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I'm most of the way through my M140 homework, which will be a thing of beauty when it is finished, even if I think my exposition is embarassingly colloquial (as they say, `hand-wavy') in parts. I thought I'd take a break to tell you some small things:

1. Hans Blix was here last week! Didn't write anything about it, but it was interesting and amusing to hear him speak. He seemed very fair, and his sense of humor seemed very Swedish; he reminded me of my friend Torbern. Heheh. It seems like it's been an incredible semester for guest speakers: Daniel Ellsberg, Robert McNamara, George Soros, Hans Blix, Ed Witten.

2. In Pittsburgh while it was pouring rain I finished reading Where I Was From (Moffitt F.861.D53 2003) by Joan Didion (thread), a great activity for a pre-emptively homesick Californian. It's a good book, an honest one that actually has a point, but doesn't force an answer upon the reader. Touching on water politics, suburbia, the aerospace industry, the prison-industrial complex, and the failure of basic education (in suburbia, supported by aerospace, etc), it is not a happy read. Here's an interesting (to me) paragraph from chapter two, about how, rather than being a self-made state, almost everything in California has been built via the funding of the federal government:

   Nor did the role of the government stop with the construction of the railroad. The citizens of the rest of the country would also, in time, subsidize the crops the railroad carried, make possible the irrigation of millions of acres of essentially arid land, underwrite the rhythms of planting and not planting, and create, finally, a vast agricultural mechanism in a kind of market vacuum, quite remote from the normal necessity for measuring supply against demand and cost against return. As recently as 1993, eighty-two thousand acres in California were still planted in alfalfa, a low-value crop requiring more water than was then used in the households of all thirty million Californians. Almost a million and a half acres were planted in cotton, the state's second largest consumer of water, a crop subsidized directly by the federal government. Four hundred thousand acres were planted in rice, the cultivation of which involves submerging the fields under six inches of water from mid-April until the August harvest, months during which, in California, no rain falls. The 1.6 million acre-feet of water this required (an acre foot is roughly 326,000 gallons) was made available, even in drought years, for what amounted to a nominal subsidized price by the California State Water Project and the Central Valley PRoject, an agency of the federal government, which, through the commodity-support program of the Department of Agriculture, also subsidized the crop itself. Ninety percent of this california rice was glutinous medium-grain Japonica, a type not popular in the Unitd States but favored in both Japan and Korea, each of which has banned the import of California rice. These are the kinds of contradictions on which Californians have tended to founder when they try to think about the place they come from.

3. Diane and I discovered a road in California called The Bohemian Highway. Here's a map.

Now I will blather briefly about that all-consuming conundrum known as graduate school:

I'm warming up to the idea of going to Rochester for graduate school and studying quantum optics. I'm still deathly afraid that Rochester (as a city, as a university) be a horribly boring (not to mention cold) place (the life in rochester section of the CS dept's web page is not encouraging), and I also feel incredibly dissed for not getting into anywhere more `prestigious'. The guy at CMU did not help matters by beginning his "why you should come to CMU" talk with the sentence, "I'm not going to kid you, this isn't Princeton." It's almost enough to make me regret spending a year abroad, trying to get a math degree, and all the various other complications on my record, since it seems that everyone is looking for nice 4-year 4.0 GPA students with one small research project and letters of recommendation from fancy faculty members. ... Well, whatever. As I said, Rochester's quantum optics program is looking better and better, but I'm just sad about having to leave Berkeley.

Back to the homework!