Recap: Why look...

...it's a Monday. We bow down to the power of the deans.

15 days, 5 finals, and a lot of cleaning and packing to do, least of all includes laundry and figuring out when I should do it because if I have to have the things packed by Thursday and I have two finals on Wednesday and I have to go to work on Tuesday....

Erf. This. This is why we have agendas, helpful or as unhelpful as they may be, they are now a deeply ingrained habit (for better or for worse).

On the other note, I feel like parts of my brain should be diseased. Very specific parts. Broca's aphasia, to be exact, and I'm blaming you, Annie.
Insanity may be contagious, but I prefer the low-level radiation over a long period of time as opposed to the sudden over-the-head whack approach.

Recap: A most exciting week

So today's Tuesday, and tomorrow it shall be Monday, all hail the might of the college deans.

We got a brief talk about exhibit this Sunday, which will be from 5-7pm, but which will involve us preparing, starting at 2pm. It will also involve certain amounts of dressing up since apparently the director of the IS program as well as the dean of the letters and sciences are invited. We'll have to curate our own show. We'll have to drag the tables around. We'll get graded on our displays all of which, I feel, will not help with the increasingly obsessive-compulsive behaviors of my fellow ISers.

At least the weather's nice.

Some unexpected workload showing up, but the phrase "Murphy's law" is really, really popular.

Recap: The return of the mass, and what befell

There were so few people at the DC last night that the management was taking bets to see how many people would come. The person who guessed the closest would get to get food from the Junction (the equivalanet of an university-operated 7-11 right next door).

We had, I think, about 300 people last night. The entire night. On a Sunday. Compared to the usual over the thousand mark. Not so today, I'm afraid, which is why I'm glad I'm not working tonight. The shift the night when people come back is always the longest.

So this week will bring... Lab final, IS banquet (which I haven't decided on attending yet), the IS class final exhibition, and the usual combinations of chem, chem, and why-is-the-teacher-letting -grad-students-with-no-apparent-organization- skills-lecture-us-instead-of- teaching-us-himself bio. I don't understand it. The finals are approaching and we get video clips of catfish and a girl who's overly reliant on the words "fascinating" and "amazing".

Not much else, I would say. It's starting to become that period in time where you count down the days, taking them one at a time and saying "Okay, I can do this--there's a light at the end of the tunnel and it's NOT an oncoming train."

17 days, 5 finals, and a whole lot of cleaning & packing left.

Recap: Another way to wake up

Possibly one of the most stupid and at the same time most amusing thing I've done this week...

Basically, while eating breakfast in my room (Molly still gone), I was looking for a file I have saved on the backup data CD from last year, and I came across the Kate Stories and thought, well it's still early (well it WAS), so why not?

Do not ever, EVER, attempt to read those thing while eating. (Yes, this is the stupid part, for obvious reasons.) Choking extremely unpleasant.

It is also alarming stuff like that can be written without involving any sort of questionable substances. And the geekiness. The book references. The geekiness. The order to tell Marvin the robot to go break a leg (literally) and then remembering somewhere in the series his leg DOES get taken away and wondering whether or not I did that on purpose (and not remembering).

But the most important point is, ladies and gentlemen, that your larynx is not the same thing as your esophagus, though they may cross paths. Gah.

Recap: Hymenoptera

I'm very proud of myself, as that I've memorized the entire bug phylum already, which means half of the memorization's done (at least in the naming section). My parents came over about...45 minutes ago and have wandered over to Farmer's Market, so I can finish memorizing my stuff. They brought food. Parents bring food. It's an evolutionary relationship that few juvenile organisms will ever forget: parents=food. (Unless you're from one of the species where you eat your parents, in which case the equation takes on a much more literal meaning. Or if you're from a species where the parent eats the offspring, and then the approaching of parents will involve a lot of fleeing. Oh. Wait. Ha. Ha. Yes.)

Parents will come back later and take me out to lunch, which even beats the ice cream because there will be Chinese food that actually taste like Chinese food. I can live without Chinese food, but a life without it generally give me the vague impression that some major form of deprivation is taking place.

If I don't finally solve the credit card issues by July I'm liable to start hating Bank of America. That covers that section.

The weather's nice. Not as many people went home for the long weekend as I would've thought (though a significant portion did go home) since it's been a fairly hardcore week which will be followed by even more mind-numbing processions, and the people in my building at least have opted compromises. Now...if this holiday-weekend had come in the beginning of the quarter....

I probably wouldn't be here, either.

[edit 4:23]
Have memorized all the names. Mother bought me one of those strawberries from Farmer's Market that's DRENCHED in chocolate...and it's actually really good. I like it.

But naming done! Yay!

Random: Chemistry

This is how the professor, Dr. Andrea Toupadakis, introduced the three basic laws of thermodynamics to us in a nutshell.

1. You can't win. (All energy is conserved.)
2. You can't break even. (Heat always flows downhill.)
3. You'll never get there. (Absolute Zero can't be reached.)

Someone ought to make a shirt on this. I'd wear it.

Recap: Counting down the hours

The full results of last week's test is back...and I'm thinking positive. Three out of four whilst sick is pretty good. I have hopes for curves, I still got a stab at the final (though the word 'cumulative' is lurking in a highly sinister fashion in the back of my mind), and with luck I won't do anything TOO stupid this time. Such as reading a problem wrong.

Meanwhile, life continues. There is no chem lab next week but there IS an unfortunate lab practical next Thursday for which I have to memorize many long Latin names covering three different phylums, more if I've forgotten anything. If I can get all the names and spelling down by Sunday I'm treating myself to ice cream. Which reminds me to note that I've been steadily uping my sugar intake which, as usual, is a sure sign that the finals period is approaching.

Brief conversation with Amara assures me that everyone's suffering in a similar fashion, though you wouldn't exactly call this "assuring".

Molly doing something with sorority this weekend. Parents coming Saturday. Need to straighten out my agenda and possibly my desk as well, as that the reading material have accumulated to a truly hazardous height.

Out.

Recap: Condemned

You know that you and your partner have been doing too many titration labs when she starts refering to the buffer as "cute". Chemistry, much like economy, has a way of slowly infiltrating your brain until all the non-chem people start doubting your sanity. Unless they're already doubting your sanity, in which case you're probably just insane.

But yes, apparently we had very cute stock solution buffers. Then we're suppose to mix our own buffer to a certain assigned pH which involved backwards calculation to find out how many mL of this to use to dissolve how many grams of that. My buffer turned out to be only .03 off from my assigned pH when we ran through the first pH meter readings. I was very proud of myself.

The feeling of which is somewhat ruined by the amount of to-read materials piled on my desk. As that I'm up early anyway, I should probably dig in.

Starfish day in bio!

Recap: Scaling

Found out last night that my shift's changed again, so now I'm working from 5:30-9:30 on Tuesdays and from 6:00-9:30 on Sundays. I'm as puzzled as you are by this change but, having been switched from dish to front house, I've concluded that if I do not gain any muscle by the end of this quarter then I have no chance to develope any noticeable muscle at all. Apples can be heavy.

Lots of highschoolers here these days. Or I presume they're highschoolers.

Otherwise...to think that I was actually caught up on my readings for one glorious day (Monday). My classes are forcing me to abandon any sort of potentially interesting social events. Such as the Davis urban legend thing we have going on during when I have my lab, or the capella night at Thompson the other week, also during my bio lab. I wonder if the urban legend will include things such as werecows.

Cannot believe I have just typed that. Werecows. Cows. Werecreatures. Werecows.

Recap: Baggin's End

Our class is invited to work over at the Domes today (or Baggin's End, as its formal name goes). It's very nice, loads of plants and odd dome houses. Got introduced to the concept of permaculture, which I'm fascinated by, as I was by the concept behind the diversity conservation discussion last night for biology. There was a wild kitty there (very friendly, purred when I petted it) that shortly after our arrival caught a mouse and ate it, tail and all, leaving only the liver. Claudia (student there) tried to coax it to eat the liver by telling the cat that the liver is good for you (and also, if the kitty ate it there'd be less to clean up) but I don't believe the kitty bought the argument.

It's co-op housing. Very eco friendly. Two of the students there gave us a tour and a segment of it went something rather like this:

Tatiyana (student there): So here's the other chicken coop...and these are more gardens...those are the squash.

Dimitri: Is that an escaped chicken?

Tatiyana: Oh yes, that little one always gets out somehow. [Goes after the rebel chicken.]

So yes, we had free-range chicken during our class. And a free range kitty which, apparently, got along with the chickens.
The place had a feel of 70s utopia experiment and it does not feel like it was on campus, at all.

Recap: Asteroidea

Annd another Monday...followed by the realization that I have one more chem lab after this week, and this week's the last bio lab before the school year's over.

Eek.

On the other hand, my lab pratical for bio is scheduled with no conflicts, on June 1st at 7pm. I am, I think, still 1 chapter behind in biology readings (soon to be 2, if I don't hurry), ditto for o-chem, but otherwise everything's--more or less--back to the usual. (Note, I avoided using the term 'normal'.)

"Turn around three times before you go to bed and tomorrow, when you wake up, you shall see what you shall see."

[edit 10:57]
On another note (because I don't think I've mentioned PE in a while), our self-defense class is simulating increasingly desperate situations. The last lessons we're learning (i.e. now) is how to defend ourselves when there's someone pinning us down to the ground, on our backs or on our stomach. The cool thing is I know I can throw off someone who's bigger than me. I'm not as strong as our instructor, obviously, who's also five feet exactly and has thrown off two hundred pound police officers in the simulation but the only real problem I've encountered so far is realizing that strikes to the face isn't going to work because the person sitting on me is big enough so that his/her face is further away than my arms can reach. It calls for a different tactic and a sharp ram to the abdomen.

And yes, we did actually do simulations with people pinning us down. It was very, very strange and there were lots of awkward giggles. For instance, when (I think her name is) Rachel threw me off she almost lost her balance and fell on me. The pair next to us did loose their balance and tumbled over each other. Giggling. Lots of giggling.

[edit 13:25]
It's A. C. Doyle's birthday! And Holmes de la calle Baker is born.

Random: Calculus?

Remember this earlier post, waaay back in October, that went something like this? --


"So you hated society and decided to take math?"

"No, I just don't give a damn about anything more arbitrary than solid numbers."

"But aren't variables 'arbitrary'? I mean, that's why they're called variables, right? They vary? Especially in stuff like implicit differentiation?"

"No, I know that, but--"

"And you know math's a human thing, right? Humanity? Society? Ants don't do math--at least not that I know of, and--"


And then Lusine commented this--


Also, I got a mental image of tiny ants with thick glasses solving differential equations. That was funnier than I thought it'd be.


I was going through biology just now and came across this:

Foraging trips of ants and bees often wind and loop about in a circuitous route, but once a forager has found food, the return trip is relatively direct. One investigator suggests that the continuous series of calculations necessary to figure the angles, directions, distance, and speed of the trip and convert it into direct returns could involve a stopwatch, compass, and integral vector calculus. How an insect does this is unknown.


...the ants...they are smarter than we know....
Insects dominate the world. Oh yes.

Recap: Crispix

After sleeping for about ten hours last night (Molly has left to do something involving sorority rush) I feel half way decent again.

It is really too bad that I must ruin this feeling with my chem stuff, followed immediately by the bio stuff.

Yesterday was sort of fun. Most of us, being IS students, were semi-dead from sleep deprivation and a week full of midterms, but it was still sort of fun. Due to a lack of coherent planning and bad over-the-phone instructions, we spent far too long wandering up and down JFK Dr. (or was it Rd.? I can't remember) and looking for the first museum, de Young, was not even the problem. We knew where the museum was, having found it, we know where one of the parking garage is, having found that, but the teacher insisted that we should meet her car at the same parking lot...which was on the other side of the park. Which involved a lot of upside-down-and-backwards direction until the five of us in that car (Melissa, Subhere (no idea with the spelling), Vanessa, Max, and I) reached a consensus that we're just going to park in the garage we found and meet the others in front of the museum.

It worked much better that way.

De Young had some truly amazing stuff. The crowd that came later ruined the experience a little, and I have something against the tour guides but, on the other hand, I saw some Chihuly glass sculptures that are very pretty. (The photo, of course, does not give full justice to the work.) Kraitz's ceramic apples were there too (and that picture's from de Young, yes) and it's very whimsical to look at...the giant apples scattered on the grass.

There is another gallery behind the downtown shopping mall place that starts with "Metr" and makes me think of "Metatron" and I went with Kate last year on her birthday and five years ago with City Year. Fire trucks wheezes by. I counted three. San Francisco does seem to be the exciting sort of city.

Discovered an iced tea with lemonade drink at Starbucks which I liked, that I've forgotten the name to the econ concept of "game theory", which I didn't, and that the relationship between politics and art lies within propaganda which art essentially can be considered a varied form of, since they are a product of the thought, which is neither here nor there but I felt like sticking it in somewhere in this post.

To chemistry then--up, up, and away.
(or sideways, downward, and away, depending on where you're standing.)

...

More artists' names that I've recorded, linked to a sample work, for the records.

Vallien
Mace & Kirkpatrick (yes it's all glass)
Demuth
Dickinson
Shreve & Co
Moran
Sargent
Church
Foncelle
Doughty
Cole
Keane
Pope (looks like a photo but isn't!)
McCloskey (this is a painting)
Derges
Kenna

Recap: Untitled

Antropod labs yesterday. I've petted a tarantula, held a Madagascar hissing cockroach, and played with a walking stick. (And no you didn't have to do any of those, only if you want to). There was a scorpion too, and apparently their shell glows bright blue-green under UV light, which is cool, but no one knows why they do that.

People found it weird that I have more things against moths and butterflies than I do of spiders and cockroachs. I can see where they are coming from and, to be honest, I don't know why that is myself. I'm actually okay with scorpions (not that I want to be stun by one or anything), I'm wary of centipedes and spiders. Of course I don't actually want any of the live insects unexpectedly on me, but really, for some reason I'm disgusted by live butterflies and found moths both horrifying and revolting. Something to do with their head, I think, and their feathery antennae.

It's not even a trama thing. I remember stopping my bike ride just because there was a large moth perched in the middle of the road, and I was five/six years old at the time.

I can reason myself out of my instinctive reaction though. Which I should probably do something about, as that plants and insects have co-evolved for millions of years and I will deal with plants and therefore, by default, insects.

Meanwhile, last midterm! Of this school year, come to think of it. But even if it is the last midterm of my first year of college I hold no sentimental feelings towards it and just wish that I can get it over with as soon as possible, thank heavens.

As for geekiness...will you design one for me, Lucy? The ID, I mean. I'll stick it in my wallet alongside my driver's license.

Recap: Untitled

A little sleep deprived right now, and therefore with a headache. However, it's a general state to be in, at this time of the year, so I really should not complain.

San Francisco trip's this Saturday (for my IS class), and since all of us are the sort of students who don't exactly have any extra time, the schedule is changed so that we would be doing a one day marathon instead of a two day trip that involved staying over night. Which, consequently, means that I have to meet at where the bus leaves at 7:30am on a Saturday with a picnic lunch ready as that we were forewarned that the museums has over-expensive lunchs that are actually quite nasty-tasting.

So the plan to spend sometimes lying quietly and attempt to recover my mind will have to be pushed back another day. Meanwhile, I am 1 chapter behind in bio, chem, ochem, labs, and possibly a three hour phone call to commit myself to (problem with credit card, again. It's the same card. It's blocked. Somehow people still managed to make purchases with it online. I've called once about it already but apparently the solution wasn't enough of a solution to prevent this time.).

Definitely am loosing patience, but at this point, the good thing is, by the time my patience is gone, I probably won't have enough energy to do anything either.

[edit 12:06]
Accomplishment of the day--figuring out how to program stuff on my graphing calculator (thanks to chem) and successfully inputing a program that actually works.

Random: Like a bat out of hell...

I did mention this is sort of a hellish week for me, yes?

I recieved this email today, from the Student Housing Officie:

Segundo North residents,

Over the last week, we've received a report of a bat within two Miller Hall rooms. Maintenance staff have assessed all possible interior and exterior entry points and found only one small area which was repaired. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that a couple of rooms did not have their window screen in place. Please note that this is a violation of Housing policy and is also a great entry point for bats which are probably in nearby trees. If you currently do not have your screen in place, please reinstall it immediately. If you need assistance, please submit a repair request online.

If you or someone you know has made any direct or indirect contact with a bat, the University is strongly recommending that you go to the Cowell Student Health Center immediately to be assessed for possible rabies exposure. No cases have been reported but precautions should be taken.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Student Housing



And yes, I do live in Miller, but my window screen is on and I have not (yet) encountered any bats.

Recap: Gadgets and devices, dear Anathema

They've got cheaper versions of this (cheap as in similar in idea, but less nifty in terms of technology), but still, isn't it neat?




Hitch Your Wagon to the Stars...On the Ceiling

Homestar_1 Ever gone camping in the boonies or looked out an airplane window and wondered, Hey, what are all those glowing dots in the sky? If you live in a city, even a small one, it’s likely that you’ve experienced the adverse effects of sky glow—that mildly unpleasant nighttime orangeness that keeps us from seeing even some of the brightest stars in the night sky.

Well, now you can circumvent this problem with the HomeStar Home Planetarium, a Japan-only toy brought to you by the folks at Sega. Forget the whole “nature” thing—just set up the $229 HomeStar on your bedside table, douse the lights, and bathe in the glow of its 10,000 LED-projected stars. You can even program it to switch itself off after you’ve been lulled into a deep astral sleep. Try getting the Milky Way to do that next time you’ve pitched your tent in the supposedly “great” outdoors. —John Mahoney

Link [via Gizmodo]

-taken from the Popular Science blog (yep, as in from the magazine, which now has a blog)

Recap: Mostly for Lucy

At our bio midterm, the clock started counting down at 6:10pm. At our bio midterm, we are only allowed to get our tests from the TAs at the front of the room at 6:10pm. Consequently, there was a line in the front of the room housing the T-Z part of the class at 6:10pm.

I found myself standing behind a very tall guy, slightly annoyed because he was blocking the blackboard and I couldn't see what was on it, and it was too crowded for me to try to peer around.

A few minutes later, he looked to the side, I realized that I was standing behind the Nick-look-alike from bio.

It was very hard not to stare.

Not that he would've noticed, even if I'd been staring for the reasons that: 1) I was behind him, 2) I'm considerably shorter than he is, and 3) I was wearing a baseball cap. To give Lucy credit though, he does look cute when he smiles, which he doesn't do as often as I imagine Nick would do. Then again, Nick is...what was the term? --hopelessly optimistic.

Also, his surname apparently start in the T-V range.

There, happy Tuesday, Lucy.

...


O chem today. O the joy. O the excitement. O the sarcasm.

[edit 12:50]
Kate, a few of my IS classmates present their compliments to your taste in music. If you happen to read this.

Recap: What?

Why are there so many elementary schoolers on campus? Where do they all come from? What are they doing here?

Midterm today, tomorrow, and Friday. Quiz Thursday. Lab session Wednesday and Thursday. Lab report due Wed (though I've had the foresight to complete it ahead of time this weekend, thank goodness). Registration appointment today. Art project due tomorrow (still need to write statement, such bs as there ever was).

May not be online as long this week. I think I have a good excuse. Or rather, several.
Am recovering from the cold very nicely though. I'm very happy about that.

Recap: A perplexing experience with tea

It's a well-known fact that the human taste bud can only recognize four tastes: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. All the other more delicate flavors come, in fact, from our sense of smell. It is an equally well know fact that therefore, when your nose's all blocked up from a cold, you can't taste things very well. Nevertheless, the entire experimence never ceases to baffle me.

For instance, I was drinking tea earlier. I know what the tea should taste like. It has a distinctive taste. It's honey-lemon green tea that Molly has bought me from when she was in Hawaii. I've had it before. I liked it. I couldn't taste it.

Or, to be more accurate, it tasted like hot water. Which I suppose it mostly is, but still, just hot water, no tea taste. It looks like tea, I know it's tea, I can't taste the tea. It's unnerving. I left the tea bag in, and sipped it like that, and continued to taste nothing as the flavor (even as the bitter part of the tea escapes from its little paper bag and gets diluted in water) intensity, so to speak, increased over time.

Those of you who know how slowly I can drink something, that was about the speed at which I was drinking it. With the tea bag in. My flavorless tea.

Then, half way through, my nose cleared up partially either from the vapor from the tea or the fact my body temperature'd gone up or the fact I'm getting well, or possibly some combination of the three. Suddenly I can TASTE the tea. Very well. And all the extra minutes I've left the tea bag in too.

Tea is not meant to be steeped for that long, but I can REALLY taste the tea now. Heh.

So that was my adventure with tea, while embarking on the ch17 chem review problems.