This Is So Fantastic It Deserves Its Own Blog Entry

go to google.com and type in "caltech interhouse party 2007" and click I'm feeling lucky.

This is what you get.

Please note: the phenomenon mentioned above happens in all of the shitty houses, not Ricketts.

I found out about this from someone google searching "Caltech interhouse party 2007" and finding my blog.

:)

Click on the Meebo thing to the left!

Hey all,

Things are lightening up here. I didn't do any real work today, and I'm not behind. I had time to play some mario kart, super smash brothers, and play a game of ultimate frisbee! Because I know you care, gentle reader, Ricketts pwnt upon Ruddock, man down at six on seven.

I have a set due Wednesday in Physics. We're doing positron - electron annihilation, the equivalence of energy and mass, and all of that nonsense.

I mean, when was the last time you hit something really hard and it suddenly disappeared with a bunch of gamma rays in its place?

Stupid scientists. Like Colbert says... you've got to trust your gut. What you feel. I don't feel that something I can hold in my hand can be turned into radiation. Unless its In 'N' Out burger, in which case it can be turned straight into energy.

On Thursday, my Math 1d Sequences and Series set is due. It shouldn't take more than a few hours.

On Friday my Chem set is due, which will take many, many hours.

But I have three days and three sets! That's doable.

Oh yeah, if you feel like you want to help, here's one of my problems:

By considering the collision [of a positron of mass m and 
kinetic energy k with an electron of the same mass at rest] 
in the center-of-momentum frame, show that it is necessary 
for at least two gamma particles to result from the annihilation. 

I'm sitting in the Caltech coffee house listening to a conversation out of the corner of my ear about "super zero" and super-super zero." Apparently, super zero times infinity equals zero, and one over super zero is much much greater than one over super-super zero.

The argument is about whether or not there are mathematical applications. Are there any math problems that are simplified by using "0!" instead of "0"? This has yet to be proven. For me, anyways.

Also, yesterday I heard that everything is math. Biology is basically chemistry, and chemistry is basically applied physics, and physics is really all math. So anyone who is not doing math is basically a poseur. Nüb.

If you feel like getting into the iPod repair business, here is something you should buy:

You can also click the little link on top. The lighthouse by the blog title means that. :) Maybe I'll change it so it's more obvious.

w0rd.

/rskjr

iSandwich

So as you can see, I'm already catching up with my work. I had time to write the last blog post, and this blog post!

Ever wonder what happens when you put an iPod in the microwave? I rendered this cgi image of what it WOULD like IF you did something like this. Of course, I didn't actually put it in the microwave...

I wonder what happens if the iPod is on while it's in the microwave?

/rskjr

Caltech: Round Two

Ouch.

First I'd like to say thank you, then I'd like to apologize.

Wow. My readership is huge! Thank you! Although I do have to ask... is my content not conservative enough?

You'll notice there is a large gap in the map where all the red states are...

Anyways. I'd like to apologize for not talking to anyone. I've been getting rocked here.

Last term I did OK. It was my first term at college, I knew (somewhat) what to expect at Caltech, and freshmen at Caltech are on pass/fail for the first two quarters, and midway through 3rd term they choose an "option". So I found myself taking Math 1a, Chem 1a, and Phys 1a, as well as Ancient Art History and Early Modern European History. Chem 1a is a 6 unit course, where most classes are 9 units. I don't know what the numbers mean, but I would regularly spend 6-8 working on weekly homework sets for that class. Math and physics were probably similar workloads for me. The two history courses I took were taught by excellent professors and had content I really enjoyed, and I did very little work outside of the classroom, probably only a few hours a week.

Everything went well until about six or seven weeks into the term when I stop going to class. Upperclassmen have a way of saying "Pass/fail frosh!" that really encapsulates an entire paragraph into 3 words... it's more like saying, "Enjoy life while you can, because after the first year, sanity, dignity, and free time disappear completely. Unless you're a geology major. Don't go to class!!" So after hearing several stories of people who never went to class, failed the midterm, and still passed chem 1a, i stopped worrying about it. The week before finals rolls around, and I realize that it is algebraically impossible for me to pass Ch1a according to the grading guidelines on the course website. I started working very late, until five or six or later in the morning, and sleeping all day, until four or five when it was already getting to be dark outside. I didn't go to class (because I was sleeping) and I never saw daylight (because I was sleeping).

It was sort of depressing.

It turns out, I passed 4 classes! Yay! First term, math was "easy" because I was placed in a "special" section of math 1a for "special" students like myself who didn't have enough sequences and series experience according to the diagnostic math testing taken before coming here.

I passed Art History, although I didn't go to the last two three hour lectures. I missed a free dinner, too! Darn!

I passed Phys 1a mainly because it was classical mechanics which isn't that difficult, and my girlfriend Meaghan is a physics major and she helped me quite a bit with that.

So that leaves Ch1a and my European History class. I basically earned 'incomplete's in these classes. I did very well on my Ch1a final (compared to the work I had done before :-S) and they didn't fail me out of pity. Now, if I pass Ch1b this semester, I pass Ch1a last semester. And if I fail this term, I get the added bonus of failing last term, too! It's double or nothing, to the tune of $46,000 a year!

Because I was so busy studying for chemistry, I didn't finish my final paper for my humanities course until just a few weeks ago, a month or so after it was due. Luckily, the administration doesn't care about that sort of thing, and I was able to turn it in (after worrying about it all finals week and all Christmas break) and pass.

So we're back in school this term. On the last episode of Blogbert™, I showed you some pics of the newly renovated South Houses, the undergraduate housing system here at Caltech. Very nice. Much, much better than the FEMA trailers we lived in last term. I now have a single, with space for all of my stuff and a desk I can spread out my work on. I'm very organized, I get up early (for a college student) and I don't miss much class. I don't waste time browsing the internet, playing guitar, hanging out with friends, or fixing iPods. I work all the time.

True, I do other things, like eat and sleep, but I've seriously optimized my life for maximum time I can work.

The problem is, I'm still not doing well enough to pass. I'm struggling to keep my homework scores above 50% in my two math classes. In Math 1d, the sequences and series course for "special" students, my first homework set was exactly 50%, and my second will probably not be much better. In the regular math class, linear algebra, I have a 65% on the first three homeworks. In chem 1b, I scored 63/100 on my last set.

So I guess the bottom line is, even though things are not going well, they should be. It's not to say that I won't pass my classes this term, because I'm going to my TA's for help on homework and making it known that I'm having trouble. But what if something happens? What if I get sick, and get behind? I'll be toast. And the best part? I had to fill out an underload petition because I'm not taking enough credits. Instead of having to deal with getting papers signed by the deans, I added a PE class that meets two times a week for an hour.

In the beginning of last term, I was enjoying college. I rode my bike most weekends, I worked a lot but I was OK with it, Caltech was still new and exciting. It turned out that my strategy for attacking school last term didn't quite cut it.

I'd like to be able to do take a day out of my life and ride my bike to San Diego.

I'd like to take pictures for the school newspaper.

I'd like to play on the ultimate frisbee team.

I'd like to learn how to program in Ruby, then learn some new web technologies.

I'd like to have some free time to read a book.

I'd like to do, you know, college stuff!

These are things I can't do here at Caltech. So I'm going to try to figure out a way I can do these things. If I can't make it happen here, I'm going to transfer somewhere else.

That's enough of me bitching for the day. I've been watching the Colbert Report lately (hey, I need something to make me smile) and I would highly recommend it. This guy is a genius.

In all honesty, it really isn't that bad here. There are lots of fun things happening. But in all honesty, it really sucks, too.

Adiós...

/rskjr

One more thing...

Perfect! My phone starts dying just when Apple decides to unveil their version of the telephone.

Awesome.

I'm finally moved into my new dorm room, the South Houses are quite nice. There is central air, gigabit ethernet a phone jack in every room, he kitchens have natural gas stoves, etc. And the best part is, all of the toilets have TWO BUTTONS!

Most rooms in the South Houses are singles, and almost all have a sink, built-in closets and drawers, and a desk/bunk bed combo. I can't complain, although fire alarms go off all the time, there are random power outages, and there is almost 24 hour construction between construction workers and houses frantically trying to finish their own construction before interhouse Saturday.

You ask, "What's under the hood of that Quicksilver G4?" and I respond, "It's a single processor 867 MHz PowerPC Linux box running Debian, of course!" But in reality, I'm having quite a bit of trouble getting Xwindows to work properly, and right now it boots into a display mode my monitor can't handle. I need to SSH into the machine and fix it, but SSH and ping are disabled on the wireless network, so I need to note its IP before it boots into the unrecognizable display mode and bla-de-blah...

/robert

A Giant Party (and Matrices)

Caltech is having a huge party for the reopening of the South Houses -- Blacker, Dabney, Fleming, and Ricketts. Aside from having fire drills a few times a day for no reason at all, the new undergraduate housing is quite nice.

Here's the catch. Caltech is pairing each house with one of the North houses (and Blacker house with Avery) and giving each house $2500 for food and drinks and $5000 for construction, or some sort of allotment on that scale. The schedule of events includes a laser show and barbecue for everyone in the Caltech community.

It comes out to being close to a $100,000 party.

Right after the South Houses have had a multi, multi-million dollar renovation? Needless to say, the administration is quite nervous about the whole situation. Students can only register 5 non-Caltech guests. Guests and students will have wristbands, people without wristbands will be booted. Should be an interesting party. The themes listed on the Alumni website are Post-apocalypse for Ricketts, Neverneverland (ranch) for the Flems, Speakeasy for the Darbs, and Soviet Russia for the Moles.

In other news, there actually are uses for matrices! Who knew?

/robert