Und wie lese sich der Schmerz
Well' und Welle schlafen leget,
Wie der letzte Schlag sich reget,
Fuellest du mein ganzes Herz.

-aus "Schliesse mir die Augen beide" von Theodor Sturm

And as the pain,
Wave upon wave, lies down to sleep,
As the final heartbeat stirs,
You fill my whole heart.

-from "Close both my eyes" by Theodor Sturm

Scary phone calls:

I got a phone call from a Mr. Donoghue from the FBI today. I was kind of expecting it, but do you know how scary it is? The FBI shouldn't want to talk to me. It also means that they have some questions about stuff on the security clearance forms, which isn't wonderful. Anyway, the guy's in Chicago and wants to talk to me. Unfortunately, I'm not in Chicago. So he's sending the file back to Washington and it will get sent to somebody down here, and I think I should get another phone call pretty soon. He had such a great Chicago accent. I miss the city, I wish I was there this summer. It's hard to think that after six more months, I might not ever live in Chicago again. Maybe I'll do some receptionist work or something in CHicago the year after next...

Cremation:

I was talking to my mother about cremation earlier and a couple of interesting stories came out.

My aunt's good friend died this year, and they recently had a service for him. He had been cremated several months ago, but they hadn't decided what to do with the ashes. The Episcopalian church he went to has a big ashes box in the church. You just put the ashes (still in their container) in this big box standing next to the altar. My aunt's friend's ashes were apparently contained in a cardboard box that could have been sent by UPS. Wouldn't that be a weird delivery to get?

A family at a garage sale in Atlanta decided they wanted to sell everything from their house. Including an urn containing ashes. A couple of garage sale buffs bought the ashes, named them Gracie, and took her around for a while. They finally lost her though.

One of my grandmother's friends died several years ago and was cremated. Cremation is a fairly new thing in the Catholic Church (the Church has allowed cremation of the body since 1963, but only since 1997 has cremation occured before the funeral. The ashes must still be buried in consecrated ground), so many people are still unsure of how to deal with it. At the wake for this woman, the family rented an empty coffin from the funeral home to have in the room for the wake. We aren't sure whether the ashes were inside the coffin or not.

My first night at the movie theater:

By the numbers...

Number of shows: 14
Total business generated: $2398.50
Amount of noncash business: $508.00
Gift certificates sold: $50.00
Passes issued: 8
Total underage/overage: ($0.75)
Computer failures: 1
Managers: 3
Guys hitting on me: 2
35-year-old divorced guys hitting on me: 1
Dumbass kids wanting a refund because they "didn't want to see the movie": 2
Chairs in the box office: 0

I know I've been bad about updating. I don't even really know what I've been doing. Reading a lot. I read Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase, two crappy mysteries (a Rex Stout and a Jonathon Kellerman), and the new Harry Potter book. I'm also about 700 pages into The First Man of Rome. I went to the library on Wednesday, and I kind of felt like a little thief. You know, I'm walking in there and I pick up all these books I know I can't afford to buy, and then I go home with them.

No real word on the job front. No one seems to know what's up with the guy I wrote about before. He had wanted to hire two people, but he only called one person, and he didn't hire her. So I don't know what his deal is. I went to another temp agency yesterday and did all the tests. It was a Microsoft Word test, an Excel test, and a typing test. The thing is, for the Word and Excel tests, you can sort of try out things and guess until you get it right, so even though I have no idea what a mail merge is, I could create one. I even wrote macros. I also typed 56 words a minute, which is faster than I think I can really type. I just got into a groove. They also give you a test with simple arithmetic (which I probably failed) and a test where they give you a list of words and tell whether they are misspelled or not. That shit was hard. They all started blending together into one big misspelled word. I'm not really looking to work in proofreading, though. The application process is sort of fun, but I really need to get a job out of all this. Almost everyone I know is having a hard time, so I don't feel so bad. One girl went back to college for the summer since she couldn't find a job anyway. The economy sucks.

I start at the movie theater today. I've probably forgotten how to do everything, and I can't even find my shirt. It's been almost a year since I worked there, but I still know three of the managers. We'll see how it goes. At least I'm not starting Friday night (or worse, Sunday afternoon. Why are people so bitchy on Sundays?)

It's funny, though, my best memories at the theater are from Sundays, even though the work itself sucked. It was always Ashley, Robert, Scotty, Andrew, Elizabeth and me working and it seemed like all the funny stuff happened on Sundays. The time we ran out of popcorn oil and couldn't make popcorn for two hours? That was Sunday. The time Ashley fell through the ceiling (well, that's only funny in retrospect. At the time it was really scary)? That was Sunday. I miss loving to go to work. I worked with such great people when I started, and even though it was hard work I loved it. I fought with my manager about getting taken out of concession and put in the box office because I was so lonely. Concession was a lot more work, but it was fun. Now I don't even know what I'd do if they put me in concession. Curl up and die. I'm too old for that shit.

The job hunt, part 2:

Well, things are looking up a bit. One of the people whom my resume was submitted to wanted to talk to me for a phone interview. If I have a good enough phone voice, I think I get the job. What does a "good phone voice" mean? Anyway, I'll be answering phone calls and doing light clerical work for a firm in Buckhead. I'd work in the mornings, hopefully, so I could still work evenings and weekends at the movie theater.

The job hunt:

Well, I've gotten back on at the movie theater, but I don't start till next Wednesday or later. I'm trying to get some temping work or something. I went to a couple of agencies and have appointments at two more next week. One guy had two jobs he was sending my (admittedly pitiful) resume to today. If I could get one of those, it would probably last for the summer, which would be wonderful. I wish the economy weren't so terrible. Temp work is the first thing to go, apparently.

As it is, I'm pretty bored. I've been out job-looking, I went to the dentist, I'm going to go run a bunch of errands today. I need something to do, somewhere I have to be for at least a few hours a day. I'm sleeping a lot.

David Trimble was reelected in a close vote today. That's good news for the peace process. Trimble is a brave man and has been willing to put his political career on the line for peace. I have a lot of respect for him.

Well, I'm not so sure I buy this, but:

You're Australia!

You're easy-going, relaxed, and yet somewhat tough and hardy all at the
same time.  You can appreciate culture, scuba diving, and even safaris.  This
makes you pretty interesting and intriguing to others, though also really unpredictable and
even wild.  Your knowledge of nature is unthinkable to most of those around you, even
though your respect for it is sometimes less than perfect.  People really like your
accent.
Take
the Country Quiz at the href="http://bluepyramid.org">Blue Pyramid

Forgetting:

I finished reading Kundera a couple of days ago. It was really beautiful and very interesting. I don't have the actual book with me for now, so the quotes are approximate. He rails against Prague as the "city of forgetting," complaining about the Soviet practice of changing street names and conveniently editing people out of history. The question to me concerns whether this changes history. If enough people believe that someone didn't exist, did he exist? It makes the world of 1984 seem more real, more immediate.

In Atlanta this problem often manifests itself in public buildings and roads named for segregationists. The question is, should we change these names? I'm not sure. One part of me believes that the state should not be seen to endorse these people in any way, including in the names of its streets. I don't think that children should be forced to go to school in a building named for a Klan leader. But by changing the name of John B. Gordon elementary school, are we somehow lessening the state's culpability in a hundred years of Jim Crow laws? The legacy of segregation is still with us, and the government is still responsible. We should still be ashamed. It seems that by changing the names, we are trying to forget that segregation ever happened, and that I think is dangerous. People should know that in 1990 in Atlanta, supposedly part of the New South, an elementary school was still named for the man who brought the Klan to Georgia.

All of this name changing weakens the power of history. If we change things, we can edit out the unsanitary bits, we can forget that there's much in the past of the United States that we should be ashamed of. And that's what scares me.

Maybe my view of history and remembering is different because of my background. In both Ireland and the American South, history is edited to serve whatever the cause du jour is. Kevin Barry is changed from a scared medical student who couldn't run fast enough to get away from the soldiers to a revolutionary hero who died for his country. Plantation owners in the south are either hard-hearted men who beat their slaves at every chance (and slept with the female ones) or as benevolent dictators who kept their slaves in some sort of workers' paradise. We pervert history and use it to prove a point.

That's why I see changing the names of building to be dangerous. If we try to pretend that segregation and slavery has never happened, then we can pretend that we don't bear a large part of the responsibility for the black kid growing up in the projects who never had much of a chance. I think changing the name of John B. Gordon elementary school is a good idea, but it needs to be done with some acnowledgement that this school is part of our past. We shouldn't forget history just because it's unpalatable.

I dare not risk using that
loaded word, Remember,
for your memory is a cruel web
threaded from thorn to thorn across
a hedge of dead bramble, heavy
with pathetic atomies.
--Ulster poet John Hewitt

Home:

Well, I made it home to Atlanta. The flight back was good, if a little crowded, and the baggage got off the plane really quickly, which was really nice. My mother is doing OK and of course she has tons of errands for me to do. Smoky is good, but dirty.

I need a job.

Oh God:

I just (about 30 minutes ago) went to check the exact time my flight left. It said 3:45, and that it got in at 4:35. Oh, shit. That can't be right. It's 3 hours difference on a flight from Midway to Atlanta. I look more closely, and sure enough the reservation I made was from Atlanta to Midway. A perfectly nice flight and all, but I'm not in Atlanta. Luckily, Delta still had seats on the 6:05 flight from Midway to Atlanta, so I made that reservation. What a dumb mistake to cost me $120, though. Next time I'll be damn sure to check that I'm starting in the right place, I guess.

I have to be out of the dorm at 3:00, so I guess I get to spend an exciting two hours at Midway. Oh well. I think I'll have to go through extra security since I bought the ticket so close to the time of the flight, so maybe it's just as well.

Leaving:

Well, this is basically it. Everything got moved (I'll omit the details except to say that Andrew ROCKS!) and I have a pile of cleaning to do between now and 1 pm tomorrow when I have to leave for Midway.

Saying good-bye is weird. Not only are a lot of people staying here in Chicago, but almost everyone will be back before me, so there's this sort of feeling of "wow! I won't see you for a long time" from my friends. Seven months seems so much longer than the summer. I feel like I'll just be coming back to Chicago to say good-bye too. The last two quarters will just be a long six months of good-bye.

Maybe I don't really feel this way. I always get sad when I have to move. I think I understand that the last six months in Chicago will be doing all the things I couldn't do before, going to clubs and bars, actually hearing live music. I'm glad I'm coming back.

Hungry, hungry earth:

A longer fall job description for those who asked:

"Duties for the first E/EST intern will include: Promoting general support for agricultural biotechnology in the UK and reporting UK government, NGO, and general public attitudes in this issue. In addition, the intern will likely investigate and report on UK attitude toward other specific scientific issues.
Duties for both E/EST interns will include:
Progress toward greater use of renewable energy, the future of the UK's nuclear industry, and a variety of ocean issues ranging from marine pollution and protection of the coral reefs to the safety of life at sea (E/EST represents the United States at the International Maritime Organization, the UN agency based in London which is responsible for maritime issues). Interns will assist on public diplomacy efforts as well as prepare analytical reports on some of the above topics and join EST Counselor in presenting demarches to UK officials. Previous interns attended conferences on biotechnology and renewable energy and attended negotiations at the International Maritime Organization."

So yeah. Farm spy.

The saga of moving, part I:

I got up at 7:30 this morning to finish packing all my stuff. I even finish grading the last couple of papers for Math 153 (so I'm done with my job! Yayy!). I go downstairs at about half past nine to enter those numbers, email the grades to my (boss? I'm not sure what to call him. The guy who teaches the class that I'm grading for), and head over to campus to do a couple errands. I check my email and there's a message from my (boss) asking for the averages of the grades for each homework. Ordinarily, this would be no problem, but I didn't record the grades in Excel (because of all the problems I had with my computer, I was keeping the grades on the U of C server, so I was using Pico, a Unix-based text editor which doesn't exactly calculate anything). Again, maybe not a big deal, but there were 20 homework assignments. So by the time I finish putting all the data into Excel, it's almost ten, so I rush off to campus, turn in my takehome (and notice the swastika on the floor of the steps in Social Sciences. What's up with that?), return my books for grading, and go to Andrew and Mike's apartment. It's now about 10:30.

Mike's at the apartment and gives me the keys to the van, warning me it's a bit low on gas. I say OK, I can run it to the Amoco on my way home. I turn on the car. It stalls a couple of times, but the engine finally turns over. The brake light is lit, so I try to turn off the emergency brake. I pull on the brake release lever a couple of times, but nothing happens, so I sit there contemplating what to do next when the car stalls. I try to turn it on again, and nothing. 20 minutes later I give up and go back to find Mike. He tries a couple of times, has no idea what's wrong with it (though we ruled out the battery because the lights work) and he offers to let me drive his car. It's tiny, but it's a million times better than nothing, so I jump at the offer. I drive it home, start loading up (numerous elevator related shenanigans follow, suffice it to say I got stuck between two floors for about 5 minutes once), and resign myself to leaving the bookshelf and having to ship a lot of other stuff home. Amanda and I are ready to go when Andrew comes walking up.

He wants one of us to drive him back so he can fix the van. We dither a bit, but I like my bookcase, so Amanda goes back with him while I drag the other stuff (that wouldn't fit in the car) outside. Anyway, I called him about 15 minutes ago and he thinks it's completely out of gas. So hopefully it will be ready to go in about 15 minutes so I can get everything to storage. The thought of dragging all that crap back upstairs makes me want to die.

More later, if it's interesting.

Uggh, I'm in the process of moving right now. I want to die.

By the way, algebraic topology went OK. Not wonderfully, but I had no right to expect wonderfully with the amount of studying that I did. I would be perfectly happy with a B+ in the class, and I think I did well enough to get that.

I'm really excited about never taking topology again. That was a HARD class both conceptually and practically, at least for me.

I figured out what was particularly bad about my number theory exam. I was one of those exams where almost every problem seemed to have involved some little trick to solve, and after applying the trick, the problem was trivial. You know, the kind of thing that later on when someone tells you how to do it, you think "of course. it's obvious," but you never would have thought of it. Those problems are kind of fun when you figure out the trick, but if not, you can sit there and stare at the problem for hours and get no farther. I don't think these problems test knowledge; instead they test cleverness. So I don't think they're really appropriate for a final exam. Oh maybe one on there as a sort of cool problem, but the rest of the problems should be more straightforward, testing a student's knowledge of the material.

But Sudeep probably disagrees with me.

Woohoo, done, went and bought boxes, now it's time to pack. I have Andrew's van tomorrow morning and have to get everything down to the storage place then.

I don't think I ever posted about this, but my dad's laptop (replacement for my broken laptop with the dead hard drive, reason number 802,237 not to buy a HP machine) got hacked within 3 hours of being hooked up to the ethernet. The funny thing is that for once I was running the computer with a firewall. This computer was far more secure than the laptop I ran Windows ME on for a year, and I even unhooked it from the network at night. But anyway, sucks. I can't hook it back up to the network until the hard drive got reformatted, and my father has stuff on there that needs to not get erased. So I have a laptop that works fine, but with no internet access. So I'm doing all that stuff from the Blackstone computer lab and it's a pain.

Yeah. Not sure why people from NIPR.mil (also read here and here) and the USMC have been reading my blog. I'll make the assumption that it's just bored workers on their lunch break or something, since I think at least one linked from the Blogger home page and it hasn't really been acting like a bot. It's still a bit disconcerting.

About to go take my topology final... when asked how I was this morning, I replied "tired and screwed."

Wish me luck.

I'm procrastinating by reading someone's copy of Time that was left in the Blackstone computer lab. There's an article about Robert Byrd, which included the line "When John Kennedy Jr. asked Byrd to list his summer reading for his magazine George, Byrd included such page turners as The Lives of the Twelve Caesars." This is Suetionius' collection of biographies of the first twelve emperors of Rome, starting with Julius Caesar. It's fascinating shit, really. Suetonius digs up all the dirt on these guys, and if he doesn't have any dirt, he makes it up. This book is the source for a lot of what we know about Roman emperors. Tiberius' sexual proclivities, Nero and Caligula's cruelty, Claudius' incompetence are all in here. I'm really not sure why Time implies it's boring. It's really not,

Well, that final's done. One more to go, and the take-home. I think it went OK, not wonderfully, but everyone seemed to find it difficult. I did figure out one problem with about five minutes to go, and I'm not sure I explained it properly, but so it goes. One thing that really pissed me off: the professor kept talking during it. I mean, not just answering a question and telling us how much time we had left, but asking someone if he had a cold or allergies and telling us where the problems came from. He even spent too long answering the questions. Just answer the damn question, don't speculate about them and repeat yourself three damn times. Irealise I'm more bugged about noise than most people, but this was during a final and I'm willing to believe that if you put it all together, it cost me 10 minutes. And that shouldn't happen.

I'm about to go off to take my first final. In 24 hours I'll be done. Well, except for the take-home that is due on Friday, but it's basically done. It just needs some quick editing.

In other news, I can actually touch-type. I had never really tried before, but as long as I don't think too much about where the keys are, I can type reasonably accurately without looking at them. Cool, no? If I start trying to remember where the keys are, it's kind of a disaster, though.

Clearly I've been spending my time doing valuable things.

Three papers done, one to go. I wrote about the changes in warfare between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Not profound or even well written, but it's the all-important 3.25 pages long, so whatever. It's time to start thinking about math, though.

I got my assignment for the State Department this fall. I'll be working in Econ/ Environment, Science, and Technology. Good. I read on. I'm working in biotechnology. My job apparently involves: "Talk[ing] to professors and NGOs about sustainable development. Interview[ing] farmers and biotech industry reps on attitudes toward and acceptance of agricultural biotechnology."

Well. It appears that The Hungry Earth will be my most relevant class. Shut up.

From a Slate article...
"Pixar needs Disney because that's how it outsources its Evil."

I had a pretty good, though not at all productive, weekend. Saturday-- got short paper #1 written. Trecked all around the near north side looking for a Crate and Barrel (that turned out to be on Michigan despite the map that said it was on State-- apparently everyone knew this but me). Gave up, took the train up to North and Clybourn and went to that one instead. Then to dinner at Las Pinatas in Old Town. Good Mexican food, but they wouldn't serve Will and me this time... oh well. Back to Will's to drink lemony goodness and white wine.

I got up this morning, finished paper #2, went to the college bowl picnic that ended up being in Susan's apartment (it was raining). Had margaritas and played Mousetrap. Well, I didn't play so much as mess with Susan's cat while Matt tried to analytically deconstruct the game (eg "Why are the mice cooperating to build the trap that will kill most of them? Is there some big super-mouse that is actually controlling the trap? Or who is killing the trapped mice? and so on). Came back home, managed to borrow a car to get my stuff to storage (Thanks, Paul, though I don't think he reads this). So I started packing and such.

It was good. Now, though, I need to get some work done. Time to start thinking about changes in warfare between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Right now, all I can talk about is the results of shortages of manpower, though I suspect there's a paper to be written on the results of the rise to power of local military elites. Maybe not by me.

For those who follow such things, I decided that the Byzantines survived the seventh century because they had generally competent leaders, kickass technology, religious (more or less) uniformity, and the theme system. I also decided that their foreign policy in the ninth century relied on walking a fine line between giving too much influence and pissing the people of Constantinople off and giving too little and pissing the foreign leaders off. But I used bigger words. Neither is exactly a novel view of Byzantine civilisation, but I think both are fine for what are essentially "Did you do the reading?" papers. Not that I did the reading. Sigh.

Oops.

I was supposed to get up at 9, go to the Reg, and work all morning, so that I could be done with one essay by this afternoon. But I forgot to set my alarm. So I just woke up. I think I'll stay at home today instead.

Last night I watched Blade II with people in Blackstone (God, everyone who reads this blog must think I do nothing but watch terrible movies and bitch a lot. It's really not true. I sleep also). Anyway, if you don't know, the premise is basically that there are vampires and there's Wesley Snipes. And it's really, really bad. Watching it, though, was fun. Some highlights:

J: "Aren't they just supposed to be in a garage? Why is there a torture chamber?"
I: "Well, it is Eastern Europe..."
E: "That almost makes up for Bubble Boy"

J: "So far, what I've learned from this movie is that cocaine addicts have super powers."

Me: "Why is his blood black?"
I: Well, he's really old. Most humans don't live this long, but when they get to 130 their blood turns black"
Me: "Makes sense to me"
I: "And they turn into vampires."

I: "You could be my sidekick."
Me: "I don't think I want to be you sidekick."
I: "You could be Math Girl and calculate things."
Me: "But that would suck."
I: "Well, you know, being a sidekick isn't that great. We'll get you a sidekick of your own someday."

Wow, early odds in Funny Cide are even and on Empire Maker are 6-5. I wouldn't bet on either for worse than 2-1. It's the Belmont, after all, notable for the quantity of upsets it's produced, and none of these colts have run a mile and a half. If I were making odds, I'd give Funny Cide 9-5 or 2-1 and Empire Maker 7-3.

This is really scary. It made me start thinking about my high school textbooks. The only one I remember wondering about the political proclivity of the author was Bailey's American history book (I think about the tenth edition of this one), probably published about 1990. My year was the last year it was used. Anyway, it was sort of the anti-politically correct book. Besides being really Anglophilic, the book contained such gems as "the Indians got their revenge on the white man by giving him syphilis" and "In the roaring twenties, the car changed the fabric of society. Teenagers spent dates in the back seat 'necking' and 'petting'." I'm paraphrasing, but only a little. It was a great book.

I didn't take a lot of world history in high school. We had one year of Georgia history (shut up-- I'll bet you don't know how many guns were in Savannah when Sherman took the city), one year of civics/econ/geography, one year of world history, one year of American history, and one year of US government. I don't remember the name of the world history book we used (and I can't find a book online when all I remember about it was that it was pretty and new), but we also used old red books (probably printed about 1970) which were a collection of essays on world history, so I think we probably got spared most of the politically correctisms in history. I definitely don't remember any chapters praising Mao in any of my books.

As for Lit... My AP English teacher did her PhD on Eliot (of the TS variety), so we read a lot of modernist stuff. I didn't read anything for that class that could be considered non-Western unless you count Crime and Punishment. Almost everything else was written in English and was very much a part of the Western canon (from Shakespeare to Lord of the Flies, if you know what I mean). Junior year was American Lit, and though we read Equiano and a few thigns by women, it was again very canonical. I don't remember world lit well, but we read Sartre and Kafka, who I'd already read in German. So I thought it was kind of dumb. But we definitely didn't read any of the really good non-Western writers, and we read Hamlet (mmm, world lit) and a lot of ancient stuff (Livy, Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, I think some of the Augfessions).

And at the U of C, I took Western Civ, Classics of Social and Political Thought, and Ancient Civ (all very dead white men classes). Hum was the only at all non-canonical class, but other than Clockwork Orange, everything we read would have fit in nicely in my high school classes.

So I think I had the anti-politically correct education. And I think I missed out. I haven't read any of the really great Japanese writers, I'm still trying to catch up on Garcia Marquez and Borges, and I've read very little that was written after say 1960. I'm trying to catch up on that, but there's just so much I want to read. I feel kind of gypped.

Can't there be a middle ground? Can't we read non-sanitised history that attempts to deal with the world beyond western Europe? Can't we read Shakespeare and Murakami? I think a lot of the problem in my high school was that we only had two years of history. If they turned the dumb geo/civics/econ sequence into European history and turned world history into non-Western history would that have been better? Personally, I find it hard to separate history like that. I would have preferred a three year long sequence that really dealt with world history-- the history of everywhere. Maybe the first year could go through the beginning of the Renaissance, the second year through the French Revolution, and the last year deal with the long nineteenth and short twentieth century. I think that crowds up the last year a lot, but I don't know of another good place to divide it up.

To the one person who actually made it through this rambling, boring post, what do you think?

Will wants to know my thoughts on the efficacy of corking. A bit of a disclaimer, I am neither a physicist nor a baseball player.

But here goes. First, I'm inclined to believe that corking does help. A little, maybe 4 feet on a 400 foot drive. Here's why. The Slate article argues that conservation of momentum is the formula that governs how the bat reacts. But momentum is not conserved in the collision any more than energy is. Not only are the ball and the bat not perfectly elastic, but if anyone reading this has ever hit a baseball knows, the bat vibrates in your hand. A lot, and sometimes painfully. If we start looking at the kinetic energy of the ball (which will determine its height and ultimate distance), it goes as the square of the velocity but only the first power of the mass. If the kinetic energy of the bat is higher (as will happen with a corked bat), there's more kinetic energy going into the collision and the ball will go farther. I'm inclined to go with the ballplayers here; there's an advantage, though not a very big one. If Matt's reading this, maybe he can resolve the controversy?

As for the question of why, then, shorter and thinner bats aren't prohibited, I think that's relatively easy. A longer bat has the advantage of providing greater torque when the batter hits the ball and gives the batter control of a much wider area of the plate, while a thicker bat increases the size of the all-important "sweet spot" (how many porn related Google hits am I getting from that phrase?) and again gives the batter control of more of the plate. No one is stopping me from going out to hit a ball with a sawed-off broomstick, but no matter how fast I can swing it, it's probably not a good idea. The problem is that corked bats are less dense, so you get the advantages of length and thickness without the disadvantage of more weight. It's a win-win situation for the batter.

It's not a huge advantage, really. But I think it's probably a little one. Will MLB now start inspecting (via X-ray) randomly selected bats at the beginning of the game? I don't think it would be a bad idea, really. If nothing else it might restore some credibility to baseball.

And that's way more physics than i ever want to think about again, thank you very much.

Last night was a Nyquil night and tonight feels like another. I'm the only person I know who can take Nyquil, sleep for seven hours, and wake up before my alarm feeling great. Everyone else barely drags out of bed two hours after their alarm goes off, feeling like shit.

My mother went back to the doctor today and got a short cast since the bone wasn't moving any further apart. Yay, no surgery! She says it hurts, but not as badly as having something screwed to the bone would. I know you're shocked.

What else? I got four new clik disks for my Mp3 player today. I like the player a lot. It was relatively inexpensive, easily expandable, and doubles almost as a zip drive (although with more expensive media). Not bad, right? Also, the disks are really cute, like tiny metal CDs, and we all know that buying electronic equipment based on how cute it is is a winning strategy. You should see my HP49, the iMac of calculators (in more ways than just being cute, but whatever). Oddly enough, this calculator has more RAM than my first computer. God, do I feel old.

So, I don't know. I think we're going to get Mexican food (and margaritas) on Saturday night which is exciting.

I need to write three pages on the reasons for Byzantine survival in the seventh and eighth centuries, and I don't think "luck" is going to cut it. But I don't really understand why, other than luck. I think I see a weekend in the Reg in my future. I'm sick. And sick of all this. I'm sick of the weekends spent researching things no one cares about (and I use no one loosely, more I'm sick of researching things I don't really care about). I'm sick of the math lectures that I don't follow and the lectures that are straight out of the book. I'm sick of reading things I didn't choose to read, and of problem sets, and of late night sessions spent trying to get another two pages out of a topic I'm tired of. I think I'm just burned out on classes, on math. Six months off is probably just what I need.

But meanwhile, finals still must be studied for, and short essays must be written.

Ag gabhail síos ar m'aistear
le solas mo chroí
fann agus tuirseach
go deireadh mo shlí.

they tell me i don't understand cos i'm american
but unlike them, i've been to northern ireland
needless to say, i was not impressed,
to tell you the truth, it left me feeling real depressed.
[...]
i support one thing, that one thing is peace
peace with justice and the troubles will cease
-from "Time to Go" by Black 47.

Should be grading, instead listening to music. Black 47 rocks. Despite playing a lot of Irish rebel rock (Like "Time to Go," "James Connolly," "Bobby Sands MP") they've been called the quintessential New York band. They're going to be in Ireland in November, and going to one of their concerts would be really really cool.

There's an article in the NYT today about Tucker Max. For those of you who don't know, Tucker Max is a former U of C student who has gained an Internet following for acting like a jerk on his web site. If I were Will, I'd comment on the first amendment implications of the case (probably even spelling amendment right on the first try. Since I'm not, instead I'll comment on the weirdness of reading about a site I read in the NYT. The internet is a small world.

As is Chicago. Going to see the Matrix with Maggie and Will last night, we ran into Susan and Ed at the theater and another guy I know on the bus home. And an old guy who told us we'd be 59 in two ticks of the cosmic clock. Waiting for the Jeffrey is always entertaining.

I have so many papers to grade, but I just don't want to. I hate my job. Isn't my blog interesting?

Sorry about the previous post. I should stop doing the html code for links and let blogger do it. If you don't put in the end quotes, very bad things happen, and I forget them a lot.

There's an article in the NYT today about Tucker Max. For those of you who don't know, Tucker Max is a former U of C student who has gained an Internet following for acting like a jerk on his web site. If I were

Jeffrey Rosen posted an article about racial quotas in the New York Times magazine today...

I think that part of the article is true. He says "selective universities can't achieve colorblindness, diversity and high admission standards at the same time. They can achieve only two out of the three goals" which I think is empirically shown. However, he goes on to claim that if universities must choose colorblindness, they will forfeit high admission standards over diversity. I just don't think this is true. In public universities the question becomes almost an entirely practical one: will the university be able to accomodate an increased number of students that results from the lowering of admission standards? Though Rosen uses the example of the infamous cultural heritage Rice essays, how many public universities read more than a handful of the admissions essays written by applying students. It all comes down to numbers in some way, the question is just what numbers to use. In Texas, the numbers are rank in graduating class. I haven't seen a study about what effect this has had on the diversity of the university system (and I hadn't realised that students got into every Texas university rather than just some Texas university), so I'd be interested to see. My gut feeling is that it won't have a big difference, because a lot of the students they are trying to attract can't afford college and many of them would have gotten in under older systems as well.

I find even less support for the argument that private universities will seriously decrease admission standards, both because the courts can't make them be colorblind and because most private universities care more for academic standards than diversity. I think that if universities that receive federal funding are told that they have to ignore race, they will continue to basically operate in the same way, using essays and other things to meet unwritten racial quotas.

If you buy Rosen's premise, I think this article would be an interesting support of affirmative action. But I don't buy the article.