(no subject)

somehow I've gotten horribly behind in math 140 (differential geometry). uurgh!

fake news

Federal investigators are scrutinizing television segments in which the Bush administration paid people to pose as journalists praising the benefits of the new Medicare law, which would be offered to help elderly Americans with the costs of their prescription medicines. [continues]

tomsawyering the Sacramento - a call to arms

I want to go from San Francisco to Sacramento by some kind of river boat. Is it possible? Or otherwise just float down that river as it winds from Sacramento to the Bay. Is it time to tomsawyer the Sacramento?

diploma

I picked up my degree today. One of the places I'm applying actually wants a photocopy of my diploma, so I thought I might as well go find it. I went to 120 Sproul Hall and waited in line (there were only two people in front of me), and when it was my turn, I said, "I'd like to pick up my diploma."

The man went to a filing cabinet and leafed through all the not-yet-picked-up diplomas. I was surprised that there weren't more. Another person working there exclaimed in surprise at my slowness in picking up my degree (since I graduated in August), "You graduated in the summer and you haven't used it yet? I can't believe you haven't used it yet!"

(Later this afternoon I ran into my friend Jackson and related this story. "Oh, I haven't picked mine up either," he said. He graduated four years ago.)

I read over the diploma to make sure everything was correct. I thought that the diploma would list my major, but it just says "The Regents of the / University of California / on the nomination of the faculty of / the College of Engineering / have conferred upon / TOBIN FRICKE / the degree of Bachelor of Science / with all the rights and privileges thereto pertaining / given at Berkeley this fifteenth day of August in the year / two thousand and three." Then there are the photocopied signatures of governor Gray Davis, university president Richard Atkinson, chancellor Robert Berdahl, and the dean of the college of engineering. The former three are all graduating as well — Davis was, as they say, fired, and Berdahl and Atkinson have announced their retirements.

I signed for my diploma, and the man congratulated me. I laughed at his Dilbert desk calendar. He laughed too, agreeing with a chuckle, "Ain't that the truth!" I suppose some would find it vaguely ominous while picking up their computer science degree to see the following cartoon:

Pointy-Haired Boss to Dilbert: "You're being hired by our Internet Company. Your job is to fire everyone."
Dilbert: "Will I be paid?"
PHB to Dilbert: "How does one billion shares of stock sound?"

Surprisingly they gave me a book along with my diploma, a copy of There Was Light, a collection of essays by alumni of the University of California. It is a nice gift. It is rare to receive a gift or a free thing of any kind from the University of California.

I pondered briefly why they don't give something similar to entering freshman. The cynical would say that it's to entice donations, but I think it's a more magnanimous offering than that. The first essay is by Joan Didion, which amused me because the next item on my to-do list was to check out her book Where I Was From from the Moffitt library (which I did, and I was the first person to do so).

Didion makes note of receiving her diploma: "My diploma was mailed to me, and when it arrived in New York, I put it in a box and had no occasion to look at it again until some years later, when I was living in Los Angeles and needed to show a diploma to get a stack permit at UCLA." She references the "do-it-yourself" nature of the Berkeley education:

``This dread was its own challenge, and could provide its own risky exhilaration: the freedom to fail was also the freedom to be, to make one's own way, to choose the road n ot just less traveled by but less traveled by for good reason, because it was mined, say, or lead nowhere. There was, of course, a down side to this free-market aspect of the Berkeley experience: it was entirely possible to graduate with an eccentric or incomplete education. Everything I know about European history was learned indirectly, and in a real sense accidentally, picked up from novels or poetry. On a campus where there were, at this time, seven or eight Nobel laureates in the sciences, I learned no science at all, managing to fulfill my science requirement with a geology lecture class favored by football players.''

Apparently `Rocks For Jocks' is a long-standing tradition.

She later returned to Berkeley with familiar thoughts:

``I was still unsettled by the familiar questions: what was I doing with what I had been given? What was I making of what I had learned? Aside from maybe a thousand fragments of poetry, what in fact had I learned? Why had I not learned more? Why had I not learned Russian, Chinese, physics, the colonial history of Africa, the kings of France? What Berkeley offered me was for all practical purposes infinite: why had my ability to accept it been so finite? Why did I still have so many questions?''