Truth be told honestly this time, I've actually forgotten how to write sentences without the crutches of LaTeX syntax and an average math density of 1 equation per 3 words of English during my previous semester as a Physics major and.

But on the bright side of the other hand, I spent 42 hours this weekend surviving on three food items which were (1) peanut butter and jelly on bread, (2) water, and (3) the best roast lamb, tomato chutney, and goat cheese sandwiches that I have ever had from the irreproachable Flour Bakery+Cafe by MIT. 36 of 42 hours were spent either staring at puzzles, running around campus looking for a man dressed as a mutant mushroom, staring at puzzles, or staring at puzzles.

Mystery Hunt 2011 was on.

As per usual, I hunted with the Random Hall team and had one of the best weekends imaginable in the most mentally taxing and physically tortuous sense of "best" and "imaginable." To show what I mean by example, here's a puzzle that ate up 12 hours of Saturday for breakfast with spare time to watch cartoons:

http://ihavetofindpeach.com/puzzles/mega_man/pesky_bugs/

That's it. One line of text and 5 seconds of noise. I will make and deliver* a sandwich to the first person(s) to solve it from scratch**.

*The method of delivery will be guaranteed to preserve edibility, somehow.

**The answers may be online somewhere, but I'll ask to see your work. Offer not valid to participants of this year's hunt.

Hint: Signal processing is invaluable. The answer is one word.

PS: Need to change my page header. I'm Course 8 and 18 (Physics and Math), not 3 and 8!

Be warned: the newspapers will spin you a cybertastically-juiceless tale of a bleach-haired megastar appearing at the MIT museum yesterday with almost as much advance notice as a truckload of detonated TNT, of a Polaroid press conference culminating in the unveiling of a 20”x24” Polaroid portrait of Polaroid's Creative Director (whose name begins with “L,” I believe, and ends with “ady Gaga”) photographed on the top floor of the MIT museum using a Polaroid camera that more-than-kind-of looks like a droid from The Clone Wars, of Polaroid donating the portrait to MIT along with a 9000-piece collection of Polaroid artifacts, of Polaroid's future plans to publicize its digital images and digitize its public image. (Grapevines for the curious: Polaroid will “soon” release a fully-digital camera with the capability to print instant Polaroids just like Grandma used to do for her scrapbook. I still submit that the slogan of the company's reincarnation should be, “Polaroid: Because Your Embarrassment Should be Accessible to Everyone.”) These details I will skip, except to note that one of the proposed designs for the new digital-camera-plus-printer combo looks exactly like what Amish people probably think army tanks look like.

All that aside, I woke up yesterday morning on a couch, faced* with the hard, hard realization that someone had stolen my pillow and replaced it with a laptop. Except the situation was far worse than you'd expect, because the someone was myself and I had already paid for my laptop and filled it with useless PDFs about why photons interact gravitationally with each other. Eventually, I found myself a new neck and decided to consume a mango from the MIT Farmer's Market for breakfast, although in reality the mango was probably imported from Mexico, an irony that reminded me of how Lady Gaga's newest music video plucks out a similar dissonance between the theme of places that aren't Mexico and the theme of places that are Mexico. I just reread the previous sentence, and it seems possible that I don't understand what the word “theme” means.

*I should have written, “the back of my head faced with . . . ” in order to evoke the accurate positional relationship of my head to the lack-of-pillow, but this sounded too anatomically confusing.

The takeaway message here is that I finished the mango, checked my email, and discovered at 9:18 AM that I had a press ticket to a Polaroid press conference at the MIT Museum at 11:30 AM. The weather forecast registered sunny with a 50% chance of celebrity sighting.

I showed up. This happened:

Which escalated into:

The people on the other side of the street on average had bigger camera lens and better shoes, so I ran past the police cars to the other side of the Gagamobile and started ducking through the crowd.

Eventually, I crossed the 7-foot-radius line and had an epiphany that no person in the presence of an international celebrity has ever had before. It was this: I would ask Lady Gaga to sign something that belonged to me. Fortunately, she was holding a Sharpie marker. The moment hung ripe in the summer air.

In my right pocket was my cell phone. The temptation to ask her to sign it was compelling up until I remembered the scene from Telephone where she walks into a Tarantino film and poisons the entire cast because someone wouldn't stop calling her on the phone. Scratch that. In my left pocket was a wallet with $15, a grocery discount card, a debit card, a subway pass with $1.70 remaining, and my MIT ID. And then I thought, “Only two more years, right?” and pulled out my ID.

Lady Gaga looked at it, paused for a fraction of a second, and said, “Are you sure this is legal?”

(If you look closely at her sunglasses in the picture above, you can see the ectoplasmic reflection of her hand autographing my ID.)

Honestly, it's probably not. But on the bright side, a new ID card costs exactly $15.

(In case you're curious or vegan, I blocked out my MIT ID number with stamps of green bell peppers in GIMP.)

You might recall that I joined a cooperative living group in January. As it happens, cooperative living involves sacrifices, also sometimes known as cooperation, but also sometimes known as sacrifices. This includes donating your firstborn child to the pika alumni trust fund and spending one fine weekend in early Spring with your housemates in a pristine, remote locale untouched by the electric caresses of ubiquitous WiFi, untethered to the nuisances of problem sets and impending deadlines. It's almost like the hit reality TV show Survivor, except instead of overcoming challenges, building community, having intense meetings, and eating bugs, pika spends the weekend overcoming challenges, building community, having intense meetings, and eating asparagus. Because pika is vegetarian-and-vegan-friendly like that.

In three hours of a Friday night undeserving of weekend status, I'd traveled from the hot pulsating heart of Massachusetts (Boston) to its limpid appendix (Provincetown, Cape Cod). Carpooling along the cement veins of deserted state highways in the company of half-comatose housemates, I perused the 60 mph'ed blur of trees and roads with ironic detachment and idly thumbed through an imaginary scrapbook of childhood road trips (with my mental thumbs, I mean). Some writers try to sell childhood as prime real estate for innocence and unadulterated curiosity; for me, all the literary value of ages 5-10 reduces to McDonald's, the focal point of my early psychological development. Like all other children who weren't raised in Berkeley, CA, I grew up in McDonald's and thought that potatoes excreted salt and canola oil when you planted them the right way and ended up as dehydrated mashed potato flakes when you planted them the wrong way. Ten years later, abruptly, absurdly nostalgic for an oasis of ketchup-and-mustard-colored plastic in the middle of Nowhere, MA, I yelled some Freudian nonsense about actualizing my formative identity, reliving my lost early childhood, blah blah etc, until Eric the Designated Driver caved and swerved toward the drive-thru of a generic McDonald's that does not warrant any further adjectives. Pulling up to the speaker, Eric ordered two baked-not-fried apple pies for a dollar, a cheeseburger, and a milkshake that contained about ¬Ω cup of green food coloring in homage to American's favorite Irish saint. For the rest of the trip, the car smelled faintly of baked-not-fried pie dough, softly cinnamonish with a creamy overtone of doughnut. I fell asleep humming a requiem for trans fat.

With deft precision honed by years of waking up before my alarm goes off, I opened my eyes just in time to watch our jeep drive past the most beautiful house in the world, curve around in a circle, and drive past the most beautiful house in the world again. To my unutterable surprise*, Eric pulled into the driveway of the bewitching palace attired in austere brown tile and parked. My heart pulled into reverse. Upstairs, through the floor-to-ceiling French windows, there appeared a smudge of soft carpet, buttery lamplight, burnished wood panels, and the waxy glimmer of paper disposable cups from Costco. Most of pika had already settled in, nestling sleeping bags into bedrooms decorated in color schemes once thought to be merely theoretical outside of Home & Garden magazine, piling suitcases against the living room walls, and admirably managing to squeeze 27 college students into a rented house intended for around 12 residents. Stepping inside, I was tragically lovestruck with the kind of adoration that spawns bad photographs.

*This is one of those figures of speech that stops making sense as soon as you say it. Other favorites include unspeakable happiness and unmentionable secrets.

Like this one. It's a staircase, but only the most beautiful staircase ever.

And this one. It's a kitschy miniature boat thing, but only the most beautiful kitschy minature boat thing ever.

And this one too. It's a stealth-otter-themed-tourist-guidebook, but only the most . . . never mind, I can't even try to finish.

Liz and Ruth were lucky/early/contriving enough to claim their own bedroom. I slept on an ottoman, but it was only the most beautiful ottoman ever.

Some of the other bedrooms were a Crayola factory worker's dream.

I can't think of an appropriate caption for this picture, except that while he's not basking in the company of bizarre statuettes, Alex does art in MIT's Media Lab.

There was a coffee table in the basement, but I interpreted it as a boat, which is what my high school literature teacher would have wanted me to do if the coffee table were Walt Whitman. The point is, I was on a boat.

After docking the USS Coffee Table, I went upstairs and saw Galina '11 enjoying nature's bounty of whipped cream with fresh strawberry (it's somewhere in the picture, I swear). And by nature, I of course mean Costco.

pika dines in style during retreat. We buy only the best that Nature (Costco) has to offer.

Around 11 pm, I left the house for a walk to the beach. Provincetown in the dark was a stunning approximation to the iconical New England horror novel ghost town, a la Stephen King. (Sentences like these are why I don't write travel brochures.)

After a brief eternity of staring at sand, I started to feel better about not having to do work for two days. I relaxed and thought about cod for a while, especially cod wearing capes.

The next morning, I woke up on an armchair with a bucketful of fresh, raw sunlight pouring onto my armchair-pleatherized face. Baptized in the robust glow of late dawn, the forests outside the window looked like stalks of perfectly-cooked broccoli glazed with poached egg. I ran six miles through Provincetown with Liz and Lisa and saw exactly one other human (1), two cars (2), one canine (1), and one Stephen King character (1).

Unable to resist the postcard-picturesque allure of the beach two blocks down the street, I went home, grabbed a camera, and gorged myself on 180,000,000+ pixels of touristy excess. (Now rescaled to ~200,000 pixels of touristy excess each for readers with dialup or tourism allergies.)

Breakfast was in full swing by the time I returned to the house, bleary of eye and short of camera memory. This was a morning of pretzels, coffee, oatmeal, and croissants that might have been pure butter spray-painted to look like a bread product. (Thanks, Costco!)

The rest of the morning and half of the afternoon was spent in meetings of a private and unbloggable nature. Later, I ran to the beach again, met a fisherman, saw a memorial to the Mayflower pilgrims, ran through a cemetery, did not encounter zombies, did not wield a chainsaw, and did not uncover shocking secrets about the founding of America after decrypting a coded message engraved onto the Mayflower memorial. I did, however, have asparagus for dinner. (Asparagus: The National Treasure of the Plant Kingdom.)

Others opted to stay inside and play chess with themselves. I intend no offense to your opponent, Aaron.

The remainder of the trip was a lazy blur of conversations drowned under a nightly chorus of stars that sang Mahler symphonies or maybe even Shostakovich if you listened closely, afternoons spent oscillating in simple harmonic hammocks, pretzels for breakfast, pretzels for dinner, lunches of prehistoric-sized tomatoes and impromptu hummus, and did I mention the pretzels? I ran through a national park, slept through more meetings, drove home by way of a McDonald's where a group of high schoolers laughed at me and my intro to quantum textbook (analytic solution to 1D time-independent Schrodinger equation lolz), got stuck in traffic for an hour on the way back to MIT, and did work on campus until 11 PM on Sunday night. I survived the rest of the week with inches to spare, despite sleeping for one hour on Wednesday.

And did I mention that the house we rented had a full-sized hot tub?

consciousness at the scale of gravity, if neurons could tune to the fine geometric structure of space and time

science is nothing but an extended frame of reference. the human mind imposes its own coordinate system upon the fluid topology of our perception, gingerly constructing a set of logical principles as its basis vectors.

thoughts have mass, carve ripples into spacetime

each entry of transformed tensor is a multiple of the determinant of a matrix whose rows are the derivatives of the old coordinates with respect to the new coordinates

aware of the slowing of time due to the ripples on a river, falling leaves, the mass of flowers in spring.

gravity is a pen with which mass writes on the pages of spacetime.

science adapts experience to sentience

the American Midwest is infuriatingly conservative in geometry.

definite integrals are primitive mathematical pleasure. from the cold, sparse simplicity of adding and multiplying arises a rich and diverse ecology of numerical life forms.

to look at an integral and see tiny flower gardens enclosed by a long curling fence on one side is like writing an unabashed love letter to human creativity

Walking to the sea in the sweet wet velvet of winter eve,
I looked up and saw a beach of stars, galaxies strewn like seashells in smears of cosmic sand.

Today I will sleep exactly one hour.

[Coming soon: 300% more blog, including a photogenic Bildungsroman in which I visit the beach and McDonald's, not once but twice each!]

(As a result, whenever a classmate uttered a complaint like, “I was five standard deviations below the mean on the last test,” my response was along the lines of, “Cool, you sound like a fascinating and unique person.”)

*Has anyone else ever noticed that the definition of standard deviation is horrifically incomprehensible in standard English? Inevitably, you end up saying something like, “The square root of the average of the square of the deviation from the average equals the deviation of the average of the square from the square of the average. No, it's not a riddle.”

On the other hand, General Relativity has been an eye-opening experience on the days when I've drank enough coffee that it hasn't been an eye-closing experience. For instance:

1.The more I learn about General Relativity, the less I'm sure of what a vector is. Right now, my internal definition of a vector is “something that has intrinsic pointiness.” (This also happens to be my internal definition of kitchen knives, needles, pineapples, pine cones, sharp-beaked birds, and points.) In four weeks, I'll probably tell you that a vector is the Shroud of Turin or something.

2.Graduate students are people just like you and me, except that they like to talk about how magnetization is like a covariant vector. Ex:
Me: “Hey, can I borrow a sheet of paper?”
Grad student: “Magnetization is sort of like a covariant vector. Yippee!”

3.You can turn a coffee mug into a donut if you're really gentle. (This is literally the extent to which we covered topology.) Also, a small person living on your coffee mug can't tell that it's now a donut unless they either figure out the metric or discover that the fundamental particle of his universe is sugar.

4.Lowercase Greek letters all look the same when piled onto a 5-indexed tensor. Specifically, they all look like o's scribbled by someone who failed penmanship class.

5.Whenever someone talks about tensor contraction, I have trouble resisting the urge to say, “Can't we all just relax?” (The same applies for mention of stress-energy tensors.)

In retrospect, taking Special Relativity last semester was like eating a large bowl of Lucky Charms at 5 AM after spending a bleary all-nighter solving cardboard-flavored textbook problems in classical mechanics. As the sunrise smears over oiled skies like raw egg yolk, your tired soul is momentarily uplifted by the sight of hearts, stars, rainbows, clovers, gammas, and uppercase-lambdas pouring into your plastic cereal bowl, rinsing away the dullness of frictionless pulleys and massless ropes in a crayon-colored flood of sugary milk. Two hours later, you're hungry again and feeling awfully inertial.

General relativity, by analogy, is brunch.

Speaking of brunch, I had it, non-metaphorically. On a cold Sunday morning two weeks ago, I pestered Jess '12 so much that she agreed to spend a miniature fortune with me, portmanteau'ing two meals into one ultra-(price/class/tast)y monster of a gustatory hybrid. In context, I was making $10.75/hour at the time working near X-ray radiation, so I figured that the phrase, “Money is short and so is life,” probably applied to me.

With due disregard for financial management, Jess and I walked over to Craigie on Main, a cozy upscale restaurant just around the corner from MIT, swankily cuddled in a block of the usual college-student haunts (pizza parlor open til 3 AM, ice cream shop with a penchant for creative caffeine, the Canonical Cheap Chinese restaurant, etc.) Flanked by tall mugs of hot strong coffee, we seated ourselves at the counter and watched the cooks inscribe isosceles toast into circular plates.

Jess' first course was a miniature sugar-crusted donut, pliant and warm as a fresh corpse lying in a puddle of caramel gore. (Despite my attempt to make Jess' choice of appetizer sound Hitchcockishly unappetizing, it was actually pretty good. Nice job, Jess.)

Endowed with slightly more civilized tastes, I started with a scoop of coriander and cashew granola, pleasantly crunchy with the mildest hint of curry.

Next was a plate of citrus-cured arctic char and sablefish, curled and piled onto toasted bagels smothered in cream cheese.

Also, I had caviar for brunch. This is now on my resume, in case you were wondering.

For her main course, Jess ordered the grass-fed house-brined corned beef hash with slow-poached egg and onion rings and too many hyphens. My conscience forces me to admit that this was unequivocally delicious. The beef revealed itself in tender, melt-in-mouth morsels of rich, velvety saltiness snuggled in blankets of briny, creamy, and crispy.

Dessert was a glass of sour milk pannacotta drizzled with a few sweet spoonfuls of blackberry coulis.

And then I went back to school and ate cereal out of a Ziplock bag during lunch while unlearning about vectors.

*Not that this is supposedly impressive. Probably half the problems were just to take logs (the math kind, not the kind that President Lincoln lived in, which are much harder to take). Speaking of which, you should check out my friend Phil's blog, blogarithm, not necessarily because of the content but because I thought of the title.

After my advising meeting, I loitered for a few hours, had a meeting with the Department Head of Physics not worth blogging about (yet), caught an elevator* to the 6th floor of the Kavli Institute, and nearly fell asleep four times on a sun-dappled sofa while waiting for my UROP supervisor to finish his phone call. In the meantime (between sleep cycles), I started to debate the redundancy of phrases such as “stick of chapstick,” which has bothered me so deeply in the past that I've refused to use chapstick of any flavor, texture, or bee-produced ingredient in fear of getting belittled by my peers for repetitive word choice. Unbeknownst to me, there was an unopened stick of chap in my coat pocket, a complimentary gift from Cedar's Hummus Company that annoyingly happened to be peach-flavored instead of hummus-flavored. I later gave it to a British exchange student by the unlikely name of Nimrod, who remarked, “Wow! It's chapstick flavored like hummus flavored like peaches!”

*The elevators in the indubitably tall Building 37 are visible from Earth only slightly more often than Halley's Comet.

Tomorrow, I will (1) wake up, (2) attempt to get a career at the uncareerlike hour of 9 AM, and (3) sit through six hours of classes, in body if not in spirit.

Lastly, I'd be remiss not to publicly observe that my bed is a right triangle. I sleep on the hypotenuse: conveniently, (Wall length)^2 + (Wall length)^2 = (My height)^2.

Slush blooms like grey wildflowers on concrete during murkily warm, precipitation-infatuated Januaries. This I gleaned from a morning of traipsing from car-to-door with luggage stuffed like roasted peppers (the stuffed kind, you know), ferrying the bare-stripped evidence of my baryonic selfhood in three suitcases, two boxes, and a broken laundry hamper mashed onto the cushions of a green car. (Is “green” somewhat of a creative-imagery let-down? To be specific, the car was nearly the exact color of the Green Party logo, but I thought that “Green-Party-green car” would be too much of a modifier sandwich.) Slush, puddled with motor juice under thin skins of ice, is the terror of unscotchgarded ankles in urban New England. Slush is a test of courage and moral fiber.

MIT is not a school for the daintily-shod. For that, I direct you to the sun-drenched, flip-flop-friendly sidewalks of that other school in Southern California, where the socially-repulsive pairing of socks with sandals is an acceptable solution to hard weather. (By “hard,” I mean “comparatively pleasant.”)

By the way, I'm sure some of you think that “shoes” is a metaphor for perseverance, academic ambition, or high SAT scores, but I urge you to read this literally. Forget having brilliant ideas or scientific ingenuity or whatever; you can't pulverize a chunk of snow in your path by factoring large integers on a quantum computer in polynomial time, unless your shoe also runs Shor's algorithm.*

*Inexplicably, as I was writing this, I mentally permuted a well-known tongue-twister into “Shoes solve Shor cells in the C shell.”

Long story shor(t), I moved out of Random Hall and into pika on Monday.

The purest of all unimportant joys may well be the clarity of knowing exactly what you own. To be precise, I have no clue whether I own any free will* or whether I still own my Intro to Solid State Chem. textbook after lending it out to some guy named Cappie, but there's little point in chasing after the unanswerable. After the sad, sweet, soul-searching-and-room-searching process of moving out of Random Hall, I can list everything I own that interacts with photons and has never interacted with Cappie.

*Evidence against the existence of free will: I lost the game while writing this.

So I typed out this poem. Apologies to anyone who can read; after 1.5 years at MIT, I consider poetry to be a list of junk in my suitcases with line indentations partially inspired by e.e. cummings* and partially inspired by Python code.

*By “e.e. cummings,” I mean “the Wikipedia entry on e.e. cummings.”

Unmachinewashable sweaters,
Unmachinewashable electronics (laptop, etc.),
A problem set for
      8.07 sublimated by Maxwell Stress Tensor puns (I was tired that week, alright?
      I just couldn't feel any sympathy for
          how stressed and tense the electromagnetic field was.),
A mechanical caterpillar,
Name-brand ketchup (Heinz) as well as a phonetic ripoff of name-brand ketchup (Hunt's),
Van Gogh flipbook in which the artist cyclically loses and regains his ear if
      you flip it forwards and backwards in sequence,
Stephen Hawking's Universe (although he's been asking for
      it back. Not that I wanted it in the first place, considering how much entropy he put in it.),
Stamps, the kind that last for-
      ever supposedly. (Stephen Hawking hates these stamps because they violate all sorts of
      physical laws when they fall into black holes.),
Five bottles of free hand sanitizer, courtesy of H1N1.

(In a moment of face-slapping irony, I realized soonafter that my list of possessions does not in fact include a room at pika, thanks to technical details of the housing system. For the past week, I've been sleeping in the back of Ruth's room, storing my unmachinewashable luggage in Dave GradStudent's room without his knowledge/consent, and waking up every morning in gorgeous pools of sunlight that softy obliterate my aversion to homelessness.)

Between transferring addresses, splurging a weekend on Mystery Hunt, helping build a sounding rocket with an X-ray telescope (it's going into outer space in 2011! As opposed to inner space, which is where mathematicians like to take dot products), cramming a 16-week class into 4 weeks, grading for the class that convinced me to major in Physics a year ago, not blogging, and sleeping five hours per night, I've been tossing a problem around in the liminal spaces between rational thought and crazy conjecture. I'm going to share it here, with the warning that it lurks around in a playground of optical physics and offers to give you plenty of brain candy if you follow it a bit further. (Don't take candy from strange physics questions.)

A few weeks ago, my friend Aviv* went to see a certain movie and returned home with a pair of magical 3D glasses. They were magical not only because they'll probably win an Academy Award for Best Inanimate Object in Cinema but also because of the strange way in which they filtered light. When Aviv looked in the mirror through his new glasses and closed his left** eye, he saw one lens of the glasses go dark while the other one remained transparent. Take a guess. Which lens was which?

*Aviv's defining characteristics are (1) competence at both computer programming and roller-skating (he worked for Google and roller skates in Boston regularly without getting concussions) and (2) surviving on a diet consisting of only broccoli, strawberry yogurt, and chewy bars. Unrelatedly, the most bizarre thing that I've said to a mathematician recently was, “Did you know that if you cut up broccoli, you just end up with exponentially more broccoli than you had originally? That's because broccoli is a fractal.”

**Left and right here will always be in reference to Aviv, not the mirror image of Aviv.

If you've read that 3D glasses usually work by polarization, the natural assumption is that the left lens went dark when Aviv closed his left eye. Imagine that the left lens is horizontally polarized while the right is vertically polarized. The light from Aviv's closed (left) eye is horizontally polarized after it passes through the left lens, remains horizontally polarized when it bounces off the mirror at near-normal incidence, and gets completely blocked by the vertically-polarizing lens over Aviv's open (right) eye. Thus, he doesn't see any light from the area covered by the left lens of his glasses, whereas the vertically-polarized light from his right eye still gets through the vertically-polarized right lens.

Great! Problem solved. Now let's go make a PBS special.

Except that exactly the opposite phenomenon happened. When Aviv closed his left eye, he saw the right lens go dark. That is, he could see his closed eye but couldn't see his open eye in the mirror.

[EDIT: Just to be clear, I ruled out the possibility of the linear polarizing system described above as soon as he mentioned this. Avatar was released in three different 3D formats, according to Wikipedia, and two of them offer interesting solutions to Aviv's question.]

After 15 minutes of Googling all possible combinations of “Avatar,” “3D glasses,” “what the heck, I thought I knew how light worked,” I stumbled upon a paper summarizing the technical specs of the Avatar glasses. (The discovery of this document is left as an exercise to the reader.) Quickly cobbling together a few scraps of peripheral 8.03 knowledge, I scribbled down a halfway decent explanation and went to bed. The next morning, I decided it was basically all wrong. Two hours later, I decided it could be workable with a few changes.

And then I decided that I simply needed more data.

Thus, gentle reader, I implore you to try the following tests and post your observations if you happen to have a pair of Avatar 3D glasses and a mirror within close reach:

1.Put on the glasses, look in the mirror, close one eye. Do you confirm Aviv's observation?

2.Look at light reflecting off a surface at an angle of around 50-60 degrees from the normal. Close one eye. Close the other eye. Does the light disappear either way? If so, open the eye that doesn't block the light, close the other eye, and tilt your head 90 degrees or until sufficiently uncomfortable. See if the intensity of light changes.

3.Repeat both of the above tests wearing the glasses backwards. (That is, face the outside of the glasses toward your eye.)

4.Repeat Test 1 with a reflective metal surface instead of a mirror.

In the meantime, I encourage you to comment here if you have an explanation. Scientific backing is appreciated but not necessary.

I met Yan during our freshman year (she even unwittingly snapped a picture of me in Diff Eq. around Valentine’s Day http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/student_life_culture/valentines_day_special_1.shtml) and continued to run into her with increasing frequency until we were living under the same roof this summer at pika*. You might recall we journeyed to New York City at the end of July and survived a gastronomical bildungsroman**.

*In all prepositional honesty, at least half of the living at pika happens on the roof instead of under it. Pika's homemade, impeccably sanded (by Yan & Co.) roofdeck is a full-service pit stop on the road to cozy summer skylines, breezy sunsets, and barely-interpolated constellations swimming in celestial gutters cluttered with light pollution. As I shiver in the dregs of December and qwertily exercise fingers unwarmed by penurious radiators, I can't help but rhapsodize my midsummer memories of coarse-grained films splattered onto a makeshift screen on the roofdeck, froth-tipped banana-sweet smoothies on the roofdeck, impromptu rope-climbing on the roofdeck, reading books in eye-frazzling noon sunlight on the roofdeck, listening to Jess discover the 2934829th normal mode of her violin on the roofdeck, absorbing plenty of delightful UV radiation on the roofdeck . . . anyway, I digress.

**Way to steal my polysyllabic descriptors, Jess.

For kicks, I asked to borrow five minutes of her fame, and she gave me a guest blog entry. Yan's pretty generous.*

*Jess, I could use a little more specificity here. Remember the time you gave me two entire packs of gum because I mentioned that the kind you had in your backpack was the most delicious thing I have ever eaten instead of breakfast while trying to catch a bus? And remember how I was so Oprah-gasmically grateful that I gave you one of my granola bars from Trader Joe's? Anyway, I think that would have made a fine anecdote about the value of friendship and generosity, etc.

I'm Course 6-2 (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and live on Conner 4 of Burton-Conner. Basically, I've got a run-of-the-mill major and live in a dorm populated by a glut of bloggers, past and present. There are a few unusual things I can share about my experience at MIT, though. For one, I have a UROP (a research job) that’s in a field totally outside my major and so non-technical that it’s slightly blasphemous—it’s in Course 21W: Writing and Humanistic Studies.*

*What in the world is a writing UROP, Jess?

“What in the world is a writing UROP?” you ask.*

*Way ahead of you, Jess.

I’m working as an editorial assistant for Angles (http://web.mit.edu/angles/), a magazine of exemplary work written by students in MIT’s introductory writing classes. The authors here aren’t the most polished, professional writers—these are the voices of regular MIT students who take the introductory classes to improve their writing, or out of interest in a particular class’s topic, or even because they are required to by the results of the Freshman Essay Evaluation. Regardless, the essays students produce in these classes are thought-provoking and even intensely personal at times. In the course titled “Writing and Experience,” people have written on topics ranging from coming to terms with their racial identity, to the death of a brother, to ethical vacillations about vegetarianism.*

*Jess, alliteration with the letter V is so passe. Ever since that movie came out that began with the letter V and ended with the letters “for Vendetta,” you can't say phrases like “vacillations about vegetarianism” anymore unless you wear a plastic halloween mask.

So, there you go, UROPs don’t have to be in your major, or even technical.

I also do quite a bit of music in what time I can squeeze out of my life during the school year. And here’s a not-so-big-secret—the music department at MIT is a gem.*

*Mohs def, Jess. (Mineralogy puns are hard.)

I started piano in kindergarten, violin in third grade, and played in the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras from middle through high school. When it came time to choose a college, music was an important factor in my decision.

What initially drew me in about the MIT Music Department was the Emerson Scholarship Program, which funds half to all of students’ private instrumental or voice lessons if they pass an audition.

MIT has a variety of musical ensembles, from the standard to the exotic: the MIT Symphony Orchestra; Chamber Music Society; Wind Ensemble; Concert Choir; Festival Jazz Ensemble; Rambax, a Senegalese drumming ensemble; and Galak Tika, a Balinese gamelan.

There are many fine musicians* here (especially pianists). Some people here go to Aspen Music Festival and other competitive music programs over the summer.

*Did you know that Feynman played the bongos?

This term I took two and a half music classes—Musical Improvisation, Harmony and Counterpoint I, and Chamber Music—which combined with last year’s classes finished up my humanities concentration in music. My favorite class was Musical Improvisation, which was taught by a visiting professor, Donal Fox. As a classically-trained musician, I had always played the notes on the page. The professor asked us to keep a journal through the class, so I started a blog for it. The last entry pretty much sums up what I want to tell you about that class. I would just copy/paste.

Although HASS classes are considered by some to be exercises in irritation*, there’s a benefit people don’t talk about much—you make friends through these classes. At least in freshman and sophomore years, when the courses you take tend to be large lectures in which you’re one in a relatively faceless crowd, HASS classes are a good way to meet new people. By virtue of being HASS, they tend to involve more discussion and interaction. All the ones I’ve taken have had fewer than twenty people, and I’ve met a range of students from different backgrounds**—from different majors, living groups, and graduating classes.

*No kidding. Nothing quite jerks your stomach into your lungs like spending two hours fleshing out the harmonic nuances of a Bach chorale in Harmony and Counterpoint II only to discover that you missed the key signature that Bach intended by an angle of pi/2 on the Circle of Fifths. Trignometry hurts.

**Speaking of diversity, I met someone in one of my HASSes who didn't like any sauces with tomatoes.

And hey, chances are I’ll meet none of you reading this, unless we take the same HASS*.

*Jess is being humble here. Other ways of meeting Jess include but are not limited to: living at pika over the summer, working for the Tech, playing in MITSO, joining the Sport Taekwondo team, spending all your time in Course 6-2 classes, letting me have your gum, writing a guest blog for MITadmissions, spending a happy new year (hopefully) with your family in Massachusetts, and visiting me over IAP because we didn't spend nearly enough time together this term, right, Jess?

1.Baked bread.
2.Read Feynman.
3.Written this list.

On second thought, make that four:

4.Unsuccessfully re-installed MATLAB (twice) because my license keys obnoxiously expired while I was busy playing minesweeper* or something likewise pre-installed and useless.

*I kid, because I have swept nary a mine since bidding goodbye to the tender age of microwaved pizza rolls, Windows 98, and messily penciled sonatas of elementary algebra on crumpled graph paper. Years ago, I convinced myself that minesweeper was prototyped during the Vietnam War to sharpen the reflexes of future army enlistees, and that Bill Gates had cleverly developed a way to hook up my parents' computer to mine-detonators in remote Third World countries. When I first learned the word “career,” I imagined myself as a top-secret military agent whose patriotic duty was to sit in front of a CRT monitor and play minesweeper to protect U.S. troops from setting off hidden mines in the Midwest or whatever. If I cleared one of the smaller minefields in less than 10 seconds, the government would issue me a bunch of yellow smilie face stickers and a “HIGH SCORE” certificate.

Every Christmas morning, I momentarily revert to my childhood definition of an agnostic (me) as someone who regards God's existence as unknowable due to lack of sense-based observations and Santa's existence as obvious due to presents-based observations. This year, however, the solid grounds of my agnosticism turned to swamp when I noticed that Santa hadn't visited my house and left me a licensed copy of MATLAB.

“Santa doesn't exist,” you interject. (By which I mean, I interject on behalf of you since you can't leave a comment on this blog before I finish it. Furthermore: FIRST.) Normally I'd agree with you, but at this transitional, trans-semester stage in my life, I interpret Santa as a wave function whose time component peaks around Christmas season and spacial dependence peaks in countries with a large population of Christians and high GDPs. The fact that I didn't get a present this year is simply the result of the Santa wave function experiencing destructive interference with economic recession.

Nonetheless, I'm the first to admit that “Santa Clause is Coming to Town” is much more metrically flexible than “Santa Claus's Probability Distribution Has a Local Maximum in Your Vicinity.”

Furthermore, I'll concede that the Santa function is complex and probably has a sizable imaginary component. It may be renormalizable, but it won't renormalize your family's opinion of you as you explain to your 5-year old cousin the dual nature of Santa as both a wave and a barely-employable guy at the local mall.

Anyway, while I was busy drafting the lyrics to “Carol of the Bell Curves,” “Deck the Hall Effect,” and “Do You Hear What I Hear, Or Do Our Observables Fail to Commute?” an anonymous commenter on my previous blog queried:

can you summarize your other activities outside of classes?

(i figured a bit of e.e. cummings would grant me some internetz)

My response follows:

Dear Anonymous,

I slept, sometimes. Other nights, I'd stay awake and think about a nice, rustic loaf of bread.

Best wishes,
Yan

According to Facebook, my other activities included:

*UWIP = Undergrad Women in Physics
**FASAP = Freshman Arts Seminar, an advising program that paid for countless free dinners and concert tickets last year. Highly recommended, even if I don't remember what the “AP” stands for.
***ATS = Association of Taiwanese Students. I am neither Taiwanese nor an association of any sort, but thanks to ATS, I'm now Taiwanese by association.
****Katelyn Gao = my former roommate, not an acronym.

In the past week, I've splurged a semester's worth of energy, motivation, and Googling on amateur breadmaking. After 19 hours of tango with mercurial thermostats and Schrodinger's yeast (is it dead or alive? I can't tell), I tossed Loaf #1 into the oven with a hearty dash of pessimism, clocked off 30 minutes, and pulled out:

A lithospheric formation of charred crust, high density, and too much compression in the . . . um, upper mantle.

Loaf #2 turned out better after a 25-hour rising period. Biting into the bone-thick, morbidly crunchy crust to pillow your molars on the soft spongy tissues of dough inside was like experiencing the most delicious dental surgery ever.

After two nights in a plastic-wrap cocoon, Loaf #2 was reincarnated in a casserole dish under 375 degree heat. A modest serving of leftover bread stuffing with apples and red onions inexplicably wore the aroma of red wine like a secondhand dress from a seamy thrift shop. I've come to accept the strange personality flips of maturing yeast.

In context, the stuffing made a terrific pairing (tripleting?) with sweet coconut chickpea curry and roasted brussels sprouts, the dinner I cooked for mom on Dec. 24.

Interlude: The rest of the coconut milk from the curry went into a cauliflower flatbread, because I was getting fed up (figuratively) with yeast getting fed up (literally). If you understood the previous sentence, congratulations.

The dough for Loaf #3 chillaxed in the fridge for two and a half days in hopes of coaxing the lively, nostril-curling flavors of sour yeast from a wet marsh of flour and water.

Yet again, I forgot that the thermal regulator on my oven had been clinically diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. Volcanic bursts cracked open the marred crust as the thing was cooling on the rack.

The loaf was tastier this time but still not French enough to belittle me. Isn't there a French proverb that goes something like, “A good loaf of bread is condescending toward the cheese”? (I hope not, because I just made this up and I think it sounds copyrightable.)

And that's what I did over Winter Break. I baked bread that wasn't condescending toward the cheese.

*In fact, this fact is not factually interesting at all, except that it starts with a strategic and misleading adverb. One of my firmest personal beliefs is that one should never waste the grammatical potency of “interestingly” on sentences that are actually interesting, like this one, which began with “One.” One could say that “one” is one of the worst one-word sentence hooks ever. See?

Apparently, I forgot how to communicate ideas other than “you can integrate a stress tensor over a surface without actually integrating it” and “I like Feynman” after one year cloistered at MIT with contact into the outside world that was tenuous at best and Facebook at worst. Soon after departing into the Christmas jingle-suffused bowels of Logan Int'l Airport, I encountered Level 10 communication barriers, on a scale where Level 1 includes talking to Intro to Linguistics teaching assistants. (In case you had an exceptionally well-englished TA, you can consider the scale to be logarithmic.) The first sign of impending bafflement appeared as I handed my boarding pass and state-issued photo ID to the boarding-pass-and-federal-or-state-issued-photo-ID-checker*.

*Do they have actual job titles? Can I abbreviate this to “BPAFOSIPIDC” without offending anyone? I'm writing this on the Internet, so the answer is either obvious or I should ignore it.

Quoth the BPAFOSIPIDC, peering at my (unabashedly expired) Missouri Driver's Permit, “Did you get an extension on this?”

Me: Nope! Too hosed.

BPAFOSIPIDC (frowning): I'm afraid I have to ask if you have any other identification.

Me: Nope! Should I go back to school now and spend Winter Break watching other people play Guitar Hero? I guess that's okay.

BPAFOSIPIDC: No, your ID is fine, but you should renew your driver's permit.

Me: I don't know what a car is.

I walked away from the conversation shoeless and uncertain of my understanding of rudimentary human communication. As my shoes drifted down the conveyor belt and into a sophisticated machine designed to verify that they weren't size five-and-a-half grenades, I puzzled over the indubitably intricate logic of the BPAFOSIPIDC: did he think I should become a licensed driver in Boston, a city where thousands of intelligent college students learn how to not operate a motor vehicle until they're over 25 and in California? Or does he simply have an unnatural aversion to expired identification? I suppose that's understandable. I have an aversion to expired dairy. In fact, I'd even venture to guess that I'm expired-lactose intolerant.

Security surmounted, I slid into a decidedly-solid piece of generic aiport furniture and, hazed by a callous carousel of Logan-traipsing on four hours of sleep, flipped to the preface of David J. Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics and internalized the most weepingly beautiful prose ever to flower from the turgid, algebra-swollen loam of a QM textbook: “ . . . quantum theory was not created- or even definitively packaged- by one individual, and it retains to this day some of the scars of its exhilarating but traumatic youth.” Never has my heart flowed with such insuppressible pathos for the metaphoric childhood of a scientific field. Yet, as soon as I belted myself into my airplane-seat-that-doubles-as-a-floatation-device-in-case-of-emergency, the intrinsic challenges of Sitting Next to Another Person became crumblingly manifest:

Stewardess: Would you like a beverage, peanuts, cookies, or pretzels?

Me: E, none of the above.

Guy in Seat 17A (gets a cookie): Are you sure you don't want a cookie? They're pretty fantastic. They taste sort of like graham crackers. Do you like graham crackers? Are you sure you don't want a cookie?

Me (in a mild state of panic, since by now I'm convinced that this guy is working for Delta Airlines and will blackmail me out of my SkyMiles if I don't get a cookie and enjoy it with televised gusto): Boy howdy, graham crackers are awesome! I have six boxes in my room!*

*This is actually true because of miscalculations in preparing for this.

Guy in Seat 17A: What are you snacking on?

Me (eating pita chips out of a ziplock bag): Pita chips, but they taste like graham crackers, which I presume taste like that delicious, complimentary cookie provided courtesy of Delta Airlines. Yum.

Guy in Seat 17A (unwrapping a cookie with an enormous Delta logo chiseled into the front): Mmm, this tastes like a thick gingersnap cookie, but even better. I love to eat them in the morning*. Hey Stewardess, can I have another cookie?

Me: Enough is enough! I have had it with these m*****f***ing snacks on this m*****f***ing plane!

(I didn't actually say this, because I suspected that Delta was filming my conversation with this guy for a commercial on public television.)

Half an hour removed from Cambridge, my regret for leaving MIT had already been amply nourished by the discovery that normal people have apparently sold their right of free speech to airline companies. I'd go back in a femtoheartbeat* if I didn't have to fly Delta.

*Combining biological figures of speech with metric prefixes satiates my inner Faulkner.

Good thing I took pictures of my bed before I left. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to print these and pin them to my pillow. Else the misery of separation would be unbearable.

(The ladder isn't attached to the loft, not even gravitationally and definitely not Coulombically. I took it out of my room and tried to pole vault with it once.)

1. Today I accidentally punched a friend in the head while gesticulating the angle between a wall clock and the horizontal. In an effort to convince Matt McGann that I am an entirely trustworthy employee as long as you don't ask me for the time in a panicked tone, I'm willing to bet that most socially-competent people punch someone every month or so. Statistically, if you have 500 friends, and .5% of your friends are within 2 feet of you at any time while you're awake, and the average human arm length is around 2.1 feet, and you point at something every 4 minutes or so, and . . . well, you should probably just try to have less friends. (Especially if your friends come in multiples of 2.5.)

2. It is possible to succeed in life even despite enormous obstacles like having 16396 unread emails in one's inbox.

3. A mental exercise: Next time you walk into a bathroom, spontaneously promise yourself that you will not leave until either:

A. You finally understand a concept that you've struggled with for a long time.
B. You remember the capital of whichever Dakota or Carolina you find to be more mneumonically elusive. (South for me in both cases.)
C. A friend/family member threatens to inflict serious Hitchhock-esque damage to your person if you don't get out of the bathroom within the next five seconds.

Through regular practice, you will expand your self-directed learning capacity while fostering a strong awareness of diverse cultures. And by diverse I mean both North and South Dakota.

4. One can broadly describe an academic field by its use of the word “subtle.” Consider the following:

Ethnomusicology major: Bartok's mingling of quasi-folk microtonal melodies with radio broadcasts from WWII airstrikes creates an aurally subtle yet contextually ponderous effect of reminding the listener that (s)he will eventually die. [“Subtle” = “non-observable.”]

Math major: This problem is subtle. [“Subtle” = “non-solvable.”]

Psychology major: The desire for social belonging is a subtle consequence of human nature. [“Subtle” = “obvious.”]

5. Over IAP, MIT's computer science department offers an enticing-and-possibly-poisonous candy shop of miniature programming classes. For instance:

[Conversation transcript follows]
Me: I think I'm taking intro class on programming in C.
Linda: I took it last year. The problem sets are hard.
Me: Really? It can't be that bad -
Linda: One kid stepped on his laptop so he wouldn't have to turn his in.
Me: . . . That's subtle.

The author hypothesizes that MIT Medical and IS&T should jointly investigate the frequency of laptop suicides over IAP in order to prevent the horrifying and tragic results of undiagnosed disorders in poorly-written code.

6. The older I get, the more crammingly I have to swallow the urge to begin every blog entry with trite, brittly cynical three-word sentences. “I'm getting old” creeps into my typing fingers like an arthritis, and every push of the delete bar afterwards nursingly massages out an infectious cramp. Lulu, with the battered wisdom of a senior year Physics major who speaks of skipping town on frigid New England winters and frigid academics while I'm listlessly thinking to ask her about the force on a dipole due to the gradient of the B-field, probably warned me about the onslaught of premature aging a long time ago, but I don't remember what she said because my memory drifted in an elsewhere of superconducting rings floating dreamily along curling field lines. Perhaps my geriatric expressiveness is a just a flavor of Seasonal Anxiety Disorder: the dry snap of dessicated branches, catapulting ice onto unprotected pedestrian heads, is pretty scary now that I think about it.

At the same time, I've become increasingly fond of telling friends and strangers alike that John A. Wheeler (Feynman's mentor and the co-author of the best textbook on General Relativity ever written for preschoolers) once believed that all electrons had the same observed mass and charge because (wait for the punchline) they were all the same electron. This is perhaps my favorite fact ever. It's thought-provoking, it's a hit at parties, and it's snappy like a dry tree branch laden with snow. (In which snow is a metaphor for hilariousness. I bet you Robert Frost never thought of that one.) On the other hand, I'm slightly worried because the uncontrollable sharing of one's Favorite Fact Ever with people who don't care is a well-documented characteristic of old people.

Hypothesis: The older I get, the closer I come to rivaling Professor Sadoway for the title of Person Most Likely to Try to Entertain You by Talking about Electrons.

Side note: What's your Favorite Fact Ever?

7. In astrophysics, the no-hair theorem postulates that black hole solutions to the General Relativistic equations of gravitation and electromagnetism can be characterized by only mass, charge, and angular momentum. At MIT, the no-time-for-hair theorem postulates that solutions to the general problem of simultaneously having hair and having too much work to do can be characterized by variants of the same three parameters: massive hair, electrically-charged hair, and angularly momentous hair. I was a brilliant example of non-quantum entanglement last week:

8. Spending Thanksgiving away from family is a delectable excuse to go geocaching with a low-precision car GPS that will ensure complete failure to find any geocaches. I tested this theory last weekend at pika, after waking up on Thanksgiving day to a house full of British accents, coupon-bloated newspapers, grey November sun dapples, dying flowers, and leftover chai tea and cookies on the dining room table. Holidays are like American dollars in Europe during a recession; they're better spent in pursuit of reckless adventures than anything else.

Ruth '13, as per family tradition, spent the morning biking through the city with her sister.
(I'm rather fond of how “pika” got truncated to “oika” in this photo, mostly because I imagine an Ancient Grecian doppelganger of Pikachu squealing, “Oika!” as it battles some sort of Charizard-esque creature from Hades.)

Emily '10, as per family tradition, baked several pies and drove to New Hampshire to celebrate pie with her relatives.

Desi (pika's cat-in-residence), as per family tradition, climbed onto my Star Wars Original Trilogy bedsheets* and pounced at Darth Vader.

*Mom wouldn't let me bring my LEGO Death Star II replica to college though, probably because she didn't want me to have too wild of a social life.

And then Desi found out that Darth Vader was her father.

Eventually, I stopped photographing the cat and kneaded some leftover potato coconut soup into a wheat flour batter, which briskly crisped into a skillet of coconut curry flatbread. Although in retrospect, I think it would have tasted just as good without the cat.

[The next morning, I released the sequel: Rosemary Onion Mushroom Olive Focaccia (or Faux-caccia, to be puntastically faithful to my non-traditional improvisations), frankensteined together from Scott '13's leftover vegetable collection. It was decidedly and fragrantly okay, but probably should have been flatter and/or breadier. Although it was easily fixed with a dollop of catsup, if you know what I mean.]

Scott made waffles.

Post-breakfast, I grabbed my GPS and embarked on a journey into the desolate zombiefied streets of Boston, whose denizens were presumably occupied by traditional Thanksgiving activities like Guitar Hero and Turkey-Consumption Hero. O'er hill and dale I traipsed, GPS dutifully bleeping the (approximate) coordinates of unseen treasures as I and my entourage peered into skeletal tree trunks, sunk our eyes deep into overgrown grass, overturned mud-entrenched rocks, and generally acted like characters from Redwall in search of a plot device.

Short story short, I decided to call it a day when the robotically-sonorous female voice on my GPS intoned, “Jump off bridge; swim fifty feet downstream and turn left. Arrive at destination.” I was like, “Girl, please. Heck no I ain't retrieving this geocache.”

So I walked home and took pictures of the cat leftovers.

Because: the first question on my Special Relativity test required me to add (and subtract!) numbers with 5 significant figures, and the professor did not manage to include a free copy of Matlab on the formula sheet. No kidding. I opened the test book, glanced at the first page, and felt my face melt into a puddle of inconsolable horror at the sight of more Arabic numerals than I've seen since the SAT II's, which was like 29483 years ago. Unable to bear it any longer, I turned the page, and went on, shuddering in a rising tide of despair. With the precious rind of spare time remaining after I finished the next three problems, I took out my extra pen and whittled an abacus out of the armrest of my chair, with which I hoped to compute the difference between .02932 and .39328.

A wise person once said that arithmetic is like arthritis: it cripples your dreams and contains the letters a, r, t, h, and two i's*. Or is it three? I can't add, remember?

*Cross-curriculum insight of the day: Homophones are the limit of consonance as consonance approaches infinity. Someday, I plan to teach a literature class that has a math prerequisite.

It wasn't until 6:30 pm that I discovered that I had scored 40 points higher on the exam than predicted. (Or was it 50? I can't subtract either.) I'm like the Dow Jones of test grades these days. Also, I'd like to thank the proud sponsors of Sesame Street for their generous contribution to my math education. Never will I forget that seven always comes after Big Bird.

Additional thanks goes to the Physics department library and the irreproachable views of Killian Court glowingly spread outside each window, watching over the study desks like guardians of sanity. Waves and vibrations, sunsets refracting through Windex'ed glass panes, provided the counterpoint to a dry, overbaked textbook with too many pictures. By pictures, I mean “diagrams.” By “diagram,” I mean “a sine wave with an arrow pointing at it.”

It's now 1:46 AM, and I've exceeded bedtime by a couple of hours. To first order, I'm sleeping as I type this. (Definition of MIT, #129: The ability to Taylor expand your states of consciousness around an equilibrium point, usually to convince yourself that you've slept recently.)

This semester, 8.07 (Electricity and Magnetism II) takes the proverbial cake for hopscotching around my criteria for likable classes. The first ten weeks or so straddled a slender line between geekishly fun and downright scary. On one hand, it's hard to complain about a class where the professor spends 5 minutes playing the Electrostatic Video Game in the middle of his lecture slides* and then inexplicably flings his USB drive into the door using a makeshift rubber-band slingshot. (I believe he was attempting to demonstrate something about tension in field lines, but the lesson was sadly overshadowed by the fact that his USB drive looked pretty expensive.)

*All seven people in attendance during this lecture burst into applause as the Positive Charge bounced off a wall, hovered in a precarious moment of unstable equilibrium, and slowly rolled into the target. It was the most breathtaking thing I'd ever experienced, but only because I don't have asthma.

On the other hand, the class this year was taught backwards, starting with the gnarliest subject in the entirety of 8.07: dipole radiation. Have you ever seen a dipole radiate? The thing spews out enough math to educate a third-world village.

<<<<}>>>>

(This is what happens when I stop taking photos. It's supposed to be a graphical representation of an oscillating dipole, alright? As I always say, MIT admissions values tolerance.)

On the third hand, there was a warm and cherished moment in 8.07 when the curriculum abruptly leaped from relativistic dipole radiation to Coulomb's Law. Did you know that I'm probably one of the few people in human history who learned the Li√©nard–Wiechert formulation of potentials for a moving point charge before learning electrostatics? By the way, the problem set for that particular week was far more bipolar than dipolar: one question was along the lines of, “Find the force on a line charge in a uniform electric field, but use the Maxwell Stress Tensor and do a spherical integral over infinity only after converting your basis vectors into Cartesian. Also, while you're solving easy problems using the hardest method imaginable, carve a turkey using toothpicks, but only after you convert your toothpicks into a small wooden flotilla.” The next question was like, “Find the magnetic field due to a current-carrying wire. HINT: Use Ampere's Law!!!11 HINT #2: The circumference of a circle is 2*r*pi.”

“What about your other physics classes?” you ask. Well, let me prelude my good-humored kvetchfest by remarking that I have nothing to complain about and that it took quite a few yardsticks of imagination to come up with the following criticisms. It's also worth mentioning mention that I'm only 35-50%* serious here: please keep in mind that all of the following are, at worst, only as mildly painful as getting punched in the kneecaps by someone wearing mittens. If you want to understand the true heartstabbing pain of MIT, you can also keep in mind that I will be repaying tuition loans for the next ten years. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go chug a bottle of aspirin.

(*Even outside of the esteemed blogging profession, I'm around 55% serious at best. By “at best,” I of course mean, “at funerals.”)

-8.03 (Vibrations and Waves) is a perfectly reasonable class until you realize that it's full of propaganda, just like television (whose existence is due to none other than VIBRATIONS AND WAVES. Coincidence? I think not). According to 8.03, vibrations and waves created light, made the world in six days, rested on Sunday, and then invented evolution, thereby ensuring that thousands of unsuspecting children would continue to buy Pokemon cards (the most expensive of which contain reflective holograms, whose properties are due to none other than VIBRATIONS AND WAVES. Coincidence? I think not.). The first one may actually be true, but I refuse to accept the premise that waves are mankind's only remaining hope for salvation. I mean, otherwise, Barack Obama wouldn't have won the Nobel Peace Prize, right?.

No OCW am I, but here's my stab at summarizing the 8.03 course material:
-A wave on a spring is a wave.
-A wave on a rope is a wave.
-A wave in a pipe is a wave.
-A wave on a transmission line is a wave.
-A wave in vacuum is a wave.
-A wave is also called a vibration sometimes.

Did I tell you the name of this class, by the way?

-8.033 (Relativity): I will heartlessly say that 8.033 makes electricity and magnetism look like clumsy squash players stumbling around in a ballroom full of elegant, waltzing kinematics, firstly because I hate playing/eating squash and secondly because I think this is some sort of metaphor or whatever. In the first half of the course, each lovely transformation and kinematics equation was tastefully attired in immaculate thought experiments before its initiation into the polite society of established physics. Yet as soon as E&M clodhopped into the room, dripping with murky math and shod in raggedy logic, the exalted sophistication of relativity spiraled down the metaphorical toilet of terrible curriculum design. You could hear the flush as soon as we started transforming Coulomb's Law in like 32939 different scenarios of relative motion between source charge and test charge. Introducing E&M by applying the force transformation laws to Coulomb was like smearing dirt over the brilliant connections between E&M and Special Relativity. Why not link the fields to the intrinsic properties of space and time, and then deduce how they must look to an observer moving at relativistic speeds, such as Lance Armstrong? To be fair, we probably discussed this in recitation for about 20 minutes.

Lance Armstrong, that is.

(Just kidding. I can assure you that we learn more about cyclic permutations than cyclist permutations in 8.033 recitation.)

Also, the flavortext (yes, flavortext) on the Problem Sets is about as straightforward as the nonexistent Star Trek episode written by Richard Nixon. Example:

Buckethead and Ry Cooder, two guitar masters who are completely unrelated and look
nothing at all alike, meet at Antone's, the famous blues club in Austin. Ry is scheduled to play
the first one-hour set, with Buckethead immediately to follow.
To while away the time, Buckethead hops in his motorized chicken coop and drives west at con-
stant acceleration a = (5=3) £ 106 m=s2 for precisely 30 minutes (as measured by his dashboard
clock) - at which point he slams on the breaks, stopping the coop almost instantly, turns around,
and drives back, again at constant acceleration a. After precisely one hour on his clock he arrives
back at Antone's, slams on the breaks again, and walks in for his set smack on time. Importantly,
all along his trip, Buckethead maintained a perfect soulful C on his monster Jackson King V.
Meanwhile, back at Antone's, Ry plays an awesome set, closing with his classic version of Woodie
Guthrie's Vigilante Man" (as recorded on Into the Purple Valley"). As the song ends, perfectly
on time, he holds out the last note, keeping it ringing until Buckethead walks back in at the end
of his trip.

Note: some details about the real world you should neglect in solving this problem:
² The earth is round. Let's treat it as flat and infnite { buckethead's coop always stays in
contact with the ground.
² Since a is roughly 20,000 g, the acceleration would crush any human inside the coop. Don't
worry, Buckethead is not human.
² To stop the coop on a dime would require absurdly wonderful breaks. Yes, it's an awesome
chicken coop.

Dare I venture any further comment? You know that something's awry with your problem set when the hardest part of the question is figuring out that it's a question.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that physics can be crushing, but there's nothing to worry about. Buckethead is not human.

I offered a slice to Li Brunetto '12, who tasted it and replied, very thoughtfully, “This tastes like detergent.”

That's how I lost my fear of cooking.

Li notwithstanding, I ended up becoming the chef on Saturdays at pika last quarter. A bit of background: pika, a 30-person independent living group snuggled in the backwoods of residential Cambridge, boasts one of the most ferocious kitchens at MIT. Knives galore, a meat locker, several fridges, an industrial-grade sink, pots large enough to double as seafaring (riverfaring?) vessels on the Charles, three bread machines, a Costco membership, and a wok that probably appeared during one of the battle scenes in Lord of the Rings allow pika to run a meal plan 7 days a week, year-round, with over 40 members. Every Saturday, I'd arrive at 4:00 pm, brimming with gastronomical illusions, take one look at the unbeautiful mountain of dishes in the sink, suffer a bout of depression, run the dishwasher several times, run downstairs to the pantry/meat freezer/fridge, and then realize that the bunch of fresh organic radishes whom I'd cast as the lead actress in my production of Citrus and Radish Confit was actually a bunch of beets. I swear, I must have been absent on the day in kindergarten when they taught you how to identify vegetables.

*This phrase is the proud winner of the Understatement of the Month Award. Ding!

Anyway, after figuring out why the giant white tomatoes with the multilayered skins were making my eyes water, I'd chop, broil, bake, fry, boil, season, blend, stir, and sample for two and a half hours until dinner was served for 30+ people. By which I mean that I pretended to be Mark Bittman and penned dining section articles for the New York Times in my head while delegating all the actual work to Ben, my cooking assistant. The results ranged from disastrous (oversalted garlic eggplant) to spectacular (coconut curry chicken), but all that truly matters is that Ben inevitably almost lost a finger due to some unfortunate chopping accident and ended up smelling like garlic every week. Did I say that out loud? I mean, all that matters is that every Saturday, we sat down to a delightful home-cooked meal.

(There was also a second chef who did a large chunk of the cooking and bought the groceries, but I'd prefer to not give him credit. Sorry, Jared. You can start your own blog. Besides, you spent like 3/4ths of the time re-organizing the spices to be in alphabetical order by Latin name or something.)

To celebrate Ben's continued ownership of all ten digits on his right hand (I'm not saying anything about the left), here's a list of my favorite recipes so far, each one in ten words or less:

-Apple and sour cream borscht (serve with a loaf of warm, dense pumpernickel freshly kneaded and baked by one of your three bread machines, just like the Russians used to do.)
-Jamaican jerk tofu baked with green apple slices
-Roasted black bean and sweet potato salad
-Savory olive oil, coconut, and pistachio granola (the trick is to use roughly equal parts salt, cardamom, and cinnamon)
-Curried cauliflower flatbread with roasted onions and sprouts
-Korean BBQ ribs (keep it simple)
-Chicken simmered in chocolate almond mole
-Asiago beer bread
-Cumin braised lamb
-Pork chops with apple and red wine reduction
-Coconut curry chicken
-Spicy roasted chickpeas
-Strawberries with balsamic and black pepper (I haven't served this yet, but it's among the most dazzling flavor trios ever, rivaled by only Peanut, Butter, and Jelly*.)

(*Not really. Sometimes, you just don't want that extra comma there.)

Much to my horror, I discovered a few weeks ago that I was slotted to cook for tEpikazoo, an 80-person feast for three of MIT's hungriest living groups (tEp, pika, and Tetazoo). If Ayn Rand had to be a dinner organized and cooked entirely by college students, she would be tEpikazoo. Specifically, she would be Spang's Seitan Pot Pie, which not only stimulated the consumers (pie-eaters) to produce value (pie crusts) but also was large enough to feed a small capitalist nation.

Luckily, tEpikazoo was a tEpikasuccess thanks to the work of head chef Spang '10 and a miniature army of volunteers from pika, East Campus, tEp, Senior Haus, and Random Hall. As soon as I tEpikazoomed over to pika after my last class on Friday afternoon, I was tEpikastounded by the frantic whirl of carrot-chopping, potato-peeling, pasta-boiling, falafel-rolling, apple-slicing, soupmaking, cheese-grating and just about every other compound gerund that happens to sound delicious.

[Editor's note: I've decided that using truncations of “tEpikazoo” as prefixes would not be tEpikacceptable if it weren't so tEpikaddictive.]

Did I mention the automized apple-slicer? It was hardcore enough to core the hardest apples. Zing! I think I've reached my literary device quota for the year.

Maita '10 cooked a trough of wonderful German potato salad. True story: I once failed a calculus quiz in high school because I had no idea what a trough looked like and therefore couldn't integrate over its volume. I think I just assumed that it looked like a rectangular prism, or maybe an ice cream cone.

I baked two batches of beer bread, a form of carbohydrate that contains another form of carbohydrate. (The beer actually replaces the yeast in ordinary quick breads.) I am told that the beer was “German” and “stout” by the purchaser. Anyway, the first batch tasted stout but not as German as the potatoes.

The second was generously smothered in asiago, parmesan, and another cheese from Trader Joe's whose name made me feel suddenly francophobic. Although the homely German stoutness of the bread was muffled by a strong whiff of asiago, just like the German Empire was historically muffled by the strength of the Italian kingdom in the Austro-Prussian war, the creamy-savory blend of flavors was marvelous.

As expected, Spang's prolific Seitan Pot Pie was stunning, sort of like the 100-page rant at the end of Atlas Shrugged except much more enjoyable and buttery.

For dessert, I dished out four bacon apple pies, as featured in the New York Times. (The reporter mentioned it for about 1/4th of a sentence, but I like to prolong my fleeting moments of celebrity.)

For dessert #2, denizens of East Campus set crepes on fire. Classy!

At some point during the night, I announced my long-awaited decision to join pika by scrawling “I PLEDGE!!!” on a roll of paper towels, which I then hurled into a packed dining room. Unfortunately, instead of sailing triumphantly through the cool autumn air, the banner of extra-strength paper towels broke in mid-flight, leaving me with “I PL” and someone on the other side of the room with “EDGE!!!” One quick-witted observer, who no doubt was a Scrabble champion, pieced together my message and yelled it to the room, initiating a rib-cracking round of hugs and congratulations. As with all spontaneous celebrations, this one inspired blurry spur-of-the-moment photos that, upon closer inspection, are actually sort of creepy.

(I'm the headless pink-and-black blur on the left. That's another sentence I never expected to utter.)

On that note, I'll leave you with the Unrelated Problem Set Typo of the Week, courtesy of 8.07. [Professor Belcher labels this, “one of the strangest trig identities in equation (7.5.2) of Problem 5 that I have ever seen (it is also totally wrong).”]

Anyway, as the kids these days would say, I ROFL'ed.

Geez! you say. That's a harsh claim. Perhaps you might soften it down until it's fluffy like a throw pillow*.

Alright: Let's just say that the week of October 19th left much to be desired. I will elaborate on the details of “much” once I finish therapy.

*Recently, someone I was talking to managed to gently massage this phrase (“fluffy like a throw pillow”) into a conversation of otherwise forgettable nature, by which I mean that I completely forgot the rest of it ten minutes later. I was completely hooked on the colloquial fruitiness of the phrase as soon as it reached my ears, resplendent in its evocations of tacky yet luxurious department-store sofas. Of course, you can barely tell how wonderful of an idiom it makes just from reading my comparatively-dry prose: imagine someone saying it with a gangsta inflection, perhaps in a context that makes absolutely no sense. Like: “Yo, it's raining so hard, my shoes are fluffy like a throw pillow.” See? Pure, vernacular magic. Anyway, back to how much my week sucked.

Three weeks, 13 Nobel Prizes, my friend's semi-spontaneous wedding (featuring a hat parade, an Ethiopian feast, vegan carrot cake, and the coolest farm-owning Canadian grandma I've ever met on this side of the Mississippi), a trip to NYC, three midterms, two papers, Windows 7, three nights of cooking dinner for 30, 105 miles of running, and a lot of Barack Obama have happened since the last time I blogged. The same amount of time has passed since the last night when I slept more than 6.5 hours. Now that I think about it, I don't even sleep while I blog, usually.

Fantastic thing about MIT, #261: Sure, you're miserable on weeks like, say-for-instance-hypothetically-speaking-of-course, October 19-23. On the bright side, it's the best miserable experience ever. If MIT is the Disneyworld of misery, then I rode all the rides this week and didn't even have to wait in line. If you asked me about how I felt last week on a scale of 1-10, I would have said negative 15 +/-2. On the other hand, if you'd asked me how I felt about feeling like negative 15 +/-2, I would have given you a solid 9.5 and then offered to adjust my answers if you paid me 20 bucks for taking your survey*.

*Fantastic thing about MIT, #262, is that you quickly learn to not take surveys unless there's a predicted payoff of at least $10, with exceptions for course evaluation surveys that give you free excuses to complain about your life. If I'm not mistaken, there was a 3.091 class survey last year that automatically deposited $15 into the TechCash account of every student that participated (and there's 500-600 people enrolled in 3.091). 15 bucks! I could have bought 1/15th of the class textbook with that fortune!

Anyway, back to my misery. It was rhythmic. I woke up every morning at 7 am dressed in a fresh layer of panic, bolted outside in 40-degree wind chill, ran several miles, made breakfast and French-pressed coffee, went to school, did work, went home, did work, went to my Black Studies class and talked about the Black Panthers, did work, went to 8.07, worked on 8.07 in the basement of the library, went home, roasted chickpeas and cauliflower, did work, socialized, went to bed, repeat five times and jump to coda.

Over the torturous course of the Week from Heck (am I allowed to say this on the blogs, Matt?), I sludged through oodles of problems. Problems involving relativistic point charges, floating blocks oscillating underneath a dripping faucet, magnetic dipole radiation, proper time in an accelerating reference frame, the Maxwell Stress Tensor (stress makes me tense too! I need to stop making this pun until I pass 8.07), and electron/positron pair formation. But never did I satisfactorily solve the deeper problem of why I cared. Perhaps I never will, but let me tell you what I've figured out so far:

Insight is indistinguishable from imagination. Like all alliterative statements, this is probably profound. Take the example of a mass on a (massless, frictionless) spring. You compress it. In Soviet Russia, spring compresses you! By which I mean that it oscillates. A hummingbird of energy hovers in the liminal space between opposing forces, lingering persistently.

(Can you spot the bad pun? Hint: Sho!)

You imagine a metaphor for your spring. It's a metaphor that looks like this:

You imagine an infinite number of masses, connected by an infinite number of springs. It looks like this:

(If you've ever tried untangling one of these, you know what I mean by infinite.)

Like all reasonable things, your string of infinite springs despise second derivatives. Gently you pluck a second derivative into its limber form, and it responds with a violent, burning hatred for you and all your posterity. In Soviet Russia, string second-derivates you! By which I mean that it snaps back with a second derivative in time. You pull out your pencil and scratch out a new metaphor:

After twisting your imagination up a ladder of metaphors, the waves rippling along the string become rays of light propagating through space at 3*10^8 m/s.

Somehow, in the grind of a pencil on paper, you've crystallized the subtleties of energy.

In truth, the process of squeezing a physics problem through layers of abstraction is a frolic in playgrounds of tedium. Which is why I had a great week, even though it was terrible.

On a happier note, did I mention that I went to New York City for an all-expenses-paid 23-hour field trip with my Black Studies class? Legitimately speaking, my homework was walking around Harlem, eating soul food, appreciating Black Panther art, visiting the African Burial Grounds, downing a plate of conch at a Haitian diner, and sitting through a production of Hair. Fantastic. It was a journey of self-discovery in the sense that I uncovered a secret fondness for plantains.

I attempted to become a critically-acclaimed street photographer in the meantime. The first step to a Pulitzer is to set your camera to greyscale.

(At the African Burial Grounds, where a student pays respect to the history of African Americans in New York by, um, looking up. I guess.)

The ironic part is that I tried to make this entry sound angsty, but it ended up being fluffy like a throw pillow.

On the flip side of the burger (to coin a stupid-sounding idiom), I no longer have an excuse for putting off this blog entry until T_n, where T_n > 5 minutes from now. A week or so ago, Becky from somewhere-recently-visited-by-Quentin-McArthur emailed me a laundry list of excellent questions that I could answer in less time than most questions I encounter on an hourly basis. I started to write back, “Thanks, Becky! It's so nice to make human communication once in a while! See you on the Internet sometime,” and then I figured that she probably wanted me to answer her questions instead of becoming her Facebook buddy. (Curmudgeonly aside: It's a sad, sad world when I get more Facebook friend requests than personal emails. Also, you kids get off my lawn.)

Hi Yan -
When Quinton McArthur came to our school the other day, I asked him a
question about the physics department at MIT, and he directed me to you. I
actually have more than one question, but they're roughly in order of
importance if you don't have time to answer them all.

It's 12:50 AM! Of course I have time.

Questions:

1. UROP seems like it would allow you to do awesome research as an
undergrad. Has this been your experience? Is there anything about physics
UROPs that make them different? Are experimental and theoretical research
opportunities both available to undergrads? How do students make time for
research during the academic year, or do most students do UROPs during the
summer?

UROP, MIT's undergrad research program, has improved my overall standard of living as well as my GDP and average lifespan. My first research group in the Materials Science department paid 11 bucks an hour, which was increased to $12/hour over the summer, for me to build and test batteries that wouldn't explode or melt or otherwise make a huge, expensive mess and ruin everyone's life. I eventually started running out of work to do after one semester, so I adopted a second UROP in the Plasma and Fusion Center writing scripts to decipher NASA spacecraft data and explain the mysterious phenomenon of magnetic reconnection. After one month, I started to think in MATLAB instead of in English, but it was nonetheless an enjoyable introduction to physics research.

UROPs are more common during IAP and Summer, but plenty of people (like me) devote up to 6 hours per week to research, usually after class on weekdays. Think of it as like taking half a class while getting paid. It's a valuable way to learn relevant skills for your field while getting rich at a very, very slow rate.

All professors in the Physics department that I've met so far have been open to sponsoring undergrad research. At least one requires that his students take 8.04 (quantum) before doing research in his group. However, most labs, experimental and theoretical, could always use the extra help with coding and performing routine tasks traditionally reserved for intelligent primates and large, powerful computers. (Well, maybe not the string theorists. Or LIGO, since LIGO was crowded with UROPs last time I applied for one in their group.) You might not get an intellectually dazzling UROP during your first years at MIT, but it's well worth the experience.

2. In a blog post from December, 2007, Lulu wrote that around 13/50 of
physics majors (just for course 8, not 8-B) are women. Do you think this
estimate is accurate? Do you notice this imbalance at all? Does it not
matter because the overall Institute gender numbers are essentially equal?
Does it not matter just because it doesn't matter whether the people
you're doing physics with are girls or guys? Have you had any
gender-related problems (academic or otherwise) as a physics major
specifically?

Gender imbalance has never influenced my experience at MIT. I'm a bit startled by your (Lulu's?) numbers, since at least half of the Physics majors I've met are women. Granted, I spend a lot of time around Undergraduate Women in Physics, which is perhaps not a representative sample of the gender distribution.

Then again, the mere existence of a group at MIT dedicated to providing support for female physicists suggests that your speculations are valid. I've also heard from professors that more men tend to take the advanced versions of intro Physics classes, such as 8.022. However, personal evidence shows that more women tend to wake up in time for lecture. (At least when McGreevy taught it.)

3. I remember at least Chris S. blogging about how his biology psets and
tests test more his ability to think and solve problems than his
memorization skills. Is there a similar emphasis on thinking over
memorizing in the physics classes?

Yes. At least for the intro classes, all relevant formulae as well as useful math identities are provided with each exam. (However, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't understand the derivations in all their gory intricacies.) MIT generally tries to ensure that you will never fail because you spent too much time on a test trying to remember the dimensionless factor in the denominator of the Larmor formula (6*pi in SI units, 3/2 in CGS).

Problem sets, similarly, require a lot of braining. This page of my 8.03 pset aptly summarizes life as a Physics major at MIT.

(After taking a shortcut that failed to reach the intended destination, i.e., the correct answer.)

4. I don't know how well you know the math department, but do you know
where on the spectrum from super applied to super theoretical the math
department classes usually fall? Or are they all over the place? Do most
physics majors end up taking classes at a certain point on this spectrum?

If you look at the math department course catalog, you'll notice sections subtitled “Applied Math,” “General Math,” “Analysis”, “Theoretical Comp. Sci.,” etc. Math tends to be the all-purpose flour in MIT's curriculum pantry. A “typical” math class doesn't really exist; there's more than enough choices for you to fine-tune the level of applicability until it resonates with your interests. Analysis classes tend to be theoretical, whereas applied math is geared toward engineers, which I just nearly spelled “gearineers.” Time for bed.

Also, I know at least one physics major who accidentally took enough theoretical math classes to get a second major in Course 18. Most people, at least those who aren't into intense theory, go with just 18.03, 18.06 (or a variant thereof), and 18.04 or an applied math class.

Thank you,
Betsy [last name omitted to create a feeling of suspense]

No problem, Betsy! Want to see my problem sets for this week? Really, you do? Okay!

To be honest, my problem solving skills this week fell short of robust. The trouble started with the double pendulum problem on the 8.03 (Waves n' Vibrations) problem set, which I naively crammed into the Lagrangian instead of kickin' it old-school with a force balance diagram. I'm one of those people who use the Lagrangian to calculate the net force on an object falling from rest, you know.

Anyway, this happened:

1.5 pages later, the moral of the story was pummeling me in the face. Live and learn but don't Lagrange. Lagrange isn't even a verb.

I reworked the problem later and massaged out the hideous lumps of unsimply simplified terms by dousing everything in a small angle approximation that was much, much smaller than what I consider to be a kosher small angle approximation. It was during Yom Kippur, after all.

The second sign of impending toil came in an email from the 8.033 (Special Relativity) TA last night that basically read, “Sorry, forgot to mention that you need to show calculations for Problems 2 and 3 instead of just drawing diagrams, because you probably skipped art class in high school anyway.” The only problem was that I had already finished the problem set and, like residents of Manhattan slums during the early factory era, I had no space left.

Appendix A turned out to be pretty much the most beautiful thing that I have ever created with my bare hands.

My 8.07 (Electricity and Magnetism II) problem set this week was blissfully merciful, except that everything equivalency statement I tried to prove turned out to be off by either a factor of 2 or a factor of sqrt(c). Did you know that the square root of a meter per second is a fundamental dimensional quantity in both electromagnetic momentum and energy flux? Neither did I.

Sometimes, frustration begs to be cartoonified.

Inspired by Professor Belcher's mathematically gorgeous field line representations (check them out- as a bonus, the animated ones also make excellent music visualizers), I took a break from work to relax, refresh, and reinterpreted a Van Gogh painting as an electric/magnetic field diagram.

Yep, this qualifies as a break from work.

One spoonful of corn chowder was allotted to each resident, provided that the partaker of the feast brought his own spoon and provided that said spoon wasn't unreasonably big.

After each person had consumed his first spoonful of soup, the cooks gave permission for seconds. Unfortunately, nearly everyone was so satiated by the first spoonful of chowder that Pecker was left with half a pot of leftovers, which by extrapolation should be plenty to feed the 14-person floor for the next week or so. Paul Christiano '12 was the token exception, consuming his first serving using a tablespoon and subsequently switching to teaspoons whose volume capacity decreased in a geometric series. It is predicted that Paul would have finished the entire pot given infinite time.

Katelyn Gao '12, who reportedly was “too hosed” with homework to participate in the social event, eventually succumbed to the satisfied murmurs of soup-slurping outside her door and went into the kitchen to enjoy a free dinner.

Remarking on the quality of the chowder, Kenan Diab '11 commented, “Yum.” A Junior currently enrolled in 14.01, he expressed a desire to visit Trader Joe's, a local grocery store frequented by MIT students and hockey moms, for the purpose of buying more chowder and stimulating the economy.

The floor dinner was generally considered a success, feeding 15 students in total for less than 0.1% of the average in-state college tuition for 2008-2009.

-Waves and Vibrations (8.03): Required for major, will keep.

-Special Relativity (8.033): Same as above.

-Intro to Cosmology (8.286): It hurts to drop this class, but four physics problem sets per week hurts even more. Perhaps I'll give it another go in two years.

-Electricity and Magnetism II (8.07): Having spent 6+ hours on the problem set already, I'm reluctant to drop this class. I'm already 3% of the way to completing 8.07! Don't give up now! (Bonus: Thanks to funding from the MIT Class of '22, everyone in 8.07 received a free copy of The Maxwellians on the first day of lecture. On the second day, everyone received an electronic clicker so that the class could answer multiple choice questions in real time during lecture. By extrapolation, I conclude that 8.07 will give me a new car before October.)

-Film Studies: Dropped.

-Intro to Black Studies: Turns out to be surprisingly engaging. Bonus: class participation involves a daytrip to New York City! Will keep.

-Intro to Comparative Media Studies: After an hour of lecture, my interest in comparing mediums had evaporated to the point where I really, really wanted to just go to the grocery store and compare medium-quality produce. I left early and arrived at the grocery store just as an employee was stocking the shelves with grapes ludicrously priced at 88 cents a pound. I'm sure CMS.100 is a worthwhile class, but grapes at 88 cents/lb might be an unfair comparison. Anyway, this class was dropped, and I had grapes for dinner. Twice.

-20th Century Composition Techniques: I stumbled into this class on a masochistic whim and loved it. Whether I add it to my schedule hinges on whether I have time to read the textbook and crank out a handful of Stravinsky/Debussy analyses before Tuesday. Were I taking this class next semester, I'd call this assignment The Write of Spring.

Ignoring the lumped mass of four problem sets, five textbook readings, half a novel, a music composition exercise, and two score analyses currently coagulating on my platter, I've been lately documenting my unreciped forays into experimental gastronomy. Throughout freshman year, cooking served as an expression of self-sufficiency and Ramen-avoidancy; nowadays, I'm trying to tighten my culinary grasp in order to make new and exciting friends. And by “friends,” I mean “food.”

Perhaps the inspiration for food as a creative catharsis came from the unabashedly sugar-saturated “Introduction to Undergraduate Women in Physics” event that I hosted for the Class of 2013 during orientation. Every year, MIT's orientation coordinators organize a themed party/carnival/interactive infomercial in the Student Center for student groups to feed and bedazzle the incoming class. This year's theme was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I freely interpreted as a challenge for student groups to 1-up each other in distributing free candy to the 1000+ freshmen. As president of Undergrad Women in Physics, I armed our humble one-table booth for war with the Undergrad Math Association to the West and the Electrical Engineering Club to the East.

The secret weapon: Edible circuits- the intersection of technology and sugar.

Some people come to MIT to learn the recipe for success. Ultimately, they learn that the recipe includes graham crackers, unpeeled Twizzlers, icing, marshmallows, food coloring, and gumdrops.

Circuits like this one left me puzzled. What's the voltage drop across a gumdrop in series with two marshmallows and another gumdrop, and also in parallel with a bigger gumdrop, which is itself in parallel with the two marshmallows and the other gumdrop? I feel like I missed the 8.022 lecture that covered this.

I'm not sure if I want the real-life version of this circuit inside anything I own, probably because it reminds me of a rickshaw. Honestly, I'm fine with having some device that contains three gigantic, unwired LEDs piled on top of each other in the middle of a circuit board where nothing is connected to anything, as long as I didn't have to pay more than $9.99 for it. It's just that this one looks too much like a rickshaw. Nothing personal, Sheila. I really do appreciate your attention to reflective symmetry.

This was a short circuit. It's also a blurry circuit.

Greg '12, not to be outdone, responded to the above by building a “short” circuit. It's not even a circuit, so Greg loses anyway. Sorry, Greg. Better luck with 6.002.

“MisLED: A Study in Unconnected, Non-functional LEDs” by Symone.

“Wires o'er Wires” by Yan.

Scarcely 5/14th of a fortnight later, Alorah '11 and I threw a bacon party at pika. A bacon party is exactly what it sounds like, except with more bacon. For hor d'oeuvres, I served a tray of grilled melon and peaches wrapped in bacon.

I accidentally burnt the bacon-wrapped fruit in the oven, which added a smoky carcinogenic musk of charcoal to each bite.

In a moment of divine inspiration, I was left unattended in the kitchen in the company of a lovely organic pie crust, an equally lovely bag of organic apples, and a pack of fat-streaked bacon. With a few plentiful shakes of cinnamon, a glaze of agave nectar, and a wink of patriotism, I had this:

Introducing: the Bacon Lattice Apple Pie.

I popped it into the oven until the bacon was crisp at the edges and still dripping with sizzling pork juice in the chewy inner folds of each salt-sweaty strip. For the finishing caress, a drizzled spoonful of melted caramel sauce was swirled over pork and apple like a silky ribbon.

It turned out to be inadvertently delicious too, albeit murderous.

Just like my class schedule.

[See legend at end of post to decode course numbers.]
[Professor Nergis, whose last name is gentle to neither pronunciation nor spelling, is my academic advisor.]

This is my class schedule for Fall '09. There's eight courses spread over a 120-hour canvas; I'll probably drop three of them so that I don't go to bed weeping tears of angst every night. One of MIT's masochist-friendly policies is that upperclassmen are free to register for every single class offered at the Institvte if they should desire a GPA of 0.2/5.0 or so. Conventional wisdom for the indecisive is that you should sign up for all the classes worthy of consideration and then progressively trim the fat from your course load until you can swallow your weekly serving of credit hours. For instance, my dilemma right now is choosing between 18.100B (Introduction to Analysis) and 8.07 (Electricity & Magnetism II). Tortured by a soul-ripping conflict between studying rigorous math and learning where MIT keeps its prodigious supply of educational solenoids, I turned to my ex-roommate, Katelyn (a devout math major who watches Jeopardy, not that this is relevant).

Y: Should I take 8.07 or 18.100B?
K: Math!
Y: I don't know if I want to be hosed trying to prove that 1+1 does not equal the set of irrational numbers greater than Australia.

Later that night-

K: Math is the dressing that makes physics taste better.
Y: But18.100B is like mayonnaise. It doesn't even go on the salad, unless the salad is potato salad.
Y: By “potato”, I mean “theoretical,” and by “salad,” I mean “physics.”
K: How do you know adding mayonnaise won't help the taste of say, a lettuce salad? It may surprise you.
Y: Hey Katelyn. That sounds delicious.
Y: By delicious, I mean “gross,” and by “Hey Katelyn,” I mean “That's the last time I ever invite you to a potluck.”

Shortly after-

K: Your salad right now has too much lettuce. It needs garnish.
Y: Yeah, well, your salad isn't even a salad. It's like a condiment bar.
Y: If you're taking applied math this term, maybe it has some tomatoes.

On the bright side, pika rush* coincides with the first week of school, injecting sunbursts of stressless creativity into a greyish schedule. Who can resist cheesemaking lessons on Registration Day, followed by an all-night Dr. Who marathon? Nobody, that's Who.

*At MIT, the first week of school is reserved for fraternity/sorority/independent living group recruitment. Although freshmen must live on campus, the rush period gives freshmen the opportunity to explore non-dorm housing options for their future years at MIT as various living groups grapple to outsplurge each other on steak and lobster dinners to attract ramen-acclimated visitors. pika inexplicably prefers to shell out for esoteric items like granola and organic nut butters. Probably half of last night's dinner budget was converted into pureed cashews.

My actual schedule for this week:

Legend:

18.303- The classical partial differential equations of applied mathematics: diffusion, Laplace/Poisson, and wave equations. Methods of solution, such as separation of variables, Fourier series and transforms, eigenvalue problems. Green's function methods are emphasized. 18.04 or 18.112 are useful, as well as previous acquaintance with the equations as they arise in scientific applications. [I dropped this class because of a last-minute lecture time change by the course administrators.]

18.100B- Fundamentals of mathematical analysis: convergence of sequences and series, continuity, differentiability, Riemann integral, sequences and series of functions, uniformity, interchange of limit operations.

8.03- Mechanical vibrations and waves; simple harmonic motion, superposition, forced vibrations and resonance, coupled oscillations, and normal modes; vibrations of continuous systems; reflection and refraction; phase and group velocity. Optics; wave solutions to Maxwell's equations; polarization; Snell's Law, interference, Huygens's principle, Fraunhofer diffraction, and gratings.

8.033- Intro to Special Relativity. Normally taken by Physics majors in their sophomore year. Einstein's postulates; consequences for simultaneity, time dilation, length contraction, and clock synchronization; Lorentz transformation; relativistic effects and paradoxes; Minkowski diagrams; invariants and four-vectors; momentum, energy, and mass; particle collisions. Relativity and electricity; Coulomb's law; magnetic fields. Brief introduction to Newtonian cosmology. Introduction to some concepts of general relativity; principle of equivalence. The Schwarzchild metric; gravitational red shift; particle and light trajectories; geodesics; Shapiro delay.

8.07- E&M II. Survey of basic electromagnetic phenomena: electrostatics, magnetostatics; electromagnetic properties of matter. Time-dependent electromagnetic fields and Maxwell's equations. Electromagnetic waves, emission, absorption, and scattering of radiation. Relativistic electrodynamics and mechanics.

8.286- Introduction to modern cosmology. First half deals with the development of the big bang theory from 1915 to 1980, and latter half with recent impact of particle theory. Topics: special relativity and the Doppler effect, Newtonian cosmological models, introduction to non-Euclidean spaces, thermal radiation and early history of the universe, big bang nucleosynthesis, introduction to grand unified theories and other recent developments in particle theory, baryogenesis, the inflationary universe model, and the evolution of galactic structure. [This, by the way, is taught by the infamous Alan Guth, who not only developed the idea of cosmic inflation but also applied it to the stack of papers on his desk.]

SP.417J- Intro to Black Studies. Interdisciplinary survey of people of African descent that draws on the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. Connects the experiences of African-Americans and of other American minorities, focusing on social, political, and cultural histories, and on linguistic patterns. Includes lectures, discussions, workshops, and required field trips that involve minimal cost to students.

CMS.100- Intro to Comparative Media Studies. Offers an overview of the social, cultural, political, and economic impact of mediated communication on modern culture. Combines critical discussions with experiments working with different media. Media covered include radio, television, film, the printed word, and digital technologies. Topics include the nature and function of media, core media institutions, and media in transition.

21L.011- The Film Experience. An introduction to narrative film, emphasizing the unique properties of the movie house and the motion picture camera, the historical evolution of the film medium, and the intrinsic artistic qualities of individual films. Syllabus changes from term to term, but usually includes such directors as Griffith, Chaplin, Renoir, Ford, Hitchcock, De Sica, and Fellini.

21W.785- Communicating with Web-Based Media. Analysis, design, implementation, and testing of various forms of digital communication through group collaboration. Students are encouraged to think about the Web and other new digital interactive media not just in terms of technology but also broader issues such as language (verbal and visual), design, information architecture, communication and community. Students work in small groups on a term-long project of their choice. Various written and oral presentations document project development.

Next up on the MitBlog: Candy circuits, notes from my kitchen experimentation lab book, plus a certifiable tonnage of bacon.

(Alright, so I stretched the imagery a bit to claim the first Google search hit for “unreformed by Ikea.” My goal for the upcoming academic year is to expand into as much unexplored Google search territory as possible without becoming so incomprehensible that I sound like James Joyce editing Wikipedia. Think of it as like Manifest Destiny for my blog.)

Anyway, the fact that I've used a legless couch as a bed and a chair as a desk in the past 2 days is a reliable sign that my standards for dorm room furniture have become practically nonexistent after one year at MIT. I've also quit using alarm clocks, blankets, desk lamps, flat sheets, television, radios, lined paper, and vegetables*. Life changes fast. My excuse for mentioning this is nothing more poetic than the fact that I slept 1 hour and 50 minutes last night, and, furthermore, I strongly believe that there is wasabi powder in my eye. The latter conviction is so compelling that I am trying to finish this blog entry as fast as I can so that I can spend the next hour blinking furiously.

*Just kidding, mom.

I leave you with an exhibition of Roomstalker Haiku, hereby defined as the trans-media art of secretly taking photographs of other people's rooms while they're moving in/out and posting them on the Internet with captions written in haiku form. It might not be hot territory as far as unclaimed Google search hits go, but I'm probably in denial already anyway.

Part I: Random Hall

Freshman year double
Color of photoshopped seas
Walls made me thirsty.

(My room last year)

Knock, knock. Who's there? Orange.
Orange who? Orange you sure that “orange”
Isn't two syllables?

(Jing '10's room, across the hall from mine)

My room seeks company
Of polysyllabic friends.
Refrigerator.

(My room for Fall '09)

Part II: pika

Refraction mural
Want to ask Pink Floyd, why is
The prism opaque?

This room makes the worst
Maze ever. It'd be nicer
If the walls were maize.

Jessica's hovel
Looks like Harvard Square bookstore
Just add bad coffee.

Who cares if the walls
Appear to be mattresses?
Look, it's a skylight!

I once owned some pants
A worthy match for these walls.
I was six months old.

But enough about my autobiography-in-progress. Chances are, if you're arriving on campus within the next week, you have an interest in avoiding starvation in ways that do not involve the Ben Salinas Delight (last Wed. night's snack, if you're interested). In my infinite kindheartedness to this year's incoming class*, I started to compile a list of memorable-but-not-necessarily-recommended-eateries around MIT but suffered a minor aneurysm from food nostalgia overload and decided to stick to just restaurants on the Cambridge side of the river. (Boston deserves a separate blog post. Or six.)

*Seriously, I not only started the MIT 2013 Facebook Group but even refrained from changing the group name to “Harvard Class of 2013” and posting “Welcome to Harvard!” on the day that MIT matriculation decisions were due. It took some serious self-control.

View Dining around MIT in a larger map

Let's start with grocery stores.

1. Star Market: The closest grocery store to most of the MIT dorms, Star Market is your generic, jumbo-sized, ten-flavors-of-Triscuits supermarket. The fruit is an order of magnitude cheaper than at LaVerde's in the Student Center, and sales on staples like cereals, breads, sandwich meat, canned soup, and frozen vegetables are routine. The downside is that the incomprehensible store layout turns shopping for dried split peas into a labrythine task involving three aisles and a compass. Also, one of the employees doesn't know what peppermint bark is.

2. Trader Joe's: Fantastic bread. Fantastic frozen risotto. Fantastic granola bars. The temptation to spend your entire Saturday morning browsing the 3948294 varieties of mustard while downing free shots of coffee is dangerously irresistible. Remember this warning before you get on the MIT Weekend Grocery Shuttle (loops around to most of the dorms and ends at Trader Joe's/Whole Foods).

3. Harvest Co-op: A scarcely-mentioned, community-owned grocery store on Massachusetts Ave., Harvest has the cheapest prices on the following: bagged spinach, loose oranges, bagged apples (sometimes), soymilk, Sabra pine-nut hummus (the Shawshank Redemption of hummus: spectacular and life-affirming.) You can usually get better prices on fresh produce than at Shaw's, depending on the weekly sales.

Restaurants in Central Square (North of MIT along Massachusetts Avenue):

- Toscanini's: Famous for eclectic ice cream flavors like Burnt Caramel and Banana Gingersnap Molasses and Burnt Banana Ginger Molasses with Snapped Caramel (not really), Toscanini's is MIT's canonical provider of late-night ice cream (other than JP Licks, of which we shall not speak*). The three best flavors in the humble opinion of this critic are Tiramisu (picture below), Lemon Expresso, and Khulfee. Belgian Chocolate, Earl Grey, Burnt Caramel, and Vienna Finger Cookie are also noteworthy.

[*Clarification: I have nothing against JP Licks, but the whole JP Licks vs. Tosci's debate at MIT is worth a blog post in itself. Or six. The best thing to do is to try both of them for yourself. Life is hard, I know.]

- Pepper Sky's: Serves the best Thai curries within a stone's throw of MIT, unless you can throw a stone all the way to the Boston University vicinity. I recommend the Duck or Seafood Choo Chee.

- Thailand Cafe: Serves the worst Thai curries ever, but it's literally next door to Random Hall and delivers comparatively cheap late-night fare, which turns out to be edible sometimes once you remove the brown paper bag. However, the Cumin Braised Beef from the secret Sichuan menu (ask for it) is unreasonably delicious.

- Bertucci's: One word- rolls. Skip the salad, pizza, and pasta; just get an eternally-refilling basket of the complimentary bread rolls, and you've got the perfect date. Fine, you can get the three-cheese ravioli too if you want. But only after the eighth basket of rolls.

- Mary Chung: Confucius says, “Every campus has a Chinese restaurant within three blocks.” Mary's is where you will buy dinner for your friends on their birthdays if you're too lazy to plan a party or bake a cake or remember their birthdays until 8 pm on their birthdays. The Dun Dun Noodles with Shredded Chicken (or without, if you're vegetarian) are unregrettably tasty, whether you were ever born or not. Wait, that made no sense.

Kendall Square (Slightly east of MIT proper, close to the T stop and East Campus):

- The Black Sheep at the Kendall Hotel: It's expensive and dressy as any decent hotel restaurant, so you probably should stay away, but let me assure you that the Yucca Mashed Potatoes are the greatest permutation of root vegetable that I've ever witnessed. Black Sheep takes the humble potato and transforms it into an earthy study in textural contrasts, tempering the ambient starchiness with crunchy, buttery morsels. But you still should stay away.

(Ignore the shrimp and vegetables in the foreground; the potatoes didn't just steal the show, they were the show. And it was a good show. You should go see it.)

- Cuchi Cuchi: Flamboyantly gourmet and culturally ambiguous, Cuchi Cuchi refuses to refer to their “international smaller plates to be shared” as “tapas” in the same way that MIT refuses to refer to “the other school in Cambridge” as “Harvard University.” Self-denial issues aside, Cuchi Cuchi serves up semi-haute cuisine that manages to be both flashy and flavorful. It's pricey, but keep in mind that the wallpaper is probably more visually entertaining than some Broadway shows. Great for bringing a crowd for a splurgetastic celebration (graduation, birthdays, passing 8.012 with a C-, etc.). I've had nearly everything on their menu as of May, and the standout dishes are the Bliny (Pancakes w/mushroom filling; topped w/sour cream & caviar), Caspian Heaven (Roasted Fingerling potatoes, crispy oysters, creme fraiche, salmon roe & champagne sauce; picture below), and the Tiramisu (caffeine-loaded and bitter, like the upperclassman down the hall).

- Clover Food Truck: The brainchild of a visionary MIT graduate, Clover Food Labs is revolutionizing the way that mankind buys food from the back of a truck. I assert that only at MIT will you find a food truck parked in the alley behind MIT medical whose slogan is “Everything will be different tomorrow.” I originally interpreted this as an inspirational message about world peace and environmental sustainability and banning chickpea sandwiches that aren't at least 30% hummus, but I think it actually means that their menu changes daily.

Anyway, whether or not Clover wins the Nobel Peace Prize, I will remain a staunch advocate of their menu (local, seasonal vegetarian food cooked from scratch that will rarely cost you over 5 bucks) as well as their business model (involves Twitter and a friendly, candid blog from the owner that gets updated more frequently than the MIT homepage sometimes.)

Last Monday, I ordered the Chickpea Fritter, mostly because I liked the word “fritter.” Lots of nice consonants.

It was essentially falafel snuggled with red cabbage in grain-rich pita bread. Tasty, but could have used more hummus. Keep in mind that I say this about 90% of the things that I encounter on a daily basis. Ex:
- “Hey, how's the 8.03 textbook?”
- “It could use more hummus.”

Other choices include the BBQ Seitan Sandwich:

And the Egg and Eggplant, the sandwich that I would have picked hands-down if only it also contained eggfruit. Alas, the egg triumvirate remained sadly incomplete.

Miscellaneous (One of the locations isn't in Cambridge, and the other isn't within walking distance of MIT except by European standards of “walking distance.” Let's just agree that to first order, this item belongs on the list of Cambridge Eateries within Walking Distance of MIT.)

Elephant Walk: A few weekends ago, Jess Lin and her family met in Cambridge for family bonding time over lunch at Elephant Walk in Cambridge, a French-Cambodian restaurant specializing in making colonialism taste delicious. I'm obnoxious on Saturdays, so I tagged along.

Starters were glorified spring rolls, which were completely forgettable. Skip it if you're ever given the chance.

In brilliant contrast, the second course was a bright, tangy Cambodian chicken soup with sparkling tones of lime and lemongrass. It was like drinking broth in C Major.

For her main course, Jess ordered the unpronounceable Croustillants aux Poires et Crevettes Flambées aux Vin Blanc (Translation: wontons layered with warm Bartlett pear, topped with shrimp with flaming bees and white wine. Pardon any minor errors.). All observable evidence suggests that Jess was ready to take this dish on a honeymoon by the time she finished.

I was less enamored with my main course, the Curry aux Crevettes (curry with Corvettes. I guess the Corvettes made it an expensive dish). Although the sauce was fragrant with the rich creaminess of coconut milk, it lacked spice. Unlike law-obeying citizens, the heat of a good curry should punch you in the face.

Jess's dessert was a passion fruit mousse. By the way, there are far too many double ss's in the previous sentence.

Bottom line: Elephant Walk has one of the most inconsistently wonderful menus that I've ever seen. Great concept, poor execution, just like the Soviet Union except for the great concept part. Considering the price (around 20 bucks for a three-course lunch), I'd rather stay at home and dumpster-dive through pika's fridge.

Speaking of which, yesterday's Franken-lunch of pika leftovers turned out to be a quinoa carrot avocado salad with corn, squash, and zucchini, tied together with a touch of golden raisins and honey mustard. Call it an edible requiem for bygone summer afternoons.

But it could have used more hummus.

1.Sin City: Honestly, this film's cinematography and editing was far more polished than any of my dreams could ever dream of being. I can dream in black-and-white or in color, but not in black-and-white-and-symbolically-important-colors-only. The sad truth is that my periods of REM sleep, no matter how R my EM may be, will never win me an Oscar even if I'm partially Al Gore.

2.Helvetica: It's an esoteric documentary about how the earthshaking invention of Helvetica not only gave aesthetic purity to subway signs but also brainwashed you into buying Coca-Cola. Need I say more?

3.Slumdog Millionaire: I blinked about 3 times per second while eyeballing this raw masterpiece of breathlessly-paced storytelling, trying to scan in every color-saturated detail before I had to face the grey ugliness of December in the Midwest.

4.Shawshank Redemption: Napping had second priority behind bets with myself about which person in my row of the theatre would start weeping first during the rain scene. I won, by the way.

5.Pulp Fiction: Like any normal person seeing this movie for the second time, I obsessively combed through every grain of Tarantino's visual/audio landscape for clues about What Was in the Briefcase. No luck. My best guess is still that it had something to do with magnetic monopoles and/or the Freemasons.

(As a point of reference, movies that I've slept through this year include but are not limited to: Watchmen, Dr. Strangelove, Life Aquatic, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Snape-I-Mean-Prince, Love Actually, and Thank You For Smoking. If you ever want a brilliant critical review of the first 10 minutes and the closing credits of any of these movies*, shoot me an email.)

((*With the exception of Thank You For Smoking, a film which lulled me into a slumber so profound that I did not wake until 5 AM the next morning. Granted, I'd just stepped off the bus from New York earlier that night and was so drop-dead exhausted that I could have slept through the brilliant climactic scene of Helvetica, in which some typographer guy opens a 1950s magazine and starts ranting and bashing on all the non-Helvetica typefaces with violent gesticulations of his index finger. Really, I have no idea why Helvetica wasn't a summer blockbuster.))

Not that I've kept track, but I'm willing to bet that most of the movies I've slept through were viewed on Thursday or Friday nights. A typically-MIT* trajectory of exhaustion goes something like:

*By the way, using MIT as an adjective is pretty much canonical when talking about tiredness/hosedness/motorized shopping carts. Just in case you're interested in those unspoken rules of English usage.

Mon.: Tired
Tues.: Tired
Wed.: Hopelessly tired
Thurs.: Drowning in tired while clinging to last shreds of willpower to floss regularly despite diminishing ability to lift hands past elbow level.
Fri.:
Sat/Sun: Regain ability to english

Minor exaggerations aside, my second thought after signing up for a 10 pm trip last Thursday to Wallace Observatory with MIT's Society of Physics Students was, “Should I bring a regular or extra-firm pillow?” My first thought was, “Mmm, meteors.”

The Perseids meteor shower, like a celestial garbage truck stopping by Earth on a yearly basis, dumps a spectacular load of debris into the night sky every August. Apparently, some people like to drive to scantily-populated areas to watch pieces of stellar trash streak across the sunless skies. By “some people,” I mean me and probably most of MIT's Society of Physics Students. Thanks to Sara '10's vice presidencing skillz, MIT SPS borrowed a van and shipped three vehicle-loads of meteor semi-enthusiasts to Wallace Observatory on the first night last week when the sky was visibly raining meteors instead of, well, rain.

So I grabbed an extra-heavy blanket, an extra-bright flashlight, an extra-warm sweatshirt, and an extra-small Jess Lin and headed over to the Green Building to await Sara's glorious borrowed van. Jess Lin was the ideal last-minute person to bring along because (1) Jess Lin and I could probably share a car seat if x > y, where x is the number of people signed up for the trip and y is the legal passenger capacity of the van, and (2) Jess Lin's family lives about 10 minutes away from Wallace Observatory, so if we got stranded in the middle of the woods, Jess Lin's mom could hypothetically drive to Wallace and bring us take-out Thai food .

Sara's arrival was timelike separated from mine, so I entertained myself by toying with 15-second exposure times on my camera, whose maximum exposure has no timelike separation from 15 seconds, unfortunately. That and my spacelike separation from a tripod precluded the possibility of magazine-worthy meteor shots, I soon discovered.

(Low-angle shot of the Green Building.)

After a while, it was clear that Sara was going to be non-relativistically late, so I started shooting the breeze with Jess and shooting the cement with my camera. That's not a figure of speech, by the way; I ended up with some excellent macros of the cement outside the Green Building. Seriously.

At last, the prophesized van showed up. Inward we piled. Wallace-ward we drove. 40 minutes it took.

Wallace was cold and dark and starry. After a short tour of the telescopes, we spread our blankets on the driveway and sprawled on our backs, eyes hungering for light. Residual splatterings of starlight slowly intensified from pinpricks into lush necklaces of hot glowing jewels on black velvet. I switched on my camera, upped the exposure to 15 seconds, and set the focus to infinity. 15 seconds later, I had a fantastic, high-quality picture of an empty black rectangle on my storage card.

This was the best photo of the night.

This was the second-best photo of the night.

In two hours, I saw three meteors. That's infinitely more meteors per hour than the average over my life prior to August 13, 2009! (The secret to avoiding disappointment is to recalibrate your perspective using irrelevant statistics. Another example: I broke my right arm. That's infinitely better than being one of the 0.0003% of people in the world who go to Harvard!*)

*Actually, I'm pretty sure this statement is comforting not because of the statistic but because it makes fun of people at Harvard.

If you're still disappointed, never fear: the moral of this story is that hope and determination always prevail in the end. After a night of abortive attempts, I was rewarded with:

Meteors galore!

Just kidding. The moral of the story is that if celestial bodies won't move for you, you can at least move your camera to create cheap blur effects that look like meteor tails, because nobody reading your blog can tell the difference anyway.

At least I didn't fall asleep.

Another can of lingual worms spilled over when I stumbled over the following twitch-inducing passage from Faulkner's Light in August:

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

Perhaps there was a time when my brain's toolbox included a robust Faulkner parser, but as of right now, I feel like I need to run MATLAB before I can understand this paragraph. After confessing this to myself, it was hard to deny that MIT does in fact wipe the hard drives of your high school English Lit. education in order to install diskloads of nerdly lingo software on your language processors.

So, for the gentle edification of the incoming Class of 2013, I offer an introductory documentation of conversational phrases @ MIT that are likely to be, um, not-so-conversational at your local grocery store checkout aisle.

Function (noun): No list of overinflated jargon would be complete without this classic, all-purpose noun that instantly makes you sound scientifically saucy in virtually any context. Otherwise known as the ketchup of argumentative conversations, “function” may be overused but it hasn't lost its awesomely obnoxious flavor. Ex:
Person A: Pass the salt, please.
Person B: Is your request a function of the underseasoning of the fish sticks, or is it a function of the evolved need to consume nutritious minerals? In either case, the spacial coordinates of the salt are not within the domain of my arm.

Spacetime separation (noun): The notion of intertwined spacelike and timelike dimensions, as explored by Einstein et. al., is especially useful for sublimating the tritest of excuses/apologies/answering machine recordings.
Ex: Oops, it appears that either I am spacelike separated from my cell phone or you are timelike separated from a reasonable hour for phone calls. Please leave a message at an appropriate temporal distance from the beep.

Vacuously true (adj.): A statement is said to be vacuously true if it is simultaneously true and proudly misleading. Successful conversations between tired MIT students and regular people (parents, doctors, etc.) often depend upon liberal sprinklings of vacuous truths into the slurred speech of the former. Ex:
Doctor: Do you sleep well at least half the time on nights before tests?
Student: Yes.
[The student's response is vacuously true because half of zero is zero, which is the amount of time that the student spends sleeping on pre-test nights.]

Null set (noun): Usually used as an euphemism for a depressing lack of something.
Ex. 1: I had the null set for dinner yesterday because I overslept.
Ex. 2: According to Facebook, you and the null set are now in a relationship.

Nonlinear response (noun): A mild, vanilla-toned label for surprises that hatch like fuzzy baby birds from nullset-minded decisions and quickly mature into giant, grass-guzzling geese that ruin your lawn.
Ex: John isn't here right now because the virus pop-up windows on his desktop responded to his mouse clicks in a nonlinear fashion. We'll just bring him food and water.

Gaussian (adj.): A nimble adjective for describing things that look exactly as they should.
Ex. 1: See how the elevation of the land is highest near the peak of that mountain? The altitude vs. horizontal distance profile sure looks Gaussian!
Ex. 2: MIT's Stata Center is non-Gaussian.

Isotropic (adj.): Admittedly, I'm the only person who uses this word casually at MIT. It's best reserved for situations in which you are completely lost in a hallway that looks precisely the same as every other hallway you've seen in the last 15 minutes.
Ex: I couldn't find your room because all the floors in McCormick Hall are completely isotropic. I swear, even the whiteboards on everyone's doors had the same drawing of a benzene molecule.

Unstructural (adj.): Anywhere else in the civilized world, “unstructural” means “potentially unsafe, likely to suffer mechanical failure.” At MIT, “unstructural” means “run away from this as fast as you can.”
Ex: I hear that East Campus' homemade roller coaster is especially unstructural this year. Better start stockpiling for nuclear winter.

Entropically favorable (adj.): When the disheveledness of your dorm room/ personal appearance/ mental state attains mythic proportions, use of this term subtly transfers blame from your personal laziness to Professor Sadoway, who in all likelihood taught you about the reassuring properties of energetic favoritism in 3.091. Ex:
-Why are you using toothpaste squeezed from a ziplock bag?
-It was entropically favorable, Mom.

Discretization (noun): Discrete modeling of continuous processes epitomizes the philosophy that if you don't succeed at first, you might as well not succeed in smaller segments. Ex:
-Did you pass the swim test?
-I did in fact swim four laps, but the coach regarded my discretization of the pool's length into 32 intervals as mathematically unrigorous.

The list traipses on, but I'll hold the rest for the second edition of The Unofficial Guide to Unstandard MITglish. (Coming soon to a browser window near you! Mention this blog post and get an additional 20% discount off the low, low price of your guide. It's so low, it's actually a member of the null set.) Now if you'll excuse me, I need to debug my Faulkner MATLAB script before I get to Chapter 7.

Twixt bus stop to the East and hot dog stand to the West, as the ungentle rain smashed into flooded streets and scoured my shoes to black polished submarines, I suffered a J.D. Salinger moment. A sigh sprouted like a mushroom in my lung. “Dangit Jess, we're getting old.” You probably could have strung a jade necklace from the jadedness of my tonal inflection. Jess disagreed, unbitingly. I can't blame her much; Jess and I have weathered hundreds of tiny, inane conversations over the trickling course of our road trip, mostly inspired by the one of us that is not Jess Lin. We have discussed neckties and Israel. We have talked about buying grapes and running shoes. We have argued over street directions, and I have bet my left kidney on the infallibility of my internal compass. Did you know that Jess Lin now owns one of my kidneys?

Somewhere along the way, in the midst of dispossessing my own kidney and grapethirsting for ripe green unwashed street fruit and watching rain flinging against skyscrapers, I became irreversibly disillusioned by a formula of two parts character-building and one part gastronomical splurge. Everyone knows that character-building stories are for bloggers who secretly want to be Charles Dickens on the weekend so I'll skip right ahead to exfoliating the gastronomical splurge/disillusionment causality.

My Manhattan bildungsroman can be nutshelled in a single hyphenated proper noun: Jean-Georges. Jean-Georges is to French cuisine as Citizen Kane is to American cinema: the darling of unsparing critics, the jaw-dropping-mouth-watering masterpiece whose glowing accolades could light a small city after sunset. One of seven Michelin three-star restaurants in the U.S., one of five New York Times four-star restaurants, and probably the only restaurant ever whose menu includes the words “gewurtztraminer” and “garbanzo beans” in the same line, Jean-Georges towers at a dizzying altitude near the pinnacle of haute cuisine. It's so haute, it's practically radioactive.

At skin depth, Jean-Georges is the type of celebrity-festooned establishment in Uptown Manhattan that pampers to the effete relaxations of the rich and powerful and occasionally hungry. This is grossly ignoring the simple truth that chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten is this awesome guy who squeezes every last drop of eyewatering deliciousness from everything he touches. The result is heartbreak served on a gold-monogrammed platter worth more than your first car. Your tongue develops emotional separation issues of its own as each unforgettable unregrettable morsel departs into the deep, dark tunnels of your digestive system without a goodbye. You walk out of the restaurant in need of a therapist.

[Let's pause a moment here to appreciate the democratizing effects of the Internet. In another century, the marble-framed double-glass doors of Jean-Georges would have flexed their hinges for nary a backpack-hauling plebe such as myself. Fortunately, we now live in an enlightened age in which bloggers and YouTubers and Internet mavens are rightfully respected for their brainwashing influence on cultural taste. It's no surprise then that anyone with a computer (and a monitor, and a keyboard, and a mouse, and a . . . you get the idea) can score an online reservation for Jean-Georges and expect to be served a perfectly-orchestrated, world-class meal in the same room as patrons whose socioeconomic class hovers somewhere in the upper stratosphere (as long as said patron doesn't show up in jeans. Jean-Georges is not amused by jeans.)]

Case in point: When away from campus on vacation, I turn into a crumbly juxtaposition of stereotypical starving MIT student and crazed gourmande. On Monday morning, I woke up on a friendly couch in New Jersey, pulled myself into uniformly wrinkled semiformal attire, tripped down the block to the nearest grocery store (which only took cash and only identified fruits/vegetables in Spanish), purchased and drank half a box of Vitasoy for breakfast, grabbed Jess Lin, jumped on a bus for lunch at Jean-Georges at noon, got stuck in traffic under the Hudson, grudgingly bought a subway ticket at 11:55 AM, panicked after a glimpse clockward, bolted out into Columbus Circle at 12:03 PM, ran in the wrong direction, ran back, turned around, located 1 Central Park Ave., accidentally walked into the hotel next door, was kindly redirected by a bellboy, skidded three doors down and crashed into the calm, courteous glance of a well-trained receptionist who hardly flinched as she arched an eyebrow and politely intoned, “Reservation?”

Jess and I were seated with overbearing assistance by the waiter, who insisted on pulling both of our beige plush leather chairs out one micrometer at a time. I swear, he would start to nudge my chair back at a glacial pace, I would imperceptibly bend my knees in anticipation of assuming the final sedentary position, and then he would start to pull the chair again, to which I would respond by instinctively jerking upwards lest I hinder the delicate progress of his chair-moving. Anyway, eventually I sat.

I still can't decide whether the literary territory of Jean-Georges' seasonal lunch menu is closer to high-end bathroom-reading material or minimalist avant-garde poetry. Charred corn ravioli? Couscous and cockles? Caper-raisin emulsion? Roasted sweetbreads, pickled peach, wild arugula, and pink peppercorn? There's at least a dozen unwritten haiku on this page.

Not to mention the dessert menu, which deserves showcase in the Museum of Modern Art.

A stiff, earthy slice of rye sufficed for the initial ritual of complimentary bread tasting. Jess sipped her $6 lime soda, and I pretended to converse with her while creepily scouring neighboring tables hoping to catch an eyeful of celebrities on lunch break.

The zeroth course* was a lively trio of amuse-bouche, each appetizer designed to be swallowed, slurped, or gulped in a single rapturous mouthful. Jean-Georges' rendition playfully flirted along the hem of molecular gastronomy. I started with an intensely red cube of compressed watermelon topped with a shiso vinaigrette, which together tasted like the inside of a Los Angelos Mexican produce market. Interesting and stylish. Next was a Chinese soup spoon cradling a poached quail egg topped with bacon, a creamy concoction that lit on the perfect balance between velvety egg and crunchy pork bits. Last was a shot of corn chowder, laced with minty unnamed herbs.

*Whatever, it came before the first course. If the nominal convention of starting at zero is good enough for thermodynamics, it's good enough for yours truly.

Jess and I became instant fans of the quail egg. We tantalized ourselves with the idea of covertly raising quail in the dorm closets and slurping their eggs half-cooked in cereal spoons for breakfast.

Course one was young garlic soup with thyme and sauteed frog legs for Jess.

With a tip of the proverbial hat to French decadence, I ordered a dessert-like foie gras cr√®me brulee with slow-roasted strawberries. What follows can only be expressed in the present tense. The server gently rests the plate down, announces the name of the dish, and commands, “Enjoy.” I crack the brittle shell of caramelized sugar with the tip of my fork, dig into the velvety goose liver, excavate a buttery caramel-colored forkful of creamy strata, lift it and bite down. I nearly have an aneurysm. “Jess!” I gurgle thickly through a fog of diminishing linguistic ability, “This is the greatest thing I have ever eaten.” My intended speech of unadulterated joy is curtailed because I'd rather use my tongue to smother every last molecule of the foie gras in thick warm hugs.

Imagine: savory liver, creamy as gelato and rich as butter, dovetailing with tangy morsels of strawberries that peek coquettishly under the smoky crisp of browned sugar. It felt like eating your favorite childhood dessert for breakfast one day and then winning the lottery. Don't ask me to describe it any further than that.

So then the server brings Jess a finger-bowl with rose petals to rinse the frog residue off her fingers and Jess starts talking to me about how I was right about Jean-Georges bringing out finger-bowls between courses and I could have my kidney back and so on and so forth and blah blah blah, oh my god that was the best thing I have ever eaten I can't even use a comma right now.

And then the server brings Jess her veal with roasted artichokes, parmesan and lavender, and the server is saying something about spoons that I can't hear because I've lost the ability to decompose sound waves into English because I'm narcotically lapsing into a vegetative state as I fantasize about the geese in Central Park and the crème brulee and strawberries that is surely buried inside their livers.

And then the server brings out my red snapper crusted with nuts and seeds and drizzled with sweet and sour jus. It's spectacular; the tender flesh under a crust of seeds and spices flakes off beautifully and tastes as fresh as spring herbs sprouting from the salty earth. The sauce is silky-mellow, gracefully balancing subtle notes of butter and bright sweet/sour timbres that sirenously urge me to drench it over every bite of fish. The miniature garden of cherry tomatoes and sweet onions cradling the snapper is ripe and delightful and makes me want to live on a farm in rural France.

About 3/4ths of the way through, I discover a strong desire to wash my face in the sauce.

Complimentary desserts were a duet of macarons (creme-filled pastries of almond flour and egg whites) and a selection of chocolates, which Jess and I empirically determined to be hazelnut, mint, coconut, and some sort of salty fruit. Everything was outstanding but would have been infinitely better with a slab of goose liver on the side. Jean-Georges will be reading that on my restaurant comment sheet sometime in the near future.

Another server-type guy came around with a cart, pulled a roll (?) of homemade marshmallows out of a jar, and cut off four cubes with a large pair of scissors. I felt that these needed some goose liver on top too.

Jess and I then bid goodbye to a small chunk of our bank accounts and walked out the door. I took a picture for posterity. It's pretty much the most expressive photograph I have ever created.

And that's how it ended- far and away the best meal I have ever had at any restaurant. Two hours later, as I stood quagmired on a dingy Chinatown sidewalk in drenched dress shoes, the dazzle slowly melted into sadness souped with sighs. Even Jess noticed me being all angsty and artistic and disillusioned for no apparent reason. Later, when I could speak coherently again, I told Jess that it was the bitter fact that I would never, ever experience Jean-Georges again for the first time ever. (If this is in fact how I phrased it, Jess was probably stunned by my powers of redundant expression. “Never experience for the first time again.”) Could it be that by dining at the world's best restaurant, I had ruined countless meals in my future that I could have otherwise savored? Have I accidentally skewed my gastronomical standards to impossible, Everest-scale heights? Will I never reclaim the humble yet overprocessed honesty of my casual relationship with cheap college fare?

And then I paused and said to myself, well, there's always bacon salt.

Sunday afternoon catches me cooking for 30+ in a hot frantic kitchen where the concentrated afternoon heat fringes on vile. Might I mention that my cooking partner, Danny, is flamingly vegan in the friendliest sense of the phrase. His trip to Whole Foods ended with a miniature avalanche of lentils, peppers, onions, brown rice, fat pungent mushrooms, like a million thimble-sized cans of tomato paste, tempeh, wheat buns, six chipotle peppers, pita bread, and yuppieish bottles of marinades, agave syrup, organic molasses, and cider vinegar messily cluttered over the counter. Tonight's dinner will feature an ambitious BBQ-themed menu complemented by a spasm of last-minute surprises: stir, simmer, serve. Stage 1: chopped onions mutiny and leap overboard. Stage 2: an aborted experiment in homemade black bean burgers is sublimated into a thick savory stew. Stage 3: minutes before serving, an entire pan of baked pesto tofu is briskly upended onto the neat red tile floor, during which Jon accidentally grills the terriyaki-glazed pineapple sans aluminum foil and then deliberately grills a pretty slab of locally-raised maple-cured ham that turns out to be invisible until right after everyone leaves the dinner table.

Mishaps aside, the inaugural mouthful of thick wild mushroom gravy slathered over honey walnut bread, chased by burgers under smothering spoonfuls of spicy homemade organic-molasses-and-agave chipotle BBQ sauce, injected a bloom of forgiveness into stomach and heart embittered by 2.5 hours of peeling/chopping/boiling/blending/grilling/saucing/baking/cleaning/scouring/sweating. Forks swoon and groan under pilings of rice-and-lentil burgers, mushroom gravy, grilled pineapple slices, bratwurst, hamburgers, Whole Foods-brand wheat buns, pita bread, black bean stew, teriyaki baked tofu, and musky-sweet BBQ sauce that makes me want to weep honeyed, tangy tears of the same sauce, because it would frankly be the most delicious act of weeping ever. Night drops like a blanket, and I am suffused with sticky satisfying exhaustion.

Not that I'd ever do it again.

II. Breakfast as Therapy

College is a breeding ground for weirdly poignant relationships with food. A friend of mine ate nothing but bread and cereal for a week. I once ate seven bowls of cereal in one day. I've also eaten cereal that my roommate claimed off of MIT's reuse mailing list at 2 AM one night. One of the GRT's in Random Hall bought a small nation's GDP-worth of cereal at Star Market once because it was on sale. He is currently undergoing an emotional separation from boxes of expired Life*.

*A lucid metaphor for the fate of the average stuck-in-grad-school grad student, as it so happens.

I've come to believe that the gentle predictability of cereal, the ubiquitous crunch and murmured tingle of glucose, fulfills the freshman's unspoken need for comfort, stasis, eternal breakfast. Same with bananas, with their blond sweetness and 69 cents-per-pound price tag at your nearest grocery store. Cereal and bananas are basically the only things you can depend on on when the sight of your daily itinerary inspires schizophrenia. Which is why it's so heartbreaking when your banana peel won't open the right way.

III. Pineapple

One night, I walked outside onto Massachusetts Avenue and got hijacked into a city-wide dance party on the busiest street in Cambridge- i.e., a glowstick-festooned mass of 800+ tax-paying citizens pulsating unhygenically to the throbbing ear-stabbing beats of 80's disco and soul. Because this was thriller, thriller night, and no one's going to save me from the Mass. Ave. Dance Party about to strike, I caved in and joined, barely pausing to appreciate the florally-patterned light displays and the centrifugal skillz of the nocturnal neon-studded hula hoopers.

I tripped home, amputated a pineapple, and devoured a slice of bright tart fruit doused in plenty of balsamic vinegar and heaping mounds of cayenne powder. It felt more like getting punched in the face by a pineapple, but nonetheless I dug the fork deep into the tender yellow flesh and let the pineapple have its revenge on my face.

IV. Matt Ritter Eats Lunch

90% of the food consumed in college does not come packaged with social constraints. Matt Ritter's favorite snack involves spaghetti-o's, lemon juice, fruit loops, an ice cream sandwich, and two slices of high-quality whole-wheat bread. Just imagine the most natural way to eat all of the above in one bite, and you will have recreated Matt Ritter's unpatentable recipe. On ordinary days, Matt Ritter favors quieter tastes, such as that of a banana omelette cooked in a high-power microwave (open a tortilla, slice bananas over it, crack two eggs over the whole mess, pop into microwave, serve with an immensity of peanut butter). Matt Ritter also pours cereal on everything, including chili beans.

V. The Beef-Shank Redemption

Last weekend, a menu plastered in the dingy-cornered window of Thailand Cafe hooked my eye. In past experience, Thailand Cafe has served weak curries infused with the chef's secret blend of regret and stunning blandness. Thailand Cafe is somewhat redeemed by the fact that it is cheap, usually empty, and all of ten feet away from Random Hall and less than ten minutes' walking distance away from most of MIT. Some people appear to enjoy Thailand Cafe; other people understand the pleasure of eating food that contains nonzero amounts of seasoning.

Yet the idealist buried inside my contemptuous, hard-shell gourmand fantasizes that maybe, just maybe, Thailand Cafe's crappiness hides a brilliant chef trapped in a cocoon of terrible menu decisions, forever catering to an audience whose tastes are slightly more sophisticated than those of a pogo stick. Pin this as my excuse for barging inside one morning, asking the waitress for the semi-secret Sichuan menu (the chef and waitstaff are all Chinese, by the way), and ordering a lineup of dishes straight from the obscenest dreams of a passive-aggressive vegetarian Buddhist.

I started with cold beef tripe and tongue, bathed in chili oil and garnished with chopped peanuts. The thin, flaking slices alternated between meltingly tender and softly chewy as only intestines can be, but they conspicuously lacked the bone-shattering crunch of tendon that usually makes this dish so texturally addictive. Not bad, could use a few more generous shots of capsaicin.

Next came a bed of velvety, salty curls of smoked pork belly, thickly streaked with iridescent milky-white fat, an indulgent contrast to the sleek silky sheaths of leek in company. Well-played.

Finally, braised beef was drop-dead gorgeous in a feisty dress of cumin, cilantro, and Sichuan pepper. Trying to relive a bite of sizzling meat juice bursting through a crust of hot spices endangers the propriety of language, so I'll stop here.

Slowly, my heart is gasping out room to forgive Thailand Cafe for their unspeakable red curry combo.

VI. Poem about Wild Raspberries by a Jeep

A miracle of ripe red raspberries hatches upon the hedges in pika's parking lot.
Vermilion with a vengeance, the juicy light through the baby bubbles
gurgles the eye.
Plucky hairs poke raw fingertips, piercing incisors, mouth madly pulping plump red berries:
A bloodletting under pearly teeth.

*If Propel Fitness Water commercials should ever feature X-Treme Web Browsing among shots of sweat-spurting sprinters and tennis players straining their facial muscles into Wolverine-esque contortions, I will sell more bottles of highlighter-colored water than anyone ever should, using my right index finger alone.

Take, for instance:

Forget philosophical inquiry; I submit that this picture contains all that anyone ever needs to know about the unanswerable questions that trouble humanity. Mankind, trembling in fear of the natural mysteries that engulf his daily existence, turns to Google and utters through his eternally-present keyboard, why is this movie called bees? (The contextual ambiguity of “this movie” defies reason. Am I the only remaining Internet user unaware that Google has been able to read minds since 1999? Remember, kids, Google knows what movie you watched in your house last night. And why were you watching a movie called bees anyway?) Although I derive Hofstadlerian comfort from #4's implication that thousands of people are using their computers to make their computers run faster*, I pray that the people who search “why is the ocean salty” are seeking an answer subtler than, “Because it contains salt.”

The implications of this next gem of a screenshot are monolithically more befuddling. Of the innumerable places and professions that begin with an M, MIT is the fourth-most popular one to get into (third if you regard “med school” and “medical school” as the same thing, which you probably should if you ever want to go to medical school instead of mediocrity school, which was incidentally where I went to high school, by the way, but let's save that story for another pair of parentheses). I felt a surge of pride, until I realized that MIT's potential applicant pool is only a few perilous notches above the set of people who spend nonzero energy trying to get on Myspace at school.

Second, the terrifying popularity of “how to get into medical school with a low gpa” makes me want to abandon faith in health insurance and maybe even dentists. When you can't even trust your dentist anymore, you know that your life is pretty much over.

A year of experience has taught me that MIT inspires questions the way Oprah's book club inspires soccer moms. Common examples range from “Why can't shopping carts go 35 mph on 4-lane roads?” to "Why does the Stata Center make my eyeballs burn in pain?” to “Assuming that the mass of a space ship is 1000 kg, with a circular sail made of a lightweight, perfectly reflective material, how big would the sail need to be for the space ship to explore the Solar system in 30 years if it is propelled only by radiation pressure from the sun?” Shockingly, Google turned out a vastly different lasagna of cheesy, multilayered inquiries. The following series of questions is left as an exercise to the author.

Ready? Here's the answer key. For extra fun, pretend it's written upside-down and then try to read it.
1 .No, but sometimes we win Harvard vs. Yale football games anyway.
2. For engineering, science research, problem-solving, hacking, checking your laundry status on the Internet, and staying up past your bedtime and then past your waking-up time with the most brilliant and quirky people you will ever know- yes. For learning how to live a healthy, productive life without omnipresent wifi- no.
3. Yes
4. See answer to #3, apply logic skills.
5. See answer to #2, apply inference.
6. I hope so.
7. Yeah, it's pretty tasty.
8. A functionally equivalent question is, are you comfortable with bizarre gardens of creativity flowering relentlessly through the toughest intellectual landscape on Earth? Also, does the crudely hilarious simplicity of the following image melt your heart with warm, buttery pride? If so, yes.

(Seeing this was like getting creamed in the face with a plateful of whipped irony. Even I can't run and hide from the nagging reminder that MIT is one of the world's pioneers in [insert whatever technological field you feel like inserting here at the moment]. Google, on the other hand, primarily registers MIT's creative minds as the generators of mailing lists and “quantum teleportation devices.” Which, come to think of it, almost dead-on encapsulates the weirdness of MIT's public image while paying tribute to the ingenuity of mailing lists like free-food.)

9. In case of severe party emergency: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_kYaPZ6eds
10. Ivy League? MIT is party league. See # 9.

Deconstructing MIT's image through the shallow windows of the proletarian Googler sort of made me paranoid and self-conscious after about 10 minutes. Although I'm chill with the archetypal student persona jigsawed together from 21, last summer's subway hack, and sundry news stories about MIT students wearing permutations of computers, the last item on the next list still gives me nightmares. What if my roommate's sixth sense is the Internet? Am I supposed to feel inferior or weirded out or worried about network problems that I can't fix because they're emanating from inside my roommate's cerebral cortex? Is MIT right for me?

This was even more disturbing. Could it be possible that the MIT Student Center basement is much, much deeper than I thought?

And then I saw this. Like a hefty swig of Drain-O gulping down clogged pipes, the following juxtaposition dissolved every last hairball of doubt in the mental sink where I'd been pouring my Googlified impressions of MIT.

At first glance, MIT's online street cred is hardly anything memorable . . .

And then, like a violently acerbic streak of balsamic vinegar in your mild white strawberry ice cream, you're struck by a gleaming contrast that fills every corner of your brain with delicious, dessert-like irony. To wit:

According to the Internet, Harvard just got 1-upped.

Might I provide an illustration of my less-than-seaworthy vessel? Crafted from “heavy duty” vinyl, deluxe'd out with a cupholder and five disco-colored stripes underneath a transparent plastic top, this nautical party ship cost all of $10.99 at the neighborhood Walgreens.

(Notice the torso-sized hole through which the model blithely dangles the sub-knee portion of her legs as she splashes in crystal-colored, chlorinated pool water with an eye-watering smile blazing across her sunny visage. I duct taped a garbage bag around the hole because I didn't want my legs to be amputated by radioactive flesh-eating eels in the Charles River.)

Generally, life-enriching businesses such as floating downstream on the busiest river in Boston during the busiest hours of the busiest night all year begins busily with the best idea ever; this one began with The Best Idea Ever. Literally: http://www.projectbestideaever.com

One anonymous participant, describing the etymology of Project Best Idea Ever: “So I said, 'Why pay for a yacht when we can just make a giant flotilla of inflatable rafts with a hot dog grill in the center raft?' and [name I don't remember] said, 'That's a great idea!' Then [other name I don't remember] said, 'No it's not, it's the best idea ever!' So the name stuck.”

The basic tenets of Project Best Idea Ever are:
1.Get rubber inflatable rafts.

2.Make rafts safe by Coast Guard standards by attaching glowsticks. (No kidding.)
3.Launch rafts onto the Charles River around 6 pm on July 4th.
4.Paddle downstream until gathered under the Harvard Bridge. Fire up a barbecue grill on the leader raft, cook meat, pass meat around in buns that have been fingered by an uncounted number of people before reaching your raft.
5.Wait until sundown, paddle further downstream in near pitch-black darkness until accidentally crossing the Do-Not-Cross line, then frantically paddle back lest a mammoth, explosives-laden barge mow down your raft like a rubber ducky in a bathtub of cats.
6.Lie back, watch more than 20,000 pounds of explosives detonate from the closest distance allowed by law.

Approximately 95 people this year heard about Project Best Idea Ever and thought, “This sounds foolproof.”

The deadline to register for PBIE happens to be June 28th; I happened to be making my Independence day plans at 7:30 pm on July 3rd. Someone once told me in kindergarten that I could do anything if I tried, so I ignored logical reason as I walked to Walgreens and bought the most river-friendly floatation device on sale, which happened to cost $10.99 and contain a manhole-sized hole for leg-dangling.

The following evening, I hauled seacraft and safety gear (i.e., glowsticks) to the launch location under the Boston University bridge, where I grouped with Rod (unpictured) and Alorah (pictured) from pika.

A nearby group from Olin substituted a pirate-themed kiddie pool for the standard grey PBIE-provided rafts. Something tells me that the steering wheel wasn't functional.

A word about safety: it appears that the official requirement for a raft on the Charles after sundown is two glowsticks, yellow in front and red in back. In consideration of the dubious legality of the inflated mattress (Does it count as a raft? If so, which side is the front?), I decided to be extra careful and attached four glowsticks instead of two. This unwittingly turned out to be an act of foresight, since one of the glowsticks promptly dropped into the river and another was unreachable given the weight-balance confines of the mattress' dimensions (meaning that I couldn't break it without falling overboard into the waiting tentacles of a flesh-eating eel).

In the interest of survival, I also carried along a backpack with a flashlight, a headlamp, extra batteries (all of which were the wrong voltage, I later discovered), leggings, a towel, a granola bar, and some hummus. Everything except the last two items were completely useless during the journey; the granola bar and hummus rescued me from suppering on a hot dog three steps removed from direct contact with the Charles*.

*Charles River ‚Üí boat paddle ‚Üí people's hands ‚Üí hot dog.

At 7:00 pm:
Mattress inflated- check
Leg-hole covered- check
Glowsticks duct-taped- check
Life-jacket secured- check
Paddles attached- hang on, what paddles?

I had no paddles. Luckily, Rod had rope, so the 61-inch Royal Deluxe was florescently hitched to Rod and Alorah's raft. Whereupon I lingered in a borrowed jacket 8 sizes too long and gazed proudly into the plastic soul of my reborn, re-safetified* raft.

*safetify: vb, to make safe. Ex: “After crashing his first car into a maple tree, John cautiously decided to safetify its successor by covering the windshield in a plastic inflatable mattress and two glowsticks.”

Meanwhile, Team Pirate Kiddie Pool ecstatically high-fived each other upon verifying that air-filled kiddie pools float without crumpling and doing the Titanic. Go team.

*Ironically, there was one point later in the night when all the boats were attached together flotilla-style and someone realized that none of the rafts were anchored. It turns out that the only boat with an anchor was the Pirate Pool, whose members thusly saved all 95 of us from floating aimlessly to our watery deaths or the Boston Science Museum, whichever one comes first.

With anxiety and anticipation clogged in my throat like a soup of strong medicine and butterflies, I nudged my raft off the measly crust of shore serving as a dock. Breathlessly, I looked down: it floats! Like, on top of water and everything! And the mattress wasn't even dissolving yet!

Suspending all fear of an unplanned burial at sea, I piled limb by limb onto the raft and drifted off into the mirrored sunset as lines from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness crept into my internal dialogue with river and sky.

Polluted as the water may have been, it carried a dim loveliness in the fading July sunlight, winking brightly into my unprotected eyes and coquettishly spilling onto my raft until I was hopelessly drenched. Slowly I slipped into a comfortable intimacy with the asymmetrically rolling waves, sloshing the mattress to and fro like a cradle rocked by a babysitter with coughing fits.

Extra props to Rod and Alorah are by now overdue. While I was snapping pictures and desperately avoiding thoughts of whatever liquid was scarily seeping through my coat pockets, Rod and Alorah were cheerfully paddling downstream, dragging my raft along like a dog with no legs and a manhole-sized hole in its underbelly.

The 45-boat flotilla regrouped under the Harvard Bridge around 8 pm, inspiring no shortage of intrigued glances and cell phone photography from bridge-bound spectators. Grilling coals ignited; as promised, chili and hot dogs and certain American beverages were circulated boat-to-boat. We camped there for a few hours, exhausting the possible modes of entertainment provided by a beach ball and 80+ paddles. Matt Ritter turned out to be the Pete Sampras of paddleball*, which would have made me proud except that every successful volley resulted in droplets of Charles River pinging against my forehead.

*Played exactly as it sounds.

Disappointingly, I'm not an athletic person when confined to a 5' x 3' rectangle that flips over if I try to move too fast; like all good losers, I gave up and took a nap.

When I awoke, the raft was again drifting, vaguely directionless in the half-dark. Every cell in my body from the kneecaps down was jellified in a wet, cold numbness. Ships loomed overhead, sometimes looming perilously-close-to-head, imposing as like nautical tanks but far more yuppie-ish. I could have scraped the side of this one with my earlobe.

Around 10 pm, someone in our archipelago of grey rubber realized that we were too close to the barges that were about to set off the fireworks. Paddles scrambled to scoop us back to observation distance instead of gunpowder-blasting-into-your-eyes distance; successful, we roped the rafts together and waited like impatient kindergarteners during a PBS fundraiser telethon. Minutes inched by like glaciers. Breaths lingered in the chilled summer sky while I achieved inner peace with the ickiness in which I was physically, now spiritually immersed. At 10:35 pm, the sky cracked open like a ripe melon, dark and sweet with gunpowder. Jagged harpoons of light pierced behind my eyes; the nether ends of my ears gulped with explosion after explosion. Each pop of hot white sparks sizzled impossibly close to my face, close enough to spill into my skull and shake the neurons into a caffeinated state of overstimulation. With it came the joyous, childlike blankness of a successful lobotomy; waves and ship, moon and skyline were obliterated in 100 tons of explosives crunched into 21 minutes of innumerable heartbeats.

(None of the pictures were taken with zoom.)

Floating in a feathery, fiery lightness, riffed by gentle ripples of cold water, I silently vowed to bring a wetsuit next year.

We're in the middle of a less-than-silky ribbon of deserted street outside the parking lot of MITERS headquarters. Charles is driving, which leaves me to enjoy the LOLriocart's G-force simulations backwards in a seat designed for children of weight 15-35 lbs.

I am fully aware that the shopping cart in whose toddler-basket I am dearly clutching to my remaining threads of life has been spotlighted in about a bajillion techno-fanatic blogs in the past three days. To anyone with the mildest glimmer of engineering-lust, the LOLriocart will induce prolific and involuntary drooling. Charles claims that the design is still in progress, but it's already beautiful in the same way that Gmail was beautiful when it was unveiled. Glowing blue lights, check. Ignition-like turn-on mechanism, check. Steering wheel, check. Ability to make R2D2 whirring noises and generate smoke by friction of wheels against concrete, check. Brakes? Um, it looks like those had evaporated.

Hence I am also nail-bitingly aware that the LOLriocart's current method of not-going-at-25-mph-anymore requires performance of “the s-shaped thing that planes do.”

Grocery shopping will never be the same again.

(Photo and survival of the author both courtesy of Charles Guan.)

In the space of the paragraph break above, you've probably calculated the answer, brewed yourself a cup of coffee, and commented “FIRST!” on my blog already. Great. We're now ready to play a short psychological game. A private, procrastinatory research project that I adopted in the dwindling time before my first final showed that everyone* interviewed found the answer by one of three methods:

*i.e., everyone likewise procrastinating in one of Random Hall's lounges at 11 pm on Sunday.

1.Take 7 times 4, multiply by 10, add 7 times 7.
2.Take 7 times 5, multiply by 10, subtract 7 times 3.
3.Imagine a piece of paper, do cross-multiplication on your imaginary piece of paper with your imaginary pencil and eraser, and then proudly circle your imaginary answer. Ex: “7 times 7 is 49, drop the 9, carry the 4 to the next column, 7 times 4 is . . .” etc.

My hypothesis is that if your first instinct was Method 2, you'd also show a natural talent for parallel parking. Rationale: when evaluating the most direct route to your goal, be it the answer to a multiplication problem or the cathartic resolution to a neck-twisting parking maneuver, you don't hesitate to overshoot your target and then back up until you're perfectly centered. (By the same reasoning, people who followed Method 1 probably had trouble getting their driver's licenses; people who followed Method 3 should stick to riding bicycles.)

It remains unclear whether this theory has valid support, but unexpected anecdotal data collected during the study has lead the author to vow against carpooling with certain denizens of Random Hall.

Since I've been having difficulties making Nobel-worthy discoveries in either of my summer UROPs this week, I've decided to resurrect my parallel-parking-mental-multiplication (PPMM) experiment. Comment with (1) your natural method of calculation and (2) how often you rear-end other cars (if applicable). Data collection via blog comments is the new trend in science, so I've heard.

A subtle yet heartbreakingly crucial property of summer projects is that they tend to exist in pairs. Or triplets. Or where n-tuplets, where n = n+1 for every time that someone batters down your self-restraint with an email like:

I conclude with a sampling of current projects filed under “Continued self-delusions of infinite free time”:

7. Rebuild the bridge from pika's balcony to pika's treehouse.

14. Deploy a Rube Goldberg machine in the basement, preferably designed around the theme of vegetarianism and explosives.

21. Eat at every single dim sum restaurant in Boston. (Alright, I will admit that this isn't a project so much as a function of my tidal desires to consume entire subrainbows of the culinary spectrum, especially compelling on Saturday mornings.)

28. Read the complete published works of David Foster Wallace, then metamorphosize into David Foster Wallace.

35. Take more photos with metaphoric gravitas, so that I can start a gallery collection and open a critically-acclaimed art exhibit at the List Center. To start:

(It's a fence, and there's a sky behind it. It represents the human condition, or something.)

42. Start running up to 10 miles regularly. (I'm at 6 miles right now.)

49. Witness the finishing of a 6000-piece jigsaw puzzle, a retina-melting endeavor started last night as a peaceful (thus far) collaboration between pika and WILG, two of MIT's independent living groups. The puzzle itself is currently living in WILG's 2nd-floor lounge and, until completed, will remain an effective hindrance to activities like vacuuming.

56. Bike along the entire shoreline of Boston's Inner Harbor, or until I discover this to be an impossibility.

View Larger Map

Arathi and I made a reasonable effort on Wednesday. I hitched up the rust-barnacled, long-abandoned bicycle that I befriended in the humid depths of pika's garage (single-speed, one functional brake, cracked turquoise paint, perfectly unlovable) and we ET'ed ourselves into the cinematic sunset, pedaling along the Charles River, past the Science Museum, past wherever-we-originally-intended-to-go, around regally-named hotels, through Boston's touristy Colonial-era marketplaces and a irresistibly charming block of Little Italy (gelaterias, pastry shops, open-windowed pizza restaurants- all adorable in the way that somehow makes you want to re-watch The Godfather), up Beacon Hill, against rush-hour traffic, and finally:

On second thought, let's add “Learn to parallel-park” to the list.