And That's What Christmas Is All About, Charlie Brown

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the world, first ordered well their own States.

Wishing to order well their States, they first regulated their families.

Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons.

Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts.

Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts.

Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost of their knowledge.

Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

--
you're gonna carry that weight

Be My Yoko Ono

At the Hirschhorn museum in Washington, D. C., Yoko Ono has an exhibit in the outdoor sculpture garden - a "wishing tree", where you can write a wish on a little paper tag and tie it into the branches.

Ben suggested that we wish for an infinite number of wishes. I suggested that we wish that Yoko Ono had never split up the Beatles.

We compromised and did neither.

I look just like Buddy Holly

Maybe The Internet Is A Good Thing After All

I can't help but feel good when the top two stories in the New York Times are about the use of the Internet to fight oppression - one in China and one in Iran. I'm not naïve enough to think that technology alone can defeat tyranny, but it certainly helps.

Now imagine a world with ubiquitous strong crypto, where anyone could safely and anonymously speak - and at the same time, everyone on the Internet could be clearly and unambiguously identified, if they so chose. The implications of this are vast, and instead of expounding on them, I'm going to bed. But I get the sense that we are living in an era of free speech the likes of which the writers of the First Amendment never imagined - and yet, they somehow managed to make the right choice. That's foresight, right there.

--
I'll tell you once more before I get off the floor

Outliers
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

In Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, he talks about something he calls the "10,000 hour rule", which is basically the statement that if you do anything for 10,000 hours, you will be good at it. He (or possibly someone else entirely) further argues that "talent" as we normally think of it doesn't really exist - if you're "talented" at something, what it really means is that you love it so much that you're willing to devote 10,000 hours to it.

Lately, I've been thinking that this might apply to relationships as well, based on two observations. One is that two people who don't love each other can build a functional relationship, if they have to - this is how marriage worked for a very long time. The other is that two people who do love each other are not necessarily inherently capable of building a functional relationship.

This is because a relationship isn't just about love - love is important, but there's more to it than that. Maybe the word I'm thinking of is "compatibility". Compatibility might be inherent, to an extent, but a large part it's learned. No two people are perfectly compatible right off the bat - part of any healthy relationship is learning to forgive each other for your flaws, and love each other in spite of (or even because of) them.

My point is that compatibility doesn't come automatically from love, but love makes it easier to develop compatibility in the same way that "talent" makes it easier to develop expertise. You can be compatible without love - it may not be a happy relationship, but it will probably be a functional one for the purposes of familial stability and so forth.

Now, before you start frantically wondering if anything is wrong with the relationships in my life - these are nothing but idle musings that in no way reveal my inner thoughts.

--
like a moth before a flame

A Birthday Recap, for the Morbidly Curious

000: Ding! It's my birthday. I'm playing D&D, and there's nothing I'd rather be doing.
0230: Gale the Elven Ranger gets his head torn off by Regiarax the dragon. This is all I really wanted for my birthday.
0330: The game wraps up. My apartment is a mess - I stagger off to bed.
1000: I wake up and stumble towards the bathroom - Eric is cleaning it, which is odd, but I occasionally have random cleaning jags, so it's not that weird.
1015: The bathroom is cleaned. I use the toilet. It clogs and floods. Fuck.
1020: Plunging fails. I start mopping up the overflow with paper towels, then give up and call maintenance, who presumedly own a mop (unlike me). I tell Eric about these developments; he tells me that he had a similar problem previously, hence the early morning cleaning. Fuck fuck fuck.
1030: I shower downstairs in 203. Later, Meggie will tell me that my soap smells nice, and I won't realize what she's talking about for a long, long time.
1115: I start cleaning the kitchen from last night's festivities. The dishes are innumerable and gross, but I have no one to blame but myself - I put on a New Pornographers album and dig in.
1215: I finish cleaning. Eric and I chat about last night's game, and I begin telling him about last night's epic battle.
1220: The maintenance guy arrives - it's just a guy wearing jeans, sneakers, and a jacket, and carrying a plunger, no other tools or equipment. He opens the door to the bathroom.
"It's flooded."
"Yeah, I mentioned that on the phone."
He goes over and flushes the toilet, which promptly floods, doubling the volume of the water on the floor.
"Hey!"
"The toilet's clogged." What did you expect would happen? He plunges it for a while - it's clear.
"You should take care of that water as soon as possible." Gee, thanks - what am I paying you for? Wait, am I paying you? I don't press the issue, and he leaves. I grab a roll of paper towels, and get to work.
1315: That was unpleasant. Eric kindly helped, and I finished telling him the THRILLING STORY of last night's session. He suggests that we take this opportunity to watch The Fountain - he's been suggesting that we do this for some time. "After my bike ride," I agree, but around then Zach returns from the first leg of the Saturday morning shopping trip. He's got an RA event, so I need to cover the second leg. No problem, I love grocery shopping.
1500: Well, that took longer than expected. Jack and I discuss housing - our lead looks promising, and she might be willing to negotiate on the summer rent. I buy some Girl Scout cookies from a troop outside the grocery store, and marvel at the physical and social awkwardness of preteen girls.
1505: Time to get some work done - I pull out some REU applications and start filling them out. Fortunately, they're not due until... later today. So much for that bike ride.
1530: I talk to my parents. Hooray! It's my birthday! The mailroom seems intent on withholding any and all birthday presents - this upsets me more than I let on.
1600: Myself, Eric, and others settle in to watch The Fountain.
1745: Wow, what an incredible movie. I kind of want to watch Requiem for a Dream and Pi now, but I'm too scared - drug use and math make me nervous.
1800: Jack has bad news - Sean can't afford the house, and he's dropping out of the deal. Unless we can find a sixth person in short order, we're right fucked. In my heart, I was already moved in - I contain my tears.
1815: Sully comes over. He brought me a present! Fantastic! I try to be appreciative, but I'm still really upset about the house. I realize this, and make an excuse about calling Ben - I go into my room and lie down, and start crying. I just want to have a place to live, and not have to worry about it anymore. I start feeling that I've wasted the day - I didn't even go on a bike ride that I've been promising myself all week. At this point, it's almost too much for me to handle.
1820: I actually call Ben. This helps a lot. I talk about housing, and how I'm doing poorly academically, and about many other things - he listens patiently and sympathetically, like the good brother he is.
1930: I hang up, feeling much better. Liz is over! I love Liz. We go downstairs, where Jack is making wings.
2030: I have eaten a lot of wings.
2130: Liz and I are wrestling on the floor. Before you get any ideas, let me assure you that this is an act of pure violence on our behalf, the consequence of my attempt to break up another argument of moral relativism vs. moral absolutism between her and Zach. I've got forty pounds on her, but damn, she's scrappy. She tells me that putting her in a chokehold is illegal, w.r.t. wrestling rules - I didn't realize there were rules to beating the bejeezus out of people.
2230: We're teaching Jwatzman how to take off a bra. This is possibly the most useful thing he will learn in his entire undergraduate career.
2330: Good friends, good food, and they got me a cake! I have the best friends ever. I make a wish and blow out the candles.
2359: The party isn't over yet, but I started at 0000, so I should end here. Besides, we all go home pretty soon in the future anyway.

So there you have it - a perfectly lovely birthday. Definitely within the top 20. I am among friends here, dear friends, and don't you forget it.

--
sing us out

You May Giggle Now, Colin Meloy, but I Will Have The Last Laugh

Googling for "legionnaire's lament giggle" yields nothing of value, so I must be the one to ask the Internet - in "The Legionnaire's Lament", by The Decemberists, is there a giggle at 3:35? Or am I just insane?

In other news, I think I want to marry Neko Case. You do too, gentle reader, even if you don't know it yet.

--

camel in disrepair

Sometimes I Am So Awesome It Hurts

I was riding my bicycle back from the grocery store the other day, and took my usual shortcut home, which involves bypassing a gate of the sort often found at toll booths and the like. It's about a meter off the ground, a little lower than the height of my handlebars. I've been practicing riding under it by putting both of my feet onto the same pedal, so I can act as a counterweight, then leaning the bike over about π/4 radians and coasting underneath, ducking my head so as to avoid obvious consequences. I've made it a few times, but have always fallen over (or had to dismount to avoid falling over) right afterwards.

I finally pulled it off, though - I dismounted, coasted underneath the gate leaning sideways, re-mounted, and pedaled off, all while carrying ~30 lbs. of groceries in my backpack.

That's not the point of the story, though.

It's been snowing quite a bit, and I was walking back to my apartment during a flurry that left an inch-thick dusting on an already icy ground. Pittsburgh being a hilly city, this journey involves at least one flight of stairs - rather than risk my neck on the slick steps, I stepped onto the banister and slid down a good 20 feet, landing on my feet.

That's not the point of the story, either.

The point of the story is this - why can I never pull off any of this stuff whenever there are girls watching?

--
so she's taking lots of vitamins

Holy God I Am Still Alive

I stumbled out of my sixth final and was immediately filled with a rush of elation. It's over, I thought to myself, I beat the F08 semester. The end guy was hard.

Such moments of triumph in my life are generally short-lived, so I'm going to ride this one as long as I can. Hopefully, it will take me all the way back to Rhode Island - then I won't have to spend as much on gasoline.

--
don't break it down

What do you do when you fall off a horse?

"It pains me to watch you code," said Sullivan.

"Why?" I asked.

"You'll have something that's almost correct, except for one character, and rather than try to fix it, you'll delete the whole line and start over. This is why it takes you so long to write code."

I looked down at the whiteboard, anything to avoid his gaze, but Sullivan's best and worst quality is that he doesn't know when to stop.

"You give up too easily," he said.

"Let's get back to studying," I mumbled, blinking back tears and swallowing hard.

Granted, Sullivan is a bit of a jackass, but his words hurt because they were true, to an extent. I'm used to things being easy. When they aren't, I work at them until they are - or I just give up. This works fine as long as I don't want to do anything difficult, but most of the things I'm interested are pretty heady, and I'm gradually realizing that there's no easy way to get there; as my "head start" wears off, I'm facing the same long slog as everyone else.

These were the thoughts running through my head as I walked through the rain to my physics exam this afternoon. I had rescheduled it due to conflicts with later exams; unfortunately, this left me with about 24 hours to study. And study I did, until the sight of a differential equation made me want to vomit. I slept, poorly and insufficiently, and then it was time.

It was the longest exam I've ever taken (about 4 hours) and probably the hardest to boot. I started off confidently, but around the 2:30 mark, I encountered a problem of a sort that had slipped under my studying radar. After an hour of desperately trying to dredge up ancient memories from lectures and notes, re-deriving relevant properties from first principles, moving on and jumping back in an effort to startle the knowledge out of myself, and sheer wild guesswork, I was on the brink of tears. Digging my nails into my thighs, I resolved to give up and hand it in.

As I put my pencil down, I recalled my earlier conversation with Sullivan. Well, I thought, leaning back in my chair, I guess he was right. Here I am, giving up again.

I looked down at my paper one more time, then sat forward and grabbed my pencil. I wasn't about to give Sullivan the satisfaction of being right.*

*I don't think I got the right answer, but at least I tried...

--
stop me from thinking of what I once knew

Just Outside Of Your Front Door

I woke up bright and early* this morning and stumbled out towards the bathroom in my underwear.

Halfway across the living room, I paused - I could hear something from out the window. It's not uncommon to hear voices drifting up from the sidewalk three stories below, but this sounded closer.

Summoning all the energy I could muster at that ungodly hour**, I turned. Sitting in the branches of the tree not five feet from my window was a workman of some sort, avidly clipping branches with those long-handled shears and carrying on an animated conversation with his counterpart on the ground.

I stumbled back to my room to pull on some pants, then went over to the window and opened it.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," the workman said.

Then I went to take a shower.

It's the little, surreal experiences in life, like waking up to find someone just outside your third-story window, that make it really worth living.

*1130
**Still 1130, give or take

--
he ended up sad

Simple Harmonic Motion

When I am overwhelmed with work, I default to one of two courses of action:

• Buckle down, work hard, squeak by
• Curl up in a fetal position and hope my problems go away by themselves

This week, I learned that there's a third option:

• Oscillate wildly between the two

I guess my point is that Real Content is Forthcoming, which is something I say often enough to need an acronym. (RCIF? RCiF? RCF?) Stay tuned.

--
please proceed into android hell

Rice, My Old Arch-Nemesis, We Meet Again

I don't think I've ever failed quite so hard at cooking as I did earlier tonight. The meal took a long time, used costly ingredients, and wasn't any damn good whatsoever - and I managed to destroy my friend's wok, to boot.

The culprit, of course, was rice - the rice held everything else up, stuck to the wok, and still wasn't finished long after I had lost my patience for it. How can billions of people subsist on such an obstinate, finicky grain for their daily sustenance? The mind boggles.

Finally, the problem was compounded by the expectations of eight of my friends, waiting to be fed. I didn't just have terrible food, I had a lot of it. Fortunately, my friends are barbarians with no taste, so they didn't particularly care - and for barbarians, they're very polite; the only audible complaints were from me.

This is made even worse when one considers that I've tangled with rice before. Its niceties are not entirely unknown to me. At least, that's what I thought when I started cooking tonight. As with many things in life, there is one correct outcome for rice, and a million failures.

This is the part of the post where I try to make it seem like what I'm writing about is important, but the only conclusion that I can come to is that I suck at cooking rice. Maybe I should... suck less? I'll figure out how to do rice right someday, but I wish I had methods other than "exhaust all possible failures".

As of now, I am formally instituting rice as my culinary arch-nemesis. It's on.

--
subatomic waves from the underwater caves

Sleep Would Be Nice

My roommate's hard drive has a tendency to spin up, loudly, at odd hours of the night. As far as I can tell, his computer is idling, so this could be indicative of drive trouble... Regardless of the cause, it provides me with an apt analogy for the state of my mind on a Sunday night - it just won't idle.

Sundays, especially cold, snowy ones, are perfect for lazing around and not getting any real work done. This is lovely when you can afford to do that, but I don't have time for laziness one day a week, much less five or six (which is usually what ends up happening). Combine this with my whiplash-inducing attempts to re-align my sleep cycle from weekend mode back to EST. The end result is that every Sunday night, I lie in bed, wide awake, and think of all the things I didn't do today, this week, this month, this life.

It's a long list, and it only gets longer as time progresses, but eventually I get sleepy counting the nodes and drift off, and wake up exhausted and not at all ready or willing to get back to the business of Doing Stuff.

Tuesdays suck even worse.

--
all the things we did and didn't do

Why I Do What I Do

I'm sitting at my desk, writing a recursive search for a binary search tree. It's challenging for me, but I understand it, and big chunks of comprehension keep falling into place. I'm blasting the good bit of Vicious Delicious, and it occurs to me: I really love doing this. I love the work that I do. This is easy to forget when there's so much of it, as there always is, so I savor the moment.

And back to work. Substantive content forthcoming.

--
I want to touch the back of your right arm

Finally, Some Recognition

Us advocates of the third amendment have to stick together, so I'd like to draw your attention to the shoutout we received in yesterday's xkcd. We really need a catchy slogan, something like, "The one constitutional right you'll never have to worry about being violated by the government!", except I'm pretty sure that the first clause of this sentence specified "catchy".

I'm typing this into a bog-standard browser text-box, but I just tried to move the cursor with [esc] [hjkl] , which means that I should attempt to reclaim some lost sleep. I last saw it near my pillow; perhaps I'll check there first.

Upcoming: Music, and the extent to which it makes us lose control.

--
but you are my love the astronaut

The Archives Of This Blog Are Now Labeled

This should expedite the copious archive bingeing I've come to expect from my readers as a matter of course. It was more than a little embarrassing to read views espoused by the me of 2006, but this is to be expected. Now you can share in my pain, with the power of metadata.

While traversing my history, I graphed my post frequency on this blog since its inception.



Hopefully, this isn't too interesting to you, but it should show that I am fairly serious about updating more frequently. It's easy for me to say this now, though - we'll see how it plays out in the long run. I know that I have ideas, but is the world ready for them? Or will the Internet shatter under their sheer awesome might?

--
until I need a pencil

The Things That Have Kept Me Awake At Night and/or Woken Me Up Early

• Automobile traffic
  
• Loud university students
  
• There's this train, which isn't particularly loud in and of itself, but I guess it's really important that it blows its whistle for a good five minutes straight
  
• Garbage trucks
  
• Street sweepers
  
• Carpentry
  
• My roommate's ring tone, which is the Dr. Horrible theme
  
• A jackhammer
  
• My roommate's "text message received" noise, which is the "get item" sound from Zelda
  
• People in the apartment above mine, holding combined track and field events / stomp dancing competitions at 0200
  
• The ceiling fan, which will every so often start doing this "click click click" noise.
  
• My roommate's alarm clock, which is the standard cell phone ring
  
• Church bells, though this is usually not on Sunday
  
• The knowledge that I will die alone and unloved.
  

It's a wonder that I get any sleep at all.

--

tell me all of your secrets

This Space Intentionally Left Blank

Today was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and while considering my sins of the past year, first and foremost among them was the degree to which my posting here has lapsed. It's been, what, six months? And it's not like I don't have anything to write about.

The problem is that I'm only taking a single humanities course this semester, and that course has only a single paper, so I'm worried that I'm going to forget how to write. Without constant vigilance, my already tenuous grip on the English language will continue to wane like the sort of simile I could come up with if I could still remember how to write.

After that realization (and getting hassled by some security guys from this one place. Funny story.) my atonement was complete - but it will lapse immediately if I don't keep posting.

So, for the sake of my immortal soul, I will keep writing.

I will leave you, dear writer, with a link to my friend Jokeserver's blog of jokes so you can appreciate what I have to put up with on a daily basis.

Also, his jokes are really bad.

--
forgive me for leaving you alone

Interlude

I know I promised zombies in this space by a week ago, and zombies there shall be, but cut me some slack, you know what I mean? You're not my mom. Unless you're reading this, Mom.

Anyway, I wanted to write about something that made me really angry on Tuesday. I waited until today because I was hoping that by now I would stop being angry, but it's still annoying in a way that nothing other than a small child should be able to irritate me.

I came to college with a single pen. I had a lot of pencils, but for whatever reason, there was this blind spot in my foresight where I simply did not anticipate the need for any. So, when I came here four months ago, I had only the pen in my pocket (I always keep a pen in my pocket).

I actually managed to hang on to it for about three months before it disappeared into whatever netherworld pens go to when they leave their masters. This in and of itself didn't anger me; it was a good pen, and it had served me well. I wished it good luck in its future travels and turned away, not wanting it to see the single tear running down my cheek.

Since then, I've been borrowing my roommate's pens, occasionally with his permission. They're decent pens, but they can never make up for what has been lost. I find it difficult to bring myself to care about them as much as I did for my first pen, but I need something to write with, and write I did. Pens came and went, but I just couldn't bring myself to care.

But on Tuesday, the unforgivable happened. During chemistry lecture, my pen ran out of ink. It was the sort of running-out-of-ink where the pen doesn't just die, it lingers for a little while. It gives you false hope, making you think that maybe if you scribble with it or shake it or hold it at the right angle, it will start writing again, and each of these things breathed a few brief moments of life into my ailing pen, but little by little it faded away into nothingness.

At this point, a reasonable person would quietly mourn the loss of their pen and move on, perhaps shedding a single tear. The emotion I felt was not sadness, however; it was anger. I was angry at my pen for betraying me in my time of need. "How could you do this to me?" I thought loudly (but not aloud). "I am angry at you for betraying me in my time of need!"

I became so angry at my pen - its brief existence, its unfaithful, inconsistent service, the way in which it tantalized me with false life - that I hurled it to the ground at my feet, where, as far as I know, it lies to this day.

It was not until later that I realized why I became so angry at the pen. It wasn't because of its failure; all pens, at some point or another, will fail. No pen lasts forever. It wasn't because of its betrayal; the pen didn't betray me, I betrayed myself with my misplaced faith, my false belief that it would always be there for me.

No, I was angry at the pen because it wasn't the pen that I wanted it to be. It wasn't the same pen that I lost so many weeks ago. When I trusted this pen, I was really trusting my old pen; when it failed, it felt like my old pen was letting me down, and that was a thought that I could not accept.

So, blue ballpoint Bic pen, please forgive me for my rash actions. In return, I will forgive you for depriving me of half a lecture's worth of notes.

--

king saul fell on his sword when it all went wrong

Ms. German's Parting Words To Her Seminar Class

Seminar on Scientific Thought was one of the best and most interesting classes I've ever taken, and it's given me a lot to think about, some of which will undoubtedly trickle down onto this website. For now, I want to share what she said to us on the last day of class; though all of you who were there remember it, it's something that everyone should hear.

FOR SEMINAR 2007

What is it about humans that we do science, and make music, and create art, and practice religion, that we study fossils and galaxies, build telescopes and particle accelerators, that we ask about the origin of ourselves, of life, and even of the universe? We keep asking questions, learning more, asking more questions.

So where do we go from here? What new technologies will expand our observations? What is dark matter? Dark energy? Can quantum mechanics and general relativity be unified? How is the climate changing? What are the links between climate and plate tectonics? What will be the results of the loss of biodiversity? What will be learned from the Human Genome Project? From stem cell research? And where will the answers get us?

Do all the pieces fit together? And where do we fit? The knowledge we have gained - continue to gain - gives understanding - and power - and we must be very careful. The work has consequences, and the workers have obligations. We must be thoughtful, respectful, and ethical; we must have compassion and humility. For all that scientific knowledge gives us, as Eiseley says, it "is not the road back to the waiting Garden ... that road lies through the human heart."

A scientist says "while science attempts to describe nature and to distinguish between dream and reality, it should not be forgotten that human being probably call as much for dream as for reality. It is hope that gives life a meaning. And hope is based on the prospect of being able one day to turn the actual world into a possible one that looks better."

A poet says: "Man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history.../Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is/ organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man/ Apart from that..."

If you are going on to do science, put your work in a larger perspective. Be responsible. If you are going on to other work, remember you live in a world where science is done; understand what that means - what science can do, and what it can't. Be responsible.

Keep learning. And dream. Ask hard questions and don't accept easy answers. And remember "there are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light."

first quote: (Eiseley): The Firmament of Time
second (scientist) Francois Jacob: The Possible and the Actual
third: (poet) Robinson Jeffers: "The Answer"
last: Barry Lopez: Arctic Dreams

--
so we'll scratch it all down into the clay