Everyone be sure to bust out the telescopes or at least binoculars tonight to catch NEA 2004 XP14 as it heads by Andromeda and accross Cassiopeia. For us still in Oklahoma, it will be closest to the earth around 23:25, for those in CA: 21:25.

Ok, I just couldn't resist sharing this wallpaper on one of the comps at Bizzell.

Done.

After work today while walking to the bike racks I saw Doug and Baily with some others around a slack-line set up in some trees near the clock tower. This was my first time trying a slack-line and wow, I'm totally getting one! Apparently I did what everyone seems to do when trying for the first time: putting one foot on the line and then trying to bring the other foot up once all the body weight is on the line. Just as what usually happens apparently, the brain is confused with the strange feeling and my leg started swishing back and forth quite fast. After a few tries however, I managed to walk accross the length of line, but I have a ways to go before I can turn around at one end and return as others (Doug included) were doing. The ground was really wet though, so whenever you fell off the line you had to be careful not to slip on mud and wet grass. Baily kept doing balance duels with Alex and Doug, where two people get on either end of the line and see who falls off first. Three people weighed too much--I tried (heheh).

Aside from that, this week is E3, which anyone who follows upcoming video or computer games will probably know about. It just *had* to be during finals week too...bah. Anyway, what this amounted to was Andrew calling me while at work to rant about the internet blowing up with reactions to the unveiling of Halo 3 among other things; also the loss of serious study time for finals. Eh, oh well, tomorrow's p math final is another 8 o'clock test which means wake up at four.

-----(subliminal message)-----
PAINT BALL!!!!!!!!!
JULY 15!!!!!!!!
----(that is all)----

Ack. Can't study, so I'll just go to bed early and wake up at 4 to study for the italian test at 8. I'm sooo ready for summer to be here...

Tonight was an interesting night at work. A urinal apparently overflowed...and at a rate none of us thought possible soaked the entire eastern wing of the fourth floor in an inch of water. Water was dripping down to the third level and even all the way through to the second. Ceiling tiles were getting soaked and swollen and were falling down (some of which I was almost splashed by when they fell into the buckets catching the dripping water.) The janitorial people came out of the woodworks and were vacuuming up the water. I was put on detail putting up plastic covers over the book stacks...*curses height*...Fun times.

There is no real point to this post, just an example of my common doings to further weird you out. (But hey, is there supposed to be a purpose to any of this?)

Last night was a Shadow Night, or one of those nights when the moon is bright enough to form respectable shadows (term coined by DB.) After a fun day of playing frisbee golf, Geometry Wars and Smash TV on the xbox 360 at Andrew's house (another Andrew--no I'm not that crazy), trying my first shots of Yeager and very pointedly not doing P Math homework, I came home with the intent of playing Wow. However, there was the moon. So I went running and then exercised, but kept the blinds open and the lights out. (Functioning while depending primarily on senses other than vision is a nice change every now and then.) When I was hanging from my feet, I started thinking about ways to modify the feet tree-climbing attachments and climbing gloves I intend to make in a way that would allow me to climb down a tree head first. The logistics of this are annoying, primarily because you'd have to depend on on the feet attachments to hold yourself up almost exclusively, whereas falling forward would result in a nasty overhead tumble that could be recoverable but not stealthy at all and certainly not fun. Plus you couldn't lunge from an inverted position, unless you could move very fast and your target was pretty much straight down. Then there's the added risk to personal saftey when considering the adding of more spikes to the feet attachments. Ah well, works in the making.

It's almost finalized now, I'm changing my major from Physics to Environmental Geology.

Reasons: Primary reason would take too long to explain and might only act to make me appear even more estranged from society than I already am, but it boils down to a sever loss of motivation and a redirecting of passions. Physics courses seem more and more to be training us to *not* visualize systems, to not trust our intuition, to doubt that we are capable of *understanding* how the world works. We are trained to calculate the outcome of events, to use math to tell the future, to use equations instead of concepts to describe the world. (While I'll grant that perhaps most equations used to describe physical systems originated from concepts, there are MANY that arose from outcome reading and reverse engineering, if you will, of events in physical systems. But even then, many equations that came from concepts were found to work so well at predicting the future that the significance of the concepts they arose from has been lost, almost completely replaced by the use of the equation.) This is understandable because of the complexity of many systems as well as cases where visualization is impossible, such as when dealing with higher dimensions or fluid dynamics. I don't like this. I like *seeing* what I'm describing. That's essentially the core reason for the switch, but other reasons include the retaking of a core physics class and still doing poorly. (Again, lack of motivation. It's amazing what the sapping of one's will can do.) Also instructors that shouldn't be instructing. Part of attending a research university is that some of the professors are teaching only because they have to, with obvious results. (A rant threatens...but is tenuously contained.)

Most of the classes I've already taken bleed over to Environmental Geology very nicely. I'm going to try to take chemistry over the summer and shuffle around courses as best as possible. So far it looks like maybe 1.5-2 more years of college with no more than 16 hours a semester, but that's pending.

Recently:
...Wowing it up with some of the most wonderfully least serious adults and others...falling asleep while healing in Wow...throwing a candy bar at Brian's face...seeing the damage John did to his wife that has been accumulating over the last nine months, who's expected to deliver by next week (she's huge!)...falling asleep in the fetal position under a table...talking till three in the morning and having to wake up for work at six fifty...frisbee golfing without loosing any disks (although Brian did have to go wading out into a flooded quagmire for his)...getting agry at computers...very hot oriental food...survival of the fittest=>we should all be killed for not finishing our rice...rogues sure are fun...7-up, orange juice and...vodka?...twisting wire into an image that shall terrify...the thinnest tofu soup I've ever had...brilliant inispiration on how to get rid of a 1+u^2 under a square root to find an ODE using ambiguous trig identies...seeing signs on campus reading "Warning, genocide photos ahead" and for them to not be joking...getting bored at work...late nights talking to parents about life, future, society, culture, religion, politics, real estate, finances, choices, etc.