saturday, april 1

•••    I just started reading a really neat book by valentino braitenberg for cognitive science. it's an exploration of the way neural networks function through thought experiments about simple evolving vehicles. (did that make sense? you should really check that link; it's very cool stuff.) it's an enjoyable read, and I was very taken with the first paragraph of the introduction:
this is an exercise in fictional science, or science fiction, if you like that better. not for amusement: science fiction in the service of science. or just science, if you agree that fiction is part of it, always was, and always will be as long as our brains are only miniscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them.
(fiction is definitely part of my science! hehe.)
11:46 PM +

•••       five hours in the van
+ four hours on the rugby pitch
+ two hours in the concert hall
= one very long day
10:35 PM +

•••    and happy april fools day, too! I'm going to be off campus all day for rugby, so I think I'll end up missing most of the festivities - which is kind of sad and kind of good. hopefully there will be entertaining stories.
12:20 AM +

•••    happy birthday to my mommy. :)
12:02 AM +

friday, march 31

•••    good things that happen when it's friday and there's a last-minute schedule change that leaves you with a chunk of unanticipated free time:
20 minute nap!!
impromptu one-person dance party
stopping to smell the magnolias, hyacinths, daffodils, forsythias, lilies, orchids, grass, sun and sky
doodling in color! (you can't tell from the scan, but some of this is silver and gold gel pen and it looks really neat from certain angles.)
*happysmilesigh*
10:41 PM +

•••    a thousand hits on the counter. wow. (and it was from a person in belgium, which I think is really neat.)
hmm. I got so preoccupied with gawking at the site stats, now I'm late for rugby.
4:20 PM +

•••    shrapnel.org is more than just a nice weblog. check out the "complain" section. it's amazing how much fun it can be to learn little things about people you don't even know.
2:49 PM +

•••    after months of lurking, I finally registered at metafilter, mostly so I could make the font smaller. I probably won't post anything in the near future . . . really, I'm one of those quiet people! . . . but I thought it was kind of cool that I was registered user number 601. I had thought the 600 was just an estimate. ;)
12:41 PM +

•••    watch mars go backwards! this is much more fun than actual retrograde motion because it's all sped up. java astronomy, woo. :)
10:46 AM +

•••    the best time to do physics homework: in the morning, in the dining hall, over a nice bowl of blueberries. the trick is keeping the textbook free of purple fingerprints.
8:34 AM +

thursday, march 30

•••    I'm allowed to play rugby again, yay. :) it's pathetic how out of shape I am after twelve days of not running. my lung capacity has definitely decreased.
9:11 PM +

•••    my blue raspberry sorbet at lunch matched my left index finger bandaid . . . and now my tongue does too. :D
1:14 PM +

•••    everyone's heard about the newly discovered saturns, right? I saw geoff marcy (one of the astronomers who works on the detection of extrasolar planets) give a talk last fall. at that point, the smallest planets they had discovered were comparable to the size of jupiter. I really do think they'll find extrasolar earth-like planets in my lifetime. anyone want to colonize with me? :)
10:31 AM +

•••    well. this is different. I like it. (this is funny because, though I'm sure you will have all discovered the redesign well before you read this, I actually saw it before it was up thanks to a referring url to a subdirectory, and I wondered if it was an old design! apparently not. hehe.)
1:48 AM +

wednesday, march 29

•••    you know, I really don't think I understand how the archives work. it seems like there are never more than two weeks archived unless I tell blogger to archive everything, and that only lasts a few days. it must be something I'm doing wrong. but what? (while I'm babbling about my blog, here's a question: should I put more stuff on the page about me? it looks so empty on the left.)
10:31 PM +

•••    my mom sent me vegan cookies! seven big chewy oatmeal raisin cookies. I ate them all in two hours. mmm. :)
5:39 PM +

•••    have you tried the borg interface google search yet? the rumors are true. hehe.
11:58 AM +

•••    going over my 1040. bored out of my mind. cure? blogger break!
10:54 AM +

•••    how come my physics homework isn't this entertaining? (the bouncing ball is my favorite. yay, moving floor!)
2:01 AM +

•••    so. I have to write a two line bio for something. maybe it should be "rabi whitaker will never get any work done in a timely fashion as long as the internet exists. she would be an insomniac, but her stuffed penguin would get lonely." (writing an interesting two line bio is hard!)
1:47 AM +

•••    I was expecting to spend a lot more time reading blogs once I started writing my own, but I had no idea how much more it would be. (a LOT.) and it's not because I have a lot of blogs to read (I do, but I did before) or because it takes a long time to read them - it's because I spend hours exploring the new blogs every single day. you wouldn't think it would take hours, but somehow it does. I always end up someplace interesting, though.
1:25 AM +

tuesday, march 28

•••    I found some rather disturbing flash-powered flip books. look at the men with holes and tell me that isn't a little twisted.
3:53 PM +

•••    seti is running a mystery photo contest. second prize (for the most creative entry) is a "seti mousepad (not used by frank drake)." for some reason I find this incredibly funny.
3:35 PM +

•••    zannah linked to me?
::falls over::
11:02 AM +

•••    looks like nasa is back on track: image is doing beautifully. still, I'm having a hard time getting excited about a spacecraft that spends all its time looking at earth.
10:49 AM +

•••    the list of admitted students (to swat, obviously) is out today. I recognize some names. it's weird. one person from my high school - our junior nobel prize finalist, no surprise there - and a couple I know from the science team circuit. at the table with the lists, most people were just flipping through looking for their town or state. I had twelve places to check. it seems wrong for a hermit like me to have lived so many places and know so many people.
10:19 AM +

monday, march 27

•••    I want to brush my teeth. (for those of you who have never lived with me - which I think is all of you - I brush my teeth a lot.)
11:29 PM +

•••    whine in a box! hehehehe. that would make a good halloween costume. people might get sick of being around you, though, if you really whined all night. people might also be too drunk to notice.
10:40 PM +

•••    arrrrg. I never ever get enough work done. whine whine whine.
10:38 PM +

•••    after spending six weeks breeding fruit flies and my entire summer sequencing beetle dna last year, I thought I would never want to think about insect genetics again. inevitably, though, my science geekness gets the better of me: I just spent an hour playing with the fruit fly genome.
12:31 PM +

sunday, march 26

•••    if I shared all of my thoughts, opinions, and views on all the things happening in my corner of the world, this thing would take forever to load. plus it would take you forever to read, and I would have to have some sort of cybernetic telepathic internet connection. so for everyone's sake, I think it's good that I excersise a little self restraint. ;) (really, you don't want to know all of my thoughts. mostly they don't make any sense.)
9:17 PM +

•••    half of my physics homework is finished! yay! and I only stopped to surf the net twice . . . (doing homework on the computer is so dangerous. I am very impressed with my self discipline.)
1:40 PM +

•••    this imac is doing weird things with my cd. I think it keeps skipping backwards.
12:57 PM +

•••    my stuffed penguin has glowing green and purple bracelets on his wings. I think we need to turn out all the lights and dance around before I go to bed. it's my own little rave. ;)
4:24 AM +

•••    well. on a complete whim, I made an icon for this site. now if you bookmark it (or re-bookmark it! you bookmark people make me so happy), you will get a little blue square thingie instead of the internet explorer e. (netscape doesn't like icons; surprise surprise.) as icons go I think it is one of the sadder ones I have ever seen, but hey, I made it. maybe I will get inspired and make a better one at some point. . . probably not soon though, since I am already guilt tripping myself for not getting enough work done this weekend.
3:54 AM +