Sure, it was founded BY Christians but do these people just kind of ignore the First Amendment? Last I checked, it didn't say "Everyone has freedom to choose whatever religion they want OH YEAH EXCEPT THE PRESIDENT WHO HAS TO BE CHRISTIAN." Article two of the Constitution provides the requirements for presidency: born in the US, at least 35, NOTHING about religion!

A related complaint is that with Obama being a member of such a "radical extremist religion" he'll just let the terrorists come in and bomb the pants off of us. To this I reply: SHUT UP AND LEARN SOMETHING! It's amusing to note that despite the hem-hawing and loud noises that the Iranian government makes, if you go up to the citizenry and ask them about the U.S. the overwhelming majority will support/not hate America/Americans (this piece of info was stolen from a documentary from that travel dude). There have been TONS of articles, books, etc. that explain VERY CLEARLY that radical Muslims are by no means the majority! So calm down!

2) "OMG THE HEALTH CARE BILL IS LIEK GOING TO MAKE US LIEK SOCIALIST AND STUFF!!1!!FOUR!!"

These emails kind of make me wonder what horrible protests would be going on if FDR was elected today. Franklin D Roosevelt is consistently ranked in the top three presidents of all time (along with Washington and Lincoln) and is personally my favorite. He created social security and other things that all PROFOUNDLY increased the power of the executive branch. The dude even tried to add another justice to the Supreme Court in order to get his bills to be passed faster (he didn't succeed, obviously). This while also dealing with World War II and the beginnings of what would become the Cold War. Many of his policies were VERY socialist-leaning. And now we revere him as the president who single-handedly (well, along with the help of a Congress that would bark like a dog if he told them to) ended the Depression.

Obama, on the other hand, supports a bill that would limit some of the powers of private-sector health insurance and provide for a federally-run healthcare system, the likes of which Canada has had for quite a while. And I haven't noticed any big wars with Canada recently.

3) "THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE DON'T SUPPORT OBAMA'S PLANS SO HE SUCKS!"

Oh, I hadn't realized that we elected him a year ago and already the entire country is foaming at the mouth. Must have missed that.

I don't really know what majority they're talking about (Eastern Washington?) because the main complaint I've seen with the Obama administration is that he hasn't yet done all of the stuff he promised he would (...he's only a year into his first term!) which indicates that, if anything, people think that he hasn't yet done enough!

4) "OMG HE BOWED TO THE KING OF SAUDI ARABIA!!"

...because one leader isn't allowed to show respect to another one? Bowing isn't an act of submission anymore. At this point I think people are just looking for reasons to criticize him.

We elected him a year ago. I would assume that he still has majority support. The Declaration of Independence, which our country was founded upon, says that if government gets too abysmally horrible the people have a right to rebel against it; this has not yet happened, so I assume that you can all just live with what the rest of us (i.e. the majority) decided for now.

Oh yeah, and shut up about the Muslim thing.

Yours truly has made a medical breakthrough!

Today I discovered that, for males, the strongest antidepressant possible is in fact Lady GaGa pumped directly into the eardrums.

The math quiz today was the easiest one we've had all year, and I completely blew the first problem because I took the integral of the wrong thing. Because I am apparently retarded. In any case, I was extremely disappointed with myself, and when that happens I get angsty and depressed.

SO, that continued until lunch, after which I played "Boys Boys Boys" on the walk back to the dorm, and I swear to God it is impossible for a dude to keep a straight face listening to that song. The chorus goes "Boys boys boys" and then a crowd of girl voices goes "We love them! We love them!" and I just CRACKED UP in the middle of passing Drumheller fountain and probably confused some geese. And now I am happy.

[Please note that the above is amusing only if the chorus line does not actually apply to me. Just making sure there wasn't any confusion.]

I've been pondering what the analogue for females would be, and the best I can think of is the sound track for Team America: World Police (e.g. "America...F*CK YEAH!!")

So yes. The key to preventing depression is not to take psychoactive drugs that have a good chance of making your depression worse; instead you just have to happen to music that is so out of character as to be ridiculous. I think that this would also only work if you have a sense of humor. That always helps.

Something bad has to happen soon...I'm getting suspicious.

Suspicious in that I've had yet another very good time and nobody has yet told me I have a terminal disease, or similar very sad things.

Yesterday, against what I'm sure would have been vehement protests by my mother were she awake (hi there madre!) a couple of friends and I walked up the Burke-Gilman Trail to Gasworks Park...at 11:30 at night. We didn't die, which was a definite plus, and also the view from the top of the hill at the Seattle skyline across Lake Union was more or less the definition of awesome. The only other people at the park were a few macking couples and a hobo who was practicing his harmonica, presumably in an attempt to set the mood for romance. Probably would have been more successful with a different instrument.

Anyway, on the way back, we came across a shopping cart that had been ran into some bushes. So naturally, we claimed it and it was made into a form of William-powered transport. Needless to say the random people who for some reason go jogging at midnight (there were I think four, which is still infinity percent bigger than the expected value, which was zero) were either amused or disturbed, since I was wearing my top hat and Elliott was wearing a mugger beanie, and we were driving an abandoned shopping cart. Oh, and the person in the shopping cart was of the female persuasion, so I'm sure that laid the ground for some very interesting conclusions to be drawn.

Also, today I conducted a social experiment. Between classes, I resolved to listen only to Lady GaGa's album "The Fame," in an attempt to estimate the extent to which the people around me could predict what I was listening to. Like the way that one would expect someone with a spiked mohawk to not be listening to a Vivaldi bassoon concerto.

In any case, several factors made an accurate result rather difficult - such as the fact that I could hardly control myself giggling. You all try listening to "Lovegame" or "Just Dance" and try to look stoic. Not very easy. Anyway, I arrived at the conclusion that the probability someone knows that you are listening to Lady GaGa is directly proportional to how colorful one's clothing is, and also probably proportional to how much one is giggling. And it also probably has something to do with how hard one is trying to repress an urge to break out in lewd dance moves.

So that was my day. Yes I know I'm weird. Ssh.

Edit: Physics. Forgot to include that today. So there it is.

I am annoyed.

I picked up a copy of the Times today on my way to get breakfast (maple bar and an eggnog latte. I was very happy) to peruse while the caffeine worked its way through my system. I was reading the article about the health care bill and how the House passed it when I got to this couple of paragraphs:

"The Republicans skipped out of the chamber mid-debate to join several hundred activists at a protest on the Capitol lawn. 'My vote is just no; I wish there was a place for "Hell, no,"' Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, told the crowd. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, led a chant of 'Hell, no!' Demonstrators shouted out 'Tyranny!' and 'Down with Mao!'

"Activists then wheeled a giant toilet-paper roll, made from a printout of the health-care bill, toward the Capitol steps. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., gave the demonstrators passes to the House gallery, a gesture that may have been related to frequent disruptions that occurred later."

ARE THESE PEOPLE FIVE YEARS OLD??? These people were elected to represent their respective states at Congress, and this is how they act? I don't care if they don't support the bill - the accepted manner for a politician to voice their opinion is to find the nearest reporter and say "Hey, I think this is a stupid bill! I'm going to vote no!" rather than give a herd of ravenous protesters a pass to the fecking Congress building where MATURE PEOPLE are trying to WORK!

And don't even get me started on the people who are calling Obama Hitler or Mao, or claiming he's turning the country into Soviet Russia. Don't even get me started.

Now on to more lighthearted adventures!

Yesterday I went walking in the rain to try out my new umbrella, because the tag said that it was tested at the UW aerodynamics lab for wind-proof-ness. They certainly did their testing well. The problem with having an umbrella that doesn't flip inside-out when a gust of wind hits it is that the thing becomes a SAIL and I swear my feet touched the ground TWICE on the walk down to the sidewalk on Pacific Street. It was kind of windy.

So after going down to the nice little park on the water to watch the ducks act all miffed at the rain, I started heading back up and noticed that one of the drains along the gutter of the road was all clogged with leaves. I kind of stared at it for a while and then decided to unclog it, more to satisfy my random little compulsions than out of a sense of public service. And of course there were five more drains that were clogged with fallen leaves, so I got to do those too.

I admit that the thought of what I looked like kind of kept me going because it's been a while since I did anything really eccentric and I felt this would settle that particular debt. Can you imagine driving along in the rain and seeing random aspiring physicist with an umbrella digging through the leaves in the gutter? I even giggled to myself a couple times with just the thought of it.

I feel very satisfied with my eccentricity now.

A Treatise on the Existence of the Best Night Ever

Yes, it does in fact exist. Furthermore, it was last night! (No, this doesn't have anything to do with dirty things, you perverts. Honestly.)

Anyway, it started thusly: Elliott and I walked around, visited the store, all that fun stuff, me with my top hat (wonderful protection against the rain, you know) and then a sudden gust of rain blew it off my head. I caught it, but I had this wonderful sense of accomplishment...it's not every man that has the opportunity to have a top hat blown off his head by the wind! I don't know. It was just cool for me.

Secondly, we went down to the docks to watch the water and be a part of the weather (rain and wind = win) and then from the area of Downtown Seattle we saw green lighting! :O Around here one is hard pressed to find a real manly lightning storm, so this was a very exciting development. Night going very well so far.

THEN we got back to the dorm, visited with our friends from third floor, and by this time it had stopped raining. However, the lightning suddenly started right above us so we all simultaneously jumped and ran downstairs and out into the courtyard to watch it. A couple more people from the west wing came too. There we were, staring at the electrostatic discharges, and then I think "...why does it sound like it's raining?" and all of a sudden this DELUGE of hail just ROCKETS down onto us! I personally took the masculine route and let off a little scream and ran to the door (I was in a tee shirt and it kind of hurt. That's my story.) while Elliott and Co. stayed behind and danced around a bit. At this point about half of the dorm ran out to see what kind of freak of meteorology had occurred, and we were all having a good time. Eventually it stopped and we all went inside to cultivate our pneumonia, but I swear that was the best night I have ever had, at least while I've been here. All of the main Awesome Weather Patterns all rolled into one cataclysmic explosion of air pressure and polarized clouds. Much fun.

Right. I'm off to trek across campus (in yet another lightning storm!) to get food because the food place near my dorm isn't serving anything good tonight. More weather for me! :D

In Which the Author Decides to Stop Titling His Posts This Way

Before I start, I would like to mention that I have managed to make it to 7 posts without failing to use the word "physics" at least once in any of them. I'm rather proud of myself.

In any case, today was an amusing day for whatever hell-demon is overseeing my life. Normally, my day follows a more or less set course: Breakfast at the cafe in the physics tower - class - lunch at the HUB - walk home. For lunch I get a slice of pizza and a drink and find a window seat from which to observe cars as they drove by and be paranoid that whenever someone around me laughs it's because of something I did. I'm weird that way.

Anyway, today was different in that somebody came up to the table I was at and asked if they could sit there too. I was like "Oh yeah! Sure!" and tidied up the various papers and things that were strewn all about so that she could sit. I didn't really know what to do at this point, so I pretended I was just on my way out anyway and, panicked, tripped over the chair leg and knocked my pizza off of the table trying to grab something. Luckily the pizza landed such that it cushioned my face before I broke it on the ground.

I'm pretty sure that at that point the people really were laughing at me.

The girl who sat at my table let out a little scream and started shouting how sorry she was while I'm thinking "Like it's your fault that I have a cursed motor cortex..." and trying not to spontaneously combust from the ferocity of the blush that had struck my face.

That was a fun one.

In Which the Author Adds Two New Topics

These topics are: "Why Depression is Really Annoying" and "My Subconscious is Apparently a Roiling Cesspool of Angst."

We begin with the first, which I shall preface with the following disclaimer. I think that killing oneself is the uppermost pinnacle of wrong things to do. There are very few things we can be absolutely sure of in life, and the most important of those is that YOU'RE ALIVE. People who kill themselves because they think their life is completely worthless and unredeemable are throwing away THE ONLY CHANCE AT PROVING THEMSELVES WRONG. I get kind of worked up about this because suicide is one of the topics that I really have a concrete and solid opinion on. IT IS NEVER OKAY. If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts GET HELP because it's BAD. Thank you and have a lovely day.

Anyway. I prefaced with that lovely paragraph because whenever I tell people about how depression runs in my family and was passed down to me (Hi madre!) I fear that they will suddenly become so much more worried about me. You don't have to! I will NEVER do anything horrible like that. NEVER. The thought of it makes me sick, it really does. In any case, the whole reason for this topic was that even though I know that I suffer from occasional bouts of depression where I can't seem to be interested in anything or care enough to try, I know that that's what's going on and I know that it's not really me, but I still can't get around it. Bugs the crap out of me. The same reasoning goes into why I don't plan on ever doing psychoactive drugs (...except caffeine. Caffeine is good.) - I don't like being unable to control where my thoughts go, and all of the weird workings of my brain. It can stay firmly seated in my head and not off battling some pink dragon unicorn off in Acidland, thank you very much. Same thing goes for depression - I know I'm depressed, but I can't just bloody get over it and get on with my day. It's annoying.

And now onto the second topic: that of my roiling subconscious. A couple nights ago, I had the weirdest sleep that I have ever experienced. And I'm talking weird on the William scale, which is logarithmic and set twelve and a half times higher than the average person's weirdness scale. Just saying.

I get the feeling that all of my non-physics/school thoughts that I've been repressing and saving for pondering at a later date are starting to rebel, because they all kind of came out in a Grand Symphony of Strange Sleeping Patterns. First, I sleepwalked out of my bunk (down a ladder) and over to my roommate's bunk (up another ladder) and just kind of stood there...the following conversation took place:

He: "...what's up?"
Me: "...oh uh...zzz...nothing...sorry..."

Following which I went back up to my own bed. The main reason this is weird is because I have never sleepwalked in my entire life. Also I can barely get down my ladder when I'm awake (it's probably the lack of caffeine), so I don't really know how I did a total of four ladder trips all while asleep. Also it really freaked my roommate out. I probably would have peed myself.

After I got back to my bed, a length of time passed and then I propped myself up on my elbow and started talking [I don't remember any of this...]:

Me: "zzz...you can sell it you know..."
Roommate [presumably afraid to go back to sleep]: "Sell what?"
Me: "...the motorhome..."
He: "The penguin says it's okay."
Me: "...oh, okay." [goes back to sleep]

And THAT issue is one that I'm sure some of you might be aware of if I have told you or if you are a frequenter of my mom's blog over at this link. Oh dear.

I also had a dream in which Kevin Federline came to town and needed to stay in our dorm. The jury is out on that one...I'm reasonably sure that by this point my subconscious was just screwing with me (not unlike my roommate and the penguin. Good times XD)

Righto. I'm going to go get some food now.

In Which the Author Discusses some Things.

I'm working on making the titles really descriptive, can you tell?

In any case, today's thoughts centered mostly on how annoying I can be to myself sometimes. Which makes me worry that I'm just bloody aggravating to other people, and if I am, you can slap me. I can't promise I won't scream like a girl, but I probably won't hit you back.

ANYWAY, what bugs me about myself is that I am so dern (sic.) impatient when it comes to learning things. In my edumacational career, I've discovered that the best way to learn is to start with the basics and work up from there, getting stuff as you go along. Some fields (i.e. pure math) are extremely OCD about making sure everything along the way is perfectly formulated, well-kept, rigorous, and other synonyms for boring. My brain, on the other hand, takes one idea and rapes the implications out of it until it is a hollow shell of its former self. Which I suppose is cool for a field such as physics where half the fun is in the implications of whatever new theory you've come up with, but this process has kind of been killing me in math.

Also, some of the random (read: crackpot) ideas that I come up with for physics are fine from a qualitative standpoint, but I don't yet know the requisite math to see if they make sense mathematically. Which is what theoretical physics is based on. Whenever I try to teach myself the math I need, the book (always!) says something like "this particular piece of information is really cool, but we won't be getting to it until later." Meanwhile, William the Idiot is too busy flipping ahead to where they talk about it to realize it's 9 chapters past what I know. So when I get confused I just assume I'm an idiot and stop trying.

Which is rather bothersome because I read books about Richard Feynman, who picked up a calculus book when he was thirteen, and other similar tales - it makes me fear that if I can't figure out (for example) vector calculus on my own, will I be able to keep up with the very (VERY) high standards I hold myself to? I mean, I'm not going for some corollary to an already existing theory. My goal in life is to UNITE THE ENTIRETY OF THE GRAND EDIFICES OF RELATIVITY AND THE STANDARD MODEL OF QUANTUM MECHANICS, along with the Nobel Prize and other fun things that would follow from such an accomplishment. I worry that I will be able to get fulfillment out of life if I don't do that, and how can I reach that goal if that problem has eluded the super-geniuses of the physics world for nearly a century? I hardly even  register as a BLIP on the scale of Physics Geniushood!

So that was my insecurity for the day. Thank you for tuning in :D