A bunch of random thoughts strung together. Oh and here's a drawing I drew in the car on the way here in August, of Dagny from the book Atlas Shrugged. It's her walking down the street on her way to visit Francisco, and there are those red paper lanterns everywhere. I don't know if they were actually paper lanterns or if they were red, but that's how I pictured them.
In calculus our prof told this random story about how as a kid he and his friends were in this field making a lever - putting small objects on one end and jumping on the other end. They ended up making a big lever and putting a rock on one end and tipping a big piece of wood on the other end. The rock flew up in the air and they were like "oops" because they couldn't tell where it went and it might have fallen on the roof of one of the nearby houses. Then they hear the sound of it landing somewhere: there was a parked police car nearby and it landed right on top of that. So the policemen get out and look up, and end up asking these kids if they saw anything going on...."no, no we don't know anything."
It woke me up better than the crappy coffee I'd made that morning (our class is at 8:30 am.)
Our sociology prof tells stories too. My notes last class were so good they were bordering on bad because I wrote down everything she said including her weird examples about coming to class dressed as a muslim for the first few weeks of class last year, and her gay friend when she was younger bringing her along to family gatherings so it would seem like he had a girlfriend.
I've heard the word "gaydar" used a lot: a friend of mine was always really good at noticing who was gay (and also who was pretending to be gay to get attention.) But I didn't know that it was an academic word, until today: I opened my sociology book (p. 180) and the first question was "What is gaydar and how would a person know when they have it?"
Fanfiction writers like gay people, it seems. They must really want to see what the characters would be like if they were gay, because they're forever writing slash fiction. In a URL where "%20" denotes a space, "%2F" means "slash." This is important to your life because
Anyway.
About a month ago I was on wikipedia and what happened was a remarkable example of clicking on links and ending up looking at the page for something entirely different than originally. It went like this: Severus Snape-->Snape, Suffolk-->Rotten Boroughs-->HMS Pinafore. Somehow I got from Severus Snape to Gilbert and Sullivan in four steps. It's like 6 degrees of separation, except instead of 6 degrees, it's 4.
I remember book club last year was really fun, and we'd go to a coffee shop after. Every time I hear a song by Feist it reminds me of book club (because L. had that CD on at book club one day.) I was daydreaming of sometime later in the year when my group of friends had precipitated (to use a chemistry word,) starting a book club or just getting friends together and talking and then going out to this place to buy a pretzel or bagel.
Anyway I should go read the actual sociology article I was supposed to read (and I was avoiding by doing this blog post.)
But not right yet. I still have another totally unrelated story:
The phrase "It's not rocket science" is universally known to just be another way of saying "It's not difficult" or "it could be harder." When someone says it they aren't actually saying "Boy am I glad this isn't aerospace engineering, because even though this seems hard I couldn't imagine how complex that shit is."
But today I was in the computer lab trying to do this "lab" where we had to draw simple stuff on intelliCAD (a rectangle, two lines, and a circle) and insert the width of the rectangle. There were step by step instructions in our lab book but it kept not working and I'd have to go back a few steps to see what I did wrong...
I walked out of the computer lab grumbling to myself how I don't like intelliCAD and would rather just draw with a pencil and paper thankyouverymuch, and the first thing I see is a poster on the wall of various rockets. I turn right and walk past something that may or may not have been the room with the wind tunnel (I'd know if I paid more attention when we went on a tour of that building.) And I thought about how hard it must be to design something that would have to survive all those forces and extreme temperatures and such.
Well at least intelliCAD isn't rocket science.