The other reason I rely on the decision-making power of serendipity, I never knew until I started studying the economics of uncertainty. It seems that in order to make a rational decision, I need to determine how my preferences behave in relation to statements like:

If a lottery with a 1/2 chance of winning a monkey and a 1/2 chance of winning a boat is strictly preferred to a lottery with a 1/3 chance of winning a goat and a 2/3 chance of winning a date with Pauly Shore, then a lottery with a 1/3 chance of winning a monkey and a 2/3 chance of winning a goat should be strictly preferred to a lottery with a 1/2 chance of winning a boat and a 1/2 chance of winning a date with Pauly Shore, if and only if the subject's utility function satisfies axioms (i), (iii) and (iv) of theorem 6.B.9 (the Yucky-Shore sexual preference theorem for rational preference relations).

Even after proving the Yucky-Shore sexual preference theorem for monotonic functions on (Ω, XXX), I am able to verify neither independence nor continuity, and my indifference curves are curvier than Marilyn Monroe.

I wish I could take economics without all the measure theory. I hate this class.

The Geology department has recently come into possession of a dinosaur, a sauropod or therapod or something like that which was given to a museum but the museum hasn't done anything with it and is willing to give it back. The division auditorium is the only place with enough empty wall to hold the thing, so there's been some talk of installing it up there at some point; not soon.

Which is a pity, because that auditorium is currently the home of my awfullest math class - one of those ones where the professor began his career as a dusty old prop in Burbank somewhere, playing a caricature of himself on network television. He's got the slightly singsong voice, the nonsensical technical terminology, the emphasis on all the wrong words - especially words like "you should find" and "trivial."

Every time I go to one of his lectures, I start filling my notes with the word "fuck" over and over again in the headings. Fourier has his fucking fingers in everything law of heat conduction and quasi-linear fuckity fuck. If I didn't have a friend to sit by who laughs at most of my angry notes, I would probably explode. Then I'd really be fucked.

You see, this is why I'm afraid of counseling: optimism is good, and pessimism is bad. How many sane, patronizing articles are out there praising the virtues of an adjusted optimistic outlook? How many of them acknowledge that it's not always easy to change the way you think? How many of them offer useful, concrete ways of doing so? I read the little brochures, and see:

Some attention to your thoughts and a few simple exercises to change some thoughts can help prevent the emotional exhaustion, the lack of enjoyment in interpersonal interaction, and the loss of general well being that comes with a pessimistic style of thinking. Try optimism.

Gee, thanks, I hadn't ever thought of that. It addresses all my concerns about learning to place a realistic amount of responsibility, credit and blame upon my own shoulders. I feel that the author would really listen to my reservations about using optimism as a blanket characterization or a panacea for all mental ills, and would fully consider that pessimism may not lie at the root of my problems.

I'm afraid that when I go in tomorrow, a professional problem-evaluator will tell me that all I need is a little Right Thinking, I should just deal with the one or two things I've been pathologically avoiding, bite my tongue whenever I start to blame myself for something and everything will be perfect again. And I'm really worried that he/she will be right.

I've never been convinced, even a little bit, that a jury of my peers would be any better than a panel of judges under close public scrutiny. As a matter of fact, I think most of my peers are total fuckwads who have every incentive to do a half-assed job of reaching a verdict.

I'm sure that somewhere, deep in the bowels of the Los Angeles County administrative buildings, there's a giant computer - so old that it's still mostly vacuum tubes. And that computer is sending gleeful little currents through its front transistor-paws and laughing, because it knows how to pick the exact wrong time to call me in for jury duty.

May God damn it.

Also, one of my spams today called me Marlys. I don't know why, but that made me feel just a little bit warm and fuzzy inside, as if I had just taken a shot of hard liquor.

The best thing about college on a quarter system is that you get 50% more exam weeks than those weaklings on semester schedules. It seems like barely an eyeblink since the term started, but it also seems like forever, and that averages out to midterms. If my entries for the next week or so are hasty, mathy, bitchy, or just not there at all - you have been warned.

I guess I did promise to say something about how the showers tried to kill me when I was just a wee frosh, but since they've mostly stopped that and I no longer live in constant fear, that's not so exciting. Of course, last night as I was checking the water temperature prior to stepping in, I tried to adjust the angle of the showerhead. It would move up, but not down, and so after a good yank pointed it almost to the ceiling I stood there for a good five minutes applying all the force I could muster to various strategic-looking points... and then finally thought to turn off the water. D'oh.

So if I'm not living in constant fear, I'm at least living in constant confusion. That's not so bad.

Hooray. Hooray. I've just gotten an email notifying me of the incredible opportunity to take another class, one which is worth exactly zero credit but which I must nevertheless take before I graduate. In summary, it's this: write a paper about science, for a non-sciency audience. Hooray. Hooray. I'm so fortunate.

It's not that I don't like to write, or that I can't take horrid schoolmarmish pleasure in revising my own work. And I'm used to giving up valuable fuckaround time for little reward. But when I look at the turgid prose common in journals, and then read a bunch of clear, cogent popular science articles, I start to wonder just what exactly the core curriculum committee was smoking when they decided we should aim for a non-technical audience.

I could rant about this forever. Alas, I must instead select a topic and write a paragraph about how I plan to make it look more interesting than organizing your uncle's bottlecap collection. I'm trying really hard to be excited. Hooray.

I had kind of been looking forward to going grocery shopping in a place filled with a wide variety of products that I understand. But the selection of margarines - a shelf large enough to encompass almost the entire dairy section of my old local Netto - had me baffled and pissed-off and bitter in a matter of minutes. After a grand total of 6 months in Denmark and at my parents' house - where I never had to buy the food - I have forgotten most of my old brand loyalties, and so I had to re-read the ingredients list of each tub o' yellow to see if it was vegan or not, and look closely at the price of each one, and wonder if the used-up tub would make good tupperware or not. Then I grabbed the crap store brand in a huff, figuring all my vegan friends can provide their own damn butter substitute and I'll just use the tub lid as a frisbee, because I was getting cold standing in front of that cooler.

The Fucking Obvious Fact of the Day is this: doing physics all day makes me cross and ranty. Today's target is from the New York Times:

But it is in everyday social conversation where the Web is having the greatest impact. Fact-checking's effect on talking is like a loud thud on the floor, a real conversation stopper, linguists say.
...
"Today's Parisians and most other Westerners do not need to come together to exchange information, because they get it on the Web or television or a newspaper," said John L. Locke, a psycholinguist and author of "The De-Voicing of Society," adding that the information age has made person-to-person news dissemination obsolete.

[link via Tinka, again]

Okay, am I the only one whose parents routinely get up in the middle of dinner to look up the capital of Booglestan in the mildewy 2020 encyclopedia? But that's not the real issue here; the real issue is that I can't get my gossip over the Internet. You see, it's reached the point where I'm more interested in romantic prospects at home than in Denmark. So I think I can accomplish something by guessing at my future love life, but these guesses are all based on fragmentary and outdated information. And this is what post-cyber-ological gossip is all about - glances and subtle implications that are too speculative, and frankly too stupid-sounding, to put down in any permanence, but they keep you informed of the local social hierarchy so you can manipulate it at your convenience. It's the kind of shit that, when amplified, makes for trashy reality television. And people watch it, eh?

Possibly the feudal Japanese aristocracy played these kinds of games as well. Or possibly not. The caffeine in my tea has finally worn off, I've given up studying (I won't be getting any useful credit from this class anyhow) and I'm going to bed. But I'm still crabby. Boo. Hiss. Growl.

Why don't the academics in this country like vending machines? Sure, they're expensive and unhealthy, but there's no better way to take a break when you're staying late in the lab. All I want is something to chew on, preferably something tastier than my hat; I'm not even hungry, really, just compulsive. I wish I had the keys to this building, so I could leave and come back later.

Maybe I'll try putting my feet behind my head, just to see if sitting in the chair has made me more flexible. Long, long afternoon.

... *!#%/!"!#%!!!!!! ?��!#&#"""�%#%!! +@{[]#��$�@!

I have much love for the Caltech Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Really. No, really, I do, they've given me lots of free food in the past and will probably be giving me lots of free food in the future, so I'm not going to bite the hand that feeds me. But they just took away all my classes. They merged Inverse Methods with another, much nastier data analysis course, made it two terms long and added prerequesites that I won't have until next year. They completely obliterated Elementary Seismology. They made two terms of continuum mechanics a prerequisite for Physics of the Earth's Interior - this was my advisor's fault, he'll be getting an earful when I get back. In fact, they completely obliterated almost all of the useful undergraduate geophysics courses. I have to fulfill an "option electives" requirement, which last year meant I should pick four courses from a list of seven. This year, I get to pick four courses from a list of five (why is Crustal Geophysics no longer considered worthy?), and there's no way in hell I'm putting myself through two extra terms of continuum mechanics, I might be nuts but I'm not fuckin' suicidal here, there's still that horrible horrible physics course to think of.

I can still graduate on time, I suppose, but next fall is going to be hell-on-wheels. Why didn't they warn me about this before I signed up to leave the country?

Gah.

Okay. Thanks. I'll try and be less ranty next time.