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could be fiction (or, boy meets girl, loses book)
I'm losing my mind. I just walked down to the Bioscience library to photocopy a paper from a journal and to check out a book I had on hold, and by the time I got back to Donner I had managed to lose both the copycard and the book I checked out. How does this happen? The book is still totally MIA after diligent search, and someone absconded with the copy card... I'm glad that Reality maintains State for itself, because if it were up to me, we'd live in a pretty weird place. Like when I find myself suddenly downstairs in the kitchen with no idea why I'm there, but then the empty mug in my hand clues me in that I probably intended to make some more tea. It's just like that line from Memento: ``I don't feel drunk...'' The amazon.com price for the book I lost is $2,100.95. I kid you not.
Back at work. Not working just now, obviously. Brewed up a pot of coffee for myself, brewed from the `Industrial Water' they swear is potable. Ken is installing his invention, a squat metallic contraption that would look like a spaceship egg if spaceships laid eggs. It's a pressure vessel containing vacuum surrounded by sulphur (I like the anachronistic spelling) hexafluoride and a graduated 200 kilovolt electric field; it's inserted under the microscope to decelerate the beam, so that the CCD camera isn't fried by the 400 keV electron beam. Fun stuff. I took some pictures.
Second cup of coffee. I actually walked to the kitchenette to get the water for this particular batch of coffee. All those EH&S safety courses have made me sufficiently paranoid to ignore all the claims that this building actually has only one water system, that the ``Industrial Water: Do Not Drink!'' signs lie, although everyone else drinks it without adverse effect. It's bad enough being in, let along eating or drinking in, a building where some of the rooms have the full set of radio-, bio-, and chemical-hazard warnings. Please don't correlate this with my absent-mindedness.
I drove Nadia to the airport this morning, in total, wanton violation of Billy Crystal's character's commandements on that subject (c.f. When Harry Met Sally), but that's ok, because it was clearly the right thing to do. Why is that melody from Doctor Zhivago (while I'm on the Hollywood kick — and did you know that D.Z. and Lawrence of Arabia had the same director? It all makes sense now!) stuck in my brain? The last few weeks — that's an estimate, as I've totally lost track of time — have been a dizzying whirlwind of last-minute romance.
Ken's invention is installed now, mated to the microscope. Compressed Nitrogen fills four (would three have been better?) pistons between the wheels and the vessel itself, pushing the thing up against the bottom of the microscope column, where rubber o-rings engage, forming an air-tight seal. Valves close, vacuum pumps activate. Now there's a symmetry to the set-up — electrons are accelerated at the top through four hundred thousand volts, then focused and directed through a sample, then decelerated through two hundred thousand volts, carefully so as to not change their trajectories.
Effects of the would-be Industrial coffee are wearing off. Another tour through campus fails to locate the single-particle methods book. Maybe it absconded off to that place to which cereal boxes sometimes wander in the night? There's a nonsensical reference for you, the sort only Google can resolve. I check Gladis and discover that I didn't really check it out after-all. The checking out — that, too, was only imagined. No, wait, I'm lying. Book is listed in my inventory despite having vanished into thin air. Perhaps Reality is not as good at keeping state as I suspected.
Ignore that last paragraph.
I got an A- in English 117B (plays from the latter half of Shakespeare's career), of which I am a bit proud. The professor notes that "Because your last three grades were so strong, I decided you deserved an A- for the course," apparently ignoring my original C+ paper. Coolness. I did quite well on the final, and I'm almost tempted to get a copy of it since I think my essays were quite witty. Somehow I mentioned computer science three times (including a reference to `subgraph isomorphism' in King Lear — thank you Paul N. Hilfinger, even if you don't have a line of signature sportsware) and Star Trek at least once (`dramatic theatricality' and `heuristic fiction' turned into `holodeck metadrama' and a short discussion of how dramatists and computer scientists apparently both have a fascination with recursion and self-reference). I enjoy final exams where one can be playful with language.
I started writing an online gradebook thing so that my CS 70 students could check their homework grades. It authenticated via CalNet AWS, so that students log in with a username and a password and I get their CalNet ID. Our grades are indexed by student ID, so I asked for permission to look up Student ID from CalNet ID. You would think that if a student authenticates themself with their student ID number and password that they could be considered to be granting permission to the application they're using to retreive their student ID number, but the campus bureaucracy thinks otherwise: ``Disclosure of student data to persons other than the student himself is governed by the Federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). The Office of the Registar (OAR) oversees student data and determines whether an application will have access to that data. ... You should be aware that access to highly sensitive data, such as student ID, is typically not granted to student-run organizations, unless there is compelling justification for doing so.'' That's right, kids: your student ID number is "highly sensitive data." Think twice before showing your student ID to the AC transit driver.
Where was I? Oh yes, thankfully the computer terminal maintains state: The last n weeks have been a total blur. At least the last week is reconstructable via tomography from memories from a string of days that seem like months, and from concrete things like credit card receipts, random notebook scribblings, and digital camera images; a trail of state information. My notebook skips from May 9 to May 19 without entry. It's been a nice time and I just wish that it lasted longer. I should write it up in best gonzo style.
Driving out to Pacifica some time ago, an exciting night in Berkeley and full of fun logistics, my thoughts turned to these huge networks, galaxies of people, connected by associations — it was all dans' idea, and it really infected him, these social networks spinning and gravitating in this huge abstract space, where, before our eyes, galaxy clusters were colliding, reforming, combining, becoming linked ever more tightly, like synapses in some counter-mimetic mind, new circuits, short circuits, degrees of separation collapsing. There's a sort of gravitation; one link forms, then pulls in others. We're at something like 1.5 degrees now in this city, it seems; strong connectivity is within reach. And then there's the mystery, the possibility of some huge phantom galaxy out there — sort of like (but not really) the Monster Group — not yet connected to ours, but revolving with us, galaxies crossing like ships in the night. It could very well be this. I'll call SETI.
Take that abstract space, now take its cartesian product with actual, factual 4-manifold spacetime and that's when two particular trajectories came within sufficient distance to interact, to pull these galaxies in new directions, if just slightly. Yep, probably just then (not Ping's python class — that was just a spacetime intersection), although it's been suggested that perhaps my showing up to the date auction in a collar and tail was vaguely influential. (``I seem to have been making cameo appearances in your journal lately.'' ``You are kind of making cameo appearances in my life lately.'') But now I'm getting way too literal. I prefer to write in vague references that even I don't really understand. Yes, this paragraph turned out far too nerd[il]y.
Okay, so, I'm going to call it quits on this frenetic mind-dump for the moment, and hope that it isn't all too spastic. Consider it fiction if that makes you feel better.
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Random thought: I think one of the things I'm going to miss most about Berkeley is the proximity to the RSF. If I want to go to the gym now it requires a 15 minute drive. Granted, it took about 15 minutes to walk from my apartment but there is something about driving that greatly increases the activation energy required to get my ass out the door.
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sniff.
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This entire post gave me a sorta techno-mystical feel, with all the talk of parallel universes and social networks colliding and interacting. I like it.
And about student ID numbers being highly secret information, that's only marginally worse than considering social security numbers secret information. Both these things are recorded on so many pieces of paper that so many people have access to.