please be well.

uncomfortable in this skin.

yesterday (last wednesday?) i felt like shit. not just physically, but i felt very... lethargic? which was weird, because i had two exams in the morning, the first i did very well on i believe, which i was concerned i might not do so well on it, so that was good. then on the second, i think i did okay, not as good as i would have liked to, but probably better than i expected to do. so those both should have been uppers. then i went to a bar with my math professors and most of the graduating math majors (woo-hoo! im not actually a math major, so that makes me feel kind of special, though ive probably taken more math than most math majors take, so hey...). i drank some, talked to emily a lot, shreve, theyre both pretty cool. then i road my bike home, and just felt... like shit. i was a little drunk (yeah, i probably shouldnt have rode my bike... but i couldnt fall asleep. later in the night my head started to hurt, my nose started to run, and i just felt an overall feeling of physical crappiness, in addition to the weird mental crappiness.

beneath the skin, were all the same. weve all got problems. for the most part, none of them are all that much more or less serious than anyone elses problems.

why dont we sit down. theres a bench.

oh shit... im sitting here, looking at buddhagram rotations, thinking about how i agree with the author that we will never really be able to visualize 4-spatial dimension objects in the way that we visualize 3d... and i began thinking, well, its easy to imagine looking at a table of numbers, and imagining that each number corresponds to some attribute of an object in however many dimensions you want, and then arrange the cells of the table in a way that allows you to split out which attribute belongs to which dimension. now, this is far from 'visualizing' in the way we think of it, but what about a human brain that has no experience with 3 dimensions? would it be easier to train that sort of brain? thats where the oh shit came in, because of all the silly jokes i have about what i would do to a kid if i were ever to have one, this is far more intriguing than the others... while the others are entertaining ideas, this has true potential. not that i would ever dare to try something like this, or even know how to go about doing it, but holy shit, the consequences if it worked... itd be difficult too, because youd have to somehow suppress experience in 3d, which we really have as soon as we are born. visual, physical... it might even be mentally hardwired in, in which case its probably impossible to succeed in my suggestion, but otherwise.

pitotheeoretothepi?

i just began wondering, "do people do these all for their own pleasure? in their spare time?" and then i thought of Russell's statement that the last product of civilization will be to figure out how to spend leisure time intelligently, and how these people have i think.

the secrets hidden in this place you called reality... they have the finest details.

the epitome of debauchery.

a minute? yeah, i suppose so.
an hour? probably, yeah.
a day? i can even remember which one.
an entire life? well, im not that old yet. but sure, i can see that happening.

a veiled approach at preserving obscurity.

the committee concluded that “we are safe from a strangelet initiated catastrophe.”

you could have just said, "i dont want this. i dont like that."

when we finally ___ ________, how will it feel?

i think im gonna focus on MIT as my choice of schools, although i should really use the summer to decide.

to everett: first question, is there something you could put inside a glass jar to make it more difficult to break when dropped? and the obvious follow up, is there something you could place inside it to make it nearly impossible to break when dropped?

all quitters are romantic.

okay, second question (and i already asked him this one), if i had a big pan of water, and i added a single drop to it, and i added the drop very slowly, so that when the drop 'combined' with the bigger pool, it had very little momentum, at what speed does the wave propagate across the surface of the water? i think the same concept is incapsulated in an older question i never posted here; if have a big flat pan of water that is perfectly still, how great an angle can i tilt it before water 'flows' from one side to the other? obviously i expect this angle to be inperceptibly small. if youve ever made careful observations of the flow of even still water, you will agree.

sea snakes are probably the most frightening animal to me.

have you ever bled so much that instead of dripping out of you, it flows, in a continuous stream? ive only done that twice. the first time i was alone in my apartment, and i considered calling 911, because i began to fear that if the bleeding didnt stop soon, i would pass out, and that no one would find me for at least weeks, if not months, at which point i would be dead. tonight it happened again, and for some reason i wasnt as concerned. im not sure why not.

dont underestimate the hippo.



some substance follows

it seems the more i attempt to define and interpret 'self' or 'my self', the less the idea seems to mean. who i am begins to seem more and more mechanical; the result of complex interactions between complex patterns. the patterns can be subdivided into local ones, within the region defined by my physical body, and external patterns, those of my environment. to say that the pattern which is defined within the regions occupied by my body have accomplished something seems,... stupid? the interactions, the complex evolution of us, of these patterns, seems entirely independent of 'us'; say, for instance, that someone reads the sentences above, and that those sentences remind the reader of a previous experience leading to a new insight which ultimately leads to altered behavior... did the reader accomplish anything? or did everything follow deterministically? dont give me credit, the same argument applies to every sentence here.

why do people feel the need to celebrate things? or to accomplish things? why are these ideas so foreign to me?

also, when facotring numbers, what if we used a number system that included certain rationals, in addition to the integers?
no, nevermind, that doesnt help.

also, does it bother anyone that there is no next element of the reals? is ther a term for that? i.e., given 2, what is the next real number? i guess its similar to, what is the least element >2, which does not exist.



please be well.
keep dancing.