Thursday, March 12, 2009

Almost caused a fire

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So I was boiling water and didn't realize that it was done until 1/2 of it became steam. Well, I still have plenty of unreleased steam from all the ungraded homeworks I have to get through.

Actually, come to think of it, I haven't gotten sick for real in more than 2 years... maybe because I get more sleep than the average Americans. Is that a sin? And did I just jinx myself and now I'll be sick in time for my exam next week? I love my life!

All I feel like is reading mangas right now. Or watch another movie.

Pacing

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Is it bad to do things slowly? Maybe it's just bad nowadays when everything else moves so fast. Am I stupid when I absorb concepts slowly? I probably am. Especially when I'm around people who absorb concepts fast. The only way I compensate is by spending more time on things, but someone disapproves. I guess that's one aspect of incompatibility.

Poetry about science

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Haha, some guy came across my poem about transistors from ages ago...

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Catch-22

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The lights are so bright, so bright, way too glaring against my darkness inside.

Each time a former I.O.N. resident said they liked I.O.N. better than Palm Gulfs, it was like a two-hit knife stab until I became a mangled mass that initially squirted blood that leached out later, slowly, slowly...

And then whenever someone asked me where else I'm considering, like I.O.N.? I had to say that my advisors told me to go someplace else and see the world. It was poking in the knife wound every time. I had an inferiority complex. That got worse as the day progressed. That might also explain the isolated Freudian slip I exposed shortly before dinner... "My advisors told me to go away... I mean, go somewhere else..."

As much as I might have not liked I.O.N. very much in the past, I've come to consider it as a home of sorts. And there's a Special Person I am very, very, very, very, very reluctant to be away from and it rubs salt in the wound whenever someone joked about having a >6-yr PhD.

Maybe I'm oversensitive, but it feels very real, and too raw, too fast, and I'm not sure what to do...

When I had to leave dinner early to catch my flight and waiting for my friend's ride outside the restaurant, the gallery next to it was playing some violin music on speakers. It sounded Dvorak/Liszt-like or whoever wrote Gypsy-style folk tunes, and it resonated something fundamental... for a moment I was suspended between the past and future with nowhere to go in the present...

Sunday, March 8, 2009

0, 1, 2, 3

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Just so there exists a duality. When the weather slinks back into a Nihilistic puddle of rain and mist, gray and blurring the boundary between full consciousness and whatever its opposite is.

The gray that is the mixture, the Duality of black and white.

A most Singular moment of Symmetry, when orthogonality does not necessarily imply independence. Any Flatland resident can safely say 2-D is more interesting than 1-D...

Juggling 2 objects with 2 hands is relatively simple. But to juggle 3 objects, one needs to juggle 2 with one hand first.

When Two extrapolates to Three, the matrices of situational hypotheses are harder to determine and invert. That why they called it a determinant?

Orthogonality does not imply independence.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Book list

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(This I got from a Facebook note.)

The BBC/The Big Read believe most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Add a '-' to the ones you HATED.
5) Tally your total and put it in the title.

My x's: 001, 003, 004, 005, 008, 010, 013, 014 (mostly his tragedies...), 015, 018, 025, 041, 042, 044, 049, 057, 061, 066, 081, 089, 092, 100

My +'s: 013, 044, 089, 092

I may plan to read quite a few of them, but I don't know if I'll realistically get to them, uh.

001 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
002 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
003 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
004 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
005 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
006 The Bible (read a few pages)
007 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
008 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
009 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
010 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
011 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
012 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
013 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
014 Complete Works of Shakespeare
015 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
016 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
017 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
018 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
019 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
020 Middlemarch - George Eliot
021 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel
022 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
023 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
024 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
025 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
026 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
027 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
028 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
029 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
030 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
031 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
032 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
033 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
034 Emma - Jane Austen
035 Persuasion - Jane Austen
036 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
037 Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
038 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
039 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
040 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
041 Animal Farm - George Orwell
042 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
043 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
044 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
045 The Woman in White
046 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
047 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
048 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
049 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
050 Atonement - Ian McEwan
051 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
052 Dune - Frank Herbert
053 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
054 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
055 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
056 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
057 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
058 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
(read a random page in the middle)
059 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
060 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
061 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
062 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
063 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
064 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
065 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
066 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
067 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
068 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
069 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
070 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (read the first two pages)
071 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
072 Dracula - Bram Stoker
073 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
074 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
075 Ulysses - James Joyce
076 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
077 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
078 Germinal - Emile Zola
079 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
080 Possession - AS Byatt
081 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
082 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
083 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
084 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
(I read another book by him)
085 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
086 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
087 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (saw movie?)
088 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
089 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
090 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
091 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
092 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
093 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
094 Watership Down - Richard Adams
095 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Toole
096 ????????????????????????????
097 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
098 ????????????????????????????
099 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (saw movie?)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Monday, March 2, 2009

"Measure of creativity"

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I think it'll be interesting to observe my "artistic output index" throughout the years, normalized and categorized. The graph will come later.