I'm worn out

I have been very busy which is why the two of you who read this blog with any sort of frequency will note that there haven't been any significant updates in several days. After working on a lengthy lab report and re-learning LaTeX in the process, I've finished up a problem set for Electricity/Magnetism. Naturally this is the point where I can no longer think straight and just finish up with whatever I have on the paper because it won't get any better than this. If I stay up much later I'll just fall asleep in class, leading to trouble in the lab period or getting behind in future assignments.

Usually I try to reserve 2-3 days to work on these, but the last several days have, again, been used up by the lab report I've been needing to type. Thankfully I suspect that future lab reports will take somewhat less time in order to complete. Of course, the longer I work, the less efficiently I work, as well. I think it's little surprise that the first couple problems went particularly easily, though it's probably also because they actually were a bit easier, being purely mathematical in nature.

One problem that I had a mental block on was one involving the capacitance per unit length of two (oppositely charged, as these problems have them set up, in order to be real conducting capacitors) coaxial hollow cylinders. I've got an answer that at least appears plausible, but it could very likely be completely wrong. In any case I've been spending this evening with an extreme case of "toroid rage". That's the term I'm going to use from now on for situations in which I have difficulty working with symmetries inherent in the math and physics problems I'm expected to solve.

The good news is that Thursday has no homework attached to it, which might just mean that I'll get to finally fold the laundry that's been sitting in the dryer all afternoon (which I put into the washing machine last night).

An even crazier sonnet

No parking may be done from nine to five --

That is, unless you plan to pay a fee;

If you do not, a tow truck here will drive,

And his hard work won't be paid for by me.

So if this parking space you plan to take,

Be wary of the change that you may hold,

Or else your car you intend to forsake

And wouldn't mind to see it cheaply sold.

An auto may not be a work of art,

Nor does it grow in value over time,

But if with it you do not want to part,

You really better pay us up some dimes.

But if the parking charge you plan to pay

2 hours is the most that you can stay.

This is what I do when I'm bored

One of my friends from internet chats has a couple cats. One of them is named Kabuki and is known for having a voracious appetite and along with that a rather large girth.

She recommended before taking a nap a few minutes before posting that the two of us form a crime-fighting team. Naturally I'm reminded of those sorts of shows one sees occasionally on Sleuth from the 80s, when such duos were apparently all the rage.

The idea then, is that we have two characters, Smarty and the Fat Cat. One's a guy who uses deductive reasoning to solve problems, collecting lots of observations, trying to get them all to fit together, often finding things a lot of other people -- even trained professionals -- miss. The other's a fat cat who likes to eat lots of food.

I then proceeded to do the most important thing for any show in the 80s, and that's develop a theme song, or at least lyrics for it. This is what I came up with:

• smarty and the fat cat / when there's justice to be dished / they'll find the clues and solve some crimes / and eat a lot of fish
• smarty and the fat cat / they're some crazy dudes / they'll put the pieces all in place / and eat a lot of foods
• smarty and the fat cat / they sit down and confer / logic, reason, evidence / and happy petted purrs
• smarty and the fat cat / now I just don't know how / they solve every single mystery / with lots of cute meows
• smarty and the fat cat / their brains like grinding cogs / they'll catch all those bad guys / and stay away from dogs
• smarty and the fat cat / one's brainy, one has claws / they've got cooperation / working hand in paw
• Smarty and the fat cat / solving all those crimes / I think I'm done with singing / 'cuz I'm all out of rhymes

man am I a dork

I think I may have to develop this idea even further. No doubt their first mystery will have to be to find out where all the tuna supply in the tri-state area has vanished off to.

NEUTRINO, a sonnet

Man, I can't believe I found this -- or at least looked for it in the first place.

I wrote this one day my senior year in High School. I forget exactly why I did it, but I think overwhelming boredom had something to do with it. Either that or temporary insanity.

Here it is:

The physics masters' ideas now well known
As small and massless particles are found
They push the larger players all around
And sight unseen their presence clearly shown.
The theorists all did give a heavy groan
As some of their ideas were run aground
Traject'ries changed so quick -- and naught a sound --
And strange collisions now had them all thrown*
Though only Bohr had such strange results seen
Recounted in the chem'stry books of old
Rutherford throwing alphas at his gold
Bohr's leptons soon changed our atomic view
Of these, Neutrinos forth begotten been**
Be seen with measurable mass, and flavors too.




* The apparent collisions between some particles and neutrinos threw the scientists for a loop.
** Bohr's atomic model featured electrons outside of the atomic nucleus. As electrons were studied further, several different electron "flavors" were found (muon and tau, in addition to the atomic electron), and these were discovered to each have analogous neutrinos. As it was discovered that these flavors could change, it was also determined that neutrinos had a measurable mass.

Phrases not found on Google

Taken from an XKCD comic idea, this documents several phrases that, as of this time of writing, turn up no results on Google. Naturally, now that they are documented on this blog, they will all return at least one result, but given the growth predictions I have for this blog, I suspect that will be it. Feel free to check on your own.

Here they are:

"I learned Klingon to impress my girlfriend" (though to be fair, even "French" and "Italian" don't)

"I have seven PS3s" (any value between "two" and "six" returns results)

"Is a quadruple orgasm healthy" (which surprises me -- I would have figured someone would have asked this question satirically on Yahoo! Answers by now)

"ARIA made me depressed" (replacing "ARIA" with "Avatar" returns over 10,000 results)

"There aren't enough Touhou characters" (there is one result claiming the contrary, that "there are too many...")

"I wish poop tasted better" (other terms for "poop" do return results though)
"Coffee cured my cancer" (neither does "coffee enemas cured my cancer")

Some things that do return results:

"make the Wii remote function as a dildo"

"plants are people too"

"should I eat my children" (although the result contains the caveat that the topic with that title was deleted)

and incidentally, "my bladder is half full" returns far more results than "my bladder is half empty"

Awesome cool stuff that's happened to me recently

If you felt that last post felt a bit more disjointed than usual, there's a reason for that. I'll detail the story here.

The grocery store near the campus has, since around October, been giving out points redeemable for Cuisinart kitchen appliances. Because we don't have a meal plan, we end up shopping there quite often, and go there every couple of days, often buying lots of soda and lunch meat (which I usually have as a quick lunch). The selection is okay, but not amazing. I can't even find cheap boneless, skinless chicken breasts most of the time. I had to get chicken tenders instead, last night, which aren't as good for the purposes I was trying to fulfill -- basically baked breaded whole breasts.

Anyway, the store's main appeal is that it's really close to the college, and open late every day. And again, the points service. It ended recently; it only ran for a couple months, presumably so that the chain wouldn't have to honor a lot of the coupon books. However, possibly due to the fact that nobody participated, some of the cashiers would give us far more than we should for the points -- they're supposed to give one for every $10 spent, but it ended up coming closer to $2-3 instead. It wasn't very long until we collected the 120 points that we needed to get a blender/food processor combo unit, which we had been saving up for primarily.

And we kept getting points! We didn't stop shopping and even maybe bought a little more than usual to collect more so that we could get other things. It didn't take as long because the cashiers became almost insanely generous with the points (we got like 25 stamps one time for a $25 purchase very near the end of the promotion), and all the other things we got required far fewer points to redeem. We have now a free toaster and a waffle iron as well. The latter will be used, you may be surprised to learn, primarily for preparing bacon, and the former will be used for eggo waffles and pancakes.

We also got a nice coffee maker, though we paid $30 for it because we could only get it half-off. It's huge -- a 12-cup coffee maker with programmable settings (such that it can turn on and start brewing before I wake up so I can rise to a nice cup of coffee) and a charcoal water filter. I bought some coffee last night at Dunkin Donuts because my roommate had to choose between that and watching the first Star Trek film, and though the smell and taste of coffee are nearly enough to bring him to extended fits of nausea, that's still nothing compared to the first Star Trek film (I couldn't even stand watching it for 10 minutes).

Since that was around 10:00 last night, having coffee then wouldn't be a good idea, so I waited until this morning to try some of the coffee with the maker. It was tasty, if a little bitter (and hell, this is coffee we're talking about here so it's not like it wouldn't be). I think it's better with a little sugar added, wimpy though some may find the practice of sweetening coffee to be.

I made more than a single cup, so I left the carafe in the refrigerator in order to make ice coffee (or just cold coffee, I guess -- I don't want to dilute it with ice).

Anyway, that's why my thoughts are a bit less coherent than usual. I had coffee, after not sleeping as well as I might have liked.

Those Fraternity Thingies.

My campus, the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, VA, recently put out a report on the state of fraternities on campus. Because this is a higher-class school, I've noticed that people seem to have come here to actually study stuff and not just get drunk on weekends and have lots of crazy reckless group sex parties and stuff. (Why people think they need to go to college to get that stuff is beyond me. Then again I guess they'd do that anyway and it's just a matter of coincidence they can find it on campus at all.) Anyway, the point is that fraternities here on campus have a very limited presence on campus and aren't a critical element of socialization on campus.

There's an article on the report at the campus's official paper: http://flathatnews.com/content/72604 which contains a link to a PDF of the report in question. There's some amusing stuff in the article, and some that's way out there.

Naturally the report deals a bit on hazing. In my freshman year I was interested in one of the fraternities, whose identity I don't intend to make public. It noted in an early meeting of the pledges that in addition to some typical initiation rituals there would be some "optional" activities that would occur off the record, but he was very clear on stating that they really would be optional and should anyone be uncomfortable with taking part to voice concerns and these activities simply wouldn't happen. I'd say I'm quite satisfied with that response, as this allows the new recruits to potentially bond and maybe have some hopefully harmless fun. Nobody gets too resentful of the people doing the "hazing" and the "hazers" don't pull anything that'll likely raise the attention of the authorities. Making it at least nominally illegal then, might be for the best -- if the people hazing are abusing their power, the pledges can report it. If there's no problem, then it can just stay off-the-record.

Apparently the sororities have a "clue week" which I guess is something like a scavenger hunt or puzzle thing. Anyway, during this, the big sisters of the new members are all trying to outdo each other -- to the point that spending $500 on this for one person isn't unusual. Now, my freshman year, there was a good deal of money left in our dorm's funds and we wanted to spend it for our floor to rent a couple limos and all go to a Brazilian steakhouse in Richmond. If the money wasn't spent it would roll over to the next year. Though this was more like $1000, it was used among all the residents of the floor, so it would be more like $75-150 per person. It wasn't approved by the other people in the hall community, perhaps not surprisingly. However, the story reached legend status quite quickly, especially among people who don't like the people in charge of residence life on campus. I can't say I blame the haters -- the people in reslife are very strong bureaucrats, who make DMV employees look downright flexible, or at least kind. They would charge us $15.75 each for leaving personal trash in the hall bathrooms sometime during March, $15 of which were administrative fees for having to contact us over the summer; the only reason the charge was removed was that nobody told us before the summer that we would have to pay for this, and the year after nobody cared that this practice continued. I don't quite know how this connects with spending $500 on a new member, but I thought I'd tell the story.

(One lesson to be learned is don't send out letters requesting payment if it'll cost more than to solve the problem yourself, I think. Count it as a small loss. Second, don't charge people who aren't even leaving personal trash in those wastebaskets (like me). Thankfully that charge was eventually waived.)

There are also a lot of beer pong tables in the fraternity buildings -- since drinking games are barred on campus, the report recommended starting a policy against such tables. Why they can't just get plain ping-pong tables and use those illicitly is far beyond my understanding. Tables designed specifically for beer pong exist, though, which is why I assume that the tables that the fraternities have are not actually ping-pong tables that are used for that. I do wonder how they'd enforce this if the units move more to ping-pong tables. Will they get rid of all tables like that in dorms? What if they played these games with, say, grape juice or something? Why can't they just modify the beer pong rules so that the cups are placed on the floor and the competitors have to stand a certain distance away from them? It's not as though they've made the issue of unsafe drinking on campus a non-issue otherwise.

What amused me most about the report was the issue of nomenclature. They listed several terms that are common parlance in the community and came up with several alternatives. The result is largely laughable, if for no other reason than the alternatives are wordy and awkward.

• Greek Life becomes Fraternity and Sorority Life

• Pledge becomes New or Associate Member

• Pledge Training becomes New Member Education

• Rush becomes Recruitment

• Rushee becomes Potential New Member

• Probate becomes New Member Show / Presentation, or Presentation of New Members

• Boys becomes Men (or Gentlemen)

• Girls becomes Women (or Ladies)

• Frat becomes Fraternity (as it pertains to referencing an IFC chapter)

• Babies becomes New Members (pertinent mostly for sororities in reference to new members)

• Frat Units [They didn't even have a replacement for this one!] Strongly suggest a strategyto immediately eliminate reference to the fraternity housing facilities as “units.” A “unit” is appropriate as a reference to a cinderblock student storage structure.

Potential New Member is supposed to be a good alternative to Rushee? Perhaps it's because I'm largely unacquainted with the specifics of the fraternity culture, as an outsider, but I fail to see the issue with most of the original terms, barring perhaps, say, "Boys" and "Girls" inasmuch as it has an implication of immaturity among the members. Given the stereotypes of Greek Life (oh dear, I've used that term rather than the longer Fraternity and Sorority Life, as though getting the expression confused with, say, discussing the culture of Mykonos was a common occurrence), that seems appropriate, though obviously changing the words will be what will cause these kids to shape up and become outstanding members of the college community. Of course, if an outsider like me has no strong emotion about most of the current language, then I don't see any reason to change it -- it's not as though changing the language will change the opinion of insiders one bit, as they already have an emotional connection to the community (or at least, it's been my understanding that such is a tenet of Greek life).

Let's look at that last entry again in particular, the one for "Frat Units" it says this:

"A “unit” is appropriate as a reference to a cinderblock student storage structure."

I lived in a building last year that was part of the fraternity complex on campus -- it was built of cinder blocks, had very tiny dorm rooms (I think less than 10x10), and never had the heater at a decent setting -- around this time last year it was 84 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course) all the time in it -- and there was no air conditioning either. Made working and sleeping -- the kinds of things one might do in a dorm room -- ridiculously difficult. I felt less like I was living there and more like I, a student, was being stored there. Thus, for the reason they feel the term is inappropriate, I will continue to use it!

The last thing the report mentions is putting up a statue to celebrate the fact that the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity originated at this campus. It's the oldest fraternity in the nation, too, thus making W&M where fraternities first formed. Incidentally the organization already has a building on campus dedicated to it: it's basically the college's performing arts center. I think if the college wants to show respect to the fraternities, it should save money on a statue and work on improving the living conditions in the fraternity units such as by giving them air conditioning.