"Zoo-zoo?" A grungy, bespectacled young man to my left shouts across the train platform. A cyclist, rolling idly down the street on what is perhaps the smallest bike I've ever seen, takes notice. "A-zoo-Bomb!" The youth next to me concludes, and the two of them wave to each other.
"You going to the pile?" The first inquires.
So, I'm back in town! That was fast!
Managed to get out of school okay: finished my two papers on time, and despite my notes disappearing managed to make it through finals without too much difficulty. The papers are actually pretty cool: for Philosophy of Physics I got to look at two accounts of the mass energy equivalence relation, and talk about how we revise the scientific process for education. I didn't get to explore that thread as much as I would have liked, but I did get to read all of Einstein's work on special relativity. I know it's been said before, but the guy's a genius. The reasoning itself is straightforward, but he makes these intuitive jumps that are very surprising unless you know where he's going.
Over the past three terms, I've become aware of a strange connection between sounds and visual images in my mind. When lying in bed and trying to fall asleep, with my eyes closed and thoughts mostly empty, I frequently experience visual patterns in response to loud or sudden noises. The first time it happened, my roommate's Macintosh computer emitted an unexpected and loud 'bonk' noise as an alert. Simultaneously, a diagonally oriented field of wavy white and black lines flashed before my eyes. The intensity of the pattern varied smoothly from black to white, so no clear delineations were perceivable. I estimate that there were about twenty to thirty of these lines visible, to give some representation of their density.
The perception lay somewhere between reality and imagination; not a concrete object in the world, but also not a "minds eye" sort of projection. It's analogous to the experience of seeing whorls and cascades of shadowy color when you press on your eyeballs for a few minutes, except it occurred suddenly, and faded as quickly as the sound. It also feels like there's an extra component to the experience, as well: it's not just a field of lines, but a visual feeling of orientation. That bit is much harder to describe or even verify, but it does seem present.
For months now, my friend Justin has been trying to get me up to the cities, and, more importantly, to meet the people on the Equality Ride. While I can't hope to express what the ride is without having been on it, the best story I can offer is that of 50-odd young adults traveling around the country on two buses, going to college campuses which make life hard for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender people. Some universities have policies so severe, students may be suspended or expelled for supporting their gay friends or family. The ride aims to change this by, well, talking. Talking to students about their experiences with sexual and gender identity, explaining how their faith interacts with those, and challenging arguments that these identities are fundamentally immoral.
The other half of the ride is more a public relations effort: when schools refuse the ride access to campus, riders stand vigil at the sidewalk, walk around the campus borders, or deliberately trespass. At one stop, riders carried pictures of their family. At another, they left lilies to symbolize the suicides of LGBT students, and read those stories aloud. "All we want to do is talk," the campaign seems to plead, "and yet we are handcuffed and arrested because the school doesn't want their students to have this dialogue."
So last night, Nik, Max, and I were studying for the philosophy midterm, and we got to talking about the Monty Hall problem. It goes like this: you've got three doors, behind one of which is a fun prize, and behind the other two are nothing. You guess one of the doors, in an attempt to obtain the awesome reward, but before you get to see if you were right or not, some punk named Monty opens a different door, and shows you that there is nothing behind it. You then have the opportunity to change your selection. What do you pick?
Well, we figured, being shown that another door has nothing behind it doesn't change what your original choice was, so it doesn't make a difference as to which door you pick now. Either of the remaining two doors will be equally likely to have the prize behind it, right?
Wow, that was a good weekend. I'm sore, and twisted my toe on the wrestling mats, but learned a lot. It was fun to be exposed to so many new techniques: all-direction step-in-thrust, a rotating takedown from side strike, and an opposite-hand variant of the fourth-kyu 180-degree pivot shuffle cross-step-under initiation. There was even koryu buki study, and some calligraphy practice! The demonstration itself went well too, although we didn't get to go through all six techniques.
I was happily surprised to see David-sensei and a bunch of other friends from the Portland club at the Genyokan. I miss those guys out here, so getting to work with them for three days was a nice reunion. Looking forward to getting back for summer, and having class with all of them again.
Two hours after going to sleep, I awoke to a shrill alarm with a start, kicking off the bed and into the air. Three things went through my head in the second or so before I touched down.
- Hmmm, that's not my alarm. It's much too high-pitched, and isn't intermittent.
- Gosh, there's a lot of smoke in here.
- Hey, is that the ground?
The weekend was pretty darn awesome. Sophie and her housemates invited Nik, Max, Rachel, Anna, and I to dinner, where they'd made tons of delicious Jewish food. There was salad, fresh-baked bread, delicious kugel, and a massive roast with carrots and other veggies... it was *soooo* tasty! After weeks of Sodexho, getting to have a real meal with good company made my day. Max and I washed the dishes, and after we hung out on the couches, studying and watching Grey's Anatomy.
The two tests from Monday's classes went okay--I was definitely more confused by the EM material than Partials. Of course, the Partials test didn't actually ask us to solve any PDEs, and that's the part of the course I totally don't understand yet, so I got off easy. Seeing the unusual connections between function spaces and Linear Algebra is mind-bending at times.
I haven't taken many classes lately with research papers. It's all been problem sets, notes, finals... not much in the way of going out and finding stuff on my own. Because of this, it was not until yesterday that I experienced the awe-inspiring mass of documentation that is the U.S. Government Archive, on the first floor of the libe: rows and rows of compressed movable shelving, stuffed full of treatises on every imaginable topic.
They're filed according to some byzantine scheme, with at least six separate fields for each identifier. The notation uses capitalization, slashes, dashes, dots, colons, and even superscripts to index each document, and after perusing shelves of this stuff, I can't ascertain what those numbers mean. On this shelf, a decrepit tome "War" rests sedately on the shelf; thicker than it is tall, it describes the military capacities of the United States decades ago. Here's a report on global warming written in 2005: a thin paper booklet held together by staples, and right next to it: five volumes, over three thousand pages, detailing the threat of Communism to the American public.
A couple of funny things happened to me today. Over break I got a series of e-mails with tips for taking the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a scenario-based assessment of critical thinking skills. The names for each tip started with the letters B and S: "Be Specific", "Be Skeptical", etc.* However, the e-mail for tip number four was:
TIP #4: READ DIRECTIONS ($5.00 extra to anyone who can come up with a version of this tip's name that starts with an “S”) Check that you’ve done what you’ve been asked to do. If you’re being asked to play a role, think about who you are suppose to be writing for. Don’t assume that your audience knows what you’re writing about.
To sum up the last term:
I took three classes: Ordinary Differential Equations, Japanese 205, and Classical/Computational Mechanics, affectionately (though with a thin edge of nervousness) referred to by many physics majors as "Classy" and "Compy". These last two ate me alive: the average weekly problem set was 18 hours in length, although one went up to 25 hours. I spent a lot of mornings (9:00 P.M. -- 3:00 A.M.) in Olin, the physics building, staring at Mathematica and struggling through Lagrangians. "You know, the windmill is really pretty at sunrise," my friend Max told me. "You can see it through the windows of the Olin hallway."
I sometimes wonder about how much postprocessing is, for lack of a better word, "honest", in creating a photograph. When working with an image composed of a bit vector, which is only interpretable through the use of complex hardware, I feel free to modify the image as much as desired; unlike working with a traditional negative, in which the image has a concrete physical form, one sequence of bits is, in some sense, as good as any other. This lack of permanency, of a link to the exposure itself, is in some ways liberating, but can also feel dishearteningly trivial.
For most images, I perform mild color (usually, just levels) correction, rotation, and cropping only. I feel that these modifications are not only traditionally acceptable, having analogous processes in the darkroom, but do not change the photograph in a way that misrepresents having been there. That is, I suppose, the most important aspect of photography for me: relaying the experience of seeing something in the world to someone else. Drift too far from that experience, and the photograph communicates a dream, not reality.