School is just awesome sometimes

We've been covering buffers in chemistry. Ironically, the quiz was this morning and I stayed up too late last night... explaining buffers to Dancing Physicist.

After the quiz, instead of moving onto the next chapter, Dr. Page spent the remainder of the lecture talking about acid-base characteristics of neurotransmitters and drugs that imitate them. For example: apparently eating increases the acidity of the bloodstream, and nicotine is more water soluble in its protonated form, so after meals it gets excreted more quickly and that's why smokers typically like to smoke after meals.

Then in math, Jonathan fired up a computer and showed us graph after computer generated graph of successively better polynomial approximations of functions that we don't like as much as polynomials. Basically what it looked like was a blue line that looks like some curve on the graph. Then a purple line would at first be a constant, a flat line. Then he clicks and it turns into a sloped line. Then a parabola, and then on and on and on up to maybe twenty terms until it's really hugging the blue line (at least on a certain interval).

And then there's Imamura's time lecture. Yes, Dancing Physicist warned me, but this dude is crazy. Every week, I go into class and it's like I just picked the red pill. Tachyons, worldlines, the twin paradox, time dilation and relativistic speed formulas all over the place. Imamura drives you down the rabbit hole and once you're down there you start to think he must have broken the steering wheel a while ago. He gets going and then it's just on and on and over here and look at this and there's no time to inspect the foundations of anything because see HERE is what it IMPLIES and THAT might suggest...

It's intimidatingly awesome.

Basic

So I'm in front of my computer doing chemistry homework when I look at a problem I got wrong the other day and haven't fixed yet. It's about mixing a strong acid and a strong base and finding the resultant pH - a really easy problem. I said out loud to myself "how could I possibly get that wrong? It's so basic!" Uh oh, double entendre. I glance at the answer I've entered - which, although wrong, can't be TOO far off - of 4.1, definitely acidic. I start correcting the statement in my head, short-circuit a bit, and then just laugh at myself.

It reminded me of a time in high school when LS said he didn't like Sprite because it was too basic. Chem geek that I am, I didn't even consider the more common meaning. "What do you mean it's basic?" I asked, confused. My reasoning was something like "soda is carbonated, carbon dioxide forms carbonic acid in water, therefore it can't be basic, and also it doesn't taste bitter or feel slippery so what is he talking about?" I don't think I got much of that out though because Senor Evergreen quickly realized my mistake and started explaining and laughing.

Recalculated: the pH is actually 2.5. Still acidic.

Things work out, things get tighter

I talked to Lost Rocket and I'm going to come to Portland on the 9th to 11th. That means I'll be able to go to the Beyond Patriarchy conference after all, which is cool.

I also got an email from my chem professor saying she might have a space in her lab over the summer and asking if I'd be interested in working there. Well, I still have to hear back from REU, but if I don't get into that, then I'm in a little bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, I wanted to be in Portland this summer and I was really looking forward to using GP's place. On the other hand, I would love to do research this summer and it seems almost irresponsible to pass up the opportunity. I'll talk to her about the project and explain that there are a lot of things to consider, but I wonder what would really be most conducive to my happiness... I've certainly made similar mistakes both directions before.

My morning did NOT start off well

I had plans to eat breakfast at Barnhart with Dancing Physicist this morning. We were supposed to meet at the edge of campus at 10:30. I initially woke up a few minutes before 9. Since I'd gone to sleep some time past 1 in the morning, I snuggled into the pillow intending to sleep another hour or so, then shower and get going.

Dancing Physicist later remarked that his dreams during short periods of sleep tend to be more vivid and memorable. I had a dream about being raped. When I woke up the second time, I was sweating and it was 10:19. I had no time to shower, no time to fix the strap on my bag that broke yesterday, certainly no time to lie in bed and reorient to reality. I dressed in a rush, splashed some water on my face and hurried out to our meeting place, still rattled by my dream. I got there five minutes late, and Dancing Physicist wasn't there. I waited five more minutes, my stress level rising, and was forced to evaluate - was he TEN minutes late, or had he already left without me? I decided on a course of action that hedged all bets - walk back to my bike, locked up right in front of his window, and if he wasn't there, take the bike to get to Barnhart quickly. As I walked back I wasn't really anxious about anything in particular, but my adrenaline and general stress response was at an unpleasantly high level.

Dancing Physicist was in his room. There was a scheduled power outage during the night, and his alarm clock doesn't run on batteries. We didn't get to breakfast until about a quarter past eleven. After yesterday's light breakfast, late lunch and no dinner, the heavy breakfast food crashed my system and I was not enthusiastic about walking back. Now I'm just tired and feel like going to bed and starting over. I'll probably take a nap or something before I do my homework.

Thank heavens for Dr. Williams

I love Dr. Williams. I love my advanced lab, and I'm so glad that he noticed I had the aptitude but wasn't in it and encouraged me to make the switch. I am sitting here formatting my report for this term's first project, saying "I hope I get a good score on this, I've worked really hard on it." And it's deja vu because I say that... every time I turn in a lab report. This is the class where I work hard. I work hard AND it's actually challenging AND I care. I worked hard in writing last term, but it was just a lot of work, not interesting work. Lately, I feel like for the most part I just kind of meander through my classes. I go to class, I do the homework, I take the quizzes... I even look forward to philosophy lectures and sometimes my math teacher is funny, but I do it all without any real attachment, just because oh well, it's what I got myself into doing this term. This report, I actually wrote most of last weekend, thinking it was due on Tuesday, and then I had an extra week to mess with it (it's due this Monday). So I took it to Dr. Williams in office hours - a complete draft that I would have turned in - and let him mark all over it. Now I'm making it even better! The "wow nice" part isn't really how hard I work on these, but the excitement I feel about it. Explaining these lab experiments is FUN, and for that matter so is doodling with Open Office graphs to a point. And they end up being something I want other people to read. Regardless the grades I got or even the work I put into them, I could care less if anyone ever reads my WR 123 essays. My lab reports, I give to Dancing Physicist, since I've usually spent a few weeks mentioning bits and pieces of them to him anyway. Dr. Williams makes a little slice of my life awesome.

Florence

Today I went to Florence, a town just over an hour west of Eugene on the coast, with SAACS, the Student Affiliates of the American Chemical Society. We picked up garbage on the beach and then had lunch and ice cream.

The kind of funny, kind of sad thing about cleaning up the beach is the state of the trash there. There's the requisite smashed-up glass and plastic bags that you expect, and unexpected but recognizable bits of litter like pen casings, bottle caps, and little colored beads. But there's also a whole lot of tiny pieces of hard plastic with the exact same thickness and fragment size of the broken shells they collect with. I have no idea what they used to be, but there's an awful lot of them, dull blue and green, and they are mixed in EVERYWHERE.

We also had a few outrageous trash finds. A couple of people apparently found a partially burned bedframe, which had to be hacked and deconstructed to fit in a car trunk. Another group walked back with their garbage bags in a cracked laundry basket that might have had things growing on it. Tucked into some plants I found a huge chunk of pressure-treated wood, which I found to be an interesting coincidence. Freshman year of high school, for intro to chemistry, I wrote an essay about arsenic in the environment, and a big part of it focused on pressure-treated wood. So here I am more than four years later, on a trip with the chemistry club, and it's the first thing to pop into my head: if that wood was treated before 2004, it's probably leaking chromated copper arsenate!

After that we had lunch and ice cream. It was nice to go to the beach; I haven't been there in a long time. It was also really nice to get away from the university, away from this postage stamp of artificially manicured grass and the same semi-anonymous people milling about constantly. Living in dorms is starting to drive me a little crazy - when I go home, I don't leave school! If I'm still in Eugene next year, I think I'll live closer to campus than I did first term, but off campus.

Yep, I'm a science nerd

So yesterday the complex government organized a showing of Pineapple Express. It was really good in the theater so I went to see it again. Before showing the movie they had some slides with "4/20 trivia," where they would ask questions and we'd call out the answers. The ones I knew the answers to are just more proof that I am a geek:

What year was such-and-such law about cannabis passed? Unless it's 1937, I don't know.

What is the penalty for possession of drugs on University property? I've probably read this at some point, but hell if I remember.

What does THC stand for? Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol! What is anandamide? The endogenous chemical that acts on the cannabinoid receptors.

You've got the one guy who's answering all the history questions, the dude in the back who contends marijuana's status in Oregon is "LEGAL!", and there's me: I'm the weird science nerd.

Pick two of three

Lost Rocket's birthday is coming up on the 29th. This means I was planning to situate my visit to Portland this term either next weekend or the one after it. The trouble is this: next weekend, there is a beach cleanup trip with the sort of chemistry club that I want to go on, and the weekend after that, there's the Beyond Patriarchy conference which I also to want to go to. I could come the weekend even after that, but that would be getting later in the term and further away from the birthday.

Lost Rocket - are you having a birthday party at any particular time? Anyone else - recommendations on which Eugene event is more worthwhile?

Speedwalking

Last night I had a good and funny run. Dancing Physicist decided he would speedwalk instead of running. After a stop-and-go start from campus over the river, I jogged moderately and he speedwalked almost up to the I-5 bridge. Then my ears started getting cold and I knew I would have a splitting headache shortly if I didn't immediately stop. He kept going. I walked. I sarcastically called out that he should tell me where he was headed so I could follow after I lost sight of him. "Over the bridge and back to campus," he called back. Not really wanting to walk back by myself, I held my hood over my ears and ran to catch up with him, but running without arms free is really awkward. As he strode ahead again, I scoured my mind and body for any way I might cover my ears adequately. Being out for a run I had none of my usual accoutrements with me, but by pure luck I was still wearing a small ribbon from Day of Silence that was made with a safety pin. I fastened my hood tightly around my head and caught up. Again I jogged moderately and he speedwalked. Then I felt myself needing to push harder. "Are you speeding up?" I asked incredulously, because it already surprised me that he could reach this speed without beginning to jog. "Yes," he said. I continued to match him until I was at just about my maximum sustainable speed. That continued up to about a block before campus. Then he left me behind and still he was only speedwalking. I pushed on maintaining the best speed I could and when he kept going in a straight line past where I expected, I informed him that I was crossing the street here and walking when I got to the other side. Ten meters ahead of me, he made to cross the street as well. We negotiated Franklin, emerged onto campus in the cluster of research laboratories, and walked back to his dorm. When I stood still in the warm inside air, I found I was dripping.

Further negotiations with a finicky alkaloid

Happy Day of Silence, everyone.

So I woke up this morning with a touch of menstrual cramps. This is always a troubling circumstance because OTC painkillers don't work very well on me in the recommended doses. You can raise the dose a little bit safely, but yesterday I'd already used a 600 mg dose of ibuprofen (where the bottle recommends 200-400) and I didn't really want to take large doses 2 days in a row. So I decided to take 400 mg instead and potentiate it with caffeine. I didn't have time to make tea or get coffee, but I had a couple of 200 mg caffeine tablets from a long time ago. I figured only 50-100 mg would be necessary to activate the ibuprofen but I just took a whole tablet (disgusting and bitter, they need to use a better binder) because my experience said 200 mg wasn't a big deal even if it was more than I needed for this application.

Apparently 200 mg is a lot more than anything I've drunk recently, however, because my train of thought went haywire and I found it very hard to concentrate on my chemistry quiz. I knew what I was doing, but I may not have done it very carefully because I had to work fast just to keep my mind from jumping ahead in the problem, or to another problem. The painkilling scheme worked though. It's gone down a bit now - the hand-trembling caffeine test (try to hold your hand still in front of you and see how much it shakes) says it's still working some mojo, but less than earlier, and the mental chaos is much subsided. Next time I'll go to the trouble to bite the tablet in half, or even quarters perhaps on a morning like this, when I woke up half an hour before my alarm and decidedly do NOT need any extra stimulation.

Dune

About ten minutes ago I finished Dune.

What a sudden ending. "Well, I've wrapped up all I absolutely must," I imagine Herbert saying to himself. "I think I'll just quit writing, then."

What a strange play of ethics and philosophies across the different characters. A framework of existence is set up at the beginning of any story - an orientation of the reader to its word - and one sympathizes with the place of the protagonist in that framework. Yet here the protagonist himself begins to doubt if he believes what was set forth, shifts his place as the story evolves, leaving the reader to consider with seriousness the moral confusion rather than adhering to a hero's unchanging "side."

Coming-of-age stories are so often linear, with challenges to be overcome that test the adolescent's abilities, but not his identity, foundations, assumptions. Harry Potter never deviated from moral true, never had to question his very aims. Dune, by contrast, was a story containing real growth and maturation.

I look forward to reading the appendices.

We didn't start the fire

Today, as often happens, I saw a copy of the campus newspaper lying around on a table and started reading it. There was an article about a fire that broke out on Franklin (the street that bounds the north side of campus) yesterday afternoon. Funny thing was, it said the smoke blew across campus and drove everybody away from 13th Avenue - interfered with some classes on the west end of campus too. You'd think I would have noticed this, but I knew nothing of it.

Then I remembered I had lab from 3-6 and was therefore inside much of the afternoon. So I kept reading and, to confirm my hypothesis, noticed the times - started shortly before 3, and was under control by 4. I recalled that I actually went to the building where my lab is about half an hour early, so perhaps I was inside before it even started. Yes, that explains it.

And then another memory percolated through, something that seemed quite insignificant at the time - but when we all walked into lab, the first thing several people said was "it smells like something burnt in here." Just a small thing, and then we all turned our attention to iodine clocks. But that's what it must have been. I did get a small whiff of the fire.

Life is a fractal

A magazine sitting on my desk asks "are we organisms or living ecosystems?"

An interesting perspective. If bacteria could reason, would they call our guts, our tissues, our bloodstream different ecosystems? The bloodstream is harsh, but an enterprising Staphylococcus can sometimes make it (at least until the Penicillium flood in)! The intestine is unfriendly to some, but Lactobacillus finds a comfortable, sustainable niche there.

The inverse view has also been posed: that the Earth is an organism. Each of us humans, each duck I see here on campus, each tree out the window, is like a cell in Earth's living body. In that case, is humanity - as a Filter song suggests - a cancer? It's quite an analogy.

And suppose there are other planets with life. Suppose we might someday meet the creatures that inhabit them (for now, I don't care how). Then we'd have interactions, and the Earth could be a cell in yet another living system. Organisms, ecosystems - it's only a matter of scale.

If you think about that, then just the fact that we here are alive - even if we could not see the other life around us, even though we cannot confirm any life past our own world - means that the universe is alive. And that is a joyful thought.

Science and art get hilarious and beautiful

Last night Stumble turned up two of the best sites it's found for me in months:

Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names
InfiniteZoom Fractal Gallery

Enjoy.

Broken televisions

In our complex there are two TV rooms. One has a big, nice, working TV. That's the one I try to go to, but people are smart and sometimes you have to show up fifteen or more minutes early to reserve your show. (The people that usually vie for the 8pm Monday slot, incidentally, are fans of Gossip Girl. I don't know what that is, but it sounds bad.) The other TV room has two TVs in it. The first TV is medium-sized, nice, and the power cord has been stolen. The other one is old-looking and turns on fine, but has static on every channel.

It's not like I'm a television hog. There is ONE show I try to watch, and still half the time I have to scrounge for it online the next day. It annoys me evermore the longer this goes on. Someone on my floor is in hall government though and she said she's going to bring it up at her next meeting.

Dreaming of my new cereal bowl

Last term right before the break I made myself a cereal bowl so I can stop using the paper bowls at the LLC. I let it dry over break, then when I came back I put it on the bisque shelf and waited for it to get fired. Finally this weekend I found it and glazed it with Cookie Monster Blue and put it on the glaze shelf.

So then this morning I had a dream that it was still only half finished and fragile. I was showing it to someone in the kitchen in Portland, and they did something that messed it up. Then I had to try to fix it but I made it worse and it broke a hole in the bottom and I was so upset because I've been so impatient about this bowl. Then as I started to wake up I remembered "wait... I already glazed that bowl. So it'll be okay."

Media I pay attention to - spoiler warning for House

So I was just in the craft center and this song came on. I was familiar with it, but I didn't know what it was called or who played it. It was just one of those songs I've heard around quite a bit. I also couldn't understand most of the words. Through some combination of intuition, contextual memory, and style, I guessed that it was Pearl Jam, but since I don't have any songs identified with Pearl Jam in my head I wasn't very confident in that guess. So I came back and Googled the one line I thought I could make out - "live for tomorrow." None of the lyrics that were coming up made sense with the rhythm. Finally I decided to stick my guess in there and Googled "Pearl Jam tomorrow lyrics." (I knew the word tomorrow had to be right.) Right away, the right song popped up - "Plush." I love it when I can identify music, especially when I really shouldn't be able to.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through Dune. I'm also concurrently reading by bits and pieces the memoirs of Richard Feynman, a famous physicist who was in the generation after Einstein. When I finish Dune, I've decided my next book will be All Quiet on the Western Front. Dancing Physicist last night gave me a wonderfully detailed account of World War I, from which I learned several times as much as I ever did in high school history class, formerly my only source of education on the war. He recommended me the book before Spring Break, along with several others including Dune, but this conversation inspired me to pick it as my next one. Atlas Shrugged, which I bought in addition to the Feynman memoirs at a bookstore he showed me last week, will have to wait for the summer because it is fucking long.

Now, House. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because I've already talked to quite a few people about it. But suffice it to say I thought Kutner's suicide was completely out of character and a stupid way to write out Kal Penn. I'm disappointed anyway because Kutner was possibly my favorite doctor, or at least the funniest and most heartwarming. But out of people on that show likely to off themselves, I'd have put him ahead of only House himself and Cuddy. In fact, in a conversation with Taub earlier this season, referencing a suicidal patient, he expressly said "no, it's people like me who don't do it." That said, in a narrative sense this leaves a wide swath of avenues for interesting fallout. I especially want to see what they do to fill the hole he leaves opposite Taub. Okay, I guess I did spend kind of a lot of time on that.

Smells Like Air Pressure

Unlike my roommate, I very rarely squeal in earnest, or freely exclaim "oh my god" to my computer. I also rarely respond to internet content with an extended laugh sprung of genuine joy and hilarity.

This did it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCmaxzH6JhI

All my regrets are of not doing enough...

One of the few things I genuinely wish I'd done differently in my past, one of the few regrets that doesn't seem to be going away, is taking chemistry at Reed. I used to think "I could've gotten into Reed if I'd done Young Scholars" but that's not even where I come from now; UO is fine. It's the class itself; honors chem is also fine, but why didn't I take it last year? Taking O-chem as a freshman would have been awesome, not to mention the breathing room I would have for satisfying requirements. Yes, the schedule was a pain in the ass, but I could have tried harder. I could have sacrificed English and left some classes early and gone late to others; high school is largely a load of crap anyway, so why not blow it off to go to college?

I was too much married to MLC and high school and my community. I guess a tight community is not a universally good thing. In the process of clinging to it, I didn't do enough to make senior year not a waste of time.