Lab reports...

I got that lab report back a few minutes ago. And my score is... 93/100. I forgot to ask what the average grade was, but on the last assignment it was 78 and the curve is supposed to center around a C+ - so if my TA grades consistently then it looks like my numeric scores will correspond to letter grades in the typical 90/80/70 scheme. This week there is possible extra credit. I don't expect to get better than 100 because there are always little things to pick at in writing, but I'm hoping to break 95.

Also, I got 91% on my chemistry midterm. This is even better than it looks because in the honors class an A goes down to 88.

I am reconsidering taking two writing classes at once, because when I have writing assignments they take up a TON of my time. This week I actually had to stay home and do work when I would've otherwise messed around on campus because I had both a lab report and a women's studies paper due. If I take 18 credits with 8 of them devoted exclusively to writing, plus the lab reports, I might get really sick of writing papers.

Continuing sagas

My TA emailed me back and says his office hours are, in fact, at 3-4 on Wednesdays. He must have changed them since writing the syllabus. That definitely multiplies the facepalm factor of the previous post.

On the bright side: Señor Evergreen is coming to town, at the same time I am. Yay!

Walking is tricky today

My shoes have a little bit of a problem: they scrape my heels as I walk. I've had that problem with shoes before and as expected, it's gotten better as I walk in them more, but nevertheless I have a blister on my left heel that is healing only slowly because I keep walking in my shoes. In compensation, I've been shifting my weight toward the toe so it scrapes less. This has resulted in a sore spot of some variety around the seams of my left toes. So, my left foot isn't in great shape.

Now yesterday, in ballroom dance, we learned swing. Because I learned lead parts for waltz and foxtrot, I decided to switch to follow. Leads start with their left foot; follows start with their right. In swing, you do a whole lot of back-stepping with your starting foot - a quick step backward followed by an equally quick rock forward onto the opposite foot. I was having a lot of fun and didn't think much of it at the time, but this morning my right calf was seized up ridiculously.

Blistered heel and sore toe on my left, painful calf on my right. I can't compensate for either one without setting off the problems of the other! To top it all off, I walked up two flights of stairs at three o'clock to see my lab TA in office hours, only to realize that his office hours are at 3-4 tomorrow and were at 1-2 today. I don't know why I incessantly mix up my Wednesday and Thursday - my schedule is so different - but I do it perpetually. So I am unhappy about a number of things at the moment.

Housing

So, my room is good through fall term. That still leaves a question of where I'm going to live for winter and spring terms. I'm considering applying for on-campus housing for winter or spring term, but I'm not sure which. I'd like to live in the dorms, but I'd also like the to live by myself, which I may not get another opportunity to do for several more years.

I'm leaning toward applying for winter term, for these reasons:

1. Probably the greatest number of people who are going to drop out mid-year, will do so after fall term.
2. What's the point of doing the thing that will help me meet people at the end of the year when I'm about to (hopefully) transfer anyway?
3. If I have to look for an apartment to rent starting in January, I'll be looking for an apartment over Winter Break when I'm in Portland.

My only worry is that if I live in the dorms winter term, I will get lazy and not look hard enough for an off-campus apartment for spring.

Thoughts?

Chemistry - lab and lecture

Chemistry lab lecture today was a friggin' joke. The prof went over types of chemical reactions, and writing chemical equations. Are you kidding? This is stuff I did in 9th grade, in high school INTRO to chemistry. This has been the worst hour so far, but truth be told the lab lecture is boring as hell in general. Thank goodness for the demo guy, who sometimes makes bubbles or cool colors happen. I gotta find out more about the advanced lab, because if it's different then I am so outta here next term. I heard that the regular gen-chem class sucks, and I totally believe it. I'm so glad I got into honors.

Now I just checked my email and had an email from my regular lecture prof, saying the lecture slides for "tomorrow" were up. The timestamp:

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:17:58 -0700 (PDT)

The percentage of people who stay up past midnight on a Sunday is probably higher than I think it is. But I doubt that people who stay up past midnight on a Sunday are the kind of people who would be checking their school email religiously.

Math, and song lyrics

Got my math midterm back with a 98%. Had a few silly errors and one not-so-silly one, but I got enough points on the bonus question to recoup most of my losses. I don't have my chemistry midterm back yet but the prof says he should have them done by tomorrow. We don't have chemistry tomorrow, so I wonder if he has office hours and that's why he didn't just say he'll give them back Wednesday.

Also, here are the lyrics to that song I posted before:

http://www.mediafire.com/?lnwm4n4g0lz

Trick or Vote

I went to volunteer with the Bus Project for Trick-or-Vote, thinking it was a good cause and would be fun. It's one thing when you go somewhere expecting fun and it falls short of your expectations; it's another when it's actively unpleasant.

I didn't come for a dark, noisy costume party. I didn't come for a pep rally, or a role-playing skit reminiscent of badly planned 7x8 plugs in the middle of the all school gathering. I didn't figure on walking up and down what must be the steepest hill in Eugene for two hours, or trying to keep sight of someone without a cell phone while talking to voters, and I definitely didn't want to be yelled at by a 96-year-old guy who doesn't want anyone, ever, to leave flyers on his doorstep, which actually I didn't even do.

I met a cool guy who goes to U of O and ate some candy, but between 2 and 7 p.m. those were the only nice things that happened to me. I definitely would have been better off sitting in the EMU writing my next women's studies paper.

I wrote a song

Started writing a song last weekend, which I finished during the week and just recorded. Might be mastered a little quietly, sorry, but here it is:

http://www.mediafire.com/?0ocqu4dmqzy

Midterms, newspapers

Well, I just finished with my two midterms. Chemistry went pretty well. There was a combustion problem that was a pain in the ass and took about twenty minutes, and in the end I got answer with a bigger molar mass than what the problem said. I didn't have enough time to go back and find my error, but I'm pretty sure it was just something in the calculations for the percent of sulfur. I have a whole page of the right process, so I should get most of the credit for that problem. The only other issue was that I didn't finish the last problem, but I wrote down enough that I should get some credit for that too. I rocked the math exam; I got answers that made sense to everything except the bonus problem. I got stuck on that because I ended up with a negative discriminant in the quadratic formula, but it was the bonus problem. If I'm lucky, I might still get over 100%.

In other news...

Street preachers! They have them at PSU, and we have them at UO. Now, I'm all for free speech. The first amendment is an amazing thing and I would never want to compromise it. That said, it grates on my nerves when I have to listen to random dudes yelling about Jesus to people who are ignoring them every single expletive-deleted day.

I also was reading an article in yesterday's newspaper covering a "feminist roundtable on the election" that I wanted to go to but couldn't because I had class. It quoted someone who said as a black woman, she didn't feel like she'd been spoken to and shouldn't have to choose between two parts of her identity. I think that person is thinking about this election in a dumb way. I'm a white woman; by her logic, Sarah Palin should speak to me. Well... she doesn't. I really dislike her, in fact, and I'm highly enthusiastic about Barack Obama, my theoretical opposite. I admit that race matters more to minorities than the white majority here in the U.S., so I'll throw out that factor, but we are still left with gender. Nobody should have supported Hillary Clinton and then switched to Sarah Palin because they are both women; anyone who did, was doing wrong to their values in supporting one or the other. Identity politics have always existed, but to me it is ridiculous to give them enough weight to actually influence your decision in an election like this.

And one more article. Somebody left a New York Times at this computer with a small article titled "How McCain Hopes to Defy the Polls and Win." I started reading it but stopped in disbelief when I read this quote: "The McCain campaign is roughly in the position where Vice President Gore was running against President Bush one week before the election of 2000. We have ground to make up, but we believe we can make it up."

But wait... we got President Bush. Is this guy admitting that Gore rightfully won the election? Oh, there are ways to weasel out of that conclusion - "It was so close that a repeat could be anyone's game," "McCain has a week plus a few days," - but I still think it's pretty damning.

Wikilinks

So I was checking my email and I clicked on a conversation where I was talking about the EMU - the Erb Memorial Union here at UO. Because I have Gmail, little ads appear on the sidebar of my email based on words on the page. One of them brilliantly suggested that I try emu oil.

Well, I had to know what emu oil was. The actual web page was just flashy marketing so I went to Wikipedia to find out more. I started clicking links and read about the family of flightless birds to which emus belong, which then led me to the page about kiwis, and that naturally had a disambiguation link at the top to kiwifruit.

It turns out that while kiwi birds are native to New Zealand, kiwifruit are not! They are originally from China and used to be called Chinese Gooseberries.

Isn't clicking link to link fun?

First grade indications

Last week I got my first paper back from Women's Studies. I got a B. I wanted better, of course, but it was within my expected range for the first assignment back, and better than the average grade. I have some comments, and the instructor posted a document online describing the characteristics of A/B/C/DF essays. So, I have something to work with for the next one.

I turned in my first paper for chem lab last week, but it wasn't a formal lab report like we'll usually be doing so I won't be able to take much from the score. I'm not sure when I'll get it back anyway - probably today. But today the first lab report is due, and I submitted it yesterday. I feel like I did a good job editing it because I shortened a lot of things - condensing phrases into single words, deleting unnecessary descriptions, and making sentences less complex. I am probably most worried about my grade in chem lab because the class is curved, and I simply have no idea how good my competition is.

Incidentally, there's this program called SafeAssign intended to prevent plagiarism, where students submit their work electronically and it compares the papers to each other and to some repository of other publications. You can look at your "matching percentage" shortly after submitting your paper, and I was amused to see that my lab report matches 11% with the rest of the class. It also tells you specifically what parts match, and I found it even funnier that one of the matching parts was a sentence stating the mean and standard deviation of my data.

My first midterm exams are on Friday, in math and chemistry. I have some reason to be worried about math, simply because I keep making silly calculational errors - usually dropping minus signs. But, since it is a 50 minute exam as opposed to the 20 minute quizzes we've had, I think I will do better, and I definitely have the concepts. In chemistry, I pretty much feel like I'm on top of everything.

Because of these exams, I think, there has been hardly any homework this week. Theoretically I should use that extra time to study for said exams, but the way I see it, doing that in the middle of the week is a waste of time. I've already learned the material in class (my homework proves it), so all studying will do is make things fresh in my mind - and that "refresher" quality only works within about the same day, or better yet an hour or two.

I have a date to practice waltz and foxtrot with someone from my dance class. It is kind of funny because I chose to learn lead parts, while most of the class split lead/follow along gender lines. So, I am shorter than almost all the other leads and many of the follows I've danced with. When the instructor gives us an opportunity to switch, I'd like to learn some follow parts, but I don't want to switch unless I know a few people will switch to lead because there's already fewer of us. I can think of a few following girls who should be leads.

Major studies and major visits

Tomorrow, I am going to declare my major. I don't consider myself any more certain than I was before about studying chemistry, but I want an adviser in the department because the German professor that they assigned me as an undeclared doesn't know much about the science programs. I want to know, for example, whether I ought to take lab 228 or 238 next term. And I'd rather get my new adviser before asking my other questions too, such as whether I should take two writing classes at the same time. I'm thinking about taking WR 122 and 123 concurrently next term, leaving two slots open third term for whatever I want to check out.

I'm going back home for Halloween. I will go trick-or-treating with my family, I need to take my best friend to Pix, and if Señor Evergreen does make it back the same weekend I must go chill with him a bit. There may be other people to see and things to do, but those are the most important.

Going back home

I've been making plans with my mom for a trip back to Portland - tentatively scheduled (until my friend calls me back) for Halloween - and today my dad called and suggested he come down the freeway tomorrow to visit me and then my uncle.

I'm satisfied with my new haircut. It's practical and simple. I may get bored of it and go back to considering that pixie cut, but I like it for now.

My hair

My hair is getting to that point where it annoys me. It gets in my face; it's long enough to go behind my ears but doesn't all fit because it's so thick; it hangs down and brushes my neck incessantly. I'm considering a kind of pixie cut, short with some bangs and long pieces in front of the ears - but I'm probably not competent to do that myself. So I'll hold off on a really short cut until I think some more, but tonight I'm going to crop it to somewhere between my ears and my chin, because it is just driving me nuts.

Comments

K, so I was wondering why nobody ever comments on this blog and so I tried clicking on the comment link myself to see what was up. I guess the default for new blogs is not to allow anonymous comments, the trouble being if you don't have certain internet accounts that not everyone has you are considered anon. Anyway, I went into the settings and fixed that so if anyone wants to comment y'all should be able to do that, whether you have Gmail or OpenID or not.

Can Palin spell potato?

The general argument against Sarah Palin goes something like this: she doesn't have enough experience, her speech is inarticulate and insubstantial, and the office she's running for is "a heartbeat away from the presidency."

This is what people said about Dan Quayle, too, but there he sits in history, the 44th VP of this country. It makes me uneasy.

Dancing physicists, info desk guys, Columbus Day and more

Just as I logged in to update, a fire alarm went off in the EMU (student union). So I walked my butt over to Klamath hall and walked in circles until I found stairs, then in circles again until I found the computer lab - Klamath is one of those buildings that doesn't have enough windows or colored paint to keep your sense of direction. "Now theoretically," I said to myself, "I should be able to get to my lecture in Columbia without going outside." I've yet to see if I can figure out how to do that.

Minus signs are out to get me. They are sly little creatures and they like to slink out of sight mid-calculation. As one math prof said, "the greatest obstacle to progress in mathematics is the human inability to distinguish reliably between a plus and a minus sign." At least I am working with the abstractions of calculus in my notebook, and not applying the Pythagorean theorem on the radio.

During the hour between chemistry and math I once again studied with the physics major/crazy dancer for whom I will invent a creative name soon. We made up chemical compounds and evaluated their solubility, and he helped me with some math. I realized this morning that since I started needing help with math sometimes, I've never known anyone besides my teacher who could supply it. Now I'm no longer the highest-placed math student in my school, and it makes me so happy.

Yesterday I played the piano in the EMU and to do so I had to check out a key from an information office. I got to chatting with the guy at the desk, who is also from Portland, about TriMet and LTD. We traded email and he invited me to watch the debate on Wednesday at his apartment with some people, so that's what I'll be doing. Wednesdays are turning out to be the best days for me, even though I thought I would like Thursdays the best.

I'm trying to spend more time on campus lately, and do things here besides take class and study - even do some of my sitting-around-doing-nothing on campus. I've shifted my food budget partially away from home groceries and toward campus food to account for this, but I am still stubbornly resisting spending more than $5 for a meal. Anyway, I consider this idea to be "working" in terms of assimilating me into the community, because I met the info desk guy pretty much due to deciding to spend all Sunday at school.

Somebody wished me happy Columbus Day this morning and I just thought "oh... I didn't know it was." But later I passed by a table set up by a Native American cultural group and this cute little boy offered me a red ribbon to wear for anti-Columbus Day. I put it in my hair and thought about just how inappropriate it is to celebrate Columbus. I wished I had thought of that on my own in the morning.

Neptune

It's weird sometimes, the things we name and the way name them. Like planets. Take Neptune for example. What is Neptune? It's an unimaginably enormous ball of gas a couple billion miles away. And we named it after a Roman god. That's pretty weird if you think about it.

Those darn physicists

"I need my stick!" my chemistry prof exclaims. He is talking about the three-foot wooden dowel he uses to point at the projection screen. "Those darn physicists have taken my stick!"

The physics major in the front row chuckles.

"You should take something of theirs!" a feisty voice calls out from the back.

The prof grins. "I should," he agrees, searching the podium for something else to point with. I smile. This kind of rivalry is fun. I wonder if this spirit of fun is what sustains other rivalries, like the Ducks and the Beavers, to use an example now ubiquitous in my world. I'd like to think I've discovered an emotional commonality with a huge portion of the world, but I'm not sure if it's the same thing.

Contrast

Everything is defined by its opposite. You need a bad day sometimes to keep appreciating the good ones. You need to freeze your butt off for a day to reset your thermostat for winter.

Wednesday beat me up psychologically. In math we had a quiz, and I got completely stuck on a problem worth a quarter of the points. So I went home knowing I got a 75 at best, and when I went to craft center to start some pottery, I ended up more or less dissolving several lumps of clay with only one successful throw. Thursday morning, I had a sore throat and a cough. But it all made it that much better when I turned out two nice clay bowls in a row Thursday evening.

Yesterday, it was freezing cold. I had a scarf and a sweatshirt but I was still cold outside, always. So I put on a coat this morning and it was still freezing as I walked to the bus but at least I had wind protection. Now, I've left my coat in the chemistry lecture hall and can't go get it yet because there's another class in session. But compared to yesterday, the temperature really isn't too bad. After all, I evidently walked from chemistry to math without noticing I'd left my coat.

As far as the math quiz, well, I did get a 75 and I wasn't happy about that. But the good part is, I can correct it to get half my points back for 87.5, which is less than I should have gotten but not too impacting. It turns out my error was calculational and not procedural - and also not really really stupid, which I thought it might have been (on the order of substituting 2 for -2) - so I can prevent the same error in the future by practicing my polynomial division. No wonder I did it wrong, really - we had calculators on tests in high school and so I only ever practiced it for two weeks three years ago.

Confirmation of my writing abilities

My paper on feminism is due tomorrow. On Sunday night I wrote the first draft, and yesterday I sent said draft to my professor asking her to make sure the focus of the content is good, and provided that, my plan was to self-edit and then take it to the writing labs for a peer edit. This is what my prof told me:

"Your paper is definitely what I had in mind. I read it quickly but I don't think you need to take it over to ALS (though it might be nice to get their feedback). It seemed well written to me as it is."

I am very happy about this since I had done no editing since finishing it at 12:30 Sunday night. I don't know why, but for some reason I seem to write my most inspired first drafts at about 10pm. I am hesitant to actively try to exploit this however because in most cases I don't feel like doing ANY homework after about nine.

Modem

As I frustratedly watch my internet connection stall, I remind myself: remember 28.8K. Someday, being able to remember 28.8 kbps modem will be a sign of being old.

Rain, rain, don't go away... but maybe lighten up a little

The weather this fall is different from what I've come to expect. I'm not sure if this is because Eugene differs from Portland or if general Willamette Valley weather is just being weird this year.

For one thing, it's been raining harder and for longer than I've seen in a long time. Everyone knows we get a ton of rain here, but usually it's in the form of sporadic sprinkles - normally it doesn't pour, nor does it hammer steadily for hours on end. I think it's been raining for at least twelve or fifteen hours. I can't be completely sure, since I was asleep for part of it, but I went to bed to rain, woke briefly at five in the morning to rain, and it's been raining since I got up.

For another thing, we usually have a nasty section in fall where it's cold, windy, and actually pretty dry. I'm used to waiting until late November to early December for the first proper rain and for the gusty wind to die down. I haven't felt any strong winds yet, and as I said before, the rain is plentiful already.

I love chemistry

Just now I said something to myself that most people would never dream of saying: "Whatever, I can do this on the weekend. Right now I'm just going to have fun doing some homework."

Today between chemistry and math I hung out with that guy who dances from my chemistry lecture. He's a physics major and he showed me the physics reading-room. We talked about all sorts of things - science, picking a college, why people identify with sports teams - sometimes drawing pictures and diagrams on the whiteboard. It was a great conversation, the kind where you're really listening if you're not speaking, with moments of animated agreement.

The VP debate

I watched the VP debate last night, and I'm going to give a brief evaluation before I read what journalists and factcheckers think of it. First off, let me say Biden blew Palin out of the water, and I don't think that's just because I already support the Democratic ticket.

I'm not sure I had heard Palin speak before - and certainly not at length. Like George W., she is an earsore when she talks! She says "nucular," a choice that has to be deliberate after how much GWB has been made fun of. More offensively, at the beginning of almost every rebuttal she spoke in SUCH a condescending tone, warbling from low to high, as though patiently discussing with a child his/her naughty behavior. She didn't even integrate it well - a patronizing comment would be followed by an argument made in a level voice with little inflection.

Both candidates annoyed me by saying the same phrases over and over, and by focusing on their opponent's shortcomings in what I saw as an inappropriate proportion to their own merit. But when it came to replacing content with buzzwords, Sarah Palin won out. Based on GWB's tactics in presenting himself as a guy you'd want to have a beer with, I would have expected her to speak simply, but in fact most of her arguments were obscured by jargon while Biden was clear and straightforward. She also criticized Biden for "looking backward" when he talked about the failures of the Bush administration and whose predictions have been correct - but how is this any different than the comparing of records that all candidates have been doing for months?

When asked a question about what views they have changed due to changed circumstances, Joe Biden gave an interesting answer about federal judges. Palin more or less said "Sometimes I don't have enough support to do what I want, but I never actually change my position." I think she was trying to paint herself as solid and reliable - playing the "flip-flopper" card we all know from Kerry 2004 - but I thought she came off as arrogant and naive. When talking about Iraq, she said several times that she and McCain have a plan and someone in the room where I watching yelled out "tell us what the plan IS." She never got around to it, and Biden picked up on that saying "well, I didn't hear a plan" and following up with a description of his and Obama's. There was also a beautiful moment where - and I don't even remember what the statement was - Palin took something about Obama's record out of context and Biden put it thoroughly back in, adding that McCain voted the same way on the bill in question. If there was any single "knockout punch", I think that would be it. the

Also, there were just so many times when Palin didn't actually answer the question posed and/or brought up Alaska as an energy-producing state out of context. The only time I felt like Biden didn't answer the question was the one about the candidates' Achilles heels as VP - and of course neither one answered that question properly because nobody is going to admit to a weakness. Palin's response was still more over-the-top though, vociferously defending her bank of experience as adequate.

Something I found quite interesting is how both candidates flaunted their middle-class cred here. Although Sarah Palin may not be rich, I think Joe Biden's credentials are somewhat more relevant. Though Sarah Palin may claim middle-class values, her experience of the middle class is not average or widespread. She comes from a tiny town in a state that has little in common with the rest of the union. Yet she must make a point of it, because John McCain, as I was told the other day, has thirteen cars and almost as many houses.

And then there was the moment where Biden's voice caught for a second as he touched on a sensitive personal subject. (I will say Sarah Palin took a few below-the-belt jabs at personal topics, though I forget the specifics now.) I want to see how this is interpreted by the media, because when Hillary Clinton did that several months ago she was criticized for taking advantage of her status as a woman. That argument can't be made for Biden, but simple fact that it has been seen before as a female thing might spell danger; how many macho-men will be turned off by it?

All-day stream of consciousness

Today I was very contemplative. There wasn't anything particularly thought-provoking about the day except the dream I had in the morning, but I thought about everything. I thought about that dream - a dream where I went back to Portland and saw, in order but without a specific chronology, first my family, then my ex-boyfriend from high school, and last two of my friends that were a couple. Not my crazy night-owl friend from the big school. I thought about how I don't really mind acknowledging my oppression or my privilege, but it is awkward when I feel like I'm supposed to identify with some aspect of oppression yet actually don't. Everything I observed seemed to have significance - if not a thought-provoking quality then an aesthetic beauty. Even something as simple as steering my bike around a corner with my hands wrapped firmly around the handlebars and not poised to brake. Also the clouds, popcornlike, drifting slowly across the sky. I spent some time sitting at beautiful locations on campus, first doing homework and then just looking around. Listening to music. I thought about how my favorite state of mind is when I stop measuring my experience in words and numbers, when either thought or sensation overtake them. When two foci of my attention suddenly merge, and I don't have to tie them together, like in dance, when the steps and the music click together and it's not hard anymore. It's like those 3D books where two pictures sit next to each other and you cross your eyes, and once you have it right you don't have to struggle anymore to focus. I thought I might try to meet people over dinner, and I rode my bike to school for my afternoon class so I wouldn't have to think about the bus schedule at night, but I left campus before dark and ate dinner at home anyway. I just wasn't in the mood for people.

Fascinating chemical trivia

I learned a few interesting things in chemistry this morning:

Imagine a computer set to count one million integers each second, starting at one. To get to Avogadro's number (6.022 x 10^23) would take 19 billion years, longer than the estimated age of the universe.

Phosphorus was discovered by crystallizing the fumes from the residue of boiled urine. Furthermore, white phosphorus (the form discovered) ignites spontaneously in air, meaning the guy who discovered it must have spent a lot of time boiling pee - long enough to figure out to protect it from air - before he got to the point of discovery.