Other people's lives...
''Bob Crane was very talented,'' Scotty says. ''Very gifted. A great father. And he had a very large penis. By the way, I don't only resemble him from the neck up."
-- an article in the NY Times Magazine last weekend
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September 30, 2002
It's all in the atmosphere
The homework shrine: studying by candlelight.
Now, since it's all about finding interesting ways to procrastinate, here are some bits and pieces for when one is trying not to study:
- the view from 306 Doe Library (points to someone who knows what this room is)
- the really weird music that French radio plays at 4 am their time (and from what I heard, the announcers get a little loopy too)
- hot tubs (and Pasta Sauce II)
- a foxtrot around the kitchen to Frank Sinatra at 2 am
September 29, 2002
How Berkeley can you be?
This morning, a handful of us from the house went to Thai brunch. I'd had roommates and friends tell me about it for years, so it was neat to finally see what all the fuss is about. Yummy Thai food in the sun on Sunday mornings, at the Thai temple on MLK and Russell. Go if you're in Berkeley. Of course there was a higher-than-average population of people in dreadlocks and paisley fabrics with odd beaded designs, and it was a given that Scott would run into some of his friends, and I ran into some of my friends (hi Jack :), and we all had lots of spring rolls and coconut fried things and pad thai and red curry and thai iced tea and mango sticky rice and odd banana tamale things. Good way to start one's day.
On the way over and back we crossed by the "How Berkeley can you be?" parade. We didn't see much of it, but we did catch glimpses of saxophones, tubas, political signs, lots of tye dye, and a Radio Flyer car. Since the car we were in had blown a fuse and wouldn't let us roll down the windows, we ended up driving down MLK with the doors open, past all this. The image just amuses me.
September 27, 2002
Les petits plaisirs
One in an occasional series on the subject of not having time to update.
My life has fallen back into a comfortable rhythm here. Weeknights, I can probably be found in bed cuddled up with a problem set, Talia on her bed with math homework or maybe a cogsci article that she'll occasionally share an amusing quote from, Hunter on the sofa murmuring in Greek.
Last night I cooked dinner. It was a vaguely French-inspired menu this time: split pea, barley, and root vegetable soup, a salad of green beans, tomatoes, scallions, parsley, and egg with a mustardy dressing, fresh bread, and chocolate fondue with fresh fruit. Actually, the fondue bit was just an excuse to get our kitchen manager to order kiwis for the week. The bread I had to mix up between CS and physics lecture to give it enough time to rise, which meant that I was all floury in class.
I've been tempted to write about cooking for a while now, although I still lack an effective premise. See, even just listing a menu makes me happy, and I wonder if I have to explain any more.
It's just such a pleasure to be in a kitchen surrounded by fresh vegetables of all sorts of bright colors and flavors, bubbling pots, flour explosions... the little things like chopping cilantro or frying onions or stealing a slice of marinating bell pepper or a half-steamed green bean as I cook. In two years of cooking for 40 people once a week, I've learned to love almost all the vegetables I hated as a kid. My parents would probably be shocked to see me inventing (and choosing to eat) my own zucchini, bell pepper, and onion taco/fajita filling.
Heck, the only thing I've been scared away from is meat, just because it's so much more disgusting to cook. Last week, the central kitchen screwed up and delivered chicken halves (literally, large chunks of whacked up chicken, with sharp bones where they'd been broken and the occasional dark red organ-looking bit hanging off) instead of the nice sanitary boneless chicken breasts I wanted, so I had to spend an hour cutting meat off the bones. When I was done, I had a foot-high pile of bloody bones with skin and fat hanging off of them, and a pile of sticky pink filets. Not rewarding.
After an intense 3 or 4 hours in the kitchen, I got to spend the rest of the evening on my physics problem set. And the wee hours of the morning on a long French homework on obscure details in la Sainte Eulalie (one of the earliest ancient French texts), which, I found out today, was an assignment my professor recycled from her grad school days. I finished after 4 am, woke up at 9 to go to an EE discussion and solve differential equations.
September 24, 2002
Meuh?
Why do I have mediterranean mayonnaise in my ear?
Goal: To elevate finite element models of the proximal lemur
One of these was a google search that hit my page, the other was written on a sheet of paper on the ground between Davis and O'Brien.
September 20, 2002
Books rare and unusual
Today my French class went to visit the Bancroft Library to see the real-life versions of the texts we've been studying. (The class is History of the French Language, hence all the random bits about Latin I've been posting lately. We've gotten up to medieval French now.)
It was fabulously interesting. The guy from the library had piles and piles of books that he took out one by one and explained, tout dans un français très correct. We saw all sorts of things, ancient tomes (that really merited the title) hand-copied on real parchment with letters for section headings whose decorations extended halfway down the pages, and cheaply printed Revolution-era pamphlets that were sold on the streets, and lots of things in between.
This was better than the time that I visted the Gutenberg museum (which also has examples of parchment books) because he let us touch the pages and peer over the drawings, all while he explained the styles of handwriting, the spelling conventions of the scribes, the stories that the books told, and the history of various copies. And because we could flip through the books, we could read random notes like the guy who wrote "this book belongs to Pierre ... 1670" in his priceless 13th century manuscript.
We saw a copy of Lancelot, from the "vulgate Arthurian cycle", the most beautifully lettered. And a single page from an Anglo-Norman translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae that had only survived because it was used as binding for another book, and whose green and red section-head letters, the librarian explained, indicated that the copy might have been made in England because the French usually used blue and red (as we had seen in the Lancelot book). And a copy of the Roman de la rose, which we were told was written in a particularly French style, an almost scripty handwriting which was exclusively used for literature at the time. It had a large snail and twining rose vines around the title header.
Some guy named Geoffroy Tory was interested in typography, among other things, and had printed a book in 1530 with a very long title* that had pages and pages of *fonts* (including "fantastic" ones with things like animal shapes!) and a large section where he tried to proportion letters properly along the human body (as he explains in the title).
The first dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise (it was spelled that way) was apparently designed more to be a monument to the French language than to be useful. It was printed without a lot of the usual accents, but the librarian couldn't tell us why, and gigantic front plates dedicated au Roy.
The original illustrations of Les liaisons dangeureuses that we saw (which, unfortunately, my copy doesn't have) were *quite* interesting, especially considering the author states in the preface that the book's aim is to provide an example against bad morals.
This is so fun.
* Champ Flevry. Au quel est contenu Lart & Science de la deue & vraye Proportion des Lettres Attiques, quon dit autrement Lettres Antiques, & vulgairement Lettres Romaines Proportionees selon le Corps & Visage humain. Ce liure est Priuilgie pour Dix Ans Par Le Roy nostre Sire. & est a vendre a Paris a la Rue de la Iuifuezie a Lenseigne du Pot Casse par M. Oliuier Mallard, Librarire & Imprimeur du Roy.
September 19, 2002
The writing on the wall
For some reason it pleases me that there are so many spaces to write on and so many things written on them in this house. Next up: the Soda whiteboards after a project... or maybe grout jokes from the library bathrooms.
Our front door:
Our back door:
The blackboard on the fourth floor:
Our dinner menus:
The dining room blackboard (which is usually more amusing):
September 17, 2002
Notes on life
Cool: Building a telescope out of lenses during physics lab and looking at the library from LeConte.
Cute: The two people sleeping against each other in my physics lecture today.
Annoying: My CS notes use a symbol that looks like '|' to mean nand.
Odd: The guy in CS who wrote "I still think you're pretty" to me on his notebook.
Really annoying: I've forgotten perl.
Amusing: The imminent CZ/Ridge hot tub war.
September 15, 2002
Trésors Français
En Latin, le mot 'hodie' veut dire 'aujourd'hui'. En français de moyen âge, ça a été transformé à 'oi', d'où le 'hui' d'aujourd'hui (en espagnol c'est 'hoy'; en portugais, 'hoje'). Mais apparemment le mot 'oi' a été considéré trop petit pour exprimer une concepte de telle importance, et les gens ont ajouté le "au jour de" pour l'éclairer. Cependant en français moderne cette expression est encore trop petite pour certains, et ils trouvent nécessaire de dire "au jour d'aujourd'hui" pour renforcer l'idée. J'ai peur du jour où on dit "au jour d'au jour d'aujourd'hui".
Aussi intéressante est la progression de 'ego' en latin jusqu'à 'je' en français moderne. 'Ego' est devenu 'eo' en latin vulgaire, puis 'io', et finalement 'yo' pendant le moyen âge (au niveau phonetique au moins) quand la phénomène linguistique de palatisation (rapprochement de la langue au palais) a transformé le mot en 'džo' (dž est comme le g doux anglais, dzh) qui a adouci à 'že', le 'je' moderne.
Et pendant que je parle de français, voilà quelques liens sur la thème de jeux de langue:
September 14, 2002
It's like being a kid, but better
Last night CZ (Casa Zimbabwe, the house next door to us) invited our house out to play drunken dodgeball on the tennis courts behind our houses. It's a co-op sport that has some potential, much like Cloyne's beer bottle bowling and junk mail slip 'n' slide. The atmosphere was completed by live avant-garde noise (it wasn't exactly music) and the odd lighting filtering down from the hulking mass of CZ above. I also got to play with Marla, who lives in CZ.
Then, because we're Ridge and Ridge is dorky, us Ridgelings all went and played charades. For hours. With subjects like "the Norman invasion of England" and "post-modernism". And then we watched Evil Dead 2.
This age is so great, I think, because not only are there no parents around (outside of those of us who are already turning into their parents), most people have grown out of the practiced ennui that was exiged by the laws of coolness in high school. Or maybe I've got it backwards, and the kind of people who were capable of being cool aren't the same ones who end up living in run-down co-ops.
Being young is fun. Unfortunately, I've got work to do now.
September 10, 2002
Why I love Berkeley, part 3 or 4
Danny dragged me out today to go take pictures of the view from Grizzly Peak with his spiffy new digital camera.
We also saw a lovely sunset from Inspiration Point.
Here is a slightly failed panoramic. The view is... arresting, even after all the times I've seen it from various angles. Photos really don't do it justice.
September 09, 2002
More fun in class
Student in my systems and signals class: "Could you please explain why 'squarer' (y[n] = x^2[n]) is not linear?"
The professor: "Are you kidding?"
September 08, 2002
Ridge House Camping Trip
Seven of us from the house decided to go on a one-day camping trip this weekend. It was a lot of fun. We ended up going to the Montebello open space preserve, which is in the south bay right near where I used to live. It is on the bay side of the Santa Cruz mountains which separate the bay area (and Silicon Valley) from the ocean.
Here's a nice view. The San Andreas fault is off to the right. This is right next to the epicenter of the 1989 earthquake.
We hiked through meadows...
... and forests.
Here are the famed golden hills of California:
We saw neat looking trees...
... and also caught a few lizards. I learned that if you hold them by their back legs they won't move.
Man and fire go way back. This is Scott trying to light his camp stove:
And here are Scott, Hunter, and Anthony making pad thai for dinner. It actually works really well: you just need rice noodles (which are light and cook quickly), tofu, a couple eggs (if you want), a jar of pad thai sauce, and chopped peanuts, lime, and "cilantro" for garnish.
We saw a nice sunset:
And here's the first star (well, planet):
We also saw several shooting stars. Even though the valley with all its light pollution was nearby, the stars were still bright enough that we could see the form of the milky way stretching across the sky.
It felt kinda weird to be camping less than half an hour's drive from home, but that's ok. The views of the valley are spectacular.
We slept outside without tents in a little trampled spot on a hill. The light woke us all up before dawn, so we cleaned up, had an early breakfast of bagels, and hiked back.
When we got home, we all made tater tots and omelets with roasted red bell peppers, zucchini, and pepper jack cheese for brunch. Yum.
September 07, 2002
Sleepless nights
I had a hot date last night.
We spent the entire evening together. I didn't make it into bed until almost 4, and though I knew it would be a bad idea to stay up all night, it was difficult to pull myself away. It just feels so good when you start to see everything going right - shades of yourself reflected in another, communication flowing freely despite wildly different backgrounds. Outside a few rather awkward missteps, everything went so much more smoothly than I expected, and I'm feeling optimistic that wrapping up a few loose ends should be relatively painless.
When my roommate and I talked this morning, she was impressed by the story of my evening. She even wanted me to show her a few things later on. I think I like that thought: geek girls taking charge.
Yep, I have a newly-minted Debian system. Thank you Benjy for the moral support.
September 05, 2002
The light at the end of the cable
My sincerest thanks to Jose, the very nice and friendly Pacific Bell representative who was the first of the 5 or 6 I've talked to this week to be able to give me the information I need, *and* transfer me to a live human for the information he didn't have access to. I will be eternally grateful.
There's nothing so de-humanizing as being stuck in a phone-tree loop for hours on end.
September 04, 2002
Fun with language
"Affin que vostre Excellence voie que ie veux acomplir sa bonne volunté, qui est que ie donne neü Zeitung a votre f. g. de omnj buso la doue si trouiamo, io lasso saber a vuestra Excellentia si come per la gratias de dios todos las compagnias tanbien los Cauallos é la mercedes de los asinos se portent mediocrement asses fort bien, et equitamus apud locum vocatis clausa, sed pian pianino, Jusques an dem herbergum, vbi alle nacht ich lass ein guetten drunck umbergen, pro sanite principem nostrum galantissimum, vostre Excellence face' quant il luy plaira raison..."
-- Roland de Lassus, 1574, from http://www.outremer.com/~sharad/agreg/multi.html
That's the weirdest thing I've seen in a while.
"If we need not only to minimize o(x) but also need that x satisfies some condition P(x)."
-- A complete sentence from my CS problem set this week.
When copy-pasting the above, I discovered that the "fi" ligature was copied out of Acrobat as a single unrecognized character. Hm.
Today
The last 24 hours started and ended in the hot tub. Life is good.
Between those two times, I also managed to:
realize exactly how bad my French has gotten in the past two weeks,
get some sleep,
go to a CS lecture,
spend an hour on the phone with Pac Bell trying to get a phone line,
write a letter to a Mormon friend on mission in South Africa,
go to Physics lecture,
improvise dinner for 30 people,
discover that my card key no longer works in Soda and Cory,
discover that running Matlab remotely with Exceed over a shared dsl connection is the slowest thing on the entire planet (W3C decision-making processes included),
install someone's version of Matlab on my own computer,
learn that the "h aspiré" in French actually comes from words with Germanic roots (as opposed to the non-aspiré ones which come from Latin roots),
and write out the last step of an inductive proof that I didn't get around to last night.
PS à Christophe: tsk tsk, tu m'as dit que tu ne regarderais pas mon site aujourd'hui. Va finir ta thèse. :)
September 02, 2002
Introducing Marla
September 01, 2002
Recipe for a fun weekend
Take 30 EECS majors. Place in a house that "sleeps 8 people". Arm with paraphernalia such as Xboxes, Playstations, DDR mats, chess timers, Set sets, darts, bumper pool tables, etc., as well as necessities such as Costco bags of tortilla chips half the size of my body, vats of salsa, and flats of Coke/Pepsi/Sprite/I dunno what.
Let loose, and enjoy show.