I took a proofs test today while running a fever, and I don't know if it hindered or helped matters.

Physicist Phriday

Wolfgang Pauli

Born in Vienna in 1900, Pauli is best known for the exclusion principle that bears his name, but was also famous during his life for what was called the Pauli Effect, which referred to his ability to break scientific equipment simply by being in its vicinity. It is now an effect attributed to all theoretical physicists by their experimental counterparts.

When his first wife left him in 1929, he is said to have been completely shocked that she chose instead a chemist. "Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood, but a chemist?"

Pauli was known as 'the conscience of physics' for being a meticulous perfectionist. He is attributed of saying of a somewhat lacking paper written by a colleague, "This isn't right. It isn't even wrong!" He was good friend and correspondent to Carl Jung, and paved the way for Dirac to discover that equation of his. Einstein nominated him for the Nobel Prize, and he won it in 1945. He died in 1958 of pancreatic cancer.

Famous Paulas That Are Not Me

Paula Hitler, younger sister of some Adolf guy..

The Compliment of Rip Van Winkle

I have always been a person with strange sleeping habits. When I was little, I used to wake up at five a.m. and run into my parents room declaring it to be a wonderful sunny day, and I would sit in the kitchen with Daddy and eat cereal before he went to work. . He tells me that whenever he thinks of me now, twenty years old and in college, he can't help but think of me then, the way I would stand in the chair in my little pink nightgown with wispy blonde hair sticking everywhere, veritably chirping about whatever three to five year olds chirp about. Gradually as I grew older, the sleeping schedule changed from waking up at five a.m. to going to sleep at five a.m. and seven a.m. and noon and two p.m. and five p.m. and nine p.m. and basically whenever I can kip an hour or two. If it's up to me my favorite time to sleep is from about two to about ten, but often it's not up to me.

Insomnia is something I've dealt with on a semi-regular basis, sometimes I'm completely immune and other times I don't sleep more than four hours in a seventy-two hour period. Since I moved into the dorms last month, insomnia hasn't been something I've been worrying about, and I think it's because this is turning into the most tiring semester I have yet attempted. I am pretty much asleep when my head hits the pillow, no problems, no questions asked, the mind goes along with the body. I've even been too tired to have my infamous crazy vivid dreams. However, despite the fact I am not suffering from insomnia, I am getting less sleep than when I am suffering it. Last night I got about two hours, and today I'm kind of wandering around in a daze... I can usually handle the not sleeping bit pretty well, reaching that plateau of tiredness at which the body can function even if the mind is kind of just along for the ride. But this semester I am reaching new and interesting levels of exhaustion.

Intellectual exhaustion is something I'm still trying to come to terms with. I'd never before really gotten to that point where my brain just gets so tired that it can't do anything that isn't already internally automated. I'm glad it can still do the automated bits, or...you know... agonizing death. But now it's a regular occurence. After the huge chunk of my brain is given away to futilely try and write decent proofs, there's hardly any left over to do my discrete homework or learn another chapter's worth of Java. I've been lucky so far in theatre that all the plays we've read are things I have read once before in high school or previous years of college (Dalton's emphasis on liberal arts education has never come in handier, and I suspect it will never come in handier) and so I've been able to slack off quite a bit in there. Hopefully we'll continue along those terms...considering it's a class primarily made up of freshman, I'm imagining it will. Most of those kids haven't taken the basic composition course, and so far we haven't really been expected to write college-caliber essays. Not that I don't do that anyway of course. I am brilliant after all.

Proofs is an exceedingly interesting course, and can be pretty fun, but also very frustrating! I really enjoy the class and I like the people, but I think it may be driving me insane! Discrete and Java haven't been so bad yet...not for lack of course load, but we've had one test in Discrete that I got a 99 on and I've been doing consistently well on the homework, so I have a nice buffer to work off of. In Java it's much the same, though my confidence level in that class is extremely low and my grades keep coming back much higher than I expect them too...so far I've been getting extra credit on all the assignments, and our first test was last Friday. It was ridiculously hard and I thought I did awful on it, but what I found out today when I picked it up is that turns out there were fifteen extra points scattered throughout the paper, and I managed to get over the full credit amount. And today, working off of two hours of sleep and another bad grade in Proofs and expecting nothing above a B, that silly 101 was enough to put me in relieved tears. The only real problems I've been having with Discrete and Java is that the work load in those classes is constant. I just don't get a break, it seems.

I don't think the work load this year is any more than it has been in the past, but here at Berry they take up a lot more for a grade then they ever did at Dalton. At Dalton they assign a lot of suggested homework but not too much for a grade... so I got used to grades being totally dependent on tests and projects, and it's not like that here. It's been an adjustment, and I'm still adjusting, and I'm afraid sleep has become one of those things I haven't figured out how to fit into my schedule yet.

Hopefully I'll get better at that as we go, and start suffering involuntary insomnia rather than all night homework sessions on a regular basis again.

Physicist Phriday

Murray Gell-Mann on Richard Feynman



The Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm

1. write down the problem;
2. think very hard;
3. write down the answer.

Mathematician Monday

Kurt Gödel

Despite his being the greatest logician of the 20th century, Gödel ironically suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Even in the middle of winter, he would leave all the windows of his house open as he thought unseen villians were trying to kill him with poisoned gas. He also believed the invisible enemies were poisoning his food, so he refused to eat anyone's but his wife's cooking, not even his own. Even when his wife grew ill and was incapacitated in the hospital, Gödel still refused to eat anything prepared by anyone else and consequently died of starvation in 1978.

Gödel is most famous for his incompleteness theorems.

La-la-la-la-la-AAAAUGH STOP USING TAPS

When the We-Say-So Corporation (company motto: "We know who you are and we know where you live. Why? Because we say so.") causes the next Ice Age, the only people who will survive will be college students, specifically those who live in the dorms. This is because in college dorms, students must be adapted to deal with instantaneous 100 degree changes in shower temperature.

Also the Russians might survive too.

Physicist Phriday

Paul Dirac To J. Robert Oppenheimer

"Oppenheimer, they tell me you are writing poetry. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write a poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say…something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand."

It's getting to the point now
where things are looking better
and I can see the end
I can see the light at the end of the tunnel
and maybe it's dimmer than I thought it might be
but it's there, baby
it's there

Please forgive me if I act a little strange, for I know not what I do

Okay, okay, okay.

I'm not dead.

I do of course realize it has been over three weeks since my last post, but I assure you (oh faithful five or six readers that include Trevor and Kevin and Jenn and Latigo) that a three week dry spell is not what I was planning. The internet is fickle here and it took me three days to register my computer to the network...I wrote out a post all about my first week and first day of classes two Mondays ago but the fickle internet ate it and I was too frustrated to type it out again. As the days lengthened into weeks I began to doubt if the quality of my post could make up for the extended absence...but now I have reached a point where I can finally deliver. DRAWINGS! PICTURES! LINKS! RANDOM GIBBERISH! BLAG! SNARG! RABBLE! THIS IS THE POST YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR!



I am currently residing on the fourth floor of West Mary hall in the Ford buildings on the campus of Berry College, in the city of Rome in the state of Georgia in the United States of America, North America, Northern Hemisphere, Earth, the Inner System, the Solar System, the Local Fluff, the Orion Arm, the Milky Way, the Local Group, the Virgo Supercluster, the Universe. And if you try to find my college on GoogleEarth you will be sorely disappointed.



Living at Berry is like living in a microcosm of the real world.

This is partially do the the fact that the workforce is almost entirely populated by eighteen to twenty-four year olds. You go to the post office on campus and there's a student behind the counter. In the health center, it's a student who asks you to fill out the three forms requesting the same information you filled out on the two forms given to you earlier. In the dining hall and Valhalla, it's a student who takes your order and prepares your food. You walk out the dorm hall and it's a student mowing the lawn, blowing the leaves, preening the garden. It's a student behind the desk in the business office handling your banking transactions. It's a student on the phone when you call Tech help. Of course there is very practical reasoning behind this, as everyone knows college students are desperate for any income whatsoever and will literally work for peanuts. Not even peanuts. Half a peanut. God knows I would. And Berry is twice as bad as the average college, being a private school with a hefty pricetag...these kids are running in here with built-in money guilt, already ten thousand dollars out in loans if they're lucky. So they're willing to strap on a leaf-blower in ninety-eight degree heat and ninety percent humidity for $5.15 an hour. That being said, it's probably very telling that Berry employs over ninety percent of its student body in on campus jobs.



Some of the faculty live on campus (on the road imaginatively named Faculty Drive) and there is an elementary school on the mountain campus, and a middle school in the Cook building. There are two coffeeshops on campus, three churches, the old mansion of Martha Berry, the house the students built for her before she died. There are far reaching miles of woodlands filled with wild animals, including entirely too many deer. The deer to student ratio is currently riding at eight to one. Which is kind of neat sometimes, because there's a certain quality to waking up in the mornings in the pale early light and seeing deer sleeping down in the courtyard beneath my window... But there is also something creepy about all those deer, especially at night... More than once I was walking down to my car when I heard a rustling, and I looked over to find nearly ten deer bedding in the grass, staring at me with their eyes reflecting the streetlight. Sometimes I get the feeling those deer are quietly biding their time until they can enslave us all. The other animals we have to watch out for at night are skunks, particularly the albino skunk that lives up near the Ford buildings, for it has been known to chase students around. So far I have only seen one skunk from a distance away, so hopefully in my two years here that's as close as I'll get to one.



The campus is ridiculously beautiful. It is amazingly, hilariously, ridiculously beautiful. The buildings I live in were built in the 1920's by Henry Ford who they say was not sleeping with Martha Berry at the time, but come on children. This is a serious complex.


I find it hard to believe a man would build this for a lady if he wasn't getting a little something something on the side.



This place is the kind of beautiful that just makes you feel better about being alive. It's the kind of beautiful that makes you happy you have eyes to see it. I wake up and open the blinds and sunlight comes in and the reflection pool glitters, and I walk across campus to class and all the trees are green and the architecture is gorgeous. When the sun is out, it is impossible to not to gaze at the fields and the woods and the sky, and when the sun is down, it's impossible to not be amazed by the fresh wind and the streetlights and the stars.



I have all my classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Which is great in theory and sometimes pretty good in practice, but I spend alot of Thursday nights working furiously until two in the morning, because I'm kind of a master of procrastination (if my timeliness of posting is any indictation). I spend most of my time in the Science Building, which is a BEAST.



And I mean that in a good way, like when I say my laptop is a beast or a snowplow is a beast.



I'm currently taking two math courses (three if you count my computer science course, but I don't); one is Discrete Structures, and the other is Proof Structures. Discrete Structures is...well...it's hard to pin down exactly, because sometimes it feels like a bunch of random stuff thrown together, like the misfits toys box of math. Proof Structures seems to be the hardest class I'm taking this semester, and I am seriously grinding my brain through it, but it is also the most enjoyable class I am taking. There are ten of us in there, and even though it's only been three weeks, I really get the feeling those guys are good people.



When it comes down to it, I only have two serious complaints about Berry. I don't know where the twelve thousand a semester goes (I imagine it goes to the pendulum) but I can tell you one thing for certain: it certainly does not go into the dining hall. So much of that food is incredibly dubious. Sometimes I walk through the grill line and go "aaaah, I think I'll just have a sandwich, thanks." But the cookies are good. Not that I'm eating cookies. Everyone tell my mother I'm not eating cookies, because I'm really not. (I'm really not.)

My second complaint has to do with the guys, or the serious lack of them. At Berry, the girl to boy ratio is something like 6 to 1. And on top of that, all the boys here seem to be on the smallish, girly side! It's a little disconcerting to see boys prettier than me wandering about in their khaki shorts and pink plaid button-ups. But what can I do? That's not to say there aren't a couple of crushworthy boys (there are, and believe me, they are intensely crushworthy) but the chances, they are not good. So all boys out there, come to Berry. You are in high demand. You can totally strike out six times.

I guess that's about all the interesting bits I'll get to for now, so I'll leave you with the handful of doodles illustrating my first week at Berry that were lazily colored with a touchpad and were alot funnier two weeks ago.