Sunday, February 3 (35 minutes)
My pleasant jaunt with Ian and Jasper was graced from its beginning with a beautiful and enigmatic rainbow, which repeated itself, not as a double rainbow (although that too was present) but just repeating BIV part of ROYGBIV.
What caused this repetition? Multiple cooexisting raindrop geometries? A heretofore unobserved double sun? An unexpected refraction of some percentage of the light between the source rainbow and me? I may never know. But then again, I probably will know, eventually, at some point in my life. I suspect that with a concerted internet search I could figure it out right now. But I don't feel like it at the moment.
Another one I never really understood was why clouds don't fall down, if they're made of water droplets. One interesting explanation was that they do fall down, but the drops at the bottom keep dissolving and new ones form at the top. Also, they're very small and so wind resistance makes them fall slowly. Don't believe this though. I don't, really.
Also, here is a comic that was not suitable for print in the school paper:
UPDATE: 10 minutes later
I'm a liar. I couldn't stop myself from trying to learn about that ROYGBIVBIV rainbow. It works in a way somewhat similar to the colors in oil slicks and soap bubbles. The closest analog I was familiar with is actually Newton's Rings.
In a normal rainbow, light enters a raindrop and experiences a refraction on entering, reflection at the back, and refraction again on leaving. Different colors are refracted differently, causing the differentiation of colors you see in a rainbow.
But there's another key element - the reflection. The reflected light is polarized, and therefore susceptible to interference. What you'll find is that at a given angle between you, the raindrops, and the sun, light can actually follow a few different paths to get to you. Entering different parts of the raindrop and being reflected and refracted differently, but in such a way that the ultimate angle formed is the same.
So you've got light coming to you over a range of pathlengths. Depending on what that range of pathlengths is, you'll get either constructive or destructive inference of any one color.
The colors also have different wavelengths, so some colors will interfere destructively while others interfere constructively, resulting in striped patterns as you trace through angles.
Saturday, February 2 (70 minutes)
I have a fantasy about the Super Bowl. It'll be the halftime, and the speakers will boom over sixty thousand screaming fans "BUDWEISER, PEPSI, AND AMERICAN FOUNDATION FOR BETTER WRITING IN UNDERGRADUATE PHYSICS TEXTS ARE PROUD TO PRESENT THE SUPER BOWL XLII HALFTIME SHOW. FEATURING... CHARLES SIMONYI PROFESSOR FOR THE PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE AT OXFORD, RICHARD DAWKINS AND... TENZIN GYATSO, HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA...IN CONVERSATION MODERATED BY A RANDOM UNDERGRADUATE FROM CALTECH"
The crowd will erupt in a communal paroxysm of unbridled exuberance. Shouts of "Yeah, secular humanism rules!!!" and "Go Lama! Contemplate the shit out of that divinity" will spring from every mouth.
The three of us will emerge from under the grandstands accompanied by a fireworks display which, viewed from the north or south looks like Einstein's field equations of general relativity, and viewed from the east or west looks like the profile of Bart Simpson.
We'll take our seats, I'll hand up one hand and a sudden silence will descend swiftly on the expectant crowd.
The Dalai Lama will scooch forward in his chair, visibly a bit nervous, tap once at the microphone, and then say in a halting voice, "The key to happiness is first to love yourself, then to love others, then at last to understand it is the same."
Dawkins will be visibly annoyed, scowling with supreme rationality, and gesticulating emphatically he will declare in his refined British accent, "Yes, well that's all jolly good, but take a look at it this way..."
But I'll cut him off with a simple raised finger. "Excuse me just one second, Dick," I'll tell him politely. Then I'll stand up and expose my nipple to the cameras.
The End.
Also, I ran 70 minutes from my house to Caltech, then around some side streets in a fairly arbitrary manner. I noticed that the preponderance of heckling could be mapped out quite easily to correspond inversely to the median income of a residential neighborhood.
Friday, February 1 (90 minutes)
I realized just now that I forgot to describe my actual workout on Monday, being too busy talking about math. Monday I did 4x2mile with a lap jog recovery, going 10:53, 10:44, 10:43, 10:34. For the last two I took no splits, checking only the finish time. I think this was a good idea and I'm proud I had the discipline to pull it off.
Today I did 90 on the north field, picking up the pace through the last ten minutes or so. This is about as long of a run as I'm interested in pursuing right now, and to make it any more challenging I'll just start making the last 15 minutes up tempo, then the last 20, etc.
Thursday, January 31 (20 minute tempo, 4xPatton)
20 minutes in Lacy, going about 5:30/2 laps. Felt fine, but not completely locked in to tempo intensity. Afterwards I did "Renato Canova" hill sprints, just 4 x 10 seconds all out on the steepest hill convenient, Patton Way. Google Earth indicates an average slope of 11 degrees over the portion I ran.
Wednesday, January 30 (75 minutes)
Poked my way around the infield for 75. It was windy. That's all.
Tuesday, January 29 (30 minutes)
Today I completed the task Kangway assigned me of 10 reps of 100lbs on the bench. I even adhered to Ian's admonitions not to arch the back at all, and was completely conscientious of my form throughout the exercise. Afterwards I felt a slight smugness when I watched big muscly guys with lots of large weights on the bar grunting their way through a set - with arched backs. "Poor fools. They'll never minimize their chances of injury to the middle third of their bodies now," I thought.
After I did an easy recovery jog on the infield.
memoir: Summer, 1992
Monday, January 28 (4x2mile)
Yesterday, a calculus student I tutor was upset because she couldn't answer the test question:
"What is the largest possible area of a rectangle inscribed in a circle of radius 4cm?"
There are many ways to do the problem, but one of my agendas when I'm tutoring, and really the reason I'm in it at all (other than the, uh, money) is that I want to get people to forget the formulas for a minute and take a look at what is really going on.
I told her she didn't need to use calculus if she didn't want to. It was okay - however she wanted to solve the problem, if the method was valid, it doesn't matter whether it's the same one the teacher had in mind.
I was thinking she would then just do this:
But she couldn't, and I didn't know why, until I realized: when she read the problem, she read the word "rectangle". She didn't know that the appropriate rectangle, inscribed in that paragon of symmetry the circle, was inevitably a square.
Here is the problem with tutoring: you can't think about it. Someone asks you a question, you need to tell them the answer immediately. So I told her the part she was missing - that the rectangle had to be a square, by symmetry. She asked why.
I wanted to say, "if you switch the role of x and y, the circle remains the same, and so the rectangle must as well. Therefore the rectangle must have the same length and width" But just before it slipped from my mouth I realized that even as an intuitive suggestion it's not true.
Just because the circle has a symmetry doesn't mean the inscribed rectangle of maximum area must have it, too. The circle has a rotational symmetry, and no rectangle has that.
Instead, I shirked it. I took the problem another way, and showed her how to set up a parametrization and use the calculus techniques we had practiced, like this:
Then, halfway through, I saw a more direct way, so I made her work through it like this:
I try to make people solve the same problem over a few times when I can, so they might understand the formula is only a crutch which eventually they will drop. But what I really wanted to do was show how you could skip right to the shape being a square, which makes the problem almost trivial. It's a great approach because you should avoid complicated analytical deductions where intuitive arguments will do. Having that ability makes to a much better problem solver than drilling your way through hundreds of equations.
I wasn't sure how to do it, though.
What I was thinking was essentially this:
Suppose it is not a square. Then you can draw it to look like A. But by rotating the picture, it also looks like B.
But wait:
If you were to solve that problem, keeping the assumption that the correct rectangle is NOT a square, you'd get two answers - one for the rectangle that looks like A and another for the rectangle that looks like B. Two different values of l solve the blue problem, if the rectangle is not a square.
That seems preposterous to me. How could there be TWO solutions to that blue problem, where you're just varying how far from the center of the circle you draw a cord, then inscribing a rectangle from it, and maximizing the area of the rectangle. Obviously there can only be one solution, and so the pictures "A" and "B" must look the same. The rectangle must be a square.
But what if it isn't obvious to the student that the blue problem can't have two solutions? Why do I believe that's true? This is where it gets hard. I know it's true. I can prove it by actually doing the problem, but I want to prove it by a simple, direct, intuitive means with no equations. That solution has to exist, but I don't know quite what it is. Not without long hours of hard though, anyway. This makes me wonder - if something is so obvious, but I don't know why, then I don't really understand it. How much, then, of what I thought I understood very well, would prove to be equally murky in my mind if I were hard-pressed about it. This is kind of disturbing to me. If you know a simple, direct solution to how to show by the symmetry of the problem that the rectangle must be a square, please post and put my mind at ease.
1/28/08 - 2/3/08 Mud In The Toes (415 minutes, 2 tempo runs)
Free Computer
i have a dell dimension 4700 desktop that i don't use, and can't think of any potential use for in the near future. it needs a new power supply, and it's not actually worth the $50 or so to me to buy one, so i'm giving the computer away.
it's currently running ubuntu version whatevertheywereuptowhenthepowersupplybroke, pentium 4 processor, lots of hard drive space (i installed a second hard drive at some point), and i don't know what else. i was using it as a server previously, but i don't maintain the site anymore. you can have the keyboard and a mouse but not the monitor.
the catch is you have to come to me to pick it up (i live at 595 N garfield, 2.5 miles from campus)
email me back with a 50-200 word essay on why you want this computer and what you will do with it, and i will give it to the most worthy individual. deadline for entry is 10am monday february 4.
1/21/08 - 1/27/08 Wet and Mild (390 minutes, 1 steady state, 1 tempo)
Sunday, January 27 (60 minutes)
Here is a story. It is not a story with guns and long legs and dead people and kissy face stuff like movies it is not a deep moving story like one with deaf blind orphan half-human-half-chimpanzees trying to understand their speciesal identity and find their place in the world/marsupial exhibit it is not a simple beautiful story like Hemingway on ice with Chinese Confucianism but no firecrackers in it it is just a story about a mosquito with no future in life.
Today there was a rain on the outside of my window so I made a comic about dying insects and chaos theory and the comic was this:
Okay so i cannot draw because when i was little i fell down the stairs and hit my head on every single one, which was wood (the stairs) and then on the concrete floor and i remember it but it's a fake memory because i can see myself from five feet back and that's not possible but it really happened because my mom says so even though she was not there which is why i fell down the stairs in the first place and the fall made me a bad drawer and a wonderfully cogent of parceller of words like this.
That means I have to steal it. The pictures. The bug lamp and the strange attractor are easy but the mosquito is hard and made of chitin. You cannot digest him unless you are a frog, which you are not because then you cannot read, unless you are a prince but you are not because then you would probably have built up your immunity to most common poisons by now so that jealous nephews of dukes cannot usurp your birthright. That is not the case, so you cannot digest a mosquito even if you want to really bad. But you can have malaria, if you want, which literally means "bad air" because it gets blown in on the West Nile wind of the East (Orient Express)
So the mosquito, I was searching for it like it was searching for my blood, which is rich and juicy, and I found this:
It is beautiful. Like if someone took Monet and translated it into a prose poem, then Babelfished it to Russian, then Chinese, the Bushman language, then back into a picture again, except with more genius and less water lilies.
And there are more. Here is the site. And here are more of my favorites:
Saturday, January 26 (80 minutes)
I'd have done 90, but I had to go to work. Stupid work. FU and your gospel soul steel band with people dancing in the aisles of Caltech's auditorium. Things are weird.
Friday, January 25 (70 minutes, strides)
A fortuitous locker room encounter with Kangway left me one leaf of endive poorer and one running partner richer. Well worth the trade off. He claimed I could surely do ten reps of 100 pounds on the bench, so after running I did ten reps of the bar + 50 (that's 95 total, right?) So while neither of us is proven correct, I judge that Kangway wins the technical argument, in that I probably could do ten reps of 100 pounds, but I win the moral argument, in that I'm correct in judging myself to by embarrassingly weak.
I did eight striders, then afterwards three all-out 100m races against the sprinters. I lost them all (in fact Becky nearly beat me in one race), but was receiving very little assistance from the wet grass and mud I encountered in lane negative one. (Ian calls this lane zero. I think lane zero is the rail.)
Thursday, January 24 (15 minutes tempo)
15 min tempo at Lacy, negative splitting. My mind tells me this is too short for an effective tempo run. I think the main reason my mind says that, though, is that I read it in lots of books and on the internet. The reason people wrote it in books and on the internet is presumably that they have the wisdom of years of experience, but sometimes I suspect the reason is more that they read it from lots of OTHER people in OTHER books and OTHER internets. This is why I am still interested in creating a distance running log with an ulterior motive - to collect massive amounts of statistical data from runners.
Of course there would be tons of noise, but if you get thousands of people contributing you might learn something useful.
I'm reading a JavaScript book now, so I am in fact finally doing something towards making this happen.
Also, the data at existing running logs is probably enough to work with, if you're clever and can get your hands on it, but I also want to make a log just to have it. I honestly think I can make one better than the scores upon scores of competitors out there. This is probably just a reflection of my own arrogance, but I think I'll give it a shot anyway.
Also, here is the first minute of a presentation on the precession of a gyroscope, which I gave in science writing class today. The total presentation was 5 minutes, and I did not use a single equation or mention Newton's laws. I did give a symmetry argument though, which I thought was very clever and completely unconvincing to any intelligent person.
At the end of the workout I did 4x200 at "distance runner speedwork pace", meaning whatever pace I felt like going, which was probably 31/32.
Wednesday, January 23
off
Tuesday, January 22
60 minutes easy
Monday, January 21 (steady state)
I didn't run until late, and it was dark, wet, and cold. I felt pretty crappy for the first couple of miles, and my hamstring was still sore from last week. After four miles I started feeling better. I did ten 1600's consecutively on the track (too dark to go elsewhere) and split it 29:20/27:57 for the 8000m halves.
This was fine with me.
1/14/08 - 1/20/08 (365 minutes, 1 tempo run)
Sunday, January 20 (30 minutes)
I realized I was already ahead of last week, so I just jogged 30 minutes around the field conveniently located directly outside my apartment.
Saturday, January 19 (70 minutes)
Meeting of the NFTC, pleasant evening run. Learned some core exercises from Ian before a night of debauchery with Kiesz (he wouldn't sleep with me.)
I spent most of the afternoon learning a bit about bike maintenance from Katherine, Matt, and Ian. This was surprisingly (to me) fun. As a guideline, I don't engage myself with things physically. I read books, write things, tell jokes, do math, sit and think, and in general live a life of virtual reality - it's almost all in my head.
I don't remember the last time I built something more complicated than a couple of couch cushions propped up against a box fan. Even when I run, presumably a highly-physical activity, I normally go in circles around the fields. Other runners ask me how I avoid getting bored, which is not a question I would think to ask someone else. To me it's the same - I'm still just running. Only when I'm on the road there is more stuff to get in my way and I'm more likely to get injured on the hard surfaces. The fact that the tree I'm passing now is a different one than that I passed two minutes ago does not register as significant in my mind.
So bike maintenance, even at a simple level, is alien. Stopping to think, though, how different pieces fit into each other, devising a plan of action, and then actually implementing it to see something, however minor, happen in the real world was worth the time.
Thursday, January 17 (2 mile tempo)
Garfield 4 laps. 2:44, 2:40, 2:41, 2:37. Ran with Kiesz for a bit, the end solo. These felt fine. I was pressing a bit, but not taxed by the end, and felt like I could have gone twice as far in race conditions. My hamstrings were unusually sore, although they felt sore even while warming up. Also, before starting I was feeling a bit weak and light-headed, probably because I only ate a large mid-morning meal rather than a small breakfast and small lunch. I'll need to keep refining the way that works. It gets even more difficult to eat properly because I'm not on a regular schedule. My work situation is such that basically, whenever I'm offered work I take it. That means running gets pushed around, and operating on a floating schedule is tough for me.
Wednesday, January 16 (70 minutes)
16 striders in the park with the guys. Afterwards I raced some four year olds and eventually got them to run about 400m with me and Matt, mostly by taunting them, calling them too slow and telling them how tired they looked.
Tuesday, January 15 (70 minutes)
Today I ran for 70 minutes. Did a few long diagonal strides across the North Field at the end. Sometimes when I look back at my log from previous years it seems like I was training much harder in 2006 than I ever did near the end of 2007, even though I was running better then. So maybe I'll go bit by bit on increasing intensity of training. For the time being I'm thinking of working up to just two hard days a week, with miles and strides and whatnot thrown in between there.
Monday, January 14 (70 minutes)
South field at night. A few striders at the end. Still wearing shoes, although hopefully I will be liberated soon. Honestly, shoes now feel awful, and every time I run on grass with shoes on I have a nearly-irresistible urge to remove them, which I can fight only because of the old iron Eichenlaub will.
1/7/08 - 1/13/08 Once a Runner, Twice the Nipple Chafing (325 minutes, one tempo run)
Sunday, January 13 (65 minutes)
Saturday, January 12 (6400m progression run)
I decided it was time to stop dicking around and go run at least some sort of workout. My goal was to hit a disciplined 6:00/5:50/5:40/5:30. Of course I did not. The first lap of the second mile was too fast, and after that the plan was about as effective at enforcing itself as the U.N.
As soon as I put a watch on, I go delusional and begin to think I'm not running a workout, but operating a ratchet. The pace cannot get slower. Even if you began by sprinting the first turn to impress the hot chick in short shorts, the pace cannot get slower. If you ever get slower in a workout you're training to get slower in a race.
I'd like to change the focus, and perhaps tell myself that running with discipline in a workout is training to run with discipline in a race. But that's a big cognitive leap when your manly honor is on the line.
The splits were 5:55, 5:37, 5:24, 5:19. Not too impressive, considering that I was working pretty hard by the end, but it's a decent starting point. And then afterwards I was walking past the start line for the hundred, and the sky was unusually black, the moon a small, sharply-focused crescent, the lanes seemed so immaculately clean and straight next to the green of the infield, and a bat was swooping around, and all this for some reason seemed absolutely perfect to me. I remember thinking that it was preposterous for anyone to have problems when the world could look like that, and that I couldn't understand how anyone could ever have a body and not want to run, gulping down this perfect air and circling the transparent darkness. That's an odd sort of scene to find inspiring, but there you have it.
Thursday, January 10 (70 minutes)
It's a problem you might have heard before, but I'll recap it anyway, since the makers of a BBC documentary about China seem to be confused.
In a certain country, every adult has a spouse, and every couple starts off having one child. If the child is a boy, they stop having children. If it is a girl, they have a second child, and if that one is a girl, a third, etc until they get a boy. What will the male/female ratio be in this country (assuming men and women live equal lifespans)? Also, what is its population growth per generation (assuming life expectancy does not change over time)?
At first brush, it might seem there will be more boys than girls, because every family has a boy, half the families don't have any girls. However, there will be some families with many girls and only one boy. These two effects cancel each other exactly, so that the male/female ratio is 50/50 (this also assumes male and female births are equally likely).
Simple proof: each child born has a 50/50 shot at either sex. Regardless of the couple's history, it's still a 50/50 shot for their next child, so there's no way around having a 50/50 split for the entire population. So the high boy/girl ratio in China (6:5) is due to illegal abortion of girls. Also for a 6:5 ratio of births, you'd need to abort one of every five girls. That's about two million black market abortions of girls every year.
Second part of the problem (population growth):
A family has a 1/2 chance of having just one child (first child boy), a 1/4 chance of having two children (first girl and second boy), a 1/8 chance of having three children, etc. To get the expected number of children per couple, we multiply the # children by the probability of getting that many, and sum.
I know two ways to do it. First, evaluate the sum explicitly. A good trick is to break the sum into a grand sum of easier sums, like this:
1/2 + 2/4 + 3/8 + 4/16 + 5/32 +...
= (1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 +....) + (1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 +...) + (1/8 + 1/16 + ...) + ...
These you probably recognize. You can solve them by multiplying by two, and seeing that you get the same sum back again, plus twice the first element. For example:
S = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ...
2S = 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + ... = 1 + S
S = 1
Using this result on the sum-of-sums, the grand sum simplifies to
1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 +....
Which we now recognize to be 2. So in this scenario the population of the country remains stable. (In China, even without abortion, they officially don't go beyond 2 children, even if they're both girls. Also, not everyone marries and raises a family. Finally, you can also reduce the population significantly my marrying at an older age rather than having less children. That particular trick is a one-time shot though, and in the very long run population will start to rise again.)
There's a quicker way to get the answer than the sum-of-series. We already know there are just as many boys as girls. Further, every family has exactly one boy, so on average they must have one girl as well. That makes two.
Finally, the reason I'm watching documentaries about China and posting silly math problems related to their demographic regulations is that I'm pretty much decided to apply for the job in Beijing this summer. Anyone familiar with how to get a visa to visit China?
Also, I got an email today from Carlsbad describing the bib pick up instructions and free hotel accommodations arranged by the race. They never took my name off the list after I withdrew. But damn, if I'd known there was a free hotel room, course tour, special gear-stashing station, and free massages included in the deal I'd never have broken the arm to begin with.
Wednesday, January 9 (70 minutes)
I was relieved to wake up this morning (Thursday) and see that my foot was not covered in blood. Not my own, anyway. I feel like that's the sort of thing we all ought to check for once in a while. Wednesday afternoon I began running on the North Field, but was brought to a halt by a sharp but fairly inconsequential pain on the middle of the bottom of my left foot. When I looked at it it was actually bleeding. This was a relief.
The day before, I had been running barefoot on the south field, and cut the run short due to pain in the same spot. At the time I wasn't sure if it was a real injury or if I just stepped on some of the multifarious random crap that is strewn liberally across that field.
An injury is much worse, because it indicates something pernicious and possibly recurring, whereas stepping on something is a fluke. And at another level, an injury I psychologically perceive to be something wrong with me, and it casts a pall of weakness on my character. A fluke accident makes me a martyr, and allows me to complain indignantly to anyone foolish enough to stick around long enough to listen.
Tuesday, January 8 (40 minutes)
Stopped early, see above.
Monday, January 7 (30 minutes)
Stopped early. I was going out for a good long one, but my head felt weak and faint and I came back inside and slept all afternoon.
12/31/07 - 1/6/08 Year of the Retarded Gay Panda Bears With Their Heads on Fire (320 minutes)
1/5/07 (60 minutes)
Things have felt different, lately. I feel unfit, but this seems to elicit alternating resignation and anger at my plight rather than motivation to improve. The training environment is far from ideal here in Maryland, but my opinion is that as an intelligent adult I ought to be able to cope with such minor inconveniences as the sun going down and the ground being too cold to admit bare feet.
My parents gave me a breadmaking machine for Christmas (at my suggestion), and today it broke. I realized after fooling with it for a while that I was getting severely distressed by simple, unimportant machine. So after half an hour I stopped screwing with the thing, kneaded the dough by hand and baked it in the oven, instead. It was the obvious solution. I knew early on that I wouldn't be able to make the thing go. But I persisted, and as I did I wasn't thinking about making the breadmaker work, but about the incompetence of the manufacturer, the idiocy of the automated phone system (it WAS poorly-designed, even in retrospect, but still) and in general all sorts of negative things that were irrelevant to the facts of the situation. I adopted the correct solution slowly and grudgingly rather than readily and impartially, as I would normally expect from myself.
I pride myself on an equanimity which has been tenuous and fleeting since the time, two or three months ago now, when my training started to deteriorate. I think this is evidence that my physical and mental states are more closely intertwined than I like to imagine.
I hold an irrational, egotistical belief that my "mental self", the "me-ness" of who I am, is an independent, invincible entity whose main purpose is the systematic mastery of whichever tasks either present themselves or are selected. The mastery of the physical body is one example. This is how I view the source of competitive drive.
This outlook, I am beginning to realize, is sophomoric and ultimately untenable. It is philosophically questionable to suppose there exists some sort of "external Mark" existing as an ineffable emergent phenomenon, floating around in nether-space and too strong to be overcome by such trivialities as brain chemistry. Why I have been genetically programmed to believe in such ghosts (as most humans seem to do) is a mystery that I may speculate upon at another time. But for the moment, it's mostly just an illusion I wish to disavow myself of.
I don't mean that I want to stop believing in sentient existence, free will, and the human soul. I mean that I want to stop believing that mine, in particular, are so damn privileged.
1/4/07 (90 minutes)
Good true long run, the first in a while. Felt great after two easy days. Check out the YouTube of last year's conference championships.
1/2/07 (30 minutes)
Pontificating on philosophy:
part 1
part 2
My tibilias anteriors were starting to get sore from all the road running (I ran after dark again and had to use the road), so I came back in early. But honestly I was happy to do so, because it was truly cold for the first time since I came home (a few degrees below freezing, with strong winds), and California has made into a sissy in that regard. I think freezing weather is fine, but with wind it's nasty, and my hands were getting numb.
Enough bitching. I'm done writing for now.
1/1/07 (70 minutes)
Managed to get out while there's still some daylight, and ran laps around the back yard. The only problem is that these are only one minute long, which means I'm turning almost constantly, and I can feel that wearing on my ankles and knees somewhat while I run. My legs feel fine now, though.
I decided to name this the Year of the Retarded Gay Panda Bears With Their Heads on Fire because it's a new year, but calling it the year of the rooster or dog or Quetzalcoatl or whatever name they already have for it did not seem apt. The Olympics are coming to Beijing, and here are the official mascots:
Incidentally, there's a chance I will be going to Beijing this summer as well. The summer camp I've worked at the past two years is starting an overseas program with a campus in Beijing, where they'll offer cosmology. Technically, I don't know cosmology (not on a college course level), but I my boss doesn't know that I don't know it. Also, they have a picture of me on their website.
I'm allowing them to use my gorgeous visage for free advertising, so they clearly owe me one. How could they not send me wherever I want to go? And let's see - your options are to do the exact same thing you've done the past two summers, living on the Stanford campus for six weeks, or to go to freaking Beijing, travel expenses paid, right before the start of the Olympics. Not a hard choice.
Also from their site, this guy
lived in our dorm last year. He's Kenyan, but he's fat and slow and never runs except when there's peanut butter at the end of it. One night he saw some non-affiliated kids sneaking around the dorm and beat the shit out of them all, simultaneously, until the cops came and handcuffed the camp director in his pajamas. True story.
12/31/07 (70 minutes)
ran around my backyard breaking wind in two senses. when i finally ran out of gas (in one sense), i felt abandoned and started making farting noises with my mouth, but they came out all wrong and so i gave up and just listened to the empty silence of winter.
later my parents went to bed at 10:30PM so i stayed up alone and watched the ball fall in times square, at which point i spontaneously ejaculated. true story.