When your boss comes in and quietly looks over your shoulder, THIS VIDEO isn't really a good thing to be watching.

When you desperately try to change the video to something else, it also doesn't help to have the words "dolphin rape" in your youtube search box.

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Dear Geo Dept,


Our lab is assisting in a project to prepare toenail samples from Bangladesh for analysis of arsenic concentration. I would like to get some random toe or fingernail clippings (the larger the better) to help us work out the cleaning and digestion protocols. If you or family members would be willing to anonymously donate some clippings, preferably taken after a shower or bath, please put them a plastic ziplock bag and deposit the bag in the plastic tub located in the middle drawer in the cabinet beneath the mailboxes in Room 106. If your clippings have or may have nail polish on them, please use a sharpie to write NP on the bag (there should be a few in the cabinet drawer). There are also extra bags located in this drawer. If you have any trouble opening the drawer, make sure the other two are completely closed. Thanks in advance for any donations for this project.

Dave

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It's usually safe to assume he doesn't want you.

Unless he holds your hand, and kisses you, and tells you that he wants you.












In which case there is still a pretty high chance that he doesn't want you.

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Sender: A friend from Providence
Subject: iiiiiiiiii'm a facebook stalker
On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 12:31 AM, [my friend] wrote:

so that 'brett' kid you used to date turned out to be GORGEOUS yeah? i encourage you to tap that.

















...tap it. seriously.

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Oh I can't keep it in
I can't keep it in I've gotta let it out
I've got to show the world
World's gotta see
See all the love
Love that's in me


-Cat Stevens

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Tonight I spent about five hours baking cupcakes and helping Chipmunk study for his calculus exam. It had been a long time since I'd studied this kind of calculus, and I'd forgotten what a lot of the rules were called, how to maximize the perimeter of a rectangle, and what the mean value theorem was. Some of the things I knew I'd never known very well, like what the hell L'Hopital's Rule was [now I know!!!]

But what I did realize is that math and I are starting to get very comfortable with each other. Sure, I probably got ~50% on my math exam on Tuesday, but when I was explaining all of my mistakes to my co-worker after the test, I realized that math and I had reached this kind of cosmic understanding of one another. I've gotten the "feel" for mathematics. I know the way equations think, and what they look like when you graph them.

It's like that wonderful feeling that English majors get when they read a fine work peppered with subtle classical references and they start "getting" all of them.

Right now we're learning the calculus of variations, which we are using to study functionals. What is a functional? Let me explain it to you this way:

Imagine a slack-line tied between two trees. You would like to "slack-line" across this rope. This rope has a certain stiffness, a certain elasticity, and a certain weight per unit length. All of these factors cause it to hang down in a roughly paraboloid shape. But what IS the shape that it will take? How can you describe it? Can you guess what it will be based only on the forces on the rope? And what if then someone stood on the rope? Could you calculate the shape of the rope as they walk across it? Could you calculate how the rope-shape changed? Could you calculate the path that a person would trace in space as they walked across the line?

YES!

Imagining a graph of a line in two dimensions, you have a group of x's that are transformed by a function to make a group of y values. In the case described above, you have a group of parabola-y-looking functions that describe the shape that the rope could take. They all have to have certain things in order to be a candidate: they have to be fixed at the ends where the rope is tied to the tree, for example. These so-called "admissible" (aka "allowable") functions all yield different values when you input them into a functional, which transforms them into a number, like the potential energy of the rope as it hangs there, or a minimum amount of time it would take for a slack-liner to walk from one end of the rope to the other depending on the path. So a functional is like a function which instead of taking numbers and transforming them into other numbers, takes functions and tells you which shape is the best or the most realistic.

Anyway, the calculation of variations is very powerful, because it lets you tackle ridiculous shapes with very poorly defined boundary conditions.

oh math. I love you. More on math at a later time. I should become a calculus tutor.

I know my calculus... it says u + me = us

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A sort of spur-of-the-moment poem I wrote while taking a break from my math studying:

To think that I once whiled away the hours
In meadows filled with bright wildflowers
A common, gay, melodious sight
Their bobbling heads in wild delight
But I do not know their names.

Neighbors had I right next door
And in the past a dozen more
Had I walked to where my driveway ends
I could have had a dozen friends
But I do not know their names.

To many I owed the ease of our cities
To volunteers on esoteric committees
The many who kept electricity coming
And kept our communities quietly humming
But I do not know their names.

We are each allowed once chance around
And now my ashes lie upon the ground
And younger faces now walk alone
Down the sidewalks that go past my home

But they do not know my name.

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