Monday, November 15, 2010

Recap (Part I)

Is any life so boring that its story doesn't belong on the internet?
Crude? Yes.
Painful? Sure.
Boring? Maybe.
But boring??? I think not. I think it's time for...

RETURN OF THE (SIM) BLOG.

Or maybe not; we'll see how long this keeps me entertained.

To start, perhaps an update on my life. Many things have remained the same since the last time I shaded in slivers of the area under the curve. I still watch TV. I still drink coffee. I'm still 6' 3". My mom still makes my lunch every morning. But the details are what matter, right? Like what was in the lunch, and which TV shows, and how much coffee, and why do I wait until 96% of my shul is telling me that my hair is too long to get a haircut.

I think this has been my favorite semester at college so far. I'm taking four Physics courses but don't have any lab reports. I have good professors for all of them, and my biophys professor hooked me up with a colleague of his who had a research project for me to attack. (That also worked out because I have a paper to do for that professor, and this gave me a topic.)

The problem with biophys is that it incorporates biology, and I was never much into that. It's a funny class because 2 of us are physics majors and the rest are biology/biochem. So me and the other physics major have no clue what the pretty pictures mean and the other eight don't understand the equations. We all just thank G-d the tests are take-home.

The other three are the standard upper level undergrad physics courses: Classical Mechanics, Electromagnetism, and Quantum Mechanics. I find them all really interesting, and each class makes some equation or mathematical relation significantly more meaningful than I had understood it before. (I get it, I'm a nerd.) It also helps that the textbooks for each of them (used almost universally across college campuses) are exceedingly clear and concise, and one of the authors is even pretty funny.

Lest I forget how to write (and lest they don't graduate me because I failed to fulfill a humanities requirement) I'm also taking a philosophy course on Nietzsche. Apparently, being a godless heathen was a prereq for this course, so its been interesting. (Granted, having some familiarity of Neviim Acharonim is definitely a prereq to understanding Thus Spoke Zarathustra.) A combination of the professor's father being Jewish and me being the only one who does the reading (slash only one willing to open my mouth during class) makes for such great class discussions as "What do you have to do to become bar-mitzvah?" and "How do you kasher metal keilim?".

My last class is part of IIT's Inter-professional PROject initiative. (Can you spell needless waste of time?) The requirement IIT has is that every student has to work on some project with team of people from assorted majors. None of the projects ever seem to get anything done. This semester they started a class where you get to build a project from scratch and learn how to work in a team. I signed up for it with a bunch of friends, and somehow at the end of the semester I seem to have gotten what I wanted out of the class. I'm on an IPRO for next semester with a fairly competent group (I chose the project based on the people I saw heading it) working on a project that I don't see as a complete waste of time. More details to follow in theoretical subsequent posts.

In summary, my life is basically doing physics problem sets (I bought a white-board to work on!), writing a paper on Nietzsche every other week, and gchat. I try to play tennis every once in a while, and the weather's been actually somewhat permitting so far this season, but I guess that's about to end.

So I never got to which TV shows or any good quantification of exactly how addicted to coffee I've become. Alas, I am tired, and quantum mechanics is at 8:35 tomorrow morning. Stay tuned for (the tentative) Part II!



3 comments:

  1. I personally am glad to get the written version. For a geek(is this the same as nerd?) you write very well! How was the chicken sandwich?

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  2. Pleased to see you're b-logging again (after nearly a year's hiatus!). Always entertaining.
    Speaking of TV entertainment, is anything better than Blue Planet with Richard Attenbrough's narration of amazing slo-mo footage of fish after fish eating fish after fish? And sometimes mating.

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  3. Where are all the comments? This deserved so much more by way of comments. You should guilt people, it's the best way.

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