March 31, 2004
No Motivation
Wow, all day long I've had absolutely no motivation to study for Friday's midterm in Adv Math Methods, so I've spent most of the evening procrastinating, by playing frisbee, talking to people online, sorting/deleting my email inbox (from over 600 messages to less than 40, wheee), getting photos together so that I can upload some photo albums soon hopefully, getting music and movies from people off the network, talkin to people on IM and Mike on the phone ... yeah, it's been a really productive evening for me. :-) Anything to avoid homework.
Just two more days of class until Spring Break . . . I can't wait! Everyone here is really anxious for Spring Break to arrive, it's long overdue. I'm really looking forward to having a week to relax, read, practice piano, hang out with Mike & Kevin, see my family and all that jazz, with a minimum of homework.
I found out from Mike tonight that the Cumberland Marching Band is gonna be playing at the Twins-Brewers game at the Metrodome on a Sunday in June, so we're making plans to go to that for sure, along with hopefully at least one or two other Twins games before I leave for Australia. And in honor of the start of the baseball season, I'm posting a link to an archived article by The Onion, "Yankees Ensure 2003 Pennant By Signing Every Player in Baseball." It's absolutely hilarious (and so true)!
Posted by Jared at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)
March 30, 2004
Levitating Frogs
Okay, so I guess I need to start getting more than just 5-6 hours of sleep at least once in awhile. I'm currently on a streak of over a week of not getting any more than that in a night, and I'm startin' to feel it. Take, for instance, this morning in Adv Math Methods at 8am. Now granted, it's usually hard for me (or anyone) to stay fully alert in that class on any given day, but today was particularly bad. I caught myself on several occasions writing gibberish in my notebook instead of what Prof Mellema was writing on the board. That's how tired I was. Not good. I haven't written tired gibberish in my notebook since last spring when John & I had to pull an all-nighter to work on a formal lab for Electronics. Man, my notes that day from Modern Physics and Accelrated Logic were really funny, hehe. For example, in Modern I labeled some graph's axis as "Tucker." Don't ask me why, because I have absolutely no idea what was going through my head at that point. Thank goodness today wasn't nearly as bad as that, hehe.
Tonight there was a Sigma Xi talk in Olin 103 by a professor from Florida State University, on diamagnetism and levitating frogs. It was really interesting, and one of the best physics talks I've been to in my time here. Apparently Florida State has the world's top research lab for magnetism, with large superconducting and resistive magnets that are capable of producing magnetic fields as large as 45 Tesla. That's ginormous! The currents that they use to generate magnetic fields that powerful are on the order of 60,000 Amps. I believe he said that they were able to make frogs levitate using diamagnetic (as opposed to the better known ferromagnetic and paramagnetic) fields of around 33 Tesla. (FYI for non-physics people: the earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 Tesla, and anything above 5 Tesla is considered a very strong magnetic field.)
Well, time for me to get some sleep for a change.
Posted by Jared at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)
Gophers in the Final Four!
Another day, another few crappy Math Methods problems done. Almost this entire assignment was pointless, none of us really knew how to do it, and even after we found out how to do the problems we didn't know what we were doing or what the point of it all was. Aaargh!
On the plus side, I had enough time to watch the entire Elite 8 women's basketball game between the Gophers and Duke. Man, what a great game! The Gophers beat Duke, the #1 team in the country, 82-75. Towards the end of the game there were probably at least 200 of us in the caf watching the game on the TV and the big screen, cheering on the Golden Gophers, it was really cool! Hopefully I'll be able to watch Lindsay Whalen, Janel "Shaq" McCarville, and the Gophers take on UConn next weekend while I'm home (translation: the game better not be on cable).
Today's strange news story comes to us from California, where a man celebrating his 88th birthday by taking a ride in a vintage biplane, decided to commit suicide by jumping out of the plane in mid-air. What a way to go.
Posted by Jared at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2004
Jonny the Prospie
I know I haven't posted in a few days, but there's been good reason, believe me. I just figured I'd post now and not wait for the evening like usual just in case any of you out there were wondering if I was still alive or anything.
I had my three midterms on Friday, and boy am I glad they're over. My E&M test didn't go so well. I nailed the first problem, but miserably failed the other two problems. Sigh. We were all more than a bit annoyed at Paul for that test. But then my Japanese and Visual Experience midterms went pretty well, I'm fairly confident I got A's on both of those. Two outta three ain't bad I guess. I have just one midterm left, Adv Math Methods on Friday, our last day of class before Spring Break. Man is that test gonna suck.
Have any of you Gusties ever gotten lost in SSC? Well, I sure did on Friday afternoon. I was taking Jonny, a prospie (more about him later), to an appointment at Prof. Jenner's office, and I totally couldn't find the so-called "Malkovich Floor." Somewhat embarrassing. I'm not incompetent, really! After wandering all throughout that strange messed-up building I finally found it though. Behold! The 1 1/2 floor!
Friday evening a bunch of us played football with the physics club. We juniors tried to take our aggressions out on Paul and his team of seniors and faculty, but we lost 3-1. Let it be noted, however, that they had a 7-5 person advantage, if you count Paul's 8-yr old son, who actually can play (he caught a TD for them). Sigh, we'll just have to get Paul some other way.
Both Friday and Saturday night I hosted Jonny, a prospective student from Plymouth, Massachussetts. He's a really cool kid, I really hope he decides to come to Gustavus next year. On Friday night we visited Liz & Jolene in Uhler with a few other physics guys, watched some basketball here in 202, and then went to see the free campus movie in Nobel, "The Last Samurai." It's the second time I've seen it, and despite the historical inaccuracies that Josh whines about, I thought it was a good movie. It also has one of the coolest battle scenes I've ever seen in a movie, it's quite striking visually.
Yesterday I worked at the Admissions Spring Open House from 9-2:30 (that's what Jonny was here visiting for), giving a couple tours and just helping out in general. Unfortunately, for my res hall tour at 1pm it started raining, and it rained the whole rest of the day. Kind of a crappy turnaround from Friday, when it was 70 and sunny and just gorgeous out.
Last night after Jonny and I watched the Oklahoma State - Saint Joseph's basketball game (St Joe's was my last chance to actually have a team in the Final 4 that I'd picked in my bracket, but with an OK St victory, Jonny has a good chance to win some money in his bracket, so all in all I'm fine that St Joe's lost), he and I went to Mankato with Josh to go see the new movie "The Ladykillers." It's an absolutely hilarious comedy written by the Coen Brothers, and starring Tom Hanks. Josh and I loved it; Jonny did too, although he thought it was kinda strange (which is natural, since he apparently hadn't seen a Coen Brothers film yet), hehe. I highly recommend it to everyone out there, it's a great movie! After that Jonny & I stayed up for awhile just talking about tons of stuff, high school, college, life, pretty much everything. I really enjoyed hosting him this weekend, he's such a nice kid. I'm hopin' that I'll see him on campus next year when I get back from Australia, but we're still gonna keep in touch even if he chooses a different college, so that's cool. Did I mention that he's a cool kid? :-) This morning he left for the airport to go back home.
In other news, Josh got the problems with the mysql database on the seenoevil server fixed. The database was corrupted, which was causing our posts to be displayed in a completely random, messed-up order, and it was what was also preventing us from importing all of our old posts properly before. So now we have all of our old posts back, and in the right order too! Oh, and you'll probably notice that on the sidebar on the left I've added a link to the Section 202 webcam, so you can watch us sitting there on the couch putting off our homework, hehe. It updates once every minute, so it's not like you're watching a live-action movie or anything, check it out.
Also in other news, I've finally decided on a laptop. I'll be buying a new 15" Macintosh PowerBook over Spring Break, so that I'll hopefully have it sometime by the end of April. Needless to say my sectionmates are quite happy that I'm getting a Mac, and I've also been getting a lot of grief from my oldest brother Nathan and some of my other Windows friends, hehe. It's a bit pricier than a PC laptop, but I'm willing to pay a bit extra for what will hopefully be a very reliable, versatile, portable machine for me while I'm in Australia, and then at grad school. But once Josh and I get our PowerBooks, we'll have 13 -- THIRTEEN -- working computers in our section! And I'll have the best laptop of them all, mwuhahahaha! Plus, I may have convinced Carl to also purchase a PowerBook over Spring Break, assuming his mom doesn't kill him for doing so. :-) Go PowerBook lust!
Well, I suppose I should stop procrastinating sometime soon, and actually get going on my E&M assignment. Sometime this week I'll get some photos posted from President's Ball earlier this month, Carl finally got the pictures loaded onto his computer. I'll post something when I put the album on my webpage. Now time for Olin...sigh.
Posted by Jared at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2004
Matt Wertz at Proclaim
Hooray for spring finally arriving! It was so nice out today, it got up to 55. The whole rest of the week is gonna be super-nice too, with highs around 60 (62 tomorrow!) and a chance of some thunderstorms (yay!) thrown in. The one downside of all this nice weather is that it's making it really hard for any of us to sit inside and study. All of us physics majors have been cooped up in Olin for so many months that we just have this uncontrollable urge to play frisbee as often as possible. :-) I suppose as long as we use it as just a 45-minute study break no more than twice a day we'll be okay, hehe.
Tonight at Proclaim they had Matt Wertz and David Barnes in concert up in Alumni Hall. They're fairly well known Christian musicians from Tennessee and Mississippi. It was a pretty good concert, about a couple hours long. I had never heard of either of them before, but I liked their stuff. I didn't have the money to buy a CD, but hopefully someone here on campus with iTunes will have it.
And then I have links to two kinda startling stories. The first is from Florida, where a 5-year old boy was caught sprinkling marijuana on his friend's lasagna in the elementary school cafeteria. It doesn't appear that the kid is really in trouble, but the school and police are investigating the parents, or trying to see if an older kid possibly gave him the bag to keep. But that would've been some interesting lasagna to eat, hehe. The second story is from Indiana, where a 4-year old boy brought $7500 worth of crack cocaine "rocks" to his Head Start program. The parents fled, and the police haven't found them yet, but again the kid isn't really in trouble. I guess not even preschool or elementary schools are immune against drugs.
Well, time to get back to studying. A little bit more tonight, and then major hit-the-books time tomorrow. I hate midterms.
Posted by Jared at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2004
Wind Power Weekend
So I had a pretty productive weekend overall, largely due to the amount of time that Carl & I spent analyzing weather data. Chuck is going to be meeting with President Peterson and a few other profs on Wednesday to discuss some of the issues involving the feasibility of installing wind power at Gustavus. We're hoping that the president will be fairly receptive to the idea, because if he gets behind it, he can sell it to everyone else, and then the board of trustees will follow his lead. But anyways, because Carl and I hadn't really done anything on the project at all since I joined it last fall, we decided to kick it into gear this weekend, so that Chuck would actually have some data, graphs and estimations of power production to show the president this week. So we spent a good deal of time working on everything on Friday night (8:30pm-2:30am) and Sunday night (10pm-2am), and we managed to get everything done that we really could/needed to do at this stage, so that's always a plus.
Aside from analyzing weather data for the wind project, on Friday evening I played some basketball with some physics people. It was still tons of (exhausting) fun, even though I'm sorely out of practice and incredibly rusty (and not even all that good to begin with). Some of my shots had no business going in the net, I'll tell ya that much right now. :-)
On Saturday I did my entire E&M assignment, and then watched "21 Grams" in Dave's room with him, Andy, Nate, Carl, Jolene, Seth & Laura. It was a really good movie, although kinda depressing. Very non-linear too, it took me about a half hour to really start to have much of a clue of what was going on.
Sunday was a nice, fairly lazy day. I was finally able to just sit down and watch a few hours of college basketball! That hasn't happened in quite awhile, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially since all the games were really good and close. Since I had Gonzaga over Stanford in the final, and Mississippi State and St Joseph's being the other two Final Four schools, my only hope to recoup any money at all will be for St Joe's to make it to the Final Four and for Duke to lose as soon as possible (Kentucky needed to lose too), among a few other scenarios. My bracket is totally shot to pieces, but so is just about everyone's, so that will have to be my only solace for the time being. Stupid Nevada. But now I'll root for them to go as far as possible anyway, since I love the Cinderella teams. :-) A Nevada-UAB final? Or what about Xavier, 'Bama or Vandy? Hey, anything's possible!
I wanted to post this last week, but since the blog was down I was unable to do so. It's a really good editorial by the down-under daily newspaper The Australian, about why appeasing the terrorists will never work, just like appeasing Hitler didn't work prior to WWII. Some will whine, "But can't we just all get along?" My answer to that is a resounding "no." Evil must be defeated at every turn, whenever and wherever it presents itself. Also, check out Condoleezza Rice's editorial from today's Washington Post as a rebuttal to all this Richard Clarke nonsense.
Well, I should probably think about resuming studying/reading. This week is gonna be pretty rough it would appear, seeing as how I have three midterms on Friday, along with a Math Methods assignment due. Sigh. Midterms are always way more stressful than finals, because usually all your tests come at once, and are compounded by homework in all your classes simultaneously, whereas finals come one, at most two at a time, and you can take time to focus exclusively on them. Oh well, I'll survive.
Posted by Jared at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2004
I'm Back!
I just got done uploading all my posts from before March 9, when Josh took the old webserver, Tribble, offline, and started switching everything over to the "newer" one, Smurf. I went through and put all the posts from each month together in the same post, so they'll be a bit more easily accessible and readable that way, as opposed to making it all one giant post. Anyway, now that I'm done with all that, and now that I've fixed my puzzling formatting problems, I'll be resuming my regularly-scheduled nightly postings! But for now I've gotta go do some homework and watch some of the NCAA tourney on TV. My bracket is totally busted though, since I had Gonzaga, Stanford, Mississippi State and Saint Joseph's all making it to the Final Four, and St Joe's is the only one of those to make it even to the Sweet 16. Aaaaargh! Well, there goes $3.
Posted by Jared at 02:43 PM | Comments (0)
March 02, 2004
Spring Break!
Spring Break is finally here! At long last! My test this morning in Adv Math Methods actually went alright, I was quite surprised. I think I have a decent hope of pulling out a B on that test. I was counting down the minutes in all my other classes, and then I gave what to be the longest campus tour ever this afternoon for Admissions. The family I toured wanted to see just about everything: Sohre (in addition to Wahlstrom), the digital arts lab in Confer, the greenhouse in Nobel, the scene shop in the theatre building, and then Svenska Huset (the Swedish House) in Int'l Center. All told, my tour took about 1 hr, 40 min (my tours normally run about 1 hr, 10 min for comparison). But then after clocking out I had to go download wind data from the weather stations around campus for the wind energy research project, meaning that it was after 5:30 before I finally left for home. Sigh.
I stopped at the Mall of America on my way back, and almost spent a lot more money than I wound up spending, hehe. I was tempted by a 40% sale on the game "Cranium" at Wizards of the Coast (their MOA store is closing apparently), and then some cool fitted Gophers hats at College Shop. Next time I head through the Cities, I might just have to buy those. :-) But the reason I stopped at MOA was to go to Barnes & Noble, where I bought three books: In A Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson (an absolutely hilarious travel book on Australia, the country that "harbors more things that can kill you in extremely nasty ways than anywhere else" -- I *highly* recommend it to anyone who's even just looking for a good read or wants to laugh), and then two Lonely Planet travel guides, one for Australia and one for New Zealand. I think we're gonna be trying to figure out over Spring Break what our travel plans are gonna be.
Oh, and I got the "official" packet of info from IFSA today that detailed the stuff about the group flight, which lands in Melbourne on the morning of July 6, after departing Los Angeles the evening of July 4. Sucky. I mean, I'm not complaining about spending a week longer down there, but why couldn't it be just one or two days later, so that I could catch the fireworks on the 4th of July up here in Cumberland with all my friends?? I'm really bummed about that, but I'm still determined to try and have some sort of shindig that weekend up here, even if it might not involve watching the fireworks on the shores of Beaver Dam Lake.
Don't be disconcerted by the image on the webcam not changing all week. The webcam was turned off last night, and won't be turned on again until we get back from spring break. So I guess we'll all be treated to the "Ben & Matt show" for the next 10 days, hehe. The plus side is that Andy was allowed to stay on campus during break, so we didn't have to unplug any of our electronics out in the section, including the webserver. Josh had previously been planning on taking that back to South Dakota with him and trying to get it to work out there, but it's just a lot nicer being able to leave it on campus where it's working just fine, and not tempt fate.
That's about it for now. Oh, and I was mildly depressed when I saw that there still are a few piles of snow here and there in this part of northwestern Wisconsin. Jake was jealous when I told him that we really haven't had any snow on the ground in Saint Peter since the last week of February, hehe. Why won't it just melt already? Well, at least the creek is roaring. Ya gotta love Wisconsin.
Posted by Jared at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)