Blah blah blah apologies for last week. My workload went CRAZY. The good news is that (a) No class tomorrow and (b) I spent an hour and a half collecting signatures from deans/professors/advisors so I could switch calculus sections away from a professor causing that craziness. So from now I should be good.
Saturday or so I made a terrible decision, especially in light of the fact that at that point my possible workload was still at a level capable of making me explode. It may prove to be among the worst decisions of my academic career. I bought Minecraft.
While playing Minecraft, I had someone come up behind me and ask what the point of it was. I had trouble explaining it. As far as I can tell, mostly it's about me getting rid of gray blocks so I can find blocks with brown streaks in them. Brown-streak rocks are like gray blocks but they make me extremely excited as soon as they appear, so that's good. Sometimes, of course, I don't find any. Then I have to break more gray rocks in retribution.
Of course, there's more to Minecraft than just mining. Sometimes, for instance, you want to take your blocks and put them on top of each other to build some kind of house. If you're like me, this is an exciting enterprise, as it will allow you to be outside without being murdered by zombies, exploding zombies, cows, or exploding cows. So it's no surprise that once I had my walls up, I elected to stay behind in my house during the night. I would complete the ceiling while I lounged in safety behind my stone fortresses. Yet, it was only a few minutes after sunset when my screen flashed, and I turned around to find myself face to face with a zombie, thankfully a fairly non-volatile one. I pull out my stone sword and proceed to beat him to death. Turning the corner, I find a skeleton, armed with the science of projectile weapons far beyond my ken. Just like that one dude's monologue about bows and arrows in Iron Man, he kills me. (If I could find any goddamn iron, I'd craft an Iron Man suit.)
Respawning, I rush back to my house. Yet, it's clear the place is compromised. Despite my walls and my calculations, my stronghold had been penetrated. How could this happen? I decided that before retreating to my secure mine shaft, I would return to my house to gather my things and assess the weakness that opened it to intrusion. I run up to it, walk through the door--the door. The door. That door. The door that I didn't bother opening because it was already, uh, ajar. Fully ajar. The door open.
Well. Fuck.
Other than that, Minecraft is fun. It's instilling in me a love of life's simple pleasures, like pieces of rock that aren't gray. It is also ruining my physics education. I am not sure that, in the real world, you can build a tower by jumping up in the air and putting things under you. In addition, I also don't think it would be a viable way to build an overnight shelter. On the other hand, I feel like I could successfully be a miner now. It is apparently not very hard--the main problem being that your pickaxes break down.But since I farm something like a hundred pickaxes' worth of stone for every stone pickax, I have a feeling I won't have any supply problems in a while.
I think I'm going to restart now--first of all so I can play on this Linux partition, and second because I got lost in my other game. I feel like I can easily get back to where I was--and rebuild that house. And then another house. And then a castle and a tower and soon Zachlavia, the greatest nation this world has ever known, and no man shall stand against my might. IT HAS BEGUN.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
New Newsworthy News
One of the interesting consequences of the rise of the Internet is the death of the newspaper. The daily newspaper traditionally performed the following tasks:
First, they provided news. This function started to become obsolete not long after someone invented television/radio/telegraph, but now people read their news all kinds of places, like blogs or, more chillingly, the Fox news website. Say what you want about the relative merits of those things as news sources, but the fact is that from the point of view of someone choosing what media to consume, they're far more convenient (and, often, cheaper) than a newspaper. Of course, newspapers do offer something the Internet rarely does, which is local news. Unfortunately, local television stations generally cover large-scale local news. Local news in small towns such as my hometown usually makes its way via word of mouth, but I suppose there's still a market for poorly-formatted stories with bad spelling in those cases, if only because nobody else gives a shit. Much other local news, such as how Mr and Mrs Thaliomide have been knitting sweaters in the same shop for twenty years, is the kind of thing I'm OK with missing.
Second, they provided classifieds. If you wanted a job, you had Help Wanted. If you wanted to buy or sell something, you had classified ads. If you wanted to get it on, there were personals. Today, we have Craigslist for all three, not counting Monster or eBay or OkCupid. Really, the internet is mostly about either selling things or sex, and often it's about selling sex.
But I worry a little bit about the loss of newspapers. Oh, not newspapers themselves. I don't read newspapers, though I do get the The Economist. I worry about our headlines. I mean, look at these. Good stuff, am I right? But as we start to transition into a world where space is no longer an issue, I fear we'll find ourselves in a world without pithy headlines like that. Luckily, I have a solution.
Eventually, it seems, we're not going to be able to rely on editors' headline abilities to pressure them into hilarity. Instead, we're going to have to make the source material great. This entire blog post comes from a thought I had last night--while I was going to sleep, so I have no idea of the surrounding mental context--that went something like "Man, what if I just tried to make everything I did crazy interesting enough that people would just say 'what'?" My thoughts, before they drifted into complete unconsciousness where I resumed work on my Inception sequel, were pretty favorable! For example, when I win a game of pool, traditionally, I would slap the loser. But, under this system, I would slap him. To death. Much better headline, right?
First, they provided news. This function started to become obsolete not long after someone invented television/radio/telegraph, but now people read their news all kinds of places, like blogs or, more chillingly, the Fox news website. Say what you want about the relative merits of those things as news sources, but the fact is that from the point of view of someone choosing what media to consume, they're far more convenient (and, often, cheaper) than a newspaper. Of course, newspapers do offer something the Internet rarely does, which is local news. Unfortunately, local television stations generally cover large-scale local news. Local news in small towns such as my hometown usually makes its way via word of mouth, but I suppose there's still a market for poorly-formatted stories with bad spelling in those cases, if only because nobody else gives a shit. Much other local news, such as how Mr and Mrs Thaliomide have been knitting sweaters in the same shop for twenty years, is the kind of thing I'm OK with missing.
Second, they provided classifieds. If you wanted a job, you had Help Wanted. If you wanted to buy or sell something, you had classified ads. If you wanted to get it on, there were personals. Today, we have Craigslist for all three, not counting Monster or eBay or OkCupid. Really, the internet is mostly about either selling things or sex, and often it's about selling sex.
But I worry a little bit about the loss of newspapers. Oh, not newspapers themselves. I don't read newspapers, though I do get the The Economist. I worry about our headlines. I mean, look at these. Good stuff, am I right? But as we start to transition into a world where space is no longer an issue, I fear we'll find ourselves in a world without pithy headlines like that. Luckily, I have a solution.
Eventually, it seems, we're not going to be able to rely on editors' headline abilities to pressure them into hilarity. Instead, we're going to have to make the source material great. This entire blog post comes from a thought I had last night--while I was going to sleep, so I have no idea of the surrounding mental context--that went something like "Man, what if I just tried to make everything I did crazy interesting enough that people would just say 'what'?" My thoughts, before they drifted into complete unconsciousness where I resumed work on my Inception sequel, were pretty favorable! For example, when I win a game of pool, traditionally, I would slap the loser. But, under this system, I would slap him. To death. Much better headline, right?
Friday, January 21, 2011
Coding (Not CODing, that's different, there are guns)
That assassins game I was posting about recently ended, which means that the winner--my roommate, which is cool--gets to put the game together again. What a pain. You have to draw circles and put people in order and stuff. So I made an offhand remark to the guy who had been putting it all together before my roommate, "You know, it seems like this shouldn't be too hard to automate."
He looked at me, wanting to be sure of what I was asking. "Well," I said, not yet realizing what was happening, "a computer could pretty easily do it all. You just need to take each name, randomly assign a target, then move onto the target and randomly assign their target, etc. Maybe it could then automatically email everyone or something, so that every person would be able to participate, and nobody has to worry about knowing too much or sitting out." He replied, "Hey. Do you have a new project for today? Looks like it."
Now, I wouldn't be able to lay claim to the sort of geekdom I do without at least dabbling in programming. A few years back I was pretty into it. Actually, it started when I was twelve, and webpages (such as they were in those long ago days) somehow hooked me up with QBASIC. I wrote calculators and games and nothing useful, but it was fun. I bought a couple books on C and C++ but I never really stuck with it. So I had some vague idea of what I needed--I was going to need for loops, uh. I would need...a...compiler. Right. Anyway, nowadays we had Google, so I surely I could work out the rest of it. I mean, it's just a programming language. It's not like...you know...an entirely new field of study for me.
Turns out Ubuntu comes with a compiler! Or at least, I downloaded one to install programs previously. So that part was easy. Let's see if I can still get my Hello World on. Terminal output suggests I can, indeed, get my Hello World on.
Key to this project is file input. I want to be able to take a list of names and assemble that in the program into a pairing of names and targets. So I write a program that reads off a file's contents, to familiarize myself with that process.
I quickly get lots of errors from g++, but it wasn't helpful, and I quickly realized that I needed not a compiler but an IDE. Some googling later, I was in NetBeans, and successfully made file operations work. In an ominous bit of foreshadowing, I fixed a segfault issue, but I don't remember how.
At this point I decided I would go for broke. I wrote pretty much the entirety of the program in one go, deciding that the bits I didn't remember how to do I'd look up as I went along and fix when I tried to compile, rather than program-by-program learn all these techniques. By programmer standards, it's not very big. It's about a hundred lines, and that's with a fair number of comments, and I'm sure I declared variables in weird places and did a million weird things to it. Still, I was proud. Of course, it didn't compile the first time. It never compiles the first time, it rarely compiles the tenth. It did compile eventually, though, after I chased down rogue initializations and stray commas and the inevitable missing semicolon. And once that was done, I was inexpressibly proud. I ran my program, and it came up:
>>How many players, shithead?
4
>>Nice. What's the file name for this crap?
roster.txt
Segmentation fault. Bitch.
(Neither my actual program nor my CLI are this rude, but this isn't the most interesting topic so I spiced it up a bit.)
So yeah. That's what's happened the last few days. (It also snowed but dammit who cares about outside.) For now, the voyage continues. If I can solve my segfaults I'll be really happy, and then the most bare-bones version of the program will be complete. I'd really like to put together the email part of things, but I worry that's going to get beyond me pretty quickly. Still, I'll probably try.
He looked at me, wanting to be sure of what I was asking. "Well," I said, not yet realizing what was happening, "a computer could pretty easily do it all. You just need to take each name, randomly assign a target, then move onto the target and randomly assign their target, etc. Maybe it could then automatically email everyone or something, so that every person would be able to participate, and nobody has to worry about knowing too much or sitting out." He replied, "Hey. Do you have a new project for today? Looks like it."
Now, I wouldn't be able to lay claim to the sort of geekdom I do without at least dabbling in programming. A few years back I was pretty into it. Actually, it started when I was twelve, and webpages (such as they were in those long ago days) somehow hooked me up with QBASIC. I wrote calculators and games and nothing useful, but it was fun. I bought a couple books on C and C++ but I never really stuck with it. So I had some vague idea of what I needed--I was going to need for loops, uh. I would need...a...compiler. Right. Anyway, nowadays we had Google, so I surely I could work out the rest of it. I mean, it's just a programming language. It's not like...you know...an entirely new field of study for me.
Turns out Ubuntu comes with a compiler! Or at least, I downloaded one to install programs previously. So that part was easy. Let's see if I can still get my Hello World on. Terminal output suggests I can, indeed, get my Hello World on.
Key to this project is file input. I want to be able to take a list of names and assemble that in the program into a pairing of names and targets. So I write a program that reads off a file's contents, to familiarize myself with that process.
I quickly get lots of errors from g++, but it wasn't helpful, and I quickly realized that I needed not a compiler but an IDE. Some googling later, I was in NetBeans, and successfully made file operations work. In an ominous bit of foreshadowing, I fixed a segfault issue, but I don't remember how.
At this point I decided I would go for broke. I wrote pretty much the entirety of the program in one go, deciding that the bits I didn't remember how to do I'd look up as I went along and fix when I tried to compile, rather than program-by-program learn all these techniques. By programmer standards, it's not very big. It's about a hundred lines, and that's with a fair number of comments, and I'm sure I declared variables in weird places and did a million weird things to it. Still, I was proud. Of course, it didn't compile the first time. It never compiles the first time, it rarely compiles the tenth. It did compile eventually, though, after I chased down rogue initializations and stray commas and the inevitable missing semicolon. And once that was done, I was inexpressibly proud. I ran my program, and it came up:
>>How many players, shithead?
4
>>Nice. What's the file name for this crap?
roster.txt
Segmentation fault. Bitch.
(Neither my actual program nor my CLI are this rude, but this isn't the most interesting topic so I spiced it up a bit.)
So yeah. That's what's happened the last few days. (It also snowed but dammit who cares about outside.) For now, the voyage continues. If I can solve my segfaults I'll be really happy, and then the most bare-bones version of the program will be complete. I'd really like to put together the email part of things, but I worry that's going to get beyond me pretty quickly. Still, I'll probably try.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
An Assassin's Tale
My target stepped out of the elevator, with me behind him. Had I already waited too long? Without the confined space, would I find time to strike? We walked side-by-side, he and I, talking like men not facing morality in that hardest of ways—by forcing it on others. As yet he showed no sign of suspicion. Was it not odd to him that I'd accepted his invitation so willingly? I rarely buy snacks from this convenience store. Surely he knew. Surely. We walk in. I pick up a juice. “100% Apple,” it advertises. I wonder briefly if that makes it more wholesome than me and my grisly deeds. He picks up something—candy? Chips?--somehow I'm past caring, but surely a man so near to his death deserves that attention. I can't give it to him. I glance at our third companion, another who volunteered to come along. What's his angle? Is he thirsty, caffeine-starved? Or is he after me? I stand with my back to a wall, hoping I don't cause suspicion. We meet friends there, by chance, and trade pleasantries. I worry that my anxiety shows as I pace a bit with my pretense of an apple juice. As we leave, Tyler—his name is, was Tyler—Tyler steps in front of me, and I realize that if I don't take my chance, no hope remains. He would do the same to me. Maybe he's planning to. I reach out, and grasp his shoulder—not hard enough to cause pain, but firmly enough that he's aware. I look into his eyes, filled with surprise and a growing dejection, and apologize.
Damn, I should skip the whole geek thing and just write melodrama. So, my floor's playing a game called Assassins, which many of you have probably experienced. For those who haven't, let me summarize: A group of people sign up. One person, in a game master role, places them in a circle-formation of targets. Each person is targeted by one other, and have one target themselves. Kills are scored in various ways—I've heard of squirt guns being used, as well as slitting throats with feathers. In some countries they use actual guns. Once you kill someone, you inherit their target. Usually some safe zones are implemented, which are especially necessary since we all live together. All public areas in our floor of the dorm are safe zones, but the rooms and bathrooms are not, which is yet another reason to lock your doors. (I would at this point also express concern about certain individuals climbing in your windows, snatching your people up, but our windows don't open and are ten floors above ground level. The way I see it, if anyone gets through the window, they deserve it.) We played one round the last two weeks of last semester, and another started as we arrived this semester. One of them went quite well for me, one ended early. I didn't win either, but let's explore these tales, because this game is crazy fun. You ever read a conspiracy theory and think it must be interesting to be paranoid? This is like that except that there really are people out to get you.
The first game, I received my first target—a man who, for anonymity purposes, will be called Jon. His real name's Jon, but we're still going to call him that. Not long after receiving this target, I see Jon and another friend of mine leave the part of our floor behind the key card swipe, which means they're in the elevator lobby. They're still safe there, but unless they're going to the girl's side of the floor, those elevators are about to turn fatal, I decide. I'll pretend I'm going somewhere innocent so I can catch an elevator and get them as they leave. I walk out, calm, collected, and hungry. For blood. As soon as I walk out, Jon calls to me, “Hey Zach,” he says unwittingly, “Want to come to Braum's with us?” I grin and reply wittingly, “Of course. Of course I want to come to Braum's with you.” (Note: Braum's is a fine establishment which serves hamburgers, fries, shakes, ice cream, and other food I don't care nearly as much about. Just so you know, there's no product placement deal.) (Note: Braum's executives: I would totally do a product placement deal.) We go, and I get a chocolate shake and drink it while Jon and [REDACTED] eat lunch. I watch them and try to think of something cool to say. Finally, we start to leave after someone buys milk. Before we walk out the door, I say to Jon, “Did you enjoy your meal?”
He gets a puzzled look on his face, and says “Yyyyes...?”
I say, “Good” and grab his arm before exclaiming “BECAUSE IT WAS YOUR LAST.” Oh hot damn. I am totally cut out for this business. Look at that! You think Lee Harvey Oswald had that sort of thing lined up? I doubt it. I bet he didn't even have a milkshake with JFK beforehand. (Booth, “sic semper tyrannis” is pretty good.)
I lasted until the final three, and when I and my target were having a staredown in the hallway, I slowly walked backwards into my room—and got tagged by the other guy. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But that's what happens when you play for keeps.
This time, well, I told you about Tyler already. Not long after, as people started arriving back from winter break, I stepped briefly into a friend's room to talk to him as he unpacked, and THE SAME GUY got me. The same way. Embarrassing. It would be like if, instead of ascending to heaven, Jesus just started walking around pissing off the government again. So it didn't last as long. That's fine, that's fine. Soon this round will end and a new one will begin. And you know? I think I'll be tearing shit up. Just watch.
Monday, January 17, 2011
You Never Forget Your First
When I was in high school, my family often asked if I was planning to be a lawyer, because I was good at/enjoyed debate and public speaking events. I would always laugh this suggestion off; I've never had any real desire to be a lawyer. My dad does IT work for a few law firms, and I'm often there with him when he performs monthly maintenance The impression I've got of this business is that it's about 95% paperwork, and there are few things I hate as much as paperwork. For that reason, I don't intend to do any lawyering besides rules lawyering at the gaming table.
But even if I were inclined towards ignoring the paperwork, I don't think I'd end up in law. I simply don't get the same pleasure out of law as I get out of science, which is not something I feel like my family understands. I suppose, really, most people don't. Looking at the way the world works, seeing the patterns that underlie it, applying reason and experience to synthesize a beautifully simple yet breathtakingly complex model of the world around us—that's amazing, it's fun, it's stunning in scale and power. Now, I come from a fairly intelligent family, so in that context it seems odd that they wouldn't really appreciate that in the way I do. It's not a criticism—after all, I was just talking about how I consider law to be unappealing, but I'm sure there are plenty of lawyers out there who love their jobs. It doesn't mean they're too stupid to realize that they hate their jobs, and it doesn't mean I'm too stupid to appreciate legal professions.
Sometimes it seems like a large part of geekiness/nerdiness/whatever is an appreciation for mechanics. There's something beautiful about a mathematical proof, or in the way a thrown ball glides along its parabolic path, or in the way simple logic gates can slowly build up to something as complex as the modern computer, that appeals to a particular kind of person. Where one person sees “cold equations” and some people talk about the nihilistic depression of a godless universe, others see a vibrant warmth of order and the beauty of a universe filled with nature.
Talking like this reminds me of a key event in my development as a person. As I entered my sophomore year of high school, I felt like I wanted to do something scientific or technical, but I didn't have a clear picture of the way being a scientist actually worked. (Arguably, I still don't, but bear with me.) In my AP Physics class—my first real physics instruction, although I'd done a lot of independent reading—our first lab proved influential. First, our teacher began talking about displacement, and how it differed from “distance.” From there, he started to talk about an object under constant acceleration. He drew some graphs, walked us through what it meant to talk about velocity or acceleration, and finally—with some handwaves concerning exactly why this worked, as there was no calculus first semester—derived the kinematic equations by calculating how much area was under different curves. We had a set of six equations, all of which fell out of some pretty logical assumptions. They looked complicated then, even if they wouldn't now. We felt like we'd done something because of the way he walked us through the derivation. Next, it was time to apply it.
We had a ball bearing, some carbon paper, a meter stick, and a special spring-loaded ball bearing launcher that showed the angle it was launching at. The project was simple, we were supposed to fire the ball bearing onto the carbon paper, measure the distance to the mark it made, and using several data points from two different angles, calculate the launch velocity of the ball bearing. That was complicated, and involved a lot of algebra that I remember being very frustrating. (I also remember that I made a mistake taking the square root of the sum of two squares and just removing the exponents. Mistakes stick with me.) However, we eventually did it—we had a v-nought.
Finally, there was one other part of the lab, and this was the cool bit. Using our previously obtained figure, we had to calculate the correct angle to hit a target two meters away from the gun. We worked it out, fired our ball bearing—and hit it very closely. Oh, sure, with basic kinematics you're losing a lot—air resistance and such. But the ball bearing was small and didn't travel for very long, so it worked.
And that blew my fucking mind. How cool was it that we started the day talking about what “position” meant, kept applying rational thought and basic reasoning, and by the end of it we were able to actually calculate trajectories and impact points? The fact that logic and mathematics could be so easily seen made physically manifest was wonderful. Oh, sure, had you asked me the day before whether it was possible, I would have said it was, and I might have said similar things to what I've already written. But witnessing it made me feel it in a very real way that I hadn't before. I think that my family (and non-physics-or-science-nerds in general) might appreciate my passion a little more if they witnessed that sort of thing, if the importance, versatility, and applicability of science were demonstrated to them as well as it was to me. Since then, I've been in a (shitty high school) chemistry lab, I've been in a (much better and far cooler college) electronics lab, and I'm hoping to find another lab to spend the summer at. Despite all this, I don't think I've seen an experiment that stuck with me quite like this one did.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Looking Ahead, Like Gandalf When They Get Jumped by Those Trolls
Originally I was considering my "I'm back" post to be this week's Friday post, but I decided that those sorts of rationalizations were the wrong way to start. And, since the best part of this blog always was always me talking about myself, I thought I'd take some time to talk about my courseload this semester, which I have no doubt everyone will find interesting.
Of course, far less important than the classes themselves are when they are. For instance, do I get to sleep in? Can I escape Friday classes altogether? Did I manage to take all twelve of the necessary credit-hours in the same day, thus giving me a six day weekend? The answer to all of these questions is no. Last semester I could and did sleep until 11:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but had to wake up at 7:30 the other weekdays. And, while I had Friday classes, I had a friend who didn't. (I'm pretty sure the one-day work week is just a wholly fictitious goal, and probably a terrible idea even if it were possible.) This semester, I have a class that meets every day at 9:30, so I'll be waking up at 8:30. Really, this is not too bad. In high school I was waking up at 6:30, and 8:30 means I can go to bed after midnight and still get my eight hours.
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: Kinda totally sweet. I've got my 9:30 class, my 10:30 class, and then nothing. (GEE I WONDER IF THIS IS WHY THE NEW BLOG SCHEDULE IS MWF HRRRRM.) The nice thing about putting my free time in afternoons instead of mornings is that I'm more likely to use that time productively. For example, I'd like to actually exercise the way I tell my mom I do sometimes. I'd also like to make blog posts. MWF afternoons, hooray!
Tuesday, Thursday: Oh sweet zombie Jesus on a tandem bike with Feynman's ghost, these days are going to suck. I'll have four classes, but they're all an hour and a half long. They're also all together. That means that from 9:30 to 2:45, I'm in class pretty much continuously, since I'll be using the fifteen minute breaks for walking. You might notice that, in most people's view, a customary time around midday ought to be set aside for, as they say, "eating." I, too, have noticed this problem, and I believe it can best be solved by large doses of Pop-Tarts.
So, that's the purely scheduled part of my schedule. How about the coursework? Actually, I like my courses this year. They look interesting and such. Let's run through the list, shall we?
Calculus & Analytical Geometry IV: Covers line/surface/double/triple integrals and vector calc. I've seen some of the material, but not all of it (Gauss's/Green's Theorem, for instance.) In addition, the stuff I did see was, oh, two years ago? So that could be tough. This one is less exciting but we'll see how it goes.
Beginning Chinese, Continued: I'd really feel much cooler taking this class if it were called Beginning Chinese II. At least I feel like I would have completed something, instead of just being on some sort of hiatus while everyone wonders whether they'll blow up the Borg cube or...right, yeah. I like Chinese, it's an interesting language and pretty different from my other classes.
Physical Mathematics I: Seems to involve mostly differential equations. I really hate hand waves in my physics class, and my modern physics class had to resort to it a few times last semester when we were solving Schrodinger's equation. I'm hoping that this allows me to put a lot of things on a more mathematical footing, and putting things on a mathematical footing is just about the coolest of all things.
Physical Mechanics I: Sup dawg, heard you like putting things on a mathematical footing, so we put more complicated mathematics in your Newtonian mechanics so you can...right, yeah. I should start thinking the entire sentence before I write it. Anyway, this is all kinds of basic mechanics but done in far more detail. As someone who kind of misses those problems, I'm looking forward to it. (Plus, Lagrangians and Hamiltonians and things. Those are important.)
How Computers Work: This semester's wild card. I'm going to be honest, I don't know how this will work out. See, at my school (University of Oklahoma) to graduate with honors you have to take certain honors classes in addition to, well, you can look it up if you care. One of these courses is called "Perspectives on the American Experience", and it is actually just a writing course in disguise which can be about a wide range of things--my girlfriend is taking "American Religion on the Margins", I know someone taking "American Gangsters", etc. Me, I'm taking "How Computers Work." Thing is, it's taught by a CS professor, and thing is, it seems to involve programming. That doesn't really mesh with the rest of the perspectives courses. Programming is a skill I'd like to pick up, so I'm happy to take this. I'd also be happy to take a writing course, as you might be able to tell from my constant apologetic "I LOVE WRITING" comments. In fact, originally I was going to take a course called "American Superheroes," which might just be the most badass thing I can imagine writing essays about. Seriously, I would have no problem going on for pages and pages about Batman. That's probably going to be Monday's post now that I've got it in my head. (I actually nearly wrote my senior term paper over the similarities between The Dark Knight and Heart of Darkness. No lie. I still have the outline I drew up before I decided to stick with Albert Camus.) ANYWAY, I was cruelly prevented from this course of action because the only section of "American Superheroes" was at the same time as the only section of "Physical Mechanics" which is supposedly more important to a physics major. Whatever.
Of course, far less important than the classes themselves are when they are. For instance, do I get to sleep in? Can I escape Friday classes altogether? Did I manage to take all twelve of the necessary credit-hours in the same day, thus giving me a six day weekend? The answer to all of these questions is no. Last semester I could and did sleep until 11:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but had to wake up at 7:30 the other weekdays. And, while I had Friday classes, I had a friend who didn't. (I'm pretty sure the one-day work week is just a wholly fictitious goal, and probably a terrible idea even if it were possible.) This semester, I have a class that meets every day at 9:30, so I'll be waking up at 8:30. Really, this is not too bad. In high school I was waking up at 6:30, and 8:30 means I can go to bed after midnight and still get my eight hours.
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: Kinda totally sweet. I've got my 9:30 class, my 10:30 class, and then nothing. (GEE I WONDER IF THIS IS WHY THE NEW BLOG SCHEDULE IS MWF HRRRRM.) The nice thing about putting my free time in afternoons instead of mornings is that I'm more likely to use that time productively. For example, I'd like to actually exercise the way I tell my mom I do sometimes. I'd also like to make blog posts. MWF afternoons, hooray!
Tuesday, Thursday: Oh sweet zombie Jesus on a tandem bike with Feynman's ghost, these days are going to suck. I'll have four classes, but they're all an hour and a half long. They're also all together. That means that from 9:30 to 2:45, I'm in class pretty much continuously, since I'll be using the fifteen minute breaks for walking. You might notice that, in most people's view, a customary time around midday ought to be set aside for, as they say, "eating." I, too, have noticed this problem, and I believe it can best be solved by large doses of Pop-Tarts.
So, that's the purely scheduled part of my schedule. How about the coursework? Actually, I like my courses this year. They look interesting and such. Let's run through the list, shall we?
Calculus & Analytical Geometry IV: Covers line/surface/double/triple integrals and vector calc. I've seen some of the material, but not all of it (Gauss's/Green's Theorem, for instance.) In addition, the stuff I did see was, oh, two years ago? So that could be tough. This one is less exciting but we'll see how it goes.
Beginning Chinese, Continued: I'd really feel much cooler taking this class if it were called Beginning Chinese II. At least I feel like I would have completed something, instead of just being on some sort of hiatus while everyone wonders whether they'll blow up the Borg cube or...right, yeah. I like Chinese, it's an interesting language and pretty different from my other classes.
Physical Mathematics I: Seems to involve mostly differential equations. I really hate hand waves in my physics class, and my modern physics class had to resort to it a few times last semester when we were solving Schrodinger's equation. I'm hoping that this allows me to put a lot of things on a more mathematical footing, and putting things on a mathematical footing is just about the coolest of all things.
Physical Mechanics I: Sup dawg, heard you like putting things on a mathematical footing, so we put more complicated mathematics in your Newtonian mechanics so you can...right, yeah. I should start thinking the entire sentence before I write it. Anyway, this is all kinds of basic mechanics but done in far more detail. As someone who kind of misses those problems, I'm looking forward to it. (Plus, Lagrangians and Hamiltonians and things. Those are important.)
How Computers Work: This semester's wild card. I'm going to be honest, I don't know how this will work out. See, at my school (University of Oklahoma) to graduate with honors you have to take certain honors classes in addition to, well, you can look it up if you care. One of these courses is called "Perspectives on the American Experience", and it is actually just a writing course in disguise which can be about a wide range of things--my girlfriend is taking "American Religion on the Margins", I know someone taking "American Gangsters", etc. Me, I'm taking "How Computers Work." Thing is, it's taught by a CS professor, and thing is, it seems to involve programming. That doesn't really mesh with the rest of the perspectives courses. Programming is a skill I'd like to pick up, so I'm happy to take this. I'd also be happy to take a writing course, as you might be able to tell from my constant apologetic "I LOVE WRITING" comments. In fact, originally I was going to take a course called "American Superheroes," which might just be the most badass thing I can imagine writing essays about. Seriously, I would have no problem going on for pages and pages about Batman. That's probably going to be Monday's post now that I've got it in my head. (I actually nearly wrote my senior term paper over the similarities between The Dark Knight and Heart of Darkness. No lie. I still have the outline I drew up before I decided to stick with Albert Camus.) ANYWAY, I was cruelly prevented from this course of action because the only section of "American Superheroes" was at the same time as the only section of "Physical Mechanics" which is supposedly more important to a physics major. Whatever.
Where Have We Heard This Before?
I'm a bad blogger. Arguably, there aren't a lot of good bloggers, and so I shouldn't be ashamed of this. But at no point have I ever really had a solid update schedule. At no point have I actually kept up blogging for more than like a week. I just left this thing for like two months without so much as a Happy-New-Year post. Hell, I'm not sure I tweeted.
I can't blame lack of material. I haven't written anything about: Wikileaks, all the movies I've seen, the holidays, the War on Christmas, New Year's, the Giffords shooting, or my rediscovery of the free downloadable game Death Worm. I haven't talked about that book I read, or the other book I read, or my experience since installing Ubuntu or my new girlfriend.
I can blame finals, somewhat. But finals were over a lonnnng time ago--school for me restarts Tuesday. But that's maybe a justification for a week of hiatus, not a silence.
I like blogging, I do. Partly it's because I like writing. I think I'm good at it, and so it's the sort of thing I like doing FOR THE ART OF IT. But I've yet to be able to stick with it. Honestly, my life is littered with things like that. I've got multiple books on learning C and C++ programming, which I never did. I can't even bothered to put in the effort it would take to get good at Starcraft II.
I'm going to make a temporary, wholly ridiculous stab at the problem: I think that I ought to come up with a different schedule. First, I was trying "whenever I feel like it". Then it was "every day, unless I don't feel like it for a month or three". This had a few problems. First, a self-defined schedule, free from the influence of the calendar, meant that I could easily procrastinate. Second, I ran out of things to talk about. Third, I put too much emphasis on the "humanist" part, I feel--somehow part of me felt like every post had to be some socio-political-philosophical essay, which was a poor approach.
So, it's 12:39 AM, a time when no bad decisions ever get made and commitments stick, right? And I'm here to say that Geeky Humanist is back (again) and we're going to try to stay that way. I'm declaring a Monday/Wednesday/Friday update schedule, with smaller updates between if serious shit goes down. If I want to skip, I have to post explaining why I'm skipping. Hopefully, this keeps me honest.
I can't blame lack of material. I haven't written anything about: Wikileaks, all the movies I've seen, the holidays, the War on Christmas, New Year's, the Giffords shooting, or my rediscovery of the free downloadable game Death Worm. I haven't talked about that book I read, or the other book I read, or my experience since installing Ubuntu or my new girlfriend.
I can blame finals, somewhat. But finals were over a lonnnng time ago--school for me restarts Tuesday. But that's maybe a justification for a week of hiatus, not a silence.
I like blogging, I do. Partly it's because I like writing. I think I'm good at it, and so it's the sort of thing I like doing FOR THE ART OF IT. But I've yet to be able to stick with it. Honestly, my life is littered with things like that. I've got multiple books on learning C and C++ programming, which I never did. I can't even bothered to put in the effort it would take to get good at Starcraft II.
I'm going to make a temporary, wholly ridiculous stab at the problem: I think that I ought to come up with a different schedule. First, I was trying "whenever I feel like it". Then it was "every day, unless I don't feel like it for a month or three". This had a few problems. First, a self-defined schedule, free from the influence of the calendar, meant that I could easily procrastinate. Second, I ran out of things to talk about. Third, I put too much emphasis on the "humanist" part, I feel--somehow part of me felt like every post had to be some socio-political-philosophical essay, which was a poor approach.
So, it's 12:39 AM, a time when no bad decisions ever get made and commitments stick, right? And I'm here to say that Geeky Humanist is back (again) and we're going to try to stay that way. I'm declaring a Monday/Wednesday/Friday update schedule, with smaller updates between if serious shit goes down. If I want to skip, I have to post explaining why I'm skipping. Hopefully, this keeps me honest.
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