I guess this kind of belongs in my other blog (it's kind of personal for this one), but it's crazy. This weekend two couples from my church got engaged (one girl younger than me), and my best friend from childhood. I don't know what's happening to the world. It makes me miss my boyfriend a lot, but more than that it makes me think people have truly lost their minds. We're so young! Us Mormons... marrying like rabbits. Wait, that doesn't make sense. Hmm...
I think I will just have to give up on medical school and go live on the streets in a cardboard box. So much for trying to help the people that live on the streets in cardboard boxes. If only I didn't panic whenever I saw a chemistry problem. Biology, verbal reasoning, and writing are all up to par. Physics is iffy, but I think I can get it there with some studying. Chemistry... chemistry and global poverty are the bane of my existence.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
some folks, they never learn
This is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I've seen in months. If I've claimed that before, I was lying. Here it is.
I was watching television with my father the other night when a commercial for these came on, and I must say I was appalled, especially by the woman that said, "now I can even smoke around my kids without giving them any secondhand smoke." Sure, it's important not to blow smoke in your kids' lungs. I agree. It's a step up. But how about providing a positive image? How about not smoking around your kids at all simply because it shows them that smoking isn't cool or normal, not something that should be part of their daily lives?
I don't get our society sometimes. If you're going to kill yourself, fine, do it with rolled up paper. Don't bother with electronics. Obviously you're not up with the era if you're smoking anyway because cigarettes do nothing but kill you quickly.
That's why I just don't get it when I see kids smoking at MIT. I mean, your IQ is probably above 140. Why are you coating your lungs in tar?
And Merry Christmas, by the way.
I was watching television with my father the other night when a commercial for these came on, and I must say I was appalled, especially by the woman that said, "now I can even smoke around my kids without giving them any secondhand smoke." Sure, it's important not to blow smoke in your kids' lungs. I agree. It's a step up. But how about providing a positive image? How about not smoking around your kids at all simply because it shows them that smoking isn't cool or normal, not something that should be part of their daily lives?
I don't get our society sometimes. If you're going to kill yourself, fine, do it with rolled up paper. Don't bother with electronics. Obviously you're not up with the era if you're smoking anyway because cigarettes do nothing but kill you quickly.
That's why I just don't get it when I see kids smoking at MIT. I mean, your IQ is probably above 140. Why are you coating your lungs in tar?
And Merry Christmas, by the way.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
you know things are bad when...
1. you drop your lemonade in the dining hall and it shatters everywhere. as you go to clean it up in front of about forty (no exaggeration) gaping, stressed college kids, you realize your flip-flops have mu (coefficient of friction) of zero, and you fall on your butt in the pool of lemonade, emerging dripping in the sticky substance. Someone comes running with a broom and tries to shoo off the crowd by saying, "move on, move on, nothing to see here!" which is something we said in like second grade when someone fell off the jungle gym and scraped his knee. (true story of my evening.)
2. you forget to include the hallogen in the reagents for your alpha hallogenation reaction. (on the last test i forgot the reducing agent on my acylation reduction reaction. sad...)
4. the farther i get in my education, the more i realize that my most profound handicap is my inability to count in stressful situations.
after sleeping for three days, i've finally caffeinated myself enough to *start* studying for my chem test in nine hours.
i HATE finals. they always lower my grades significantly because i'm too burned out to push through it.
2. you forget to include the hallogen in the reagents for your alpha hallogenation reaction. (on the last test i forgot the reducing agent on my acylation reduction reaction. sad...)
4. the farther i get in my education, the more i realize that my most profound handicap is my inability to count in stressful situations.
after sleeping for three days, i've finally caffeinated myself enough to *start* studying for my chem test in nine hours.
i HATE finals. they always lower my grades significantly because i'm too burned out to push through it.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
finals/stranger loops
Suppose you one day think about the statement, "only fools argue with fools."
there's some kind of strange loop in that.
i need to think about it
(inspired by my fortune in my fortune cookie: "never argue with fools." as i decided before i opened it that it was going to predict my success in finals this week, it was a little hard to interpret it. i interpret it as follows: the graders of my tests need not take any points off. it doesn't pay to argue with fools :-) ).
there's some kind of strange loop in that.
i need to think about it
(inspired by my fortune in my fortune cookie: "never argue with fools." as i decided before i opened it that it was going to predict my success in finals this week, it was a little hard to interpret it. i interpret it as follows: the graders of my tests need not take any points off. it doesn't pay to argue with fools :-) ).
Saturday, December 12, 2009
random connection
So I am probably slightly off on everything I'm about to say, but at least it's interesting, and I'm a bad enough scientist to say that's what matters:
1. So first off, I think that vast clumps of matter these days (galaxies in the like) are from quantum fluctuations that were massively stretched by inflation in the inflationary theory
2. Information coding in the hippocampus from the dentate gyrus to CA3 (and vice versa) is very sparse. The dentate gyrus (I think... if I were actually studying and not philosphizing maybe I would know)is responsible for pattern separation, or taking subtle differences in pattern and inflating them in the neural circuitry long enough for the brain to discern differences (ie did you park in row E or row F in the thirty-row parking lot?).
3. My idea: what inflation does to quantum fluctuations in the early universe (separates them into discernible fluctuations), the dentate gyrus does to information from CA3 in the hippocampus.
It's just an analogy, but it's at least more interesting than the enolization reactions I am vainly struggling to re-memorize.
1. So first off, I think that vast clumps of matter these days (galaxies in the like) are from quantum fluctuations that were massively stretched by inflation in the inflationary theory
2. Information coding in the hippocampus from the dentate gyrus to CA3 (and vice versa) is very sparse. The dentate gyrus (I think... if I were actually studying and not philosphizing maybe I would know)is responsible for pattern separation, or taking subtle differences in pattern and inflating them in the neural circuitry long enough for the brain to discern differences (ie did you park in row E or row F in the thirty-row parking lot?).
3. My idea: what inflation does to quantum fluctuations in the early universe (separates them into discernible fluctuations), the dentate gyrus does to information from CA3 in the hippocampus.
It's just an analogy, but it's at least more interesting than the enolization reactions I am vainly struggling to re-memorize.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Come on guys
Come on, Uganda. You're supposed to be one of the more progressive countries in Africa (never mind the LRA of course). This isn't the way to fight AIDS. Or do anything really.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
a rose by any other name
I don't know why, but I was thinking about beauty today. What prompted it was looking at some of the images of nebulae etc, data translated from non-visual wavelengths to visual light by some (probably linear given that wavelength is a linear scale, isn't it?) transformation. Anyway, it got me thinking.
Questions:
1. I find these images of the nebulae etc beautiful. But they aren't something I or anyone can ever see, because they were just produced by a mathematical transformation of a bunch of numbers recorded by light-sensitive instruments. They aren't originally in the visual spectrum at all.
What is it that I find beautiful about these pictures: the visual representation, the underlying relationships that create the mathematical form of the data?
2. Say that someone took the most beautiful math in the world and used a transformational process to come up with numbers that could be translated into the auditory spectrum.
If the music sounded hideous, would you still listen to it? Would it be beautiful? What about if it was beautiful music? What would make it beautiful: the beauty of the underlying mathematics, or the beauty of the auditory representation, or the beauty of the idea of the 'artist'/'mathematician' who carried out the transformation?
3. Take for example the IUPAC pictures I enjoy making (see my last post which is wrong by the way; it should be 2-butanol not 3-butanol).
Are they beautiful? (I think they are.) What makes them beautiful? Is it the representation you see when you draw out the structures? The underlying IUPAC formula? The creativity of using chemical reactions to draw?
4. What about abstract art. For instance there's this painting I like at the MFA. The painting isn't that great, but it's supposed to be a painting of life, from birth to death.
Does knowing the artist's interpretation of the painting make it more beautiful? Does having your own interesting subjective interpretation of the painting make it beautiful, or does it have to be intentional from the artist? Could an ugly painting be beautiful if it is based on an interesting idea?
It seems there are instances of purely aesthetic beauty (ie I am obsessed with beautiful, harmonious chord transitions), which is subjective but mostly agreed upon. But these examples I've given are I think way more subjective interpretations of beauty. For me, I have a gut feeling for all of them, but it may be different from yours. In these examples I've given, you have to know more than the superficial or the aesthetic to fully grasp the situation (ie you have to know the music is from beautiful math, the pictures are from chemical reactions, the art is based on such and such idea, etc). My best friend in high school argued with me about this a lot. I found that learning more about the world and the causation between things made it more beautiful to me (knowing cosmology basics has made the universe infinitely beautiful to me). My friend is a violin performance major. An example of our disagreement is that I like Mahler even though he's not particularly pretty because the psychology behind his music is very interesting, while she likes Mendelssohn because he wrote pretty music. Another example is that I find music amazing because it is just one physical manifestation of a more ubiquitous phenomenon: wave vibrations, harmonics, etc. But if I tried to tell her about that, she'd get pissed off at me and tell me I was ruining it for her. It seemed I could at least see her aesthetic point of view (like with my chord transitions), but knowing the science/story behind things didn't enhance her perception of beauty at all. It was mostly face-value.
Just some stuff to think about. Now I really must go back to reading about the cosmic microwave background... test tomorrow on the math of the radiation dominated era of our universe and nucleosynthesis as well as the incorporation of the vacuum energy/cosmological constant.
Interesting ideas for the day:
1. I think it's bumblebees or something that can actual see in infrared. Trying to imagine seeing in infrared (or seeing another color) is like thinking about having multiple dimensions of time and three spacial dimensions, or a third sex. It doesn't mesh well. There are just these mental blockades. What I find is interesting is that the principles that go into these things are all quite conceivable; it's just the result that we can't seem to fathom.
2. To God (or a hypothetical being capable of observing our universe from another dimension of sorts), the universe must look mostly like a fractal. It's almost entirely homogeneous and isotropic (non-uniformities arising from quantum fluctuations and inflation). Thus, given that God is sufficiently far away from everything, or in another dimension or something, our spacial universe looks like a ?3? dimensional fractal of nested spheres (orbits swept out overtime). Planets revolve around stars, stars revolve around galaxy centers, and it's all homogeneous so it has to look the same the closer and farther you look (until you get to a distance small enough to show anistropies etc). Kind of a pretty idea. Probably wrong, but interesting.
Questions:
1. I find these images of the nebulae etc beautiful. But they aren't something I or anyone can ever see, because they were just produced by a mathematical transformation of a bunch of numbers recorded by light-sensitive instruments. They aren't originally in the visual spectrum at all.
What is it that I find beautiful about these pictures: the visual representation, the underlying relationships that create the mathematical form of the data?
2. Say that someone took the most beautiful math in the world and used a transformational process to come up with numbers that could be translated into the auditory spectrum.
If the music sounded hideous, would you still listen to it? Would it be beautiful? What about if it was beautiful music? What would make it beautiful: the beauty of the underlying mathematics, or the beauty of the auditory representation, or the beauty of the idea of the 'artist'/'mathematician' who carried out the transformation?
3. Take for example the IUPAC pictures I enjoy making (see my last post which is wrong by the way; it should be 2-butanol not 3-butanol).
Are they beautiful? (I think they are.) What makes them beautiful? Is it the representation you see when you draw out the structures? The underlying IUPAC formula? The creativity of using chemical reactions to draw?
4. What about abstract art. For instance there's this painting I like at the MFA. The painting isn't that great, but it's supposed to be a painting of life, from birth to death.
Does knowing the artist's interpretation of the painting make it more beautiful? Does having your own interesting subjective interpretation of the painting make it beautiful, or does it have to be intentional from the artist? Could an ugly painting be beautiful if it is based on an interesting idea?
It seems there are instances of purely aesthetic beauty (ie I am obsessed with beautiful, harmonious chord transitions), which is subjective but mostly agreed upon. But these examples I've given are I think way more subjective interpretations of beauty. For me, I have a gut feeling for all of them, but it may be different from yours. In these examples I've given, you have to know more than the superficial or the aesthetic to fully grasp the situation (ie you have to know the music is from beautiful math, the pictures are from chemical reactions, the art is based on such and such idea, etc). My best friend in high school argued with me about this a lot. I found that learning more about the world and the causation between things made it more beautiful to me (knowing cosmology basics has made the universe infinitely beautiful to me). My friend is a violin performance major. An example of our disagreement is that I like Mahler even though he's not particularly pretty because the psychology behind his music is very interesting, while she likes Mendelssohn because he wrote pretty music. Another example is that I find music amazing because it is just one physical manifestation of a more ubiquitous phenomenon: wave vibrations, harmonics, etc. But if I tried to tell her about that, she'd get pissed off at me and tell me I was ruining it for her. It seemed I could at least see her aesthetic point of view (like with my chord transitions), but knowing the science/story behind things didn't enhance her perception of beauty at all. It was mostly face-value.
Just some stuff to think about. Now I really must go back to reading about the cosmic microwave background... test tomorrow on the math of the radiation dominated era of our universe and nucleosynthesis as well as the incorporation of the vacuum energy/cosmological constant.
Interesting ideas for the day:
1. I think it's bumblebees or something that can actual see in infrared. Trying to imagine seeing in infrared (or seeing another color) is like thinking about having multiple dimensions of time and three spacial dimensions, or a third sex. It doesn't mesh well. There are just these mental blockades. What I find is interesting is that the principles that go into these things are all quite conceivable; it's just the result that we can't seem to fathom.
2. To God (or a hypothetical being capable of observing our universe from another dimension of sorts), the universe must look mostly like a fractal. It's almost entirely homogeneous and isotropic (non-uniformities arising from quantum fluctuations and inflation). Thus, given that God is sufficiently far away from everything, or in another dimension or something, our spacial universe looks like a ?3? dimensional fractal of nested spheres (orbits swept out overtime). Planets revolve around stars, stars revolve around galaxy centers, and it's all homogeneous so it has to look the same the closer and farther you look (until you get to a distance small enough to show anistropies etc). Kind of a pretty idea. Probably wrong, but interesting.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
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