signs of the times

ATLANTA -- Shouting "Bush go home," hundreds of demonstrators lined historic Auburn Avenue--once the hub of the civil rights movement--to protest President Bush's visit to lay a wreath at the tomb of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the slain leader's birthday. Though anti-war protesters, environmental groups and human-rights activists were among the demonstrators, many in the crowd were African-Americans who said they opposed Bush's visit because his policies have gone against most of the values King stood for. — chicago tribune "Mr. Bush was shielded from [the demonstrators'] view by a row of transit-authority buses with police officers in riot gear atop them, according to the pool reporter who accompanied the president into the center." — nyt. "He stood briefly in silent prayer before being whisked away to attend a $2,000-a-plate re-election fundraiser." — ct;

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 — The president and Congress should immediately begin work to achieve health insurance coverage for all Americans by 2010, the National Academy of Sciences said on Wednesday. "It is time for our nation to extend coverage to everyone," the academy's Institute of Medicine said, in a report intended to put the issue back atop the national agenda. The report, summarizing three years of work by a panel of 15 experts, concluded, "Universal insurance coverage is an important and achievable goal for the country." The academy is an independent, nonpartisan body chartered by Congress. It did not endorse a specific legislative proposal or estimate the cost of its recommendations. But Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the University of Michigan, who was co-chairwoman of the panel, said, "The economic cost to the country from the poorer health and premature deaths of uninsured people is in the range of $65 billion to $130 billion a year." — new york times

it sends tingles down my spine.

I think we should start an organisation called "Unemployed, uninsured individuals for Marriage and Moon-bases!"

small update

Yesterday Diane and I went to the first class of Spanish 1A at Vista. The professor seems pretty fun(ny) but the whole 2-hour first session was dedicated to him blathering on about how hard the course would be, in order to get people to drop. Hmm. Then we saw What Alice Found with Rebekah and Stevie at Landmark Act 1&2. Last week we toured the Scharffen Berger chocolate factory in Berkeley with Matt (ankaerith) and Dina. Last weekend Kenny, Michelle, Diane, and I went on a super-nifty hike up in the Berkeley Hills' fire trails.

It looks like I will be boarding in a frat in the very soon upcoming future. Not sure which one yet, but I have a bunch of leads. Tomorrow I'm going to go visit a bunch of them. I think it will be a great sociological experiment... from the gay house to the frat house! and before that I lived with a bunch of orthodox jews, and before that I lived in a swedish dorm. Amusingly, one of my housemates said, "ooh, there are such cute boys there! You can be my 'in' to [three greek letters]!"

I've been reading more about phonons. There's a great entry on Phonons in the Wikipedia (actually the whole wikipedia is astonishingly useful; it's an open-source encyclopedia, and I often find it more useful than Mathworld for physics/math topics). I'm really shocked that phonons (which, remember, are vibrational modes in a crystal) can be considered spin-2 bosons! I think understanding phonons and their friends will lead to a much better understanding of field theory and wave-particle duality in general. In EE117 (electromagnetism) the professor showed some network of springs as a model for the propagation of waves/photons, and suddenly it's making a bit more sense.

There's a class this semester on C*-algebras. I got the book from the library, and I'm curious if I'll be able to follow along, despite being blatantly underqualified. Probably not, but the course description is pretty exciting: "The theory of operator algebras grew out of the needs of quantum mechanics, but by now also has strong interactions with many other areas of mathematics. ... t I will somewhat emphasize examples which go in the directions of my current research interests, which involve certain mathematical issues which arise in string theory and related high-energy physics. Thus one thread which will run through the course will be to see what the various concepts look like for quantum tori, which are the most accessible non-commutative differential manifolds." Similarly, I'm debating taking Math 140 (Metric Differential Geometry) because I'd kind-of sort-of secretly like to get on the string theory track. In any case, the two courses I intend to take for-sure are Physics 141A (Solid State Physics) and Math 114 (Galois Theory, with Ken Ribet). You can check out my ridiculously ambitious schedule of courses I want to check out during the first week. (-:

On the software engineering front, I have a much better understanding of COM now, based mainly on reading Essential COM and working on the JEOL project, as detailed by my alter-ego nibot_lab. Also, thanks to hyperionab I found out about GeoURL, which I think is pretty nifty, and I plan on geo-coding all my pages on splorg dot org as soon as possible.

SF Cacophony is celebrating MLK day with a Peninsula Pub-Crawl: Do you commute on CalTrain every day and wonder what's going on in those communities you pass by every day? Well, we've got an afternoon of train-based exploration planned from San Francisco to San Jose, with numerous stops in between. We'll wander through San Mateo, Redwood City (Climate Best By Government Test), visit Steamies bar in Hillsdale (haven't you always wondered what that place is like?) and more. All this using only a single Caltrain Day Pass!. It's just $11 for a Caltrain daypass, plus booze money of course.. anyone wanna go??

Still reading Prisoner's Dilemma and Fresh Air Fiend sporadically.