Oh man. I'm so miserable today. ughnnnn.... the Rockies were slaughtered. The weather sucks. I'm sick as can be. I feel like my internal organs are going to explode. I must have the worst immune system in history*. I took a midterm... that was probably the highlight of my day. My advisor sent me a half-encouraging, half-snarky email, which bounced back because my email was full, so he had his secretary print it and put it in my box. I have to do two fluid mechanics homeworks tonight in order to make up for last week, and I'm supposed to go with my friend to buy my Halloween costume, which I'll probably never get to wear...

Because I'll probably be dead by then.
Let's exchange "probably" with "hopefully".




*not counting hundreds of millions of people including people with AIDS

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I'm working.

On the way home on the airplane I sat next to a man who seemed to have a lovely wife and horrific grandchildren. He had just finished a grand tour of Europe, including several cruises around the Baltic and the Mediterranean.

He was an electrical engineer (well, he was before he retired, and he's been retired for a while). He graduated from UDubb, and then moved down to Arizona in 1965 because his wife had gotten a job there. She might have been his wife at the time but I'm not sure. She was sitting across the aisle because they both wanted aisle seats. He packed all his stuff in his car and drove down over a weekend, having no idea what he was going to do when he got there. On Monday he went and got an interview, interviewed that day, and went to his first day of work on Tuesday. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Je suis in Paris maintenant. Je travaille.

On the way over I sat next to this pencil-thin girl from Eastern Europe (not really, she and her parents moved to Connecticut when she was a little girl). Then she went to Brown University as an undergraduate (pre-med). She graduated pre-med then took a year off before medical school when she worked in a lab in Chicago. In Chicago she got into the art scene, and she ended up going to school for sculpture and media visual arts. Many of her projects have focused on the similarity between many city systems and the systems of the body. While she was getting her MFA she worked briefly on an art fair that was coming to town. That's when she met Michel, a Parisian student and lover of art and philosophy who was in town for the week visiting and whose friend also worked for the art fair. After meeting her he extended his stay a few days and then went back to Paris. She figured it was a fling, but she couldn't forget about him. He couldn't help but come to visit again and the feeling only grew stronger. She learned that her school offered a semester abroad in Paris and she took it. Turns out the school she went to was really bad, but by that time she was in love with Michel and he with her so it didn't matter. She learned french. As she was finishing her MFA he was asking her to move to Paris and she did. She found it much harder than she thought it was going to be to get a job; they got married almost immediately and then it was much easier. Now she works designing websites and art projects, and she's working on an art project on the Parisian metro and its similarities in appearance and use to a biological system. They've been married for over 6 years now.

Seth, a row behind me, sat in the window too, but next to a sweaty guy who was in the middle of requesting a seatbelt extension when we arrived.

Luckily the flight wasn't full and the fellow moved across the aisle where he snored a great, complicated snore about once every 4 minutes the whole night through.

Qu'est-ce qu'on peut faire?

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So this morning when I was having a meeting with the commander of Apollo 15 and talking to him about what it was like to do geology on the moon...

oh? what? what did I say? Yeah, I just casually mentioned that, did you see how I did that? But it's true.

I have a sweet job.

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Yesterday I went to a talk about the ethics of bioengineering. We're talking about real Gattaca stuff here. Who should decide what a child's genes should be? The parents? The government? One of the speakers began the lecture by talking about the failed social experiments of the 20th Century. Communism, socialism, fascism- these were all experiments in the 20th century in different forms of government. All of them ultimately failed, most with catastrophic consequences. Why? Because they tried to change (through re-education, gulags, and what-have-you) the fundamental essence of human nature. At the end of the century, most of the world has come to the view that democracy is the only truly stable form of government, because it works with the nature of mankind instead of trying to change it. Professor F described this as an equilibrium result.

However, the advent of bioengineering and genetic engineering has ushered in a whole new era of thought- namely that we now can change the nature of mankind. So... shall we try the whole thing over again?

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And my kingdom as great.



(From BloodRoses1619 on DeviantArt)

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My professor was teaching us about random noise. Can you somehow predict random noise? (Ans: yes, and that's how they make noise cancelling headphones... I'll talk about this later when I've had time to make figures) How do you tease real data out of random noise? (Ans: using very, very tedious techniques, that's how)

"No matter how well you know the physics behind your experimental setup," he said, "you will always have to deal with random noise. The only way you can deal with it is statistically."

I raised my hand here. I'm sure he loves it when I do this. I said, "But if you really knew everything about your experimental setup, you wouldn't have any random noise."

"No," he said calmly, "you would still have random noise."

"Ok, let's say," I pressed, "let's say that we are God." A "God-cringe" wave swept over the faces in the room. They hate it when people mention God, even it's just as an analogy. It makes them all uncomfortable, like you just made a major faux pas.
But I didn't let that faze me, of course.

"Let's say that we are God, and we know EVERYTHING about our experimental setup. We know about every stray gamma ray that passes through, neutrinos, beta-particles, minute changes in the wind, whatever, and we put ALL of these things in our model with the right relations. Then we should be able to account for ALL of the random noise in the experiment, no?"

He was about to say no again, but he paused. "Yes," he answered a little uncertainly. "Hypothetically, if we knew everything, then there would theoretically be no random noise. But we don't, so it isn't really an issue."

But ISN'T IT?! Isn't it THE ISSUE?! To assume that no noise is truly random is to assume that that the Universe is infinitely knowable! Isn't that the entire point of science?! If something isn't understood, it's because there are variables that we haven't accounted for! To say that an electron is statistically in a particular place in the electron cloud is to say that you DON'T KNOW but roughly what influences its orbit! To say anything is statistical is to say that you haven't discovered all the variables that govern its true equation of state!!! To rest there, at statistical probabilities, and consider the problem solved, is a HUGE COP-OUT. There should be a big FAT ASTERISK next to any solution with a statistical spread as an answer which leads to an explanation that says, *the answer, or as close as we care to get for practical purposes/government work.

Now all of this rant flies in the face of my personal opinion that there are some things in the Universe which are infinitely unknowable, such God himself, altruism, love, and what the tupperware container in my refrigerator used to contain before several weeks of neglect.

But I have to make Sloppy Joes for myself before I starve to death so I'll have to talk about that later.

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