Canto XXXI

Wow, it's been two weeks. Well, as I mentioned in the previous post, school is back in session. And that has certainly put a bit of a crimp on my time. I haven't played FFXII in 2 weeks, and I think it's safe to say that will continue until spring break. But here's a quick recap of what's happening and some other fun bits 'n pieces.

Over the three day weekend Steph & I used our first Zipcar (in Portland they're Flexcars). Not bad. We did a whole bunch of shopping and errands around the town. I miss a car sometimes. It's certainly much easier not having one, but when you really want to bounce around doing a bunch of stuff, one comes in handy. Zipcar will hopefully take care of that need. We also did a lovely dinner at the local Peruvian place and had a good meal. Steph's been missing the South cuisine, and by South I mean South America.

Steph is always worried about how much we'll define the gender roles in front of our future children. She grew up in a more traditional household with Mother cooking & cleaning while Father would dispense wisdom from Mount Olympus. My family not so much, but we also had our traditional settings as well. I dispute the fact that we'll end up like her family (with Steph doing all the house work while I drink beer in my underpants) because I willingly help out with the stuff around the house, and even enjoy it. Then there are times like last weekend where I organized our books, did the dishes and folded laundry while Steph played World Of Warcraft for 4 hours. I think if anything, our kids will just be confused about the traditional gender arrangements.

This came up a little bit ago. It has to do with Alanis Morrisette's You Oughta Know. During the chorus, I heard the line (keep in mind I never look up lyrics until confronted with some situation like this one) "It's not fair to deny me or the cross-eyed bear that you gave to me." Now, this song is about a slightly crazy ex-girlfriend, and that's fine. I just thought that this little bit was highlighting how crazy she was, like she was holding onto some little stuffed animal that her now-ex had won for her at a carnival or something and then promised to love her forever. You know, something stupid and sappy, which she took a little too seriously. Now the real lyrics are "It's not fair to deny me of the cross I bear that you gave to me." First off, this must be a fairly mis-heard quote. Am I the only one who heard this wrong in this particular permutation? Well, Steph thinks now I'm crazy for thinking this. She can't believe I mis-heard it in this way, calling it completely ridiculous. She also thinks the narrator for the song isn't crazy. Just pissed-ff, but not crazy pissed-off. I retorted that if it's not crazy, then will she go down on me in a theater? I think Steph wanted to slap me. Is the singer-woman crazy? Am I crazy for mis-hearing? Maybe in general?

One of our chores from the three day weekend was to do a bunch of spring cleaning and bring old stuff (clothes and some junk) over to Goodwill (using the car!). This naturally led to a treasure trove of old things I haven't seen since we moved out here because they've been buried in various boxes. Pez with a Star Wars Stormtrooper dispenser! Lots of pictures of drunken parties in The Cube! And high school pictures, too! Well, those were all good times, but there was nothing like clearing out my T-shirt drawer. Now, just to make clear right now, I did not give away my old T-shirts. Steph is collecting them and wants to make some kind of quilt out of our used T's in another 10-20 years (roughly the time scale for her projects). Here's a quick list and maybe you can try and picture the shirt and bring back some good memories.
Healy's, Kokopalie, Living Known Animal Species, White Bread 5 for $2.70, Morning Dew, Ireland (black), Celtic Dragons, DeadHead, Carpe Diem, Know Your Insects, Smithsonian (purple), Star Wars TIE Fighter, Jerry Garcia, Athenes 2004, Why I? Why B? Why Me?, Colorado, Guiness, Ireland (off-white), Rabbits, Wassail, Blues Brothers, Lincoln High Seniors, Moon Jerry Garcia (purple long-sleeved)
So many memories...

Back to school, though. I "get" to teach 3 lab sections during the term, 2 nights per lab, roughly 3 hours per night from 6:30-9:30 pm. It really sucks. It's fun to explain how it works the first few times, then you have to do it 50 times to all the different groups and it's really draining. What's so hard about electrostatics? Well, that plus grading and my own homeworks to work on doesn't leave me much time to do anything fun, like research or games. But that little segway gets me to my research point of the day. Starting in January I got a new little thing to work on with the Advisor. It has to do with a conjectured bound on the viscosity of a fluid divided by the entropy density. The conjecture is that this is always greater than or equal to 1 over 4 pi. (Too bad Blogger doesn't support LaTex, I could make this look much nicer.) This was shown to be true for a large class of theories in the AdS/CFT correspondence, and conjectured to be true more generally about 3 years ago. I was reading about how to calculated these things in a general field theory framework (rather than through AdS/CFT) and working out some basic calculations the last few weeks. Then last week someone published a counter-example. So the last week was like the 5 stages of loss. You know, denial, anger, bargaining and so on. At first we didn't believe it, then we were pissed off that such a simple counter-example could be worked out. Now we've grown to accept it and I need to find something else to occupy what little free time I have. So that sucks. Science really blows sometimes. But I learned something that may be useful someday. And now I get to start that all over again.

Well, that's all the news that's fit to print! Peace!

Canto XXX

So now I'm back in school again. Actually, I think my classes will be alright. I've got some other stuff I'm trying to work on, as well. And now I'm even trying to get back into the gym a few times a week. Too much? Maybe. But I'd rather be too busy than sucked into FFXII and not get my PhD. Curse you, Squeenix! Are there anymore Final Fantasies coming out in the next two years? Oh God - what if one comes out Christmas time 2008, just 6 months before I'm suppose to graduate?

Thanks to Tim & Joseph for their music suggestions. I'll have to get around to doing that. Last year I heard the Fiery Furnaces, and they're wierd but kinda fun as well. It sort of depends on the mood I'm in. It always depends on the mood I'm in, actually. But that's just true for music.

Oh, but today is the Pushpinder friday meal! It's going to be a great day! Pushpinder is the Sikh who delivers delicious Indian food to MIT (mainly to other Indian students here, but thanks to my Indian officemate, I'm on the list). His friday meals are the best. If you ever visit, I get Pushp for lunch one of the days. And if you're here for fridays, you get the best lunch of all. I'm already hungry and I just had breakfast.

I'm also TA-ing advanced intro to E&M (8.022 for those familiar with MIT's course numberings). I did this last year and I'm hoping the work I did then will help make sure this year will be less (approaching minimal) work. Today is my first office hours. It's nice, because no one ever comes to these and I can just sit there and listen to music and work on some field theory. I never mind if people come by, though. It gets lonely in that tiny little room.

Canto XXIX

I think this is going to be the post of a lot of short points.

First off, some big news from the CTP bathroom front. They've switchted to 2-ply! This happened last week. This now makes MIT way better than Harvard, which is still using scratchy 1-ply (I had to go after String Theory earlier today). 2-ply, baby! MIT is so cool.

I was originally going to post about this January 25th, and then Febuary 1st, but I kept forgetting. For those wondering, Kermit is still dangling from our neighbors' porch. Still.

It's really cold. Ever since KH showed up, we've had maybe 3 days above freezing. My breath freezes to my beard. In some ways this is really cool to me, but I really just want the snow, but it's been incredibly dry. Just ask Steph how many bottles of moisturizer she's gone through.

I think people may have mis-interpreted my last post. I'm not really that concerned about whether or not I "make it" in physics. I love my life right now, and I'm very happy about what I'm doing. I hope I do become a physics professor, but that's not the whole reason I went into grad school.

The first comment from XXVIII says "You're a good husband", and no one came in with a WTF, so I'm a little disappointed in you guys for not making that observation. Well, this was in relation to the original post in which I aired a grievance about a tiff Steph & I had a little while ago. I wanted Steph to respond, but she said she would not do so in a such a forum (I think because she knows she was wrong, but that's just me goading her), and so I deleted that part of the entry about an hour after the original went up. But it's good to know that some random person was on my side after just an hour. Eric-2, Steph-1.

Super Bowl! An OK game, but nothing too special. Basically everything went the way everyone thought it would. The Bears are who we thought they were! The Colts are who we thought they were! I was rooting for Indy, though not for much particular affection for that team. (Although I did want to see people who kept saying Peyton couldn't win the big game eat their words - there are 22 starters + special teams & backups on a football team, it's not entirely a QBs fault when they lose, nor is it all his doing when they win. Yes the QB position is the most important, but it's not the whole story.) I just didn't feel that the NFC deserved to win a championship this year. That would be like an NL team with 85 wins taking the World Series last year... Oh wait.

I'm totally addicted to FFXII. They're really made having enough gil very hard. And usually the best stuff (especially early on) is on sale, not to be found in a dungeon. Very annoying. I'm constantly poor in the game. I feel a little dirty, but I'm playing with a guide book. I used to play through once, then play through a second time with hints & guides. But the games have gotten just too damn big and my time suddenly seems too precious. Or I'm just not 14 anymore. I've already cleared 40 hours, and I probably have 80+ to go before I consider the game to be 'complete'.

And a quick side note that Joe & Syd brought up a little while ago over at Syd's Thoughts. I really need to get more into the music scene. I know there's some decent stuff out there that I would enjoy and would have a chance to see them in their prime live, but I just don't have the will to do it. I feel some shame about this, but I first heard The White Stipes (bad example since they've made it and are no longer indie, but you'll get the idea) on SNL several years ago when they were doing the White Blood Cells tour. And I kinda liked it. So later I downloaded (illegally) some of their songs. And I kept liking it, so I bought the album. And then I bought the previous albums because I liked them so much. Now they're my favorite band making music and I've even gone to see them live. Really this is a success story for music sharing. But it all started because of some cheesy pop-culture cliche of being the music guest on SNL. I know there are more nifty bands out there I would like, but unless I'm directly exposed it won't do much good (Ben was kind enough to do this for me with Sleater-Kinney). I don't listen to the radio, watch music videos or read much in the way of pitchfork.com and so on. So I rely on you guys to make sure my music world stays open.

Take 'er easy for all us sinners out there! Peace!