pills & pillos

if my profs knew how little I know, they would be appalled. if I graduate this spring, it'll be an embarrassment to the university and a travesty to the country. it'll be a beacon of hope for winos on the street; an affirmation that they, too, can one day walk in cap and gown if they only so much as wish it.

how have I gotten to this place? I've wondered the same thing myself, and I have two ideas:

first, the profs likely harbor an attitude which can be summed up as "well, you've gotten this far through the program, so you must know something." it turns out this is an unmanageably large assumption to make, and the resulting error of logic leads them to grade coursework more favorably than they should.

second, it would not surprise me if the college of engineering were under pressure from the university to increase the number of graduates for reasons having to do with government dollars and private funding.

the avenues of my mind are an unwelcoming place to stroll during the night. they are populated with disparate pieces of information gleaned from the courses I've taken over the years. rather than coalescing into a cohesive whole, the things I've learned have formed rival gangs which are ceaselessly battling each other in the slums. usually, people are good at what they enjoy. in the case my major, I only enjoy it, the proficiency is totally lacking. on the bright side, I still have plenty of time to fail.

productive procrastination submission #1

a good idea can come across as a bad idea if its supporter explains it poorly, and vice-versa. numerous bad ideas have gained substantial support due to the articulateness of their backers.

these sorts of social phenomena occur because we're doing something we shouldn't be. we're assigning the human attributes of the person pitching the idea to the idea itself. it's sad/funny that the best marketers are considered those who can motivate people to buy things they don't want. the sad/funny combo occurs so often in life that I'm inclined to plot it for want of a better understanding:
naturally, I've located opposite adjectives 180 degrees from each other on this 2d map. the vector A is equal parts sad/funny if θ = 45 degrees. if you only wanted to talk about the funny portion of the sad/funny vector, you could make your intentions clear by specifying Asin(θ). in the case of θ = 45 degrees, Asin(θ) = Acos(θ), but you would still be advised to use Acos(θ) to refer to the sad portion since the different trig functions result in answers which, while equal in magnitude and sign, are located on different axes.

I expect the real fun begins when you plot different things you encounter in life on this 2d map and perform vector addition. if it takes you somewhere you'd like to go, you need only figure out what the real life equivalent of performing vector addition on these intangible concepts is.

ambidextrous writing leght rift

if there were an award for expressing simple, obvious things in the most long-winded manner possible, I'd win it:

aspiring writers of non-fiction, or of stories based on true events, might choose their subjects owing to the belief that if their writing concerns something which takes up considerable space in the public consciousness, then what they've written will be guaranteed a more successful debut in bookstores than it otherwise would be.

or they might ride piggy-back on the prior successes of other writers or the public exposure of famous people. a biography of henry VIII sells more copies than a book about the life of chelsea brimrose, a girl known only to the author and a handful of friends, for example.

none of this really made an impression on me until last winter break, when I was reading a small book called godel's proof. it doesn't consist of the impenetrable and lengthy mathematical derivations which constitute kurt godel's hugely disrupting contribution to the math world in 1931. instead, it's an explanation of the proof for the layman. I don't think I've ever read another book whose commercial success comes across as being so directly linked to the public's prior familiarity with the subject.

wake me up when I have to board the plane

I've decided not to speak to my family for at least a year after I leave fairbanks in may. I spoke of my intentions one night during dinner. my sister was not at the table, I think she's still unaware. my mother's forlornness was communicated to me by her silence and avoidance of eye contact. my father was fine with it. he reminisced about what his own family relations had been like when he was my age. his situation was a little different. by the time he was 24, he had spent some years at various locations far from home, and so had long been separated from the familiar individuals who had populated his childhood. also, his father had died in front of him many years prior.

I love them, my decision is not borne of hatred. many families, I think, consider themselves abnormal and dysfunctional in comparison to how they imagine other families are. but, really, wouldn't lightly using the term 'dysfunctional' be fitting to describe the norm? too often, people measure the inner workings of their own family against an incomparable variable: the outward appearance another family projects onto the public. yes, we have a healthy share of stress inducing character conflicts, these issues exacerbated as a consequence of living in such close quarters, but it's precisely the existence of these seldom discussed grievances and frustrations that lead me to believe my family is, on the whole, unremarkable, and I love them all the more for it.

so, why the isolation from them? mostly, I don't want to hear their voices on the phone. hearing their voices will pull me from wherever I happen to physically be and set me back inside this house in my mind. written communication would do the same to a lesser degree, but a lesser degree is no better. the associations I create between the people I know and the geographic locations I pair them with are very strong. part of this might have to do with the first time I tripped on mushrooms. I remember being keenly aware of how distinctly different the handful of environments we explored were, and how the boundaries between each space were so well defined. there was the ground floor of the cabin, the loft, and the outdoors. even a particular small corner area in a room had its own unique ambiance. pardon the forthcoming metaphor, but I lack the skill to express what I mean any other way. wherever I move to will be the start of a new chapter in my life, and I won't tolerate cross-chapter contamination in my book.

prologue to homeless living

people pay a premium for goods that exhibit prized characteristics. I'm curious how a consensus is established about what these characteristics are. like the explanation for so many things, it's probably a combination of learned behavior and instinct, the exact proportions of these two ingredients depending on the person and the good in question.

I'm struck by how many dollars could be saved by someone whose ideas regarding prized characteristics of goods directly opposed common consensus. it would be effortlessly frugal living. take these three food examples:

day-old bagels are packaged together and sold at half price on the discount rack. yogurt past the sell by date is donated to the food bank.
box wine...'nough said.

it's one thing for some hag to enjoy these "lower-end" foodstuffs remorsefully, wishing they could afford fresh bagels, bottled wine, etc. it's something quite different if there's a person out there who genuinely prefers goods with unpopular characteristics (stale, approaching rancidity) to those goods with characteristics favored by the majority of people. essentially, they would be paying less to buy things they enjoy more.

look at wine closer. the only thing I know about wine is that its price range varies from being free to being so expensive that its purchase serves more the purpose of being a symbol of social status than a beverage to accompany a meal. I'm guessing that the more expensive a bottle, the closer a wine approaches the ideal qualities which wine drinkers have been conditioned to believe the perfect wine should possess. this means that an experienced drinker wouldn't have much trouble lining up samples of wine in order of cheapest to most expensive. the ideas about what makes a good wine good have been so well established for so long that they're unlikely to change anytime soon, but I'm entertained by the idea that a social outcast, who has no preconceptions about what a good wine should be like and doesn't operate under the assumption that the more expensive the bottle the better the wine, could prefer box wine to a $500 glass of cabernet sauvignon.

obviously, this idea applies to all goods, not just food. so, for example, someone who prefers acrylic to real cashmere wool and capitalizes on the lower cost also.

um...this is all kinds of awesome