blogwaffe

!happy birthday bert! .katie cooked a fine meal, and we all talked a fine talk about roogby and how dublin has poor immunities. .props to uber and ger forsinking down to our level and coming to gli stati uniti.

.i’ve finally posted a few new pictures. .mostly from the city hall tour, but some much older.

.i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again. .everyone on this campus is just a teensy bit odd in some way. .or rather, at least a teensy bit. .on my way over to steele, i ran into an early fifties guy who told me not to walk on the grass, that it was for the dogs. .he himself was standing in the middle of the grass. .by ockham’s razor, he must, therefore, have at one point walked on the grass also. .so i assumed he was joking. .i faked laughed and asked him how he was. .he said he was fine and asked me where i was from.

“idaho”, i said, “and yourself”. “hm… yes… i’m going to montana in a while”, he says avoidingly. .”ah – right next door”, blitheringly. .”?what do you do here anyway?”, he asks (note: it seems even noncaltexen can’t speak in notscience when they’re on campus). .”aah – i’m a chemistry grad student”. .”hmm”, he intones knowingly, “with the test tubes and the beakers”. .”no – i’m more theoretical – i’m bad at experiment”. .”!bullshit!”, the exclamation, “don’t sell yourself short”. .”nono – it’s true – i really am bad at experiment”. .*grumble grumble grumble*. .he then tells his dog to attack me, but she seems more interested in being in frolick state than rampage. .he tells me all about his dog (she’s a thousand year old from armenia – i can only assume he means the breed), and i leave before he goes off about the stock market, or the bright kids at caltech in a bleak world, or how i never actually explained quantum information to a random guy on the grass whose knowledge of physics and mathematics is not only unknown, but suspect.

?was this guy for real? .i came away almost feeling like he was a dean of so and so trying to figure out if the students here were worth it. .but he was definately just some random (slightly neurotic) dude from the area who may or may not have been joking about the grass. .but the encounter was not without its rewards. .now i have proof that the oddity of those at caltech is not a matter of the type of people the institure attracts, but rather the aberration is actually caused by the campus itself; everyone who sets foot on campus is instantly oddified. .i bet both the oddities and the incapability of speaking in notscience have a common source. .more details as they are unearthed.

.i’m thinking about ditching my stat tracker. .it’s mildly annoying for everyone else, and has only ever told metwo things i didn’t know already. .but i’ve sort of been waiting around until i see a random google hit. .that may take months; i’m not listed on google, and even if i were, there’s little reason anyone would happen to hit here. .plus, many of my “faithful” simply block the cookie, anyway (i sure as hell would). .the only good thing about it so far is figuring out who links here. ?but who am i to try and get at that sort of information? ?johnny ash? .ps: i know you’re at strong, and i know you’re watching me.

.i woke up today as i did every day last week. .jackhammers. .kakkkkakakkakkkakakakkkaaaakaakakokohkuh. .i learned last week to keep a pair of good earplugs by my bed, so i tossed those in (!it was in my head!). .i looked at the clock, though, and decided i might as well get up and shower. .so i got up and took the still expanding bits of foam out of my head. .kakakakkkakakakkakakakkakakokokohkuh.

.throwing on my robe, i walk out to the living room where roommiemike informs me that the excellent crew of jackthors broke the water lead to our building and demostrates by operating the kitchen faucet in a way that looks strikingly correct yet yields no flow of water. .so the shower is out. .instead we watch a rerun of the o.c. supplied on vhs by roomiemike’s parents. .roomiemike: “o.c.rific”, me: “o.c.licious”, roomiemike: “o.centatious”, me: “o.cirrhosis”. .kakakkakkakakkkakakkakakkokkokohkuh.

.punto del día: james for the identification of the doucheality of the world’s population problem.

.went on a city hall tour with bonnie, michelle and ~ariele. .it’s being restored and made seismically sound for when the big one hits, and this is the last time tours are available until 2006ish. .fairly interesting, but it did take a while before we actually got up into the dome. .i’d post the pictures, but i forgot to bring the cable to the lab, so i can’t upload them. .walked around town with bonnie for a while and ate dinner at fuddruckers. .pretty tasty burger. .i’ve been thinking this site needs some actual content as opposed to all this mindless drivel. .i’ve also been thinking we all know how quickly that will happen.

?you thought this site had bad content? .check out a wace of spaste by abu. .more interestingly, i saw spring, summer, fall, winter… and spring with heidi at laemmle. .really a nice movie, though the plot was a bit cliché. ?come on – who doesn’t like a little korean monk action? .let me know if you want to see twilight samurai.

.so i was noticing the other day that a person walking around on campus would be extremely hard pressed to overhear anyone talking about notscience. .people here at caltech converse almost exclusively about science. .it’s truly bizarre. .even when it seems as though people are talking about notscience, they’re still really talking about science. .for example, i was walking toward lauritsen yesterday and passed a guy talking on his cell phone. .i heard him say, “… yeah, i know you wanted to go look at shoes”. ?perfectly normal, right? .wrong. .he next said, “ok, im almost done writing the script i need to run overnight…”. .he could have said, “ok, i’m almost done here” but no, notscience is a foreign language to this person and most other caltexen. .now i’m on a mission to overhear even a bit of conversation about notscience.

.a diction question for those interested. .i was trying to think of a good word for “to pass” in the sense of “those two people whose velocity vectors were (for the moment) approximately antiparallel passed eachother” as opposed to “to overtake (parallel velocity vectors)”. .i was trying to be more descriptive (read “less ambiguous”), but i couldn’t without using more words: …passed a guy going in the opposite direction…. ?is there a good one word for this?

.well, i have officially admitted failure; i have submitted a petition to the cce division requesting summer funding because i couldn’t find a research group that could pay me. .i can’t imagine they’ll approve the petition, but it’s worth a shot. .in other news, ace has made me want to start keeping log of the restraunts i’ve patronized and the movies i’ve seen. .look to the future.

.point of the day goes to dixie for making a remarkable …point (too many… points) about hax0rificus 31337alious. .btw, thank you for using (s)he and not s/he. .i was just thinking last night about how much the later annoys.

.talked to dougherty. .we discussed various options: taking the summer off, being a “volunteer” either in physics or chemistry, petitioning cce for funding. .naturally, the last is to be tried first. .also spent many hours doing the ph125 hw. .those sets are really geared toward experiment (read “application”). .not sure how i feel about that. !ah! .speaking of hw, i’ve found i don’t have to write the problem sets for ch2 for the next two weeks.

.el cholo for dinner. .sad to say i liked el torrito better. .sad because el cholo is an la orginal and not (really) a chain. .ace and i had a fine time despite. .i’ve decided a good bit for a cartoon would be to have all the black characters talk like white people and all the white characters talk like black people. .by that i mean get black voices to do the whites and white actors to do the blacks. .obviously, you’d need more of a foundation than that for a cartoon, but i think it’d be a funny bit. .to describe the situation to the inevitable frenzy of media attention the show would attract, we came up with the word “ethnigma” (cf. “gender-bender”). ?how do you describe something to a frenzy, anyway? .seems like it be hard to get one’s attention.