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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 March 22, 2004 11:49 PM