From the infirmary

I’m in quarantine right now because I’m displaying symptoms of a “flu-like illness”.  Luckily, Tom brought me my laptop yesterday, so I don’t have to be incredibly bored during my stay.  However, this means that I also have to do schoolwork.

“Bop bop bop” is the title Duncan suggested for this post…

Last night I ate dinner with an astrophysicist (and Duncan and a cool senior). It was a very, ah, mind-expanding experience. This astrophysicist fellow works with dark matter detection experiments and is, as far as I can tell, extremely intelligent. He talked about these crazy things called “twistors” and other awesome stuff. It seems that in many of the better formulations of physical laws, space and time are emergent phenomena of something more fundamental. Which makes me feel really weird when I think about it — since space and time are pretty important to me as a biological entity. It’s a strange thought: All that I am and will ever be is contained in a mass of breathing, feeling flesh, but it’s somehow not really what it seems to be. Well, I suppose this is what happens when paradigm shifts happen; damn smart men have come before me and laughed at the idea of the atom.

I’m trying out this experiment where I get a lot more sleep than usual. It is making me feel better about life most of the time (I am much, much more coherent, speech-wise, when I’m well-rested) but it has the unintended side-effect of not leaving me much time for homework. I’m running into a self-limiting situation.

Also: We’re logging our sleep hours in a google spreadsheet. Some awesome plots are coming your way, after we collect some weeks’ worth of data.

Here’s a silly video to wrap things up:

EXTREME RICE

Thanks to Justin S for this!

Please don’t hurt me

I’m pretty sure that I violated some taboo today.

Internet Explorer in Ubuntu using the Unity feature of VMWare Workstation:

Unity works with multiple monitors now!

Stuck

Funny things can happen when you’re the moderator for a mailing list but don’t have the password.  You would think that  I would be able to post emails to the list, but I am required to approve my own messages.