Journal entries in 'Ruminations' for April, 2005

Interestingly enough, being stuck down here all alone has actually helped increase the number of friends I consider close. In Clemson, I kind of focused all my social energies on the select few friends that occupy the "Govies & more" group on my buddy list, to the exclusion of most of my other existing friendships.

Being down here and unable to spend every minute of every day hanging out with Meg et al. has forced me out of the comfortable hiding hole into which habit had driven me, and caused me to broaden my net and reestablish contact with all the friends I had fallen out of contact with, or that I'd never really gotten to know well.

While my life is still very lacking in physical interaction, socially I've actually improved, and I'm now good friends with a much larger group of people than the small circle I was limiting myself to before. I hate having to grudgingly admit that something you'd cursed and despised has actually been beneficial to you.

I've always hated talking on the phone, mostly because telephonic conversation seems to consist mostly of accidentally talking over each other and having to stop and say "sorry, what?" To me this seems like a flaw inherent to the design of the telephone; you can't see the other person, so you have no indication when they are about to start talking. Online chatting lacks this feedback as well, but the software enforces serialization and cleanly puts the messages one after the other. Talking on the phone is sort of like chatting with a program that prints the messages as soon as you type them, even if the other person sent something at exactly the same time. That kind of conversation would have exactly the same problems. So with such a critical design flaw, I just don't understand how the telephone has gotten so popular. It seems like it should have been a flash in the pan invention that quickly fizzled, like the pogo ball.

[Entry Continues...]

With my 25th birthday and everything, I've been feeling a bit of remorse about the uncontrollably swift passage of time. I know I'm not old yet, but I'm older than I want to be. Sort of a quarter-life crisis, as it were. But George Carlin says, "Life is a series of dogs." And I'm still on my first. It feels like Chelsea has been with me all my life, and that's almost true.

And sure, she's getting a bit old, but the fact is, if my first dog is still alive and well, I don't have anything to complain about.

[Entry Continues...]

Some bands or albums are inextricably linked to places, and usually cars, in my memory. Bad Religion - Stranger Than Fiction is driving in the Bonneville with Andrés and Bryan. NOFX - Punk In Drublic is hanging out with Bryan and Andrés when we were living in Estancias (particularly, all of us harmonizing along with Linoleum in the Bonneville while leaving the neighborhood). Goldfinger is driving around in PR in the Camry when I was in high school (particularly, passing by that no-name pizza place on Esmeralda). Snake River Conspiracy is driving around in Clemson in the Camry (particularly, looking for parking in the Calhoun Courts parking lot). Hole is pulling into the CVS parking lot in Ohio with Cat. OSI is walking along the waterway between my host family's house and the subway station in Japan. Cafe Tacuba is riding the subway in Japan on my way to class. The Cranberries is driving to El Yunque in Papi's Lexus with Andrés, Meg, and Amy last Christmas. Godspeed, Rachel's, and Thornley all bring to mind working at Xapiens, but we'll have to let them settle a while to see if they will become distilled down to a singular image like the rest.

Am I the only one who has such specific memories associated with music?

Man, why is it that reading pretty much any page on MathWorld leads to an immediate feeling of inadequacy and stupidity? It's like someone going way overboard with one of those jokes where they make up technical-sounding words to ridicule the concept of jargon. Except it's all real:

In many cases, the Hausdorff dimension correctly describes the correction term for a resonator with fractal perimeter in Lorentz's conjecture. However, in general, the proper dimension to use turns out to be the Minkowski-Bouligand dimension (Schroeder 1991).

I tend to feel I'm relatively well educated, but reading things on that website makes me feel like an six-year-old stumbling across his older brother's Calculus textbook. I felt the same way watching A Beautiful Mind. I'm so in awe of mathematicians. I can't imagine being conversant in all of those terms and knowing what to do with them. But I'd like to be.

[Entry Continues...]