Lost In Me

Neubert is living up to his reputation for handing out long problem sets. Our first quantum set has 9 problems, so roughly twice the length of a normal problem set. I consider this very fortunate, because it will give me a chance to finally learn quantum mechanics. In the physics department, undergrads normally take three semesters of QM, but since I took the first two semester back in 2003, a year that is now a large hole in my memory, I actually know pitifully little about the wave properties of matter. I am hoping that this will be my semester of quantum redemption.

lostinme: Yeah I was doing QM until about an hour ago, and my head won't spin down.
mathcamper: Lol
lostinme: Er, no pun intended.

It's just a ripoff of this.

Has everybody heard about the British guy holding Bernd the rabbit ransom? As a rabbit lover myself, I find this quite tragic.

And please Drew, no comments about how funny white people are.

I'm in a bad mood and I'm not sure why.

Today was the first day of classes. My Mondays go from 9 in the morning to 10 in the evening. Which is good, because I think it's a good idea to start the week off with a bang, it makes the rest of the week easier, also. I am taking the second half of the EMT training course which I started in the fall of 2003, and was unable to complete due to my leave of absence the next semester. I'd forgotten how morbid the class really is... the three hour long lecture is mostly a discussion of the various ways in which human body systems fail, and lead to death. I'm not sure what state of mind I was in back in 2003, to have found this class so amusing, but looking back in my old blog entries I seem to have enjoyed it back then. I suppose I thought more about death back then than I do now.

All in all, it looks like a promising semester. Neubert is teaching my quantum mechanics class, he is very good, with a delightful German accent. German professors will tell you that quantum mechanics must be taught in a German accent, because quantum mechanics was invented by Germans. My analytical mechanics professor is one of those types that talks a hundred miles a minute, spitting words gratuitously out of their mouths before they have fully had a chance to form. The girl that sat next to me remarked that he must be very sharp, to be able to talk so fast. My mathematical physics class looks as amusing as last semester. I always fit in a math-type class into my schedule, for entertainment purposes.

So, it looks like I'll be busy as hell for the next four months, but I'll try to update whenever I can.

So president Bush's inauguration speech confused me, until I realized he is speaking in a kind of code. For the freshly sworn American president, certain words in the English language have taken on alternate meanings:

freedom = American hegemony
liberty = American domination

For example:

"Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of [American domination], though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of [American hegemony] ever seen, is an odd time for doubt."

"The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of [American hegemony] in all the world."

"We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion. The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of [American domination] in other lands."

"All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for [American domination], we will stand with you.

"We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of [American hegemony]."

Quotes from this AP article.

Drew here. I need to ask--

What kind of hat?

I saw Panna for the first time this year. She gave me a ride to Pyramid Mall, where I needed to buy a hat to keep my head warm. Some may argue that Panna ought to be next in the series that I am writing for Motte. In fact, however, that episode was merely a case of temporary insanity brought on by the mind altering effects of anti-depressant medication.

I used to read a lot from the Zmag website. It is a good source of essays by notable progressive writers such as Chomsky and Zinn. I like it because some of the essays published on the website tend to be more professional in nature, since they are written by academics who (unlike most columnists) carefully cite their sources to back up their claims. On the Zmag website, you will usually find an assortment of articles that decry the universal social destructiveness which imperialism and capitalism tends to perpetuate. In particular, these days discourse on the website is dominated by articles criticizing American foreign policy in the middle east, and the adverse effects that the war in Iraq has on both American and Iraqi society.

However, I no longer feel a strong need to keep returning to the Zmag website and its fundamentally humanist perspective on international relations. This is because I've come to feel that no amount of moralizing is going to change the rules that govern international relations. In the case of the middle east, no essay, no matter how well-written, will change the geopolitical reality that this region holds most of the world's fossil fuel reserves, in an industrialized planet dependent on fossil fuels for most of its energy. Given the current state of technology, fossil fuel is the opium of industrialized nations, and under such circumstances it is unavoidable that the dominant industrialized nation would seek to gain control of the middle east.

This is perhaps one of the many reasons why I spent most of today applying to summer internships in fusion physics. As strange as that sounds, I believe in the potential that fusion technology holds to provide a clean and abundant source of energy to satisfy the needs of the industrialized world of the future. More importantly, because the fuel for fusion energy can be extracted from water, which is found everywhere humans live, in a fusion-powered planet no one region will be a geopolitical prize in the sense that it is where all other nations find their energy supplies. Thus, unlike the contributors to Zmag, I propose to end the war in the middle east not by teaching politicians to be humanists, but by making fossil fuels irrelevant.

In short, geopolitics is the name of the game when in comes to international relations. I have lost faith in the ability of morality to change the rules by which that game is played, but perhaps science and technology can.

Motte mocked me much about my previous post, and demanded that I post an entire series of embarrassing stories about my ineptitude with women. So I thought I'd write about how I became very good at multivariate calculus.

My high school in suburbia Ohio didn't have much of a math program: a geometry class, an assortment of algebra classes, and the most introductory class in calculus. When I completed the offered classes at the end of my junior year, I was given the option of taking math classes at the local state university, paid for by my high school. This was a good deal, since I could spend the entire afternoon taking just one college math class, instead of staying for three high school classes.

However, instead of enjoying my afternoon after my math class at Ohio State was over, I would scurry over to the study room in my neighborhood public library. Every day, I sat in the same spot studying multivariable calculus, waiting for Clare, who worked in the library, to walk by. Clare had been one of the few friends I'd been able to eke out in the insular, all-white high school I'd transferred into sophomore year, and by senior year I was attracted enough that it was worth sitting in that library, going over my class notes and homework, for a chance to say hi to her as she got off of work, and perhaps have a short conversation. As a result, I didn't get to talk to Clare very much, but I did get a lot of studying done.

In retrospect, I can see that I was too hopelessly shy to have ever expressed my feelings, and even if I could, it's not clear what I would have been able to do with those feelings. Isolated beyond belief in my racially homogeneous suburbian high school, I was woefully inadequate in building any sort of human relationship with my schoolmates, and Clare was no exception, despite all the one-sided attraction. I do still hear from Clare once every few months, and sometimes we lurk each other's blogs. So I suppose I should thank her, for she is the reason I am so good at multivariable calculus.

During my sophomore year, I participated in the training program for an over-the-phone emotional counseling service run by students at my college. I don't think I ever really intended to volunteer for the counseling service proper, but I figured that the training would make me a more effective counselor at math camp. Every Monday night I would show up to an intense training session, where I would listen to the various emotional issues of my fellow trainees for several hours at time. Most of the issues were not very interesting: type A personalities obsessing about their grades, and sorority girls coping with the occasional bouts of guilt that cheating on their boyfriends entailed.

Patty was one the trainers during my last semester of training, a slim Taiwanese-American senior headed for medical school. Near the end of the semester, she picked up on my crush for her, and I guess she found it annoying, since she decided to do something about it. One Monday night, Patty took a group of about 5 trainees aside and gave us examples of "troublesome" issue givers. For each trainee, she pretended to be an uncooperative caller, such as one who simply asked for advice, or one who had called just to chit-chat. When my turn came up, Patty looked me in the eye and started to moan, and in her sexiest voice started to flirt with me. Afterwards, she explained that she was a "perverted caller with a fetish for talking to strangers while masturbating"... but meanwhile my immediate reaction was, of course, to turn beet-red and start stammering like an idiot. The situation was made all the more embarrassing for me because it happened in front of 4 other trainees, all of whom happened to be girls.

I suppose that if not for my crush for Patty, I would have handled the simulated caller calmly and professionally, as counselors were expected to do. But by nailing my ass to the wall and embarrassing me in public I think Patty shot me down in the most humorous and clever way I'd ever seen. Even at the time, I laughed at my own predicament, and it is even more amusing in retrospect. I have to hand it to her that it was both well executed and effective.

I remained on friendly terms with my trainer afterwards, and when she graduated Patty asked me to keep in touch through email. Of course I never did.

About a week ago, I made some complaints about the stinginess of rich nations offering aid to the victims of the Southeast Asian earthquakes. I held up the examples of South Korea and the United States as examples of such stinginess, only to be corrected a few days later when both countries increased their promised aid by factors of ten or more. However, this article makes me wonder if I was too naive in assuming that the rich governments would live up to their promise. (The article gives several examples in which promised aid to disaster stricken nations never materialized in full.)

For the cynical, a broken promise may already be a bygone conclusion, as this article on BBspot shows. In the meantime, I hope to follow this story after the brouhaha concerning the earthquake dies down in the mass media. Maybe if enough people stay interested for long enough, governments will be obliged to make good on their promises.

In order to put on some semblance of a fresh new start, I spent 8 hours yesterday cleaning out my apartment. You know that the place hasn't been cleaned in a while when you have to clean the dust off of the bottles of cleaning agent before you can use them to clean out your apartment. Of course this back-breaking binge cleaning comes half a week late... you see originally I hadn't given much thought to the beginning of a new year. But reading the hopes for the new year of various fellow bloggers has given me the vague feeling of optimism. And so, to fellow bloggers and the few readers who stop by here, I say happy new year.

A friend of mine sent me a collection of files a while ago. These files contained the scanned images of every centerfold from Playboy magazine dating from the present back to 1954. I double clicked on the October, 2003 file. The image consisted of a woman revealing herself in front of the unmistakable background of a bar. My eyes immediately darted to the bar, and I squinted my eyes trying to discern what beers this bar had on tap. After gazing longingly at the bar for a while, I noticed the unclothed blonde in the foreground. Noticing that she was decidedly unattractive, I dismissed the image with a click.

So much for porn.

I'm fairly convinced that my neighbors are drug dealers. Maybe it's just me, but I don't know of any other reason why two black guys living in the crummiest part of town would get nightly visitors of the white middle-class variety, or why most of these visitors are completely new faces, almost every single time. I don't have much objection to my neighbors running their business out of their apartment, though it would be embarrassing if I saw one of my professors coming up the stairs to stock up. I just wish they didn't play very loud techno late at night.