Friday I woke up with a migraine, and took one of my special poison pills. Normally these make me feel awesome but this time I was terribly depressed all day and had a sort of breakdown at work. After work I kind of felt like driving in no particular direction and not stopping. So I wandered around the city for quite a long time and somehow ended up on top of Goose Island Overlook (not sure how that happened). So I walked around there for a while, and then (oh no!) could not start my car, which seemed pretty fitting. Then I wasn't quite sure what to do. Who do I call? What the heck do I do? I don't know anybody who's home right now! (my parents are away on vacation, all my friends would be at a bowling-birthday-party). Luckily Amy answered her phone and saved me, and thank god for cellphones (incidentally, I later told god exactly what I thought of him before hurling some rocks in his general direction and telling him to fuck off). Some more wandering (somehow, I found myself on the road up the hill to Goose Island Overlook again), then I ended up on my parents' farm where I spent most of the next two days doing nothing and watching Pi (because you can never watch Pi enough times), and also going on a several-hour-long walk across the fields--bad idea, it was very hot and sunny which invariably results in more headaches. Now it is the last week of work. After this week I will have very infrequent internet access, so I'll probably get very agitated quickly. Over the weekend (only 2 days without internet), I went through severe withdrawal.
I seem to have committed myself to grad studies in English, mostly because the registrar phoned me today wanting a synopsis of my future plans and I said I was going to apply for grad studies. I always feel I have to tell them I'm planning on pursuing academics further, as if they'll withhold paying my scholarships if I don't (which may very well be true, I wouldn't know). But I'm also becoming more and more interested in math and science, especially astronomy. I mean, what's with Gabriel's horn? Finite volume yet infinite surface area? Crazy. Et cetera. I have a bad habit of quitting in the midde of things and deeply doubting what I'm doing. I really don't know where to go for advice anymore.
According to this personality test, I am: introverted, irritable, observer, depressed, does not enjoy leadership, reveals little about self, dislikes large parties, does not like to stand out, sensitive, not a thrill seeker, solitude loving, likes silence, fragile, second guesses self, negative, unadventurous, fearful, weird, paranoid, phobic, dependent, cautious, avoidant, semi intellectual. Oh boy, how very positive. I ask you, weird? And "semi" intellectual? All lies, I tell you!
I know, I haven't posted the drawings like I said I would. I just didn't feel like setting up my computer and then packing it up again two days later. Next week! For sure!
- Also awesome: check out this hummingbird-bee-moth
- man, this internship sounds like my ideal career in English! (or, for that matter, one of the only careers in English I would want)
- Montreal overpass collapses...I hope my parents are ok
- new permanent stamps
6 comments:
Being awesome is what's with Gabriel's horn! Do you understand it? What I want to know is how Ramanujan summation (and what the heck is that anyway?) can make the infinite sum of positive integers equal to -1/12. WTF? It has to do with renormalization of quantum field theories so maybe I will learn about it someday woot
Also I think we should begin ending sentences with "woot" instead of a period.
Also, I think everybody is wondering why you didn't mention your award of total awesomeness?????//////slashslashslashslash
-rt
I bet you there are multitudinous possibilities like that internship! Really, I do.
Also, the leading cause of all bridge collapses is civil engineering students showing up to class drunk and handing in assignments without units or vector signs. In the next assignment I mark, when a student forgets to write the units, I'll write "Every time you forget your units, a bridge collapses."
And maybe, "Every time you forget your vector signs, a plane crashes."
The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost due to incorrect unit conversion, and AC Flight 143 became the "Gimli Glider" for the same reason.
-rt
I think I understand Gabriel's horn. At least, I can see how it must have finite volume and infinite surface area at the same time. But let me get this straight: you could fill it up with paint, but you could never have enough paint to cover the outside? But wouldn't it be bottomless? Aah! We obey the laws of physics in this province!!
I haven't been officially notified of the award yet. Details at eleven.
You will have to explain this Riemann zeta function to me woot~~~~tildetilde&&ersand
I learned about imaginary numbers! (I always used to think that Hobbes made them up, you know like eleventeen and thirty-twelve.) And fluxions! I'm afraid I tuned out set theory—too bad, because half of my book managed to incorporate sets into everything.
Yeah, you can fill it with paint but not paint the surface. Which doesn't seem to make sense, but common sense doesn't really apply here. It would be bottomless, but the inside narrows so tightly that it can be filled despite being bottomless. That's the idea of convergence of an infinite series or integral.
Complex numbers are pretty cool. What are fluxions? They talked about them in the Baroque Cycle.
-rt
So the volume of Gabriel's horn is a pi?
Fluxions are what Newton called his calculus (and "calculus" is what Liebnitz called it)
I need to learn calculus.
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