Energy, etc.

I'm doing my part as a brainwashed minion to shamelessly promote this website. I don't care whatsoever about climate change because I don't think human intervention has anything to do with it, but Al Gore made a good point in his speech today:

In my search for genuinely effective answers to the climate crisis, I have held a series of "solutions summits" with engineers, scientists, and CEOs. In those discussions, one thing has become abundantly clear: when you connect the dots, it turns out that the real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices. Moreover, they are also the very same solutions we need to guarantee our national security without having to go to war in the Persian Gulf.

And hey, if it makes the climate crisis doom-criers happy, that's just icing on the cake!

So here's the plug: http://www.wecansolveit.org. Go there and do... something. Ride the bus tomorrow. Turn off your A/C when you leave. It'll save you money and save the world too. How many opportunities do you have in your life to be altruistic through selfishness? :-)

I would like to know who these "several senators" are.

Uh... OK.

Here's my favorite part:

In Congress, several senators have proposed that Iraq should start paying for some of the military's fuel costs because of its large oil reserves.

Translation:

We're going to invade you, cripple your infrastructure, then make you foot the bill. Capice?

RIP, Tony Snow

Cancer = :-(

Let's punish the FAMILIES of terrorists. That'll show 'em.

Oh, Israel...

What do you think this crowd is doing?

So what do YOU think they're doing? Trying to get tickets to a Hannah Montana concert? Waiting for those sweet Black Friday deals at Best Buy?

Close.

This is a picture of South Koreans protesting in Seoul after the government decided to lift the ban on importing US beef. "Who cares?" you may ask. While it is true I am indeed not Korean, I do have a profound appreciation for their ability to gather in large numbers. For example, where do you think is the largest stadium in the world? You guessed it - Pyongyang. Seriously, it takes a rock concert to get that many people in one place here in the US. All Korea has to do is make one change to their foreign policy, and BAM. Out come the masses.

I took a bunch of pictures of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium here at UF, and I was proud of standing on the field of what I thought must surely be one of the largest stadiums (stadia?) in the country... that is, until I saw that stupid May Day stadium in Pyongyang, which is nearly twice as large. Thanks a lot, Korea.

Bugs like my ears, and more soaring

Every time I leave the physics building, wherever I go a cloud of gnats buzzes around my ears. I don't feel them anywhere else on my head - only my ears. I probably look pretty strange to passers-by, grabbing and rubbing and scratching my ears as frantically as I do. It's not easy to look natural trying to swat a tenacious cloud of bugs away from my head, I've found.

And just when I thought the soaring may have taken a hiatus...

Viva España!

Germany 0-1 Spain

This guy is selling his entire life on eBay.

Seriously. My favorite part is that his friends "were willing to be introduced to the highest bidder." Those are some deep, meaningful friendships he has right there. I'm seething with jealousy.

More soaring

And thanks to Mum for finding this one:

Aaaaand... still soaring

Trying to ignore people passing you on the sidewalk is pretty dumb.

Here is an exercise in futility if I've ever seen one. I'm walking on a sidewalk, and there's a person coming towards me on the same sidewalk. For some reason, I decide, "Nah, I'd rather not acknowledge that I see them." So I desperately try to feign ignorance - I stare at the ground, or I suddenly become supremely captivated by that cloud formation, or I get the urge to look - no, stare - at my watch, even though I know exactly what time it is. My favorite though, is when I just stare straight ahead as they pass. That gives the impression that, if the person passing me said hello, I would suddenly turn and look at him, completely startled, and say, "Oh! I'm so sorry, I didn't see you there." Right.

Heaven forbid we bump into each other once in a while.

Riccardo Chailly and Martha Argerich: young and old

How cool is this?!

Young: Sergei Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3
Old: Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto

Still soaring...

More (moar?) on soar

I found this on NPR.org this morning. I rest my case:

P.S. To those news agencies guilty of using such hackneyed language, here is a list of alternatives, courtesy of my industrious mum, courtesy of Thesaurus.com. You're welcome:

aggrandize, amplify, augment, boost, build, build up, burgeon, enlarge, escalate, expand, extend, grow, magnify, mount, multiply, proliferate, rise, run up, snowball, swell, upsurge, wax

The soaring popularity of the verb "soar"

I don't recall a single instance in the last... six months or so in which I read an article or heard a newscaster report on the price of gasoline or oil or food without seeing or hearing the word "soar." It seems the only thing they are able to do is soar. They can't skyrocket or rise or grow. Only soar. I wish that, just once, somebody would use a different verb in that context.

A conflict of [televised] interest

So last night I was watching one of my favorite movies, Ocean's Eleven, on TV. Whatever channel it was one had one of those "series" in which they play various movies under that series name that may or may not have some loosely connected theme with one another. This one was called the "Make a Difference" series or something like that. Anyway, at the commercial break the announcer said, "This 'Make a Difference' series presentation of Ocean's Eleven is brought to you by UNICEF."

...UNICEF? Seriously? A movie about robbing casinos is sponsored by an organization which feeds starving children? ...Ok.

Particle physics is the lamest field of physics ever.

I personally believe it is also the primary contributing factor to the stigma that scientists (but especially physicists) are unapproachable and that the subjects they study are hopelessly confusing for any outsider. In Physics for Poets Robert March writes:

To emphasize the uniqueness of these [sub-atomic] particles, [Murray] Gell-Mann chose the fanciful name quarks. This peculiar choice of terminology proved to be fateful. Following Gell-Mann's lead, particle theorists have tended to play a game of "one-upmanship" with terminology, resulting in a lexicon of "cute" names that tend to baffle (and sometimes outrage) nonspecialists. This practice has often proved a barrier to wider understanding, however much fun it may provide for insiders. Thus one of the more confusing and annoying tasks you will face in the rest of this chapter will be to wade through a lot of verbiage that is far from self-explanatory.

Smiling at pictures of me smiling

Whenever I look at a picture of myself smiling (a rare occasion, mind you), I always smile back. Not only that, I smile the exact same smile I smiled in the picture. I think I've done this all my life, and to be honest I have no idea why I noticed I do it at all, because it is a completely subconscious response. I don't even know how my brain rationalizes it. Am I critiquing myself? Does it genuinely make me happy? I'm really drawing a blank here. I wonder if other people do this too.

Weird bathrooms, jumping the [punchline], farting vents, and a really funny looking guy

So I've been studying physics since about 8:45 this morning. Time to take a break, I think.

For supper I went to a barbecue restaurant right next to the Delta Cafe. I thought the sign just said "Buddies BBQ" but the "B" actually doubles as a "3" so the full name is "3 Buddies BBQ." I've been driving past that restaurant at least once a week for almost three years now, but only today did I realize what the sign actually said. And the only reason I came to that realization at all was because somebody else was talking about it in the car.

Anyway, I've been on this I'm-going-to-drink-80-gallons-of-water-per-day stint for the past few weeks. (I suppose I take pride in my colorless pee.) I went to the restroom before I left, and was a bit taken aback by what I saw.

Take a closer look at the positions of the sink and the urinal. There was a gap of about one foot between them. With no divider. And not only that, they were at the same height. Holy cow. What if somebody mistook one for the other? It wouldn't be difficult to do. Anyway, I was thoroughly grossed out by that, and I washed my hands again when I got home.

I've also realized something that I think is kind of a jerk-ish thing to do, but which I find myself doing embarrassingly often: jumping the gun at the punchline of a joke. You know what I'm talking about: somebody retells a joke or a funny story he's heard on the internet or from one of your mutual friends or from a comedian, and you know exactly how the joke goes and you really like it, so after the guy spends five solid minutes building the story up, you jump in enthusiastically and steal the punchline, and everybody laughs at you instead of at the other guy.

I do this all the time. I think I even did it today. Somebody was telling the classic Jim Gaffigan joke: "Fruit, good; cake, great; fruitcake, nasty crap." And what did I do? I waited: "... yeah... yeah... nasty crap! Ha ha ha!" It's never out of malice, but it still makes me kind of a jerk. So, dearest readers, don't steal punchlines. Yes, they're funny, but if you didn't tell the story, give the real storyteller his moment in the spotlight.

The sound our vent makes when the air conditioner or the heater turns on sounds exactly like a fart. Exactly. Not a high-pitched trumpet, but a deep, full-bodied tuba. The temperature fluctuates like crazy in our apartment because none of the things that should be sealed are sealed, so the AC turns on about every 30 minutes and heralds itself with a majestic frrrrrrrrump.

And last of all. I went to Sun's website for some reason or another, and I was greeted with this image:

Gah, this made me laugh. Doesn't he look funny? I'm sure he's a whole lot smarter than I am, and I'm not trying to be mean, I just think it's absolutely hysterical.

There's nothing as sweet as the sound of swift justice.

Swift justice indeed...

Brahms Cello Sonata No. 1 (part 2)

So I finally played the first few pages of this fabulous cello sonata with Laura today. Holy. Cow. It's going to take a lot of practice before we play it very well, but even with the ~45 minute session we had tonight we made MAJOR progress. Man oh man, it sounded so cool. The timing is a little bit difficult in places, but we got synchronized amazingly fast. The time absolutely *flew* by. I'm really, really glad I found somebody with whom to play.

Well, I feel better.

Brahms Cello Sonata No. 1, Op. 38

I've never really played anything but solo piano music. I'm even trying to learn Schumann's piano concerto as a solo piece. I don't have any particular affinity for playing solo music - on the contrary, I think playing with others would be magnitudes more enjoyable - but as the piano is more of a hobby than a focus for me right now, and I play only relatively sparingly, and I am not exceptionally talented, it is difficult to collaborate with other musicians.

Then last night, for some reason unbeknownst to me, I decided to ask my cellist friend Laura if she wanted to learn to play one of the myriad cello/piano compositions in existence. She jumped at the chance, and suggested Johannes Brahms's Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor, for which she had copies of both the piano and cello parts. I started practicing it not five minutes after she gave it to me, and I absolutely adore it. We're both terribly excited to start playing it together. It is rather difficult, however, so I've started doing lots of finger exercises to improve my speed and dexterity (I've actually found that the 3rd movement of Schumann's piano concerto serves this purpose wonderfully, along with being a marvelous piece of music in its own right).

Gah! I'm so excited. The cello and the piano are my two favorite instruments of all time, and putting them together is just about the neatest thing ever.

Cluster#$&! to Geneva

(Please don't sue me, Daily Show folks :-( I use the phrase with complete reverence.)

So I applied to a bazillion physics internships for this summer, and, just like two years ago, the first reply I received (last time from Texas Tech, this time from U. Florida) just happened to be the only offer I got. Today I got a response back from CERN, but I didn't make the cut there. Apparently there were 160 students applying for 14 positions (see the title of this post). So tomorrow it looks like I'll be signing on at Florida! I was hoping to work for a German experimental astrophysicist there named Guido Mueller (you read that right) but that didn't work out. I'll be doing theoretical solid state physics instead. Oh well, an internship is an internship, as far as I'm concerned. Dr. Chen said there's no money in astrophysics anyway, so if I want to make a nice living he suggested that I rob banks instead.

I'm almost convinced.

Arthur is my new friend.

And a faithful companion, he is:

A particularly overwhelming sentence from my Modern Physics textbook

I was grinding along quite nicely this evening until I met this behemoth:

The (2l+1)-fold degeneracy of the rotational state with angular momentum lħ makes the thermal equilibrium population proportional to (2l + 1)exp[-l(l+1)ħ^2/2IkT].

Duh.

Plungers, exact change, and my big mouth

I haven't clogged a toilet in several months. That's quite an achievement for me. Sadly, today was just not my day. So I went to WalMart on my lunch break to go buy a plunger because I didn't have one in my apartment. Of course the bathroom cleaning supplies are in the very back corner of this monolithic grocery store, and as soon as I picked it up I suddenly became painfully self-conscious of my image - a kid who went all the way to WalMart, all the way to the back corner, to buy nothing but a plunger. Not a plunger and, oh yeah, some peanut butter while I'm at it; not a plunger and, oh yeah, some deodorant or some blank CDs. Nope. Just a plunger. I may as well have worn a T-shirt that said,

YEP, IT WAS A BIG ONE

So I did my little walk of shame to the counter, and to my amazement the cashier didn't make any remarks or even smirk. Kudos to you, Madam Cashier. I know I certainly would have succumbed to the temptation had I been in her position.


Later on I went to the mail room at school to buy some postage, and, for the first time in probably several months, I paid with exact change. It was the most amazing feeling ever. I didn't use a credit card or a $20 that would have yielded me a wallet full of one-dollar bills and half a pound of pocket change; heck no I didn't. I used exact change, and I was so proud of myself. To the wind with credit cards! They can't give you that kind of satisfaction.


When I was a freshman here, I took a class called Old Testament History and Literature. The lecturer, who shall remain nameless and whom I will henceforth call Dr. X, would often ask questions of our class during his lectures and would not move on until at least one person responded; usually nobody would respond and he would simply call on somebody. Most people were wrong about, well, most things, but he was nice enough to at least make an effort to tie their bogus answers into the real answer, or, at the very least, make it seem not as completely retarded as it actually was. The one time he called on me, however, I allowed me no such mercy. I don't remember what the question was, nor what my answer was, but do clearly recall thinking in my mind as I said it, "What a load of crap I'm spewing right now. Oh well." When I finished speaking, I sat there quite sheepishly, but instead of trying to make me feel better, he looked at me for a few seconds and said, "...mmm... no." And he moved on. Needless to say, I felt pretty stupid.

Two years later, Dr. X now teaches my Biblical Ethics class. (By the way, I'm just now starting to get over the embarrassment of that harrowing incident from Old Testament class.) Today we discussed the idea that some of the Bible was historically conditioned; that is, the teachings in a most literal sense simply do not apply the same way to us as they did to their original audience long ago. Dr. X asked us if we thought ANY part of the Bible was NOT historically conditioned. Apparently I didn't learn my lesson the first time because I'm a big fat stupidface, so I piped up and said, "One could make the case that the Ten Commandments have withstood the wear and tear of the passage of time. They seem to me as relevant today as they did then." Without missing a BEAT Dr. X shot back, "Hm. Well, Brian, do you still keep Sabbath, then?" I sat there for a few seconds in silence while the rest of the class started snickering, and finally I threw my hands up and said, "... touché." I don't know how many shades of red I must have turned, but Dr. X certainly did not make things better for me by referring to my comment several times in during the remaining class time. To his credit, he was very respectful about it, but it really didn't take the sting away of being shot down so fast. Remind me next time not to spar with a theologian.

I don't understand anything related to economics

And believe me, I've tried. I do my best to be an informed citizen, but none of this stuff registers at all in my brain. Do you know what economics-speak reminds me of? Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Please don't mistake this reference as indicative of any disdain I bear towards this poem - on the contrary, it is quite possibly my favorite of all. I instead mean to imply that the lexicon of economics makes about as much sense to me as that of Jabberwocky. And I take them equally seriously. So what does a recession mean to me? Hell if I know. It sounds like a bad thing, though, kind of like a receding hair line; the most insight I can glean from all this stuff about a recession is that the price of Honey Bunches of Oats is probably going to go up even more, and that is a tragedy if ever there was one.