Course ID: MATH 098 INTRODUCTORY ALGEBRA II Grade: A- Course ID: ENGL 101 WRITTEN EXPRESSION Grade: A Course ID: HD 112 SELECTING COLLEGE MAJOR Grade: A-
I totally thought I bombed on my Math final. I don’t think I’ve ever literally done a happy dance before. Yay me.
Things are brewing.
After four years of intensive collaboration, 18 top mathematicians and computer scientists from the United States and Europe have successfully mapped E8, one of the largest and most complicated structures in mathematics, scientists said late Sunday.
Today string theorists search for a theory of the universe by looking at E8 X E8.
Full story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070319/ts_alt_afp/ussciencemathematicsfrancegermany_070319121747
And. . .
Atoms of gold colliding at 99.99 percent the speed of light; temperatures instantly soaring to 1 trillion degrees, 150,000 times hotter than the core of the sun. With these experiments, Hallman and his Brookhaven colleagues are discovering something extraordinary about the early universe. The quarks and gluons that coursed through the newborn cosmos—and considerably more recently, through RHIC—took the form not of a gas, as physicists expected, but of a liquid. For a few instants, a sloshing soup of quarks and gluons filled the universe.
“I like to say that our theory of the early universe is now all wet,” says Bill Zajc, a physicist at Columbia University and the leader of one of the experimental teams at RHIC.
He might have added that the theory is full of holes, little black ones from the fifth dimension, because it turns out that in a strange mathematical sense, the quarks and gluons at RHIC are equivalent to microscopic black holes in a higher-
dimensional space. Moreover, the accelerator’s results hint that string theory—the much-ballyhooed “theory of everything,” which has lately come under attack as being little more than a fanciful, if elegant, set of equations—may have something to say about how the universe works after all.
Full story: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/feb/cover/?searchterm=big%20bang%20liquid
“I’d much rather regret something I’ve done than something I was too afraid to do.“
And here’s why.
Tonight, my 85-year-old Grandfather sat his 4 children down and told them he has been in love with a woman other than their mother for the past SIXTY YEARS. Before my Grandmother arrived on the scene, my Grandpa had been married, and had a child with Lady X. When he joined the Army, rumors surfaced that she’d had an affair, so they divorced. He met my Grandmother a couple of years later, married her and they had five children together. A full, complete life with grand-babies and great-grand-babies. My Grandmother died about 4 years ago.
Lady X sent my Grandpa a sympathy card. Then a birthday card. Then he called her. They started talking daily.
Now, they’re getting married.
My 85-year-old grandpa is driving to Missouri to pick this woman up, whom he hasn’t seen in 60 years. He claims he never stopped loving her, and evidently she’s felt the same way.
My family is in shock. I have mixed feelings. I’m proud of him for making some sort of declaration that the last 5/10 years of his life will belong to him. I’m disappointed (for him) that he waited this long to confess. Alternately, I’m grateful that he did, or I may not be here. I admire him immensely for sticking it out through almost 55 + years of marriage with my grandmother, and doing his part to raise their 5 kids. My whole life I always had the distinct feeling that they were just going through the motions because that’s what people do, but I had no idea to what extent.
My Grandmother died thinking she was the love of his life. That’s tragic and touching at the same time.
The weirdest part about this is it’s the second time in my family that this has happened. . . My great aunt on the other side married at age 76 after being separated for some 55 years. . .she was even in the paper!
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=2734434&date=19980214&query=olga+wedding
I may be reckless. I may be driven by passion, to the fullest extent of karmic law – But I will never wake up one day and find myself at the end of someone else’s life.
Have you ever been with someone that was so amazing, all you could think was, “yeah right. They SO can’t be into me. Where’s Ashton Kutcher. Where’s the guy pointing out the blinking red light, telling me ’smile, you’re on Candid Camera’?”
I’m really not an insecure person. I mean, sure, I get that way sometimes, but this is a little different. It’s like I’m waiting for him to find out who I really am, or see me in the light that shows what I really look like. And then? The gig will be up. Except I realize there is no real me, other than what you see, and there is no deep dark secret (except my obsession with midget porn and kittens) that’s going to send people running for the hills.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way before. Not an, “oh my gawd, I’m so in love, sqeee, puke-in-my-mouth” way (which, by the way, I hate all of you for), I’ve just literally never felt this precise feeling, where I almost didn’t trust someone based on how perfect for me they were.
There’s always a catch.
Let’s cross our fingers together, mkay?
Sometimes I wonder how I don’t just fall over from how busy I am. Just stop, short circuit, and fall down dead. It’s not that I’m stressed out, I’m just constantly going. I practically have to schedule orgasms.
Today was my last day in English 101. How silly of me to be sad, and slightly empty feeling inside. You have to understand – this class was Sociology in disguise. Really, it was about racism and forced me to look at my place as a white woman in a racialized society. Many tears have been shed in and outside of this class over the last 10 weeks, and I’m sad that it’s over. I’m also afraid that the effects of the class will soon fade from my memory, and the fire that is fueling me won’t burn so intensely.
I think the people around me will be grateful, as I’ve been awfully “soapbox-y” lately. What can I say? I become passionate about a subject, and I run with it. I believe with awareness comes responsibility, and especially in the case of racism – to remain silent is to perpetuate it.
Next quarter I start Psychology, which will probably start me on a new war path. It’s funny that I’m going to school for Physics, but because I’m getting my electives out of the way, I’m knee-deep in social/ humanities classes. Well, of course I’m plugging away at my math classes too. Calculus scares me.
So here’s to furthering understanding.
Just thoughts.My mom must love it when I have a new boy over – her house gets instantly cleaned in the blink of an eye, usually late at night after she’s gone to bed. Do boys have any idea what we put into ourselves and our homes before they show up?
Side note. Only a hypochondriac could understand my excitement at getting sick. I have a chest cold. It’s been building for weeks, which of course made me think it was lung cancer. Why would I be happy it moved into my throat? Because I know having lung cancer and throat cancer at the same time is ridiculous. Does anyone else feel me on this?
Grumble. School is good. I realized I have too high of standards for myself, when I’m busting my ass to figure out how to raise my Math grade from an A- to an A+. Like, it really pisses me off. heh.
Speaking of “like.” I’m in college. I am older than most of the students in my classes, because most of them are there right out of high school and I’m a capital S slacker. So I am subjected to 18, 19 and 20 year olds all day, every day. (Funny, when I’m sleeping with them, it’s ok. . .) Anyway. “Like” has become so deeply embedded in their vocabulary, it’s become a noun. So now they’ve started adding ANOTHER “like” to back the original one up. To top it off, they’ve added a new vocab word: “Kinda.” So when they’re trying to articulate anything, pretty much anything at all, it sounds something like this: “Well, like, it’s kinda like, the way I felt when I saw like, the movie? Yeah, well, kinda, it like, I don’t know, it like, like affected me kinda, and like. . . ” And so on, and so on. I could never be a teacher, for that reason alone.
In fact, I’m sorry to have bored you with this entry. That’s how obnoxious it is.
I think I’m bitter tonight. I’m really happy in general, I’m just kind of floating right now.
Since I’m a Cancer, I have to talk about love and relationships in every post to make it complete. I’m finding an open relationship to be very fulfilling, but filled with its own ups and downs. When talking to my girlfriends about things, even though we have totally different situations, we seem to bitch about the same things. It’s funny. She’ll say, “My boyfriend was looking at some girl,” at the same time that I’m saying, “My boyfriend didn’t tell me his feelings were growing for some girl. . .” It’s just funny. No matter how different we try to do things, how many different rules we conjure up to make ourselves happy, we still find something to bitch about.
One thing is for sure, you’ve got to have a VERY communicative partner to be successful at open relationships. I hate that I’m a jealous girlfriend. I very much want to have my cake and eat it too, but don’t want him to do the same. So unfair of me. I know this. There’s just too many problems for me when it comes to separating sex and emotion. At times, I think I can do it, and that he can’t, so I freak out on him because I’m convinced he must be falling for one of the girls he sees. Then in the same breath, I find myself liking boy X perhaps more than I should, and that makes me freak out even more.
I need to remind myself that it’s ok to care about more than one person at a time, and it doesn’t ALWAYS have to be about me. 
And sex doesn’t always have to be detached and cold, or devoid of emotion. And relationships don’t always have to lead to something more, like kids and marriage. Lord knows I don’t want any of that crap, it’s just embedded in me. It’s like fighting Catholicism or something, I was SO OVER IT years ago, but I still have the guilt.
I should’ve been born a boy.
