Stupid Economy

Life here is fairly well insulated from the money struggles of the rest of the world, but occasionally they penetrate: the toys at the campus career fair today were absolute crap. Especially compared to the glory days of aught-aught, back when companies thought they could make money by losing it and handed out fancy logo-strewn whatsits for just a hint of a geeky smile. I needed a corporate keychain bottle opener, dammit.

Meanwhile, the Peace Corps recruiter sounded almost enthusiastic about a go-go-volunteerism initiative promising to double the amount of Peace Corps service in the next five years. So I read the State of the Union address, without taking any precautionary shots of hard liquor. Mistake.

I mean, I'm all in favor of the Peace Corps, and am seriously thinking about doing my two years of service after graduation. It's certainly better than the Marine Corps.
But this whole Freedom Corps thing is just creepy. Sure, it's probably a good idea to consolidate the government offices concerned with organized volunteering -- but why oh why do these Homeland Security people have to put their paranoid little fingers in every last piece of government pie?

Paranoia spawns more paranoia. According to a government publication, citizens are supposed to call 9-1-1 when they see or hear about someone using verbal threats, or suspiciously exiting a secured area near a train or bus depot, airport, tunnel, bridge, government building or tourist attraction. I hate everybody. I want to go get drunk, but I have math to do instead.

Bleah.

yami · 23:11 · 31 Jan 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics

I Heart Time Cube

Just in case you hadn't heard, Gene Ray the Time Cube guy gave a bit of a talk at MIT. What with the mad-crazy networking in the scientific community and pseudo-greek organizations of the privileged and all that, I got a summary of the event fresh in my email. Here are excerpts, rearranged a bit for editorial convenience:

I was kind of worried about the kind of reception Gene Ray would be given at MIT, since Time Cube is banned Forbidden Truth, and no university physicist would dare to support the Harmonic Time Cube Creation Principle for fear of attack by the religious zealots who staff and control academic institutions. Fortunately though, no zealot faculty members attended, probably out of fear that they would be exposed as frauds by Mr. Ray. The crowd of roughly 300 students was extremely warm and receptive to Mr. Ray; some students brought signs saying "Cubism NOT Facism" and "Gene Ray for President" Students who heckled Mr. Ray were loudly jeered. That's not to say that intelligent questions and challenges weren't cheered; this was, after all, an open intellectual debate. But I was happy to see that Mr. Ray was shown the proper respect, and that the crowd was not made up of ignorant people educated stupid and unable to open their minds to Time Cube.

I've got to say, Gene Ray is pretty convincing in person. He gave me a lot to think about ...

When asked "What is 9 x 6" by a student, Mr. Ray looked puzzled for a moment, and then said "It's false man-made math!" Fuckin' A. He also pointed out that when you
say 16, you don't really mean 16, you mean four fours. 16 is just a cubeless word that we use. I felt like I needed to know more, so I asked Mr. Ray whether, according to Time Cube theory, 4 was the ONLY number; He explained that in nature, you can only divide the sphere into four, not infinity, not into 3 or 5, only 4, and that yes, all odd numbers were false, man made fabrications.

When asked how he could possibly conceive of and understand the timecube, and how he could describe it with evil cubeless word, Gene gave the only answer that could really make sense:

"I'm not a human."

He may not be human, but Mr. Ray is still a lovable guy. Not to mention The Greatest Thinker, and above God.

You should definitely invite him to come to Caltech; MIT may have been the first Academic Institution to open it's doors to Mr. Ray and a Cubic perspective, but it shouldn't (it WON'T) be the last.

Thanks, fawnings, infinite love and envy to Miles of Dabnicorp Boston.

yami · 23:58 · 30 Jan 2020 · #
Filed under: Crackpots

Thrust Faulting

Budding young geophysicist that I am, I desperately look forward to earthquakes. Whenever I miss out on one it's like the Mole People are sitting in their fantastical underground caves, laughing at me and monitoring my footsteps so they can make all the aftershocks happen while I blink, the bastards. Last night their earthquake was only about 25 miles away; just a 4.2, nothing exciting, but enough to rattle windows in Valencia. A few people felt it here on campus too, but I was typically out of touch, sweeping out vast areas of space with informative gestures of my entire arm, leaping up and down in front of a giant dry erase board while working on a seismology assignment.

I'll get you, Mole People, and your little dogs too.

yami · 3:19 · 30 Jan 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary

Coffee

My parents drank coffee (and still do, of course, red-blooded Americans of vague Scandinavian heritage that they are), but this is not important. What is important is that Pippi Longstocking drinks coffee. This has very little to do with my actual induction to the wonderful world of drinking coffee instead of merely smelling it, which was in 8th grade when a friend of mine brought out a thermos and insisted that I learn to like the stuff because it would put hair on my chest, but Pippi is nevertheless important to my caffeine addiction in many ways both subtle and mysterious.

So rest in peace, Astrid Lindgren.

(I was originally going to link to a crappy cnn.com obituary, but not only was it short and boring, the front-page headline was "Karzai thanks America" and such boosterism still makes me feel a bit ill. Plus, I'd just finished reading most of a Randian-feminist synthesis that I'd found while searching for some good Pippi-related feminism to post in memoriam, and Ayn Rand really makes me feel ill. But I do think it's damned fabulous that Hamid Karzai is some kind of fashionista.)

yami · 1:07 · 29 Jan 2020 · #
Filed under: Literature

My Boots Keep Me

There is an important accessory to college life, and that is the Boy Whose Sister Makes Music. When you have one of those around, good things happen, like incredible musicians coming to play in the lounge where you do homework so you don't have to pay any money or even move to hear them. So on Thursday night between sets, we all bought shiny new Noe Venable CDs and for the past three days her voice has been leaking out of rooms, through closets and cupboards, ventilation, plumbing, secret conduits of all kinds.

It's a good voice. If you've never heard it, you should spend some money on a shiny new CD for yourself. If you need a target demographic, it's the kind of shiny new CD that would open for an ani difranco concert. It's definitely a super bonus good change from the usual subwoofer études. But I'm starting to see (hallucinate, maybe, but maybe not!) people tilting their heads in unison, eating in rhythm, and other signs of zombie singer-songwriter mind meld. It's creepy.

yami · 23:09 · 27 Jan 2020 · #
Filed under: Music

Dear Jack,

After repeated viewings of your latest television advertisement, I finally decided to patronize one of your fine food establishments. Congratulations to your publicity department: they've figured out the secret of reaching the disposable income of the young, hip, and cynical. It's not edgy graphics or throbbing bass jingos - it's monkeys. I like monkeys, and I'd like to see more of them in advertising, so keep up the good work.

However, I was disappointed to find that your web site offers no way to electronically contact your organization. I wanted to suggest that each restaurant employ a cute goat, to eat leftovers and entertain dine-in customers. Your food is vaguely edible, and reasonably priced, but it's nothing special compared to any of the dozens of similar food chains operating in the SoCal market. A goat would put you several cloven hoofsteps beyond the competition.

I was going to put this idea in the suggestion box, but the one at my local franchise was out of comment cards and nobody seemed to know or care where the extras were kept.

sincerely yours,
yami

yami · 1:16 · 27 Jan 2020 · #
Filed under: Whimsy

People At My School

I went to the Dean of Students today, because my adviser is out of town and I needed someone to sign a small yellow paperwork. The Dean has gone a bit loopy from a prolonged lack of meaningful feedback on his natterings. He humbled and hooed over my schedule for a little bit, signed the card, and told me to take three aspirin with a glass of water and call him in the morning. I think I got off lightly.

One of my professors lectures in a style which demands close attention, and expects us to take an active role and ask lots of questions so we don't get swamped in the math. When we do ask questions, he's perfectly accomodating, and never appears irritated that we're interrupting with such a trivial concern, which is something that I've seen from various other people on this campus who shall remain anonymous (coughcoughthephysicsdepartmentcough). Alas, his class is right after lunch, so with full stomachs and drowsy digestive brains we're not always up to the task. Today, though, I think I finally managed, and came out feeling all enthused and energized and other nice e-words because of it.

Of course, it might have been that a week-long slog of background math finally bore fruit - we got to see the first glimmerings of how Rayleigh waves and other things can fall out of diagrams with poles and kinky contour integrals. It means I'll be able to have pictures that solve wave equations, instead of just letters, and I'm a huge fan of math pictures even if I can't manipulate complex 3-D objects in my head.

But there was a greater point I was trying to make, before all that fun. I've been thinking about teaching, and what makes the difference between the good, bad, and simply mediocre profs out there - and I've been thinking of it all in the context of efficient spoon feeding. Which is all well and good if you have a life full of patient, dedicated mentors, but as every college student knows, all profs at all schools are irascible, incoherent, and hate anything that keeps them from churning out impressive publications.

Have you ever been taught how to learn under adverse circumstances?

yami · 1:38 · 26 Jan 2020 · #
Filed under: Pedagogy

Five Four">Friday Five Four

When other people answer these questions, I almost never read their answers, even if I normally hang slobbering and twitching off their every blogg'ed word. For some reason, this week I felt like joining in, and writing something that my eyes will automatically skip over when I look at my own blog. Whatever.

  1. What cologne or perfume do you wear? The pheromone-drenched goodness of my own bodily fluids! I mean, um, no.
  2. What cologne or perfume do you like best on the opposite sex? See above. I mean, vanilla extract.
  3. What one smell can you not stomach? Vomit. I get sympathy heaves.
  4. What smell do you like that others might consider weird? Skunk spray, in low concentrations. Also manure-based fertilizer - reminds me of home. I grew up in a town full of hippie organic urban planners, and very near many many hog lots.
yami · 0:10 · 26 Jan 2020 · Five Four">#
Filed under: Whimsy

Sprocket!

Leuschke claims precedence on the googlewhacking-shebang, using a slightly different scoring system, which is superior because it gives results of order unity instead of this hundred-billion crap, but inferior because the math takes more keystrokes. On balance, so what?

So, I've never actually walked into a yuppie organic grocery to ask if they carry natural logarithms.

Nipple Update: my nipples are no longer itchy. One of you asked, I won't say who.

yami · 0:30 · 25 Jan 2020 · #
Filed under: Whimsy, TMI

Waste of My Time

First there was Word Dissociation; now, there's Googlewhacking. I'm not sure which is more fun yet, but googlewhacking seems to have more friendly competition going for it.

Both of them have a certain poignant, mayfly beauty - I'm not about to protect the sanctity of my results by refusing to share them on a google-indexed page. I work towards some future world where this game is impossible to play. The score is the product of the number of hits produced by each word alone.

  • crapulent x cello = 586 x 648,000 = 321,128,000. This guy looks like Alex from Blur! He needs a new design, but he's pretty funny. I'm sad that this merely a page of writing and not a blog with regular updates.
  • soluble x crumhorn = 661,000 x 3,590 = 2,372,990,000. Mailing list archive. Puha.
  • etherealness x dulcimer = 1,550 x 108,000 = 167,400,000. Some rtf file I can't view without crashing this gimpy lab computer, so I won't link it.
  • ileostomy x cannibal = 20,900 x 224,000 = 4,681,600,000. Oh dear lord.
  • mesospheric x pussy = 5,370 x 22,600,000 =121,362,000,000. My morals are disintegrating - not as though I had many to begin with - but I'm so freaking close to surpassing the 151,000,000,000 mark set by "linux anemonefish." Can you tell how much I don't want to be working right now? The link is to a record catalog.

My theory is that "sex" could be my only real shot at surpassing "linux anemonefish" and pals, and attaining true googlewhack stardom. So far, "sex puggry" has come closest, with only 3 hits. So close, yet so far.

yami · 6:14 · 24 Jan 2020 · #
Filed under: Whimsy