| And I wonder, who's the father? And I wonder what they call her? Sierra! |
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| 05:06pm 18/07/2008 |
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What would you call the child of your step-parent with someone who isn't your parent?
Because I'm about to get one:
( The People Who Could Conceivably Be Called My Immediate Family: A Diagram )
My stepmom is having a baby with her husband Brad. I didn't really expect this, but I'm less concerned with the surprise and more concerned that ENGLISH DOESN'T HAVE WORDS FOR THESE FAMILIAL RELATIONS. Come on, America... the demise of the nuclear family should have prompted many more new lexical items by now.
I should just follow Abby's lead, which is just to use names. When she was five or six, she decided, "It's like I have two mommies because I have a mommy and a Jean." |
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| I'm here because they're payin me to do my thing. They never specified what it is I should bring. |
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| 09:04pm 10/07/2008 |
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So here I am, in Columbus, OH, at the LSA Summer Meeting for my first conference presentation. I gave my poster today, and it went remarkably well, given that I didn't even get it printed until this morning.
The thing is, conferences are expensive, even when they say they're going to pay for you. Here's my old-school Mastercard ad for it:
Flight*: $150
Cab from the airport**: $32.27
Ethernet cable***: $7
Poster printing at Kinkos: $94.50
T-shirt****: $10
Meals that weren't provided (so far): $30
Having your project torn apart by the big names in the field*****: priceless
Asterisks:
* - they're suppossed to pay me for this, but not until I work through the paperwork.
** - because I couldn't figure out how to get to campus by bus
*** - because OSU doesn't trust conference attendees using the wireless in the dorms
**** - it has my name on it! I have to buy it!
***** - this didn't actually happen.
My dormmate wants to know about parties...he's heard that you're supposed to get trashed at conferences. I told him that's how we do it at Chicago, but I'm not sure that'll happen here because I don't have the connections to get me a wristband. I can't wait for what is bound to be the terribly awkward 'Undergraduate Social' on Saturday night. As for now, I'm chilling at the campus hookah lounge because my life has been too full of virtue lately, and I need to vice things up a bit.
The boss wants me to try to get an abstract together for the LSA conference in San Francisco this January. I think this means I'm officially in the club.
Anybody else in Ohio this weekend? Want to hang out? Now that I'm done, I basically have three days of free housing and semi-free eating before I come home. I'm not sure what to do with myself. |
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| Put your weight against the door, kick drum on the basement floor. |
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| 05:58pm 23/04/2008 |
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Today in my corpus linguistics class, one of my friends in the class leaned over and told me to check my email. He had sent me some snide comment about the guy who was talking, or something. Instead, I saw this:
Dear Edward King:
I am delighted to inform you that your abstract, “Vowel Length Degradation in Latvian-English Bilinguals,” has been accepted for presentation as a poster at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Meeting in Columbus, Ohio from 10-13 July 2008.
And I went "Holy shit."
Then I kept going, and read:
ask you, assuming you plan on attending, to send a short 100-word abstract for inclusion in the program.
I am requesting that you send me this information by Friday, May 2 at the latest. If you have not confirmed your participation by that date, I will assume you will be unable to attend the meeting.
And I said "Oh, fuck."
Both of these exclamations were out loud.
In short, this means that that one project that I spent so much time bitching about actually went somewhere. It also means that I'm gonna be doing a whole lot more bitching about it, because I have to do the other two-thirds of it by next Friday. Shit... |
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| I am the key to the lock in your house, that keeps your toys in the basement. |
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| 05:42pm 19/03/2008 |
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I put in a load of laundry about a half hour ago, and sat down in the living room to watch a movie. When I figured the washer was done, I went back to switch it.
The machine had moved three feet across the floor.
My first though was that the landlord had come in for some reason. But I had been right by the front door the whole time, and hadn't seen anybody come in. And there was a chair in front of the back door; if anyone had come through there, they wouldn't have been able to put the chair back.
Do I have ghosts? Or is my washing machine just getting antsy? |
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| And I'm gonna ge-e-et to, the bottom of this. |
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| 07:00pm 17/03/2008 |
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I submitted my first individually authored abstract to a linguistics conference, the Linguistic Society of America Summer Meeting. It was full of shitty prose introducing the topic, a lot of "well, I haven't analyzed this yet", one convincing statistic, and a pretty graph.
I've been working on this for about three weeks, and have put untold hours into coding the data, and it was still nowhere near ready to submit to real people like the LSA. Up until about four hours ago, I wasn't even planning on submitting. But I did anyway, and it probably sucks, but whatever.
Now I have to study for my final tomorrow, but I really want to watch a movie and go to bed. |
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| But I'm workin' all weekend. I need to get paid. |
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| 06:08am 08/03/2008 |
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There's nothing like six straight hours of ( labeling spectrograms ) to get you seriously reconsidering your choice of linguistics as a career path.
If my experience is any indication, it can also:
- turn a messy stop release or a creaky-voiced vowel into a personal offense,
- teach you to determine if someone is frustrated or amused by looking at patterns in their aspiration, and
- make thoughts like "I'm not entirely convinced by her fricatives" seem perfectly normal and rational.
Oh God, what have my Friday nights become? |
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| Bags in tow under my eyes, highest lows and lowest highs. |
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| 01:01pm 03/10/2007 |
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An interesting exercise in Computer Science classes is to look around at your classmates and determine what it would take for each person to be cool, in the middle-America high school jock definition of the word. You think, 'He needs to drop 50 pounds,' 'He needs to put on 50 pounds', 'She needs to get rid of her mustache', etc. You can discount things like acne that were totally uncool in 7th grade, because those are difficult to get rid of, and only focus on things like how a person dresses, talks, and interacts with their classmates.
Since one can obviously not judge the nerdiness of one's self by the same metric, you can only determine your nerdiness by extending the exercise: you can see how well you can fit your judgments of others into an information-theoretical context: in the best binary encoding system, what is the smallest number of bits needed to convey the probability that a certain person could ever be cool?
That is when you know you have been paying enough attention in your Computational Linguistics class, and when you can accurately determine that you require infinite effort to ever be cool.
This quarter is going to burn me the fuck out. |
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| Skaista ir jaunība, tā nenāks vairs. |
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| 12:57pm 17/09/2007 |
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Latvians really enjoy it when an American starts learning their language. It's pretty hilarious.
When, upon first getting to Garezers, Anna asked me "Cik latviski tu saproti tagad?" -- How much Latvian do you understand now? -- and I responded "Tikai mazliet" -- Just a little -- she exclaimed "Why can't I find one like that!" I'm not sure if she meant an American, a boyfriend, or both. She then declared me a "Pusamīts", a "half-American". I'm apparently part-Latvian now. This weekend was my initiation.
There was also Andis, who couldn't hide his excitement when I said things in Latvian. He regularly burst out with "He just said 'tagad'!", "He just said 'lekcijas'!" or "He just said 'iesim'!". He also told me not to worry too much, since Latvian is a pretty easy language. Aiva once told me the same thing. Duh, guys, it's your native language; of course you think it's easy.
I learned a bunch of folk dances, along with polka. And we hung out until 6am with Iļģi, the folk band who is apparently very popular in Latvia. It's funny to drink with famous people who you don't realize are famous. They played "Yellow Submarine" on some weird instrument at some odd hour of the night, and tried to wake one guy up with bagpipes so he would come party with us. There was lots of singing.
EDIT. I almost forgot this part:
Whenever I'm around only Latvians for a few days, I start to slip into this state of almost languagelessness. I get so completely used to figuring out what's happening that I don't actually need anyone to translate. This has a few weird side effects:
1. When someone actually does say something to me in English, it often takes a repetition for me to understand. I'm so out of English that I don't understand it when someone uses it, and I'll occasionally mistake it for Latvian, even subconsciously substituting Latvian phonology.
2. English starts to sound very inappropriate. When we were at the music lecture on Saturday, someone put on a clip from a song in English, and I was completely floored when I realized that some of the people there might speak English (especially the ones without American accents in their Latvian, another distinction I learned to pick up on). I was also confused by my own reaction...it feels really weird to suddenly realize you've been considering your native language to be a foreign language.
These weekends really screw with my brain. It's very cool.
Of course, no vacation is complete without odd adventures, and apparently no season of my life can pass without getting locked on the wrong side of a door. This weekend was no exception to either rule.
Saturday night, we were hanging out at a little house at Garezers, just a short ways from the boys' dorm, where we were staying. I went back to the dorm to get a drink (as an aside, I noticed a random light flashing in the building where we had been dancing earlier, but I ignored it).
So I get back to the dorm, and the door is locked. Oops, I think. Oh well, Imanta or Markus (who're running this) probably have the keys. I go to inform Aiva, who says "That shouldn't be locked. Let's go check." But, surprise, I'm not an idiot; the door is in fact locked.
A lot of running around the camp gets the us following information: Imanta doesn't have the keys, but the groundskeeper does; the problem is, it's 3 in the morning and he's asleep. The bigger problem is, the flashing light I saw earlier was because someone accidentally pulled a fire alarm while groping in the dark for the light switch...Imanta had to call and wake up the groundskeeper to turn it off so the authorities don't come, and he's pissed. Asking him for the key is NOT an option. We have to find another way in.
We pry the screen off the front window to our room, but the window is locked, too. We walk around the back, where there's a small eye-level window...it's unlocked! But it's small, so getting a leg over is difficult. And it's at eye level, so going through headfirst is a bad idea.
We manage to get ahold of a chair, as does Markus, who has to get into his (locked) bathroom. We go back behind the dorm again, and start trying to climb through. I'm way too inflexible to pull this off, so Aiva goes for it...but her jeans are too tight for her to have full flexibility. I look over to check on Markus' progress just in time to see his feet slide into his window and a small porcelain-sounding crash. He went in headfirst.
Now that we're alone, we decide it would be best for Aiva to take her pants off and take advantage of the increased flexibility. It worked, and we managed not to break anything (bones or windows).
Okay, so I was a bit misleading...the point of this story was actually to illustrate how many times in my life it's necessary to take off pants to get through locked doors. There were artistic reenactment pictures, as in my December post, but I'm hesitant to post photos of my girlfriend without pants. |
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| Wake me up before you go, go. Cuz I ain't planning on goin' solo. |
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| 11:10am 14/09/2007 |
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Since the summer is pretty much over, even for us quarter-system folk, it's time to evaluate my
Summer to-do List
- learn how to both pay rent and afford food at the same time. I was doing great with this, but rent in my new place is higher. We'll see how this goes.
- bike more. Biking to work every day? Does this count?
- explore Chicago more. Not nearly as much as I had hoped, but I still managed it
- explore Chicago on bike more. Not so much
- improve my Latvian and maybe try to confuse actual Latvians into believing that I am their long-lost cousin. I haven't really learned all that much over the summer. But I'm going back to Latvian camp for Kulturas Dienas (that's Culture Days, for the Balticly-challenged), so I'll see if I can pick some more stuff up.
- not forget my Arabic. I remember so little of this, it's scary. On the upside, I managed to successfully petition to not have to take the competency test, so I don't actually have to remember too much Arabic
- work on my computer hacking skills. I've also done very little of this
- go to the damn beach. Uhh, this happened like twice
- learn how to fix my bike. Maybe acquire a road bike. Failed and failed. But this can happen over the winter has to happen if I plan on biking through the winter
- have parties. invite everybody. Failed. I'm planning a housewarming for my new place, though. Watch for invites
- acquire a grill. Got this. I left it at my summer place, but I own one
- acquire fall quarter roommates. Found 'em, after much ado
- get back within 5 pounds of my driver's license weight. The freshman 15 has been hanging out for way too long. I've really stopped working out, so i have no idea how this is going
- get new shoes and trash the ones I've been wearing for four years now. Failed
- work all three of my jobs for the entirety of the summer. Try to hold onto at least one for the school year. The CLML job ended, and I haven't been to Northwestern in over a month. And I'm quitting the Graham School. On the upside, I'll be working at the The Phonology Lab this fall, and I gave my Graham School job to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) xoxoniamh
- write letters to Mike and Abby. Nope, but I'm probably gonna go to Champaign to visit soon.
- coerce at least half of my 31 cousins to come drinking with me in Michigan. Failed. Everyone bailed when I started asking for money. Cheap bastards
- chill on the Southside more. Bronzeville? Bridgeport? Pilsen? Thoughts? Failed in this too
- take the Green Line and the Cottage Grove bus. Success! The 15 to the Green Line has become my new way downtown, and the Cottage Grove bus is my late-night ride home
- remember to schedule time for doing nothing. I did really poorly in this, too
Well, that was pathetic.
Happy news: I moved into my apartment. It's huge.
Pictures as soon as I figure out iPhoto, or how to upload cameras onto my Mac without using proprietary software.
How does one do anything on a Mac without proprietary software?
Also, I forgot my Photobucket password. |
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| One of these years, I'm gonna get back to sing hosannas. One of these years, I'm goin' home. |
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| 10:31am 03/08/2007 |
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So I'm at work, wading through a pile of "Please remove me from your mailing list" requests. People, there are a few things you need to know if you ever find yourself in this situation.
1. We are not internet spam. Contacting us will not simply alert us to your existence so we can send you more stuff. We do not want to waste money on you, and will not send you any more catalogs if you give us enough info to remove you from the list.
1a. People who cover or black out the mailing list code are idiots. We can't remove you from our list if we don't know what list you're on
1b. People who cover or black out the city/state/zip are idiots. Especially when their address is on a street such as Wacker Dr. A quick Google shows 3 different "Wacker"s in this country, and only one of them has a Suite 7200. THE INTERNET KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE.
1c. I need to actually know your name and address if I'm going to remove you from any list. There is no computer algorithm that can search a spreadsheet using parameters that require mind-reading to find. I promise I won't send you anything else.
2. Don't yell at us for having your information. You need to stop giving your address to companies that sell their mailing lists.
2a. More than 80% of the companies I've contacted whose Privacy Statement says they won't sell your information, will actually sell your information.
But enough bitching. This post is really about progress in my summer to-do list. Here's a list of things I've either succeeded or failed at:
- learn how to both pay rent and afford food at the same time. I live!
- bike more. Rode back from Evanston yesterday
- improve my Latvian and maybe try to confuse actual Latvians into believing that I am their long-lost cousin. With only a "sveiks" and an "uz redzīt", I had Aiva's metalworking teacher believing I was just a very quiet Latvian
- not forget my Arabic. This language is gone from my brain
- work on my computer hacking skills I'm learning Python and starting to remember C
- go to the damn beach. Done! Several times over
- acquire fall quarter roommates. One down, one to go
- coerce at least half of my 31 cousins to come drinking with me in Michigan. As soon as I asked them for money, 75% of the family bailed
- take the Green Line and the Cottage Grove bus. I like the Green Line. I talked to the guy who sings in the train for money yesterday. He knows a lot about bikes
- remember to schedule time for doing nothing. Planned!
edit: FinAid just came in. Rent + food looks safe. I'm gonna make it! |
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| Maybe you should just drink a lot less coffee and never ever watch the ten o'clock news |
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| 10:39am 18/07/2007 |
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Okay, so here it is. Ed's List of Things To Do This Summer (however late into the summer it is):
- learn how to both pay rent and afford food at the same time. I haven't starved yet
- bike more
- explore Chicago more
- explore Chicago on bike more and don't pay for it. Silly me
- improve my Latvian and maybe try to confuse actual Latvians into believing that I am their long-lost cousin
- not forget my Arabic. Shit, I have to retain this for at least a year
- work on my computer hacking skills
- go to the damn beach
- learn how to fix my bike. Maybe acquire a road bike. There are no mountains around here
- have parties. invite everybody.
- acquire a grill
- acquire fall quarter roommates
- get back within 5 pounds of my driver's license weight. The freshman 15 has been hanging out for way too long
- get new shoes and trash the ones I've been wearing for four years now
- work all three of my jobs for the entirety of the summer. Try to hold onto at least one for the school year
- write letters to Mike and Abby
- coerce at least half of my 31 cousins to come drinking with me in Michigan
- chill on the Southside more. Bronzeville? Bridgeport? Pilsen? Thoughts?
- take the Green Line and the Cottage Grove bus.
- remember to schedule time for doing nothing |
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| And I ain't big on rappers, actors, or models. If I had to dip, I'd probly skip to Chicago. |
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| 09:55am 13/07/2007 |
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During my recent meanderings around events and information related to biking in Chicago, I found out about the LATE Ride, which basically looks like Critical Mass that you have to pay for. But whatever, I decided to register for this 25-mile ride around the city.
Keep in mind that I've never ridden that far before.
So, I convinced Aiva to join me, and go to register. I decided we should bike to the registration place, which I thought was in the Loop.
Turns out it's in Lincoln Park.
So, we rode a 25-mile round trip so that we could pay $40 to ride a 25-mile round trip four days later.
Genius.
Back to the always interesting topic of Awesome Things That Are Happening In The Lab, apparently my name is going on as a co-author for the technical paper on our computational phonology software that we're submitting to UMass Occasional Papers in Optimality Theory.
This means that, before the end of the summer, I will officially be a published academic.
I win.
PS. I know it's getting late, but my list of things to do this summer will be coming soon, I promise. |
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| Whatcha gon' do? Slam doors? Break a glass? Maybe pass out on the kitchen floor with ya naked ass? |
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| 10:19pm 25/06/2007 |
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Things that are awesome:
1. The lab is getting MacBook Pros for all the students. Probably for home use. So, come two weeks from now, I'll have a new laptop to play with.
We tried to get free iPods too, but that would require paying out of pocket and waiting for reimbursement. Fuck that.
2. I have keys to the lab. That brings me to two linguistics labs I can randomly enter whenever I want.
3. I finally have some leads on who I can and can't contact about the NU study. Problem is, I have to run through the whole study, every condition, myself to make sure there are no errors. That'll be about an hour and a half of listening to random syllables. Blah.
Anyways, if any native (read: first and only language) English speaker feels like coming down to Hyde Park and making a quick $5, let me know.
4. Free furniture! I'm getting a futon from my cousin...maybe a whole bunch of stuff from Fitz, if I can ever manage to get through to him by email.
That's all I can come up with right now. Life has got me ridiculously busy. I plan on posting soon with a to-do list for this summer, inspired by BP's request of the same from Niamh. Look forward. |
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| Tell Dad I'll call him back, soon as I resume normal, and get out of this bathroom. |
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| 11:46pm 13/12/2006 |
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Background
All quarter, my bathroom door hasn't latched. This is a problem, since, theoretically (ie, if they were looking hard enough), people could see me in the shower.
I decided that tonight would be "Fix the Shoreland" Night. I fixed my bedroom door, and moved on to the troublesome bathroom door.
It turns out the problem with the door was that the latch on the door fell slightly below its catch on the frame. I figure the easiest way to fix it would be to lift up on the knob and close it, which works perfectly. But when I let go of the knob, the door drops slightly, and its weight breaks the latch off in the frame.
Turning the knob is doing nothing, and I've left my phone on my desk, so I can't call anyone to help me from the outside.
I have to try to get out on my own
My first attempts are at getting something between the door frame and the latch, and levering the latch out of the door. This would be a good time to note that there is absolutely nothing in my bathroom that would be really helpful in this situation.
I first take a ring off of my shower curtain rod, and try to loop it around the latch to get it out of the door frame. This results in the ring being bent into an almost completely straight line, and the latch going nowhere.
Then I try using my room key to lever the latch out of the frame. This is also fruitless. At this point, I am still confident that this would be a simple proposition, so I only yell for help when I hear doors open or things move.
I make a brief attempt at removing the hinges from the door. I take my shitty little trash can to try and knock the pins out of the hinges. They're painted over with so many layers that they won't budge. I would like to put forth my observation at this point: I'm pretty sure that all there is holding together the Shoreland right now is all the layers of paint on it.
My next attempt is at unscrewing the doorknob. As I said earlier, there is nothing of any real use in my bathroom. I consider taking apart my shower head or other parts of the room; I stop these considerations when I realize that anything I can take apart will most likely either flood the building or electrocute me.
I search for coins, but no, I emptied my pockets last night, and left my change from lunch as a tip for the nice ladies who overprice the food at Plum Cafes.
I try my key (this really screws it up), but that gets me nowhere. I even try to figure out what card in my wallet is the thickest...this only results in my Shoreland ID getting all bent out of shape. Poor guy.
FINALLY, I realize, "Hey, I'm wearing jeans. These jeans have a metal button. This metal button could be used as a screwdriver." (I bolded the key words in this sentence just in case you didn't catch their significance).
So I use my goddamn jeans as a screwdriver, and--surprising as hell--manage to get three screws out of the knob plate. (All the while I'm thinking the moral of this story will be that, if Ed King can get through a locked door with just a pair of pants, he can do anything). Unfortunately, the most vital screw, the one on the knob itself, is at too weird an angle for my jeans, and is in too tight for my key. Failure once again.
At this point, I start to get a little worried, and I pound on the door harder. I start coming up with last resort plans. "If I have to sleep in here," I tell myself, "I'll plug up my sink and bathtub when I wake up, and turn them on. Eventually someone will notice the building flooding, and come look for the source." I start hearing more people-like noises; I assume hallucination, but I am still resting my hopes on someone, sometime, hearing my yelling and pounding.
I finally give up on trying to do things the nice way, and decide to remove the doorknob by force. Still pantless from the button-as-screwdriver phase, I remove my belt from my pants and loop it around the knob. I pull on the belt from all directions and angles (even stepping on it), trying to yank the knob off of the door. This results only in the knob creaking a little bit (or maybe that's the door making that noise?).
I am nearing panic, recalling that night that Dan Crotty and I spent trying to get into his locked car for 9 hours. That was a long night. I do not want this to be a long night. I start pounding harder on the door and yelling more. I hear cracks in the door.
I briefly consider the possible outcomes of the situation: (1) me sleeping on the bathroom floor, (2) me dead of starvation on the bathroom floor, or (3) me awkwardly explaining to the front desk that I need a new bathroom door. It does not take me long to make a decision.
I give the door my shoulder a couple of times, and start to make out cracks along the edges of the middle panel.
A couple more shoulders. I can see my roommate's desk through the crack!
Another shoulder. CRASH. This is my first, last, and only reminder of the full-length mirror that is was hanging on the outside of the door.
I get my hands around the panel, and start pushing/shaking/kicking. It falls outward and lands against my closet door.
I get my phone and check the time. It's been two hours since I went to fix my bathroom door.
Now, I get to beg the building manager for a new door, a new full-length mirror, and a new room key(I tried it, and it definitely doesn't work too well anymore)
( The remains ) |
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| This planet spins on a thin axis. All-access passes won't help you to grasp the atmos. |
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| 10:31pm 18/06/2006 |
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Al Gore recently released a movie documenting political and scientific struggles about global warming. I haven't seen it, and don't plan on it, because I don't go to movies anymore, but nevertheless: Ahh! Global warming!
Pretty much everybody agrees that it exists, and that it will eventually detriment mankind. The question before is, then, what can we do about it?
The cliché environmentalist solution is to reduce the use of fossil fuels, thereby reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the increase in temperature. We all know this argument, so I won't give it more than a passing mention.
Another possibility is that the increase in temperature will increase water evaporation and create a cloud cover that will block more light from getting to the Earth's surface, creating a sort of balance. This might not be all that accepted scientifically, but I needed something else to fill some space.
Anyways, I think that these solutions are bullshit. They can only provide temporary solutions. Eventually, human destruction of the environment is going to bring back a greenhouse layer and negate the efforts of environmentalism. And cloud cover can only provide so much protection. So it goes.
I, however, have come up with a new solution--if I do say so myself, a better solution.
I give you the King Plan to End Global Warming:
Rockets.
Hear me out.
Any 4th grade science student knows that Pluto is colder than the Earth. This is not because it has less carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, or because the people of Pluto are refraining from destroying its environment. No, Pluto doesn't even have an atmosphere. Nor does it have an environment. And trust me, its people are doing their best to screw up the planet. Their efforts are all in vain; the planet will never heat up. Why?
Duh, Pluto is FARTHER FROM THE SUN than Earth.
All the proposed remedies thus far deal with people doing things to stop global warming here on Earth. But, just as abstinence is the only safe form of birth control--because it gets rid of the threat entirely-- the only safety from global warming is to get rid of our source of heat entirely.
Obviously, it would be stupid to destroy the Sun. But we could certainly reduce the threat by moving farther from the source.
This is where the rockets come in.
(This took me like an hour, since I only have MS Paint and not Photoshop or anything fancy. But I'm sure once the US government buys the patent for this idea, I'll have enough money to afford a better schematic)
At any rate, we would attach these rockets, and blast off. Even these enormous things wouldn't have that much effect, because of the tremendous gravity of the Sun, but it would be enough to blast us to a distance (probably near the asteroid belt) that would be adequate to counter global warming.
A few negligible calculations that I didn't bother to make (I leave these to professionals):
1) the exact distance from the Sun that would be best.
1a) the potential of seriously disrupting our orbit and spiralling into the Sun
2) the exact force these rockets would have to exert to get us to a good distance
2a) how much greenhouse gas the rockets would add to our already burgeoning supply
2b) the percentage of the Earth that would be blown off into space by the blast
3) the necessary size of these rockets
3a) the amount of Earth's resources that would have to go into its construction
3b) the percentage of the world's population that would be physically crushed by the rockets and strap when they are attached
I submit my proposal to the international scientific community, with the hope that they can resolve any slight flaws in my design. |
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| I drink my whiskey from the well. Except on Saturdays, then it's the top shelf. |
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| 01:21am 09/06/2006 |
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Alright kids, pop quiz:
In order to make money for school, this summer, Ed is working:
a. 62 hours a week.
b. Enough to make more than $6000 in three months
c. So much that the casual reader of this journal will forget that he exists until he emerges from his labor-induced stupor in mid-September
d. All of the above
Bet you can't guess the answer!
Anyways, since I'll be doing almost nothing besides working, sleeping and commuting, I figured I would try to get some reading done when I have a spare minute or two. Here's the summer reading list:
Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species
Jerry Gill: If a Chimpanzee Could Talk
Brian Greene: The Elegant Universe
Robert Harris: Fatherland
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct
William L Shirer: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Bryan Sykes: Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men
Steven Weinberg: The First Three Minutes
I'm lame. |
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| I would have waited there behind the milk... |
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| 12:57am 03/06/2006 |
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I just realized that reconciling Julien Benda's "The Betrayal of the Intellectuals" with Antonio Gramsci's prison notebooks is going to be much easier than I had been thinking all along.
Also, that I smell, because I haven't showered in almost 48 hours.
I can only assume that thousands have had very similar revelations in the Reg at 1 in the morning. |
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| It's gonna be, a glooooooorious day. |
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| 10:55am 24/03/2006 |
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I woke up an hour late today, and had to rush to catch the train to Beverly.
I didn't have time to drop off my bike keys, or eat breakfast, or even shower.
As I was running to the door of the train, I felt something fall out of my coat pocket, and looked down just in time to see my fucking cell phone falling underneath the platform of the Metra station.
So I am without it until whenever I can manage to get it from the station downtown.
Call my house, friends. |
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| Everyone's working for the weekend. |
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| 01:59pm 14/03/2006 |
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After my Astrophysics final today, I crashed for four hours.
During these four hours, I had four dreams.
I'll give you three guesses as to the underlying theme of said dreams, but you're only gonna need one:
1) Robots in the Reg.
2) Robbers in the Reg.
3) My godfather in the Reg.
4) My best friend from grammar school. In the Reg.
Is finals week crushing anybody else's soul? |
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