Note: This blog has been deprecated, because the system it's built upon (MovableType) was comment-spammed to the point of destabilization. This URL now exists for archival purposes. Trying to add a comment to an old entry will not work here; however, the entries do exist at my blog's current manifestation, here, and comments do work (and I'm still very happy to read them, if you're so kind to leave them).
A strange habit of a human being is collecting things. Some people, in their youth, might have collected cards or pogs (for those of us who went to McKenney, as far as I know). Me, I collect data, in gargantuan amounts.
Thanks be to KaZaA, for it opened a doorway into terrabytes of binary information that I never would have found otherwise. Some small-time datahogs spend their time collecting .mp3s, but I have sufficiently one-upped them and gathered TV shows. Yes, that's right: I collect TV shows.
I don't enjoy watching actual television anymore...there are simply too many things that offend me (mainly SUV commercials). So, with KaZaA, I have collected the shows that I enjoyed in my [quite wasted] youth...already, I've gathered 7 entire series, including Gargoyles, and the Transformers...
However, what is Hector to do with all of these? The total runtime of these files would be approximately three hundred hours...my train of thought is now brought to procrastination.
I believe myself to be at a high level of procrastination. The first level is simply putting off little things like homework or practicing in favor of doing other things...however, I put off the latter in favor of the former. Heh, maybe this 'high level' was just a load...Methinks that I procrastinate not in an order who isn't high, but reversed. I put off enjoyment for work.
Mayhaps I can tie the two together at some point, though I assume it won't be with TV shows and real work. So far, the only categorical compromise that something in life has made for me is math, as some of you may have inferred.
Yesterday, I had worked out a formula for the Physics Water Balloon Launch range, as a function of only how far back the person pulls on the rubber cords. Well, I thought that I'd use a little calculus and take one simple, tiny derivative, because my final formula was really about six inches long on paper. I also believed that I could get it done in, oh, say, a half hour...
Well, I thought better and threw it onto a computer math program first, and lo and behold, my 'simple' derivative became one full page...then I scrolled down, and all of the parentheses and radicals spanned THREE PAGES. I laughed for twenty minutes straight.
Then I set that beast equal to zero at about midnight...when I got up in the morning, and checked it at 7:00, it was still evaluating.
I am not just a data hog, but a memory hog as well. Hoorah for resources!
Alex
I must say that some animals will find nests anywhere. Take my bird Neon, for example. She will crawl into just about anything that even resembles a hole, including flower vases, slightly open kitchen drawers, rolled up blankets, and shirts. None of these are enjoyable for humans, because of fear that she'll get caught in whichever object...that, and for fear that she'll bite the nipple on the way back out (looking for a beak/foothold on the vertical climb). Believe me, the latter is not pleasant.
The most amusing happenstance that she's been in left her with a tan. Though she has a yellow face, one day I came home from school and she seemed to be an avian bronze god. Upon closer inspection of a box of Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate packets, and a whiff of her, I noted that her habit of chewing on anything in one of her hidey-holes had finally left its mark.
The tan was gone within two days. She still smelled of chocolate. Unfortunately, her head just smells like a normal bird head now...no complaints, but it was interesting to have a little chocolate aroma follow me around whenever she was on my shoulder.
Here's to smelling of normal bird's head.
Alex
This was a letter written to over a dozen people, selected fairly haphazardly, on April 17, 2002.
Allow me to begin by saying that the sine wave is, at the moment, my favorite elementary function in the real^2 universe.
The study of differential equations gives many equations that look so hideous as to never have visible solutions, or other, more subtle equations that have a hidden glance of EVIL in their eyes (or variables).
This morning, on the 17th of April, the example of the hour of a DiffEQ was given as:
cos(t)*dy/dt + sin(t)*y = 1
The objective: Solve for y.
To eliminate dy/dt, this problem started off with hints of a deep beauty, in the tangent function, which is trigonometric joy to integrate and differentiate. After a little more dinking, we even ended up with a tangent on one side, a secant squared opposite a derivative, which threw up little to stop the simplicity of
y = sin(t)
However, The Bastard Child of Integration C ruined this and flung in a Ccos(t) to mar, dare I say, mutilate the Computational Beauty of Nature in the sine wave as a solution.
Needless to say, the cosine is now my least favorite of the elementary functions in |R^2.
Alex N, Nelly, Loup Vert, and Lumi�re.
This actually occurred a couple months ago, but since I can't remember the date, I can't Reverse-Temporally Engineer this entry's current existence. (Kudos to thos who recognize the 4th-Book-of-Trilogy reference.)
Once upon a Saturday morning, I meandered into my home's kitchen, intent upon having my breakfast fill. I stood in the middle of the room, and thought to myself, "Hmm, a Kern's sounds pretty good right now - I think I'll go over to the fridge and get myself one." Having that thought in mind, I went to the fridge, opened it up, and almost pulled a can out when an unconscious impulse sent my eyes skyward.
A nice, large web the size of two printer sheets of paper had been built the night before, between the freezer door and the ceiling. I don't know what type of spider it was, but the legs were about two-thirds the length of a Daddy-Longlegs', thrice as thick, and the body had a cross-sectional lateral area between a dime and a silver dollar, and it was sitting smack dab in the middle of said web. Thanks to my height, it was approximately nine inches from my face.
As an ento- and arachnophobic, needless to say, I reflexively exercised the higher frequency range of my voice. The fridge door was slammed shut, and I scurried away from the kitchen, to the opposite end of my house. However, upon arriving there, I had completely forgotten why I was moving so quickly - I could recall no motive for going away from the kitchen. In trying to mentally reconstruct my footsteps, it dawned upon me:
"Oh yeah, I think I wanted a Kern's."
Six times that day, this happened.
Over the years, my dad realized that both of his sons turn into fantastic pansies at the site of anything with more than four legs. So before #7, he had heard the screaming and came, grumbling, to vacuum the little monster up.
Hooray for the fathers of pansies.
'Twas not a proud day for my arms.
In Physics, Mr. Elder finally commenced setting up for the mythical Water Balloon Lab (btw, Nick, it's mythical thus far because of lousy weather) by pulling a large collection of pipes about twenty feet long out of the upstairs of building 7. How one gets upstairs, I don't know...but anyway, this collection of pipes and [steel?] cables weight collectively about a hundred pounds, so two other guys and I all moved it the long way around building 7. Of course, I was leading with my arms in a funny position to balance the mass.
After that, I went to work as a lawnmower boy at the house of one of my dad's co-workers. Today was the first day I tried out their weed-whacker. It's a nifty model, but it has no shoulder strap, so it must constantly be supported by the arms, and the twine at the end rotates at over 700 rpm on -idle-, and gives at least 3000 rpm with the trigger pulled. I didn't realize this rotational comparison until I had given my arms a few minutes of the pleasure of holding something vibrating at over 3000 cmHz...picture Mosquito energy with t near zero, concentrated in a rod the size of a broomshaft, and you have a picture of a jellifying weedwhacker in the hands. The weedwhacking lasted a half-hour.
Point being...my arms are so thoroughly exhausted now, I couldn't even pick up a mug of milk with one hand without contorting most of my torso behind it. Trying to cut tofu with a fork followed the same principle, but with the force directed downward, so looming was necessary to slice through my afternoon meal...
Tomorrow won't be a proud day for the arms either, I reckon...here's to liftin' my backpack later tonight.
Alex
...Even in me. Especially in me.
A little background info before I go into this first slew of pseudo-psycho characters...
In Physics, there are several types of energies that are considered, which exist to mainly sling water balloons (for all Honors purposes). These are potential energies, including elastic, gravitational, electrical, and chemical. Each of these energies has its own merry little equation to go along with it.
Over the past few days, I have shamelessly defined a new type of energy: Potential Energy-Mosquito. The equation for this one is stupidly simple: PEm is inversely proportional to the amount of sleep that I get the night before any given school day. Or, in other words:
PEm = k/t, k some constant like 2
One notes, as t approaches infinity, PEm approaches 0...or, if I sleep for a week straight, Moustique won't be too buzzy.
However, as t approaches 0, PEm approaches infinity. Case study: Today.
Last night, I had the merry joy of doing homework until 4 in the morning after the AP Physics test, a college History test, and an audition for re-entry to SOGO. This time is only there because of a rather scornful glare from dear ol' dad...
So, today, after 5 hours of sleep (I have late late arrival), the energy in me just fluttered out through every limb it could. My body flew to the left with every step I took down the hall, the French slapping game and some name-calling provoked me to flop my torso across a table in third period, and my right foot never stopped vibrating while I was sitting all day.
t has yet to be zero...who wants to guess what infinite Mosquito Energy is?