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.