No more judging and Dyer bashing. I DO have reasons to be inspired. Yesterday Dillon McKinsey did an amazing “Writing on the Air” (a 30 minute radio talk show I co-produce on KOOP 91.7 FM) with Austin Mayor Will Wynn and his wife, Anne. Dillon interviewed them on the topic of “Poetry in the Public Square.” He had quotes from the likes of Mario Cuomo, “Campaigning takes poetry, leadership takes prose.” His questions were surprisingly good, stimulating. They opened up, talking as people rather than as figureheads. They genuinely like slam poetry; Anne sees more talent in the likes of Wammo than in Bonnie Raitt. (She called Will on his cell as he sat in a Bonnie Raitt concert to call him over to Ego’s to see a slam.) Will, interestingly enough, has all of the songwriter Guy Clark’s lyrics memorized, and he did a beautiful two minute recital of a set of his lyrics.

If the leaders understand the importance of art, and the people play an active part supporting and creating art, then Austin is redeemed. It becomes a place capable of renaissance, not just economic renewal.

i made my way onto a Wayne Dyer discussion board. what a rush! see comment in the next entry.

i must continue ragging on dr. wayne dyer. his bald head seems to appear on pbs at exactly those times when i least need it. wayne says that you can perfect a life art, where your gradually increasing appreciation of beauty translates into a positive orientation with the universe. the payoff being that people are ATTRACTED to you because you are just so full o' life, so full o' the goodness.

he also says that it is very, very bad to judge people. and he quotes Soren Kierkegaard as saying "when you judge me, you negate me." it occurred to me today that the act of judging another person isn’t so BAD. The only thing bad about it is if you happen to take pride in the judgment. Judging people quickly and correctly is actually what dynamic people do all of the time.

A realtor visited my condo today. She was exactly what I want in a realtor: quick, cute, a DYNAMO. She ran through my place, her mental tape measure whirring. She said that she is a proxy inspector for “a little 78 year-old lady.” I could not have witnessed a more effective surveillance. I’m sure she wasn’t correct, 100% about ME, or my place, but what the fuck? She did not need Dr. Wayne Dyer.

I suppose that there is a philosopher, other than Wayne Dyer, who would appeal to me. I am becoming fixated on the concept of class. What it means to have class. What it means to break through to a life where you approach things lightly, and at the same time are attuned the deeper implications of it all. Attempting to surround yourself with a halo of Emersonian purity just gets in the way of what is important.

saw "the bourne supremacy" tonight. my mind was already made up about what i'd get out of it before the opening credits rolled. i wanted to see matt damon, uber man, operating at such a high level of cognitive ability that it made my own problems seem small. it delivered. for example, checking into one hotel room and then breaking in to the desired hotel room just down the hall is smart. it buys you time and you'll know when the swat team arrives.

for a few moments this afternoon i watched the opening of Dr. Wayne Dyer's four hour PBS pledge drive marathon, "The Power of Intention." he takes the stage in Boston and says "most people think that having intention means getting what you want, no matter who gets in your way... well i'm here to dispel that myth... blah blah blah." if i contined to watch his show i would have probably been told that i needed to focus on the art of forgiveness, or tap into child like wonderment, etc. i won't snap on poor Wayne and write here that he is utterly full of it. but if it's so true that "intention" doesn't have anything to do with navigating human obstacles, then why is it such an adrenaline rush watching bourne outhink and outsmack his opponents. it was, admittedly, incredibly satisfying when the toast popped. people who saw the movie will know what i'm talking about.

there were a few good hours early this morning. i made progress in "modeling random systems." an exponential random variable models wait times. it slopes down towards zero as time approaches infinity; as long as there is some probablity of rain, there is no chance that a drought can last. i thought about the cassini orbiter. there must be some probability of a space rock ripping through the hull, but it survives because the tail of the exponential collision variable remains vast, even as years go by. stephen jay gould, after being diagnosed with cancer, examined the mortality statistics and realized that it was the dimensions of the probability tail that mattered, not the frightening average. he lived for 20 years after being told he only had a few years to live. probability and statistics can suck when you think in terms of "how" before "why." people have a fundamental need to describe things that don't occur in plain sight. instead of leaving for an appointment at an exact time, we recognize a range of time as "the leaving time." this time begins quietly and then crescendoes into a "now or never" moment, and then trails off into an "oh shit we're not going to make it" moment. we usually give the mean when we tell somebody when we're leaving. we already know the bell curve. however, when you crack a textbook there is this disorienting overload of information. the author doesn't think the way you do. as the day goes on, from a peak in the early morning, the ability to concentrate trails off.

http://www.webmath.com/Integrals/int_ts.html

current runs from infinity to origin via the x axis, then veers right and goes out to infinity again via the y axis. find magnetic field intensity H at P(0,0,1).

the biot-savart formula introduces a deceptively easy looking integrand that will eat your lunch. unless you have a cheat sheet in your back pocket, or a computer, you will have to be, how do they say, clever about solving it. follow the above link, and choose three down and one to the right.

electromagnetics is interesting in that you can think you are very much more informed than people 150 years ago, yet you find yourself wanting for their pencil and paper skills. if you can't draw a triangle and make a few substitutions, there's no point attempting to solve for the EM plane wave, i should think. but i don't think 90% of EE majors can do this kind of thing anymore, or else i would have been taught by now.

summer school began today. encouraging developments. this past weekend i went to see my friends Meg & Mark get married in Chicago. they met Julie, me, and five other people for Greek food on Halsted. Julie's friends Alex & Iris drove down, and I was amazed to find that they were interested in the topic of frequency response. although with regards to biofeedback. Alex, with what seems to be a self-led understanding of electricity, is trying to design equipment that measures the body's vital signs. they are invested (although i don't know to what extent) in metaphysics. anyway, alex's intense interest in the subject complemented my intense desire to tell somebody, anybody, about it. so he wants to correspond with me about amplifier circuits. it will give me a chance to focus my writing to an audience other than myself. i think that a key reason that professors need to teach is that basic questions from novices can be extremely good a clarifying exactly what you know and don't know. physics and math concepts can sit in you head in a heap and when it comes time to explain, you may realize that you either know the subject or that your concepts are in disarray. in a similar situation, my neighbor Don, also a metaphysicist, brought up the subject of "The Elegant Universe" and string theory. I tried explaining to him that the uncertainty principle does not have much to do with God. Physicists give the probability that an electron will be contained within a certain volume, and this is only math and geometry, not directly representative a faith in the unknown. don seemed very latched on to the idea that extra dimensions was spiritually exciting. i tried to explain the quantum physical processes that occur in semiconductors, i.e. electrons jumping the bandgap due to excitation, but realized that i maybe needed a better grasp. i think that human beings get excited about what they think they know a lot about. so if you spend a long time studying religion, you get excited about religion and not about science. and the converse is true for scientists. if only the influential people of this world could recognize this and stop IMPOSING their respective philosophies upon the world, we'd be so much better off. dialoge can and should occur between people who do not necessarily agree on everything. for this reason, i realize that there might be something to gain from talking to metaphysicists.

a transfer function H is P/Q, output over input. denominator Q is a characteristic equation, a factored second degree polynomial, in the textbook at least. in signal processing theory H gets a box, and lines are drawn going in and out. many Hs are strung up en masse to model a system. within the H box, a ratio of differential equations.

particularly cool for descibing waves, electromagnetic, sonic, whatever. anything you see or hear.

we're going to the lavender fest today. it's one of julie's favorite scents. scent isn't a wave phenomenon. it's diffusion. i intend to bore nobody with these grasping observations, except you dear reader.

grades came out well, nothing lower than a B.

inbetween semesters one gets to believe that he is actually smarter than he is.

the input resistance of a common-gate MOSFET amplifier is only 1/gm, and what praytell is input resistance. it is the resistance across which Vsig (our old friend) is "felt" by the circuit. i am no longer an enemy of Vsig, at least with regards to simple transistor models.

EE 438 questions center around achieving gain, arranging transistors, resistors, and capacitors so that a small signal (Vsig) can become a large one (Vout). right now i'm no friend to the small signal. let's put it that way. my path is strewn with murdered small signals.

Vsig is the EKG blip, the caller's voice, the link to the landing gear; you can't be careless about Vsig. somebody has to safeguard Vsig from its enemies.

i placed in a writing competition sponsored by the UT college of engineering. (second place)
the essay is here
the lovegren essay won.

rob and tanya had their farewell party at jeff's today. their leaving splits up (at least geographically) the powerpuff girls. old alignments give way to new ones and it's better to be identified with who we are becoming than who we were.

an EE 313 midterm exam question asked for a definition of the continuous time unit impulse function. i provided a definition of that, then i also provided a definition of the discrete time unit impulse function. they aren't mathematically equivalent, the continuous and discrete time functions, although the book uses the exact same lowercase greek delta symbol.

a lab problem in 319 asks me to write a trap that mimics the behavior of an HC12 instruction, EMAXM. the hypothetical reason i need to do this is that i'm writing software for a "cheap chip" that doesn't have EMAXM.

this is my fourth semester here. holes, electrons, acceptors, donors, pnp, npn, drain, source, gate, collector, emitter, base, fermi level, diffusion, drift, saturation, triode, hybrid pi model, t model, assembly language!, (insert 150 motorola HC12 instructions, such as LEAS, BEQ, and STAA here. don't forget STAB.) then there are linear, time-invariant systems. we're at the semester/2 mark.

Oh Joy, Another Morality Alert
(read on KOOP Austin, 91.7 FM)

This holiday season brings with it an orange terror alert and practically meaningless appeals to the public for a quote-unquote “heightened state of vigilance.” It comes at a time when we already feel prodded towards standards of heightened morality that are equally meaningless. It’s not that we wouldn’t benefit from being more alert, or more considerate, but I think it’s time to admit the absurdity of the ways in which we prod ourselves towards these ideals.

Consider how readily we absorb and re-absorb the message of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol:” You are not good enough, so be good. It’s hard to deny that Scrooge was bad, easy to identify with his joy at being granted the time (and resources) to undo his mistakes. We admit to ourselves that we can also be bad and that Christmas is giving us a chance to be good. It’s supposed to be psychologically cleansing.

But if we made frequent attempts not to be bad throughout year, and many of us do, it would seem that this ritual of identifying with Mr. Scrooge is an admission of failure, on some level. We let Dickens prod us, annually, towards an abstract, heightened state of morality that we know we won’t maintain. We might also ignore that in his pre-reformed state, Scrooge possesses what many of us need: Scrooge is assertive, career oriented, in control of his finances, and not co-dependent. Many of us would find it easy to have his radical change of heart, it’s a radical change in our credit card balances that we might actually need, or the radical ability to communicate to others how we feel at any given moment.

I have not read Dickens’ book; it may contain many subtle messages that didn’t carry through to the film adaptations. But in future Christmases, I will question the authority of “A Christmas Carol,” before I question my own integrity. With less room for doubt, maybe I can be a better person, or at least more vigilant.

home for the holidays

it is interesting to watch a lot of cable tv and then rewind the experience to think about how various parts made me feel. space ghost got angry and punched the head of a praying mantis type thing, decapitating it, making me very happy, while the head of dennis miller looked out from a tv monitor. a real head looking out from a cartoon tv. yes i get it.

the jeffersons rerun did not make me especially happy. lamont was off in japan, learning the latest about "advanced computer circuitry." in the early 80s this was how a screenwriter could easily script the idea of "success" without making the audience think too much. lamont, at least, was never stereotyped as a computer geek, but there's something cheap and unsettling whenever computers are used this way.

well. family members are milling around this laptop, which belongs to my mother anyway. so i'd better relinquish control

Some girls are singing christmas carols at the top of their lungs out of a 12th story window (the castillian) overlooking the drag. I guess to celebrate friday. I am waiting below for the 982 bus. It's 4:30 pm. The slanted sun is still bright and the girls are at such an altitude that their voices are distorted. I wave to them. I think they wave back. What the fuck. It's the end of the semester. My bus is white and streamlined, like something out of a science fiction movie. It is almost 2004, and we are alive to see it.

I've been following this story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/opinion/02KRUG.html

Krugman's on target, but he doesn't mention the extremely good report that's on the web about Diebold's system. It's written by geeks at Rice and Johns Hopkins. Too technical for the newspaper, which in itself says something about the nature of the problem...

http://avirubin.com/vote/response.html

...which would be that the people who are knowledgeable enough to settle this issue have no political clout. They don't hold office, have a lot of money, or write for the newspaper so they aren't heard.

I passed unit 20 (the final unit) in EE 316 today, and this is one of those days where I surprised myself. Given a set of rectangular waveforms, I was able to determine their source to be a D flip flop connected to a XOR gate. My TA/grader passed me in about 45 seconds, with none of the usual agony. Earlier this morning I demonstrated my design of a binary divider to none other than C.H. Roth, the author of the textbook.

http://www.ece.utexas.edu/faculty/directory/details.php?id=72

I had a few small errors in how I diagrammed the circuit which he spotted instantly, but he cut me some slack.

This is a midterm summary of my academic activity. I should be doing more homework right now, but I love the sense of control that I get from expository writing.

In Logic Design, we're seeing how systems of gates become functional units. For example, why something like a programmable logic array (PLA) is important. It packages a framework within which gates are combined, and standardizes a method of associating them. In order to think about what drives something electronic, such as a clock radio display, one can think “PLA” and see a big piece of the picture. Obviously, no engineer goes to a store and buys a little AND gate. The logical units must come bundled together. I guess I’m saying that it’s satisfying to see and understand how.

In 411 we are covering transients. Inductors and capacitors are like wheels, in that they give a circuit a sort of rolling “momentum.” The Inductor is easier to visualize this way. It’s like a paddle wheel in the current. Even if the current suddenly stops, the paddle wheel keeps spinning, and for a while it will keep the current moving downstream. (The strange difference is that it spins perpendicularly to the direction of the current, not in line with it). A capacitor binds parallel branches of the stream. If several parallel streams have a capacitor among them, they are backed up in the event that their upstream source suddenly stops. The capacitor will attempt to maintain the driving force across all of the branches until it expends itself.

In M340L we’ve learned the basics of matrices. There is a conceptual leap between thinking of math as a way of manipulating individual numbers, and thinking of math as a way of grouping numbers. The class has felt a little bit dull, perhaps because we’re looking at things that simply exist rather than do. For example, a 3X3 matrix spans 3 dimensional space if it can be reduced to a diagonal row of ones, etc. etc.

In data structures, we’ve spent 6 weeks learning what all of the confusing C++ syntax is about. I think it’s ironic that the C++ language immediately exposes newcomers to its most difficult concepts, and that these concepts are intended to make the language easier to use. For example, function overloading is supposed to make it convenient for the audience (other programmers) to use symbols like “+” and “==” in ways like, “does this data == my mailing address.” This relatively modest gain (that benefits these “other programmers” not the human race at large) comes at the expense of a cumbersome syntax and many scary new punctuation marks. I've yet to find comprehensive examples that show how big O, big omega, and big theta can be applied to programs. The examples that I've seen give short incomplete explanations. There is an O'Reilly book written on this subject, Algorithms in C, which waters it down. More professional books give more thorough explanations. I recommend anything by a fellow named Skiena.

proposition 12 passes, narrowly. in fact, all of the propositions pass. the creepy recorded phone call i received from rick perry, urging me to support prop. 12, evidently did its job. the legions of the walking dead were activated. they got into their ford expeditions, programmed to vote yes, yes, yes.

the republicans' secret agenda in limiting non-economic damages in civil suits (i'm told) is to undercut the power base of trial lawyers, and hence the funding base of the democratic party. by imposing this cap, however, large corporations are more liable to act irresponsibly.

it's almost as if texans would vote more reasonably there wasn't a liberal minority urging them to think. it's not just the liberal minority in texas, the world is beginning to think that texas is backwards, hence texas resents the world and passes laws that further isolate it from modernity.

annoyances

an asian guy in a tight grey ribbed top swaggered down the narrow hall at about half the normal walking speed. i was behind him, in no hurry. perhaps he sensed me behind him, as if he were some kung fu master with eyes in the back of his head. the pretty girl from my EE 411 class tried to walk past him on the left, but as she did, she stumbled because she was trying to navigate the narrow space carrying books. he did not alter his gait, say excuse me, or anything. if it was a guy stumbling, fine, be bruce lee about it, but if it's a girl what's the harm of saying sorry. i wanted to snap on him, "this is texas, son, you say 'excuuuse me' to a lady." in a sense, i was paralyzed by his race. i disliked him even before the girl walked up. his walk suggested all that was alien and unattractive about asian youth, a kind of midget bravado. i wasn't afraid of confronting him so much as tapping into some sort of uglyness inside me. i wouldn't have been confronting him because i believed in chivalry so much as i would have been trying to put his personality (and his 'culture') back into its box.

my reader(s) may find this kind of thing tiresome, but i obsess on stuff like this. it concerns me too. i'm supposed to be thinking about

OPERATIONAL AMPLIFIERS

a guy in 411 did the unthinkable: the trick where you flick your cheek with your finger in order to make a watery plopping sound. i haven't seen this trick since the 1980's. the professor was up there talking about induction, the foundation of RF circuit theory (and anything having to do with wireless communication) and amazingly, this guy has reverted to his sophomore year of high school. i really feel like i got back into college just in time. if i had a little more grey in my sideburns, i would look totally ridiculous sitting there. for some reason 411 is a zoo. i had ploppy in front of me, an extremely nonplussed girl who could only pay attention to the professor long enough to mock him, sitting behind me. the whole back of the room was talking. i realized, with horror, that my classmates would probably become ruder and harder to like the higher up i go, not more likeable. they're turning 20, and many of them have never enjoyed the experience of being "cool" in a class. the jocks and thugs that used to hem them in are now elsewhere.

in other words, i'm feeling rather isolated this semester. my lifelines are the JP Java coffee house, carrying a copy of the new york times, and (i will need to take advantage of this) setting lunch dates with adults that i know on campus.

i got into the major sequence this week. meaning i take my first junior-level course this Spring.

fall at UT, pedestrian traffic is high. more soothing to consider as a brueghel painting than as a series of portraits, looking back at you. i feel slightly self-conscious as an older person, and i could not blame these young folk in the least at any resentment over inheriting such a badly used world. the art of walking around involves what tom ridge might call relaxed vigilance (or some crap like that). nobody remembers what they see when they walk, usually. the trick is getting to point b feeling as good or better than at A, and this is an art.