i bought something called "maple pecan crisp, peace cereal" at whole foods market (they have no major brand cereals). on the side of the box is a picture and quote from Yogi Bhajan. sales of peace cereal support "peace jam" seminars. i felt slightly unlike myself pouring a bowl this morning. but my angry thoughts throughout the day were curbed by memories of what i ate for breakfast. for example, a dude sat behind me in physics with a cocksure way of speaking out answers to the professor's questions. he was correct only about half the time. when he was right, i could hear him chew his gum in a way that seemed to suggest that he thought he had kicked everyone's ass. i thought, "fuck it, i could get mad at this guy, but i ate a bowl of peace cereal this morning."

anyway, in four weeks we've gone from coulomb's law to inductance. too much too fast, actually. in general, i now realize that three dimensional geometry, for all its perils, is the easiest way to understand the forces that affect charged particles. electric forces point straight. magnetic forces encircle. an electric field flows through the length of a conductor creating concentric magnetic fields. wrapping a wire in a loop can cause it to trap energy in the fields. a novel idea. i had previously thought that only batteries could store energy. with a steady current, energy can be stored simply by putting conductors into geometric arrangements. coiling them (inductor) or creating sandwiches for the electric field to go in (capacitor). buttons have capacitors under them. by writing this, i'm attempting to demonstrate that i'm comfortable with the subject matter. in actuality, i struggle with it, and when i take my eyes away from the book or the professor, i stop thinking about it immediately. when walking down the street, i have to force an equation into my mind, such as the biot savart law, and see how long i can keep it there until i start thinking about something unrelated. part of me hopes that i can actually become a good electrical engineer. i've realized that i need to LIKE it, and so far, there is little correlation to what i evidently like to think about. i've tried not to be hard on myself, it doesn't do any good. however, i like to think about the meaning of life, and myself, like my life is still a fantasy, even though i'm almost 32.

tomorrow is independence day.

i'm studying physics in the periodicals room at the engineering library and who should walk in but bruce sterling. picking up journals such as "machine design" etc. i walk over, confirm that it's him, and then shake his hand, introduce myself, tell him that i liked the "difference engine." "hi" he says, no comment on his book. "doing research?" i ask. "yes, you wonder, 'where does he get all of his ideas.'" he says, looking at the shelves. he seems to want to get away from me and i oblige.

i was in a state of glee for about an hour. i tell the librarian, figuring she'd get a kick out of knowing that a columnist for Wired does research in her library. she says "the twilight zone guy." "no, bruce sT-erling, not rod serling." i say. "i'll have to tell my boss" she says.

oprah gave out free ipods, roombahs, and handbags to her guests today. the women in the audience were shrieking, like they were at a rock concert. i've never seen anything quite like it.

straight A's, including diff eq, thankyouverymuch.

war poem no. 1

perhaps this man is dead
beneath a rubble wrapping paper pile
on christmas day

could he have only gasped
on the televised front,
to sate those who
sat in chairs to watch.

hate, from somplace, for you,
my american friend.
my senses apologize,
and i can spontaneously tolerate.

the sudden, and then again,
the everyday tones remain dictated.

let me blame this dead man
and love you, my unforgiving man,
and accept these crosshairs
through which you've learned to see

i decided to listen to the classical station tonight, KMFA. diane dunnavan does a show on tuesday nights called "classical austin." she had steven mills of the austin lyric opera, promoting his original production "Touch" and playing long excerpts from the score. Glover Gill of Tosca did some or all of the score, beautiful strings and a touch of accordion. this radio show was so good that it actually made me begin to feel human again. the idea that this music was made in austin, and that the ballet will premiere in austin, was unexpectedly encouraging. i have been preoccupied with the images and the repurcussions of the war. in a sense, i have gone to public radio (not KMFA) regularly, needing an unhealthy fix of war news. i am personally neutral on the subject of the war. our president is having an elaborate, bloody, and costly argument with the world. while this isn't inspiring, it is interesting. our siege of baghdad will change the paradigm in the middle east. if our occupying troops win and we establish what we perceive to be "rule of law" in iraq, it could be a stunning counterexample to our relentless failure in the region. it is also possible that our military victory will make us globally hated for decades. either scenario could become apparent within the next few months. but back to my original idea, our eyes and ears turn towards the war and I do not think that we always appreciate the subliminal effect of what we see. in a sense this war is completely dulling to the imagination, the opposite of a good new musical composition. i won't say that it is just or unjust, but it does not inspire me to act, or create, only to ponder the practical consequences. yawn.

Reader(s), try and watch this someday: A Class Divided.

i actually saw dr. patt today, walking down speedway around 5pm. i stopped him and said, "are you dr. patt?" and he said "the last time i checked." i told him that i loved his book "introduction to computing, from bits and gates to c and beyond." he asked who my instructor was how he was doing, how the TAs were doing. i said they were great and then he seemed to be on his way so i thanked him and said goodbye.

chapter four of the book finally sank in today. the instruction cycle consists of several steps: fetch, decode, evaluate address, fetch operands, execute, store result. in the upcoming weeks, they'll have us analyzing examples of assembly language. i also was successful at evaluating a non-exact differential equation today. the lego lab went ok, our robot managed to feel its way along a few strips of black tape.

i'm noticing that a lot of people are eating fried chicken these days. i don't know if it's the poor economy or just a cooincidence.

no more people in space, at least for awhile. based on what we saw today, the the idea that we're fit to commute back and forth to outer space seems absurd. the cost was too high for whatever commercial and scientific tasks they had performed.

in the 1960s, Kennedy could call space a frontier and be intellectually daring. today, the president calls outer space a frontier and he is merely playing it safe, putting positive spin on a disturbing incident. the difference between 2003 and 1969 is that putting people into space no longer proves a moral point. if the justification for manned space missions is "scientific research," then we need to ask why it's acceptable to risk the lives of researchers who work in outer space, and not acceptable to risk the lives of researchers who work on earth.

robots and computers give us many alternatives to astronauts. for example, we're using unmaned drone aircraft to spy and fire upon our enemies. we could push the boundaries of computer science by investing heavily in a drone shuttle.

that's all.

i've spent the last few weeks trying to rope myself up onto bevo's back. (bevo is a longhorn bull, the mascot of the university of texas at austin.) registering, figuring out finances, buying books, coping with the physical shock of waking up at 6:30am.

my first impressions of the school:

mostly positive. on friday 1/3, i went down to campus to buy books and pick up a parking pass. away from the carnival atmosphere of the drag, the campus had a chilly, quiet austerity. the late afternoon sun gave white granite of the UT tower a rosy tint. there was a feeling of walking in the mountains, or of visting the preserved ruins of a greek city. a week later i was walking out of GE 207K, a course that gives engineering majors extra practice with differential equations, east on 24th street. a lot of natural science buildings are on 24th. a beautiful asian woman walked towards me, and for a second i recognized that we were in the same place: happy with the class we just left, relieved at having a smart instructor, a future. i could have fallen at her feet and asked her to marry me. i don't mean to disgust my readers, here, and i will get to the less flattering aspects of undergraduate life at 31 in a second...

i was a full time administrative employee at UT for four years. i worked east of IH-35 for a year, and then transferred to IC2 which is located along Lamar. i rarely needed to go to the center of campus, and when i did there wasn't much reason to celebrate. as a student, pursuing an engineering degree, the place now seems enormous, exciting. a large Asian population attends UT: india, china, korea. many schools are highly ranked. there is the sense of a thriving community, quite apart from Austin's general community. the smartest young adults from places like madras, beijing, seoul, walk around in groups having dialogues that may never be heard or appreciated by people in Austin. the contrast between this community and middle class white austin is sharp enough; it's mind blowing to consider that communities east of the expressway are even more insulated. thankfully, one of my professors, Mario Gonzalez, discussed "the digital divide." but UT, as an elite place, creates divides upon divides. students only stay at UT for a few years, and they have no time to contribute to Austin.

i must brag about the resources at UT. a UT professor, Yale N. Patt, wrote my intro to computing textbook which is amazing. in february i'll attend a meeting of the amateur radio club (ARC) which, unlike typical ham radio clubs, has real antennas and satellites to play with. the ECE building has wireless labs, digital design labs, biomedical equipment labs, etc.

on the downside, engineering students are plain looking, plain acting people. in my large introductory EE sections I'm detecting a lack of healthy enthusiasm. it's 85+ percent male, everyone's dressed the same, hair is cropped short (with a few notable exceptions), and many guys almost seem angry. making friends will be a challenge. engineers try to show that they're emotionally simple but sophisticated in terms of technial expertise. i at least look the part. my hair is short and my clothes are nondescript. i fight notions that i'm somehow more talented and creative than those around me, because they probably aren't true.

the night before finals.

what a person needs and creates beyond habits and basic necessities becomes religion. this includes art, money, sex. homes become shrines. books become scripture. working out becomes ritual. ...conscious worship. i'm not sure that staying in bed all morning is a form of religious observance. there has to be some discipline. some religions, such as zen, are all discipline. i'm worshipping issac newton, numbers, and they aren't fulfilling me completely. numbers aren't usually beautiful to me, but there are brief exceptions.

taking a study break. kmfa started playing that sad erik satie song, reminding me of death. at 30 going on 31, i'm that much closer to death, compared to a normally-aged physics student, who would be, say, 20. the physics book does point out that the "psychological effects" of sound wave amplitude cause small increases in power to be detected as extremely large increases in loudness. it does not mention the psychological effects of hearing satie at 1:00 AM on a Sunday evening, with rain hitting the kitchen skylight.

my college term papers from the early 90s were submerged during a flood, but luckily the ink didn't completely run. i have a file of brittle, discolored papers representing my best thoughts when my mind was fresh and pliable. a long paper that i wrote about the gayl jones book, corrigedora, made the point that certain forms of psychosis preserve important links to the past. in the main character's case, she was able to bear witness to the injustices of slavery by remaining psychologically detached from men while she was a young woman. only as a much older woman do she and her romantic interest, a man named mutt, begin to relate to one another. it's an intriguing thought, still, that dysfunction might actually serve a purpose, and that old age might serve a purpose.

The moral value of human life develops gradually.

I took this thought out of a report that I am attempting to write about stem cells, and I needed to put it someplace. My belief is that a human embro is nothing more than a few cells and that medical researchers should do what they want with them as long as the public remains informed. I mean, god bless you for being smart enough to tell me what an embryonic stem cell is, go forward with what you are doing and godspeed.

At Duke university they began treating a child having Sanfilippo Syndrome, a very rare disease for which there were no prior treatments. The treatment involved a transfusion of stem cells derived from donated umbilical cord blood. The researchers don't understand exactly how the umbilical stem cells know how to get into the bone marrow and start repairing the immune system, but that's exactly what they appear to do. It's not unlike mixing potions.

still in chicago. wrapping up two busy days but feel fine. yesterday, mom claire and i went to the renaissance exhibit taking place at the art institute. the exhibit focused on the medicis, the royalty who funded the likes of michalangelo and da vinci. for example, "cosimo II wandered the streets, causing great consternation to his father" and then there you see an original oil painting of the goateed young cosimo II. claire had her 3X5 flash cards which i guess are related to an art history class she's currently taking. speaking of school, i will soon have to take final exams covering subjects such as double and triple integrals, wave motion, directional derivatives in 3D space. etc. it's scary. i looked through an old box in the basement that contained essays that i wrote as an undergraduate in English. my essays had a few embarrassing slips, but overall, the clarity and directness with which i wrote back then surprises me. these days, i view good ideas as being extracted at a great cost, in time, effort, etc. these essays (at the risk of sounding self-satisfied) seem to possess a thick and easy supply of "good ideas." something that is so easy to forget about literature and serious writing is that it's very good at training one's thoughts. in comparison to my skill at computing limits, correct quantities of velocity, etc., i was naturally gifted at writing and appreciating literature. i've always known that my educational re-tread is somehow a betrayal of the solid undergraduate work i did as a much younger man, but i've been working too hard at math and science to suddenly give up. it's getting late and i'm not seizing what i'm trying to get at.

meg and i saw a REALLY BIG cat skeleton at the museum of contemporary art today. that should have been enough.

(yes, two art museums in two consecutive days)

currently at mom's house in elmhurst, il. spent six hours in the middle seat on an AA flight between here and austin. the plane sat on the runway for about 90 minutes due to snow over o'hare. the lady to my left read alice sebold's the lovely bones, the man to my right read a golf magazine. i didn't have the energy to begin talking to either of them. it preserved a sense of balance. each of us emanated the same type of polite, quiet indifference. my mom's friend tom bought us dinner at a nice italian place, capri, on north avenue. which was great. i ate two stacks of interleaved eggplant and breaded veal slices, that floated like battleships in a sea of red marinara.

read about 80 pages of rosellyn brown's "half a heart" on the flight. the main character, miriam vener, has seemingly begun to screw things up with her daughter, veronica, who she is visiting for the first time in seventeen years. on flights, i am more aware than usual of peoples' styles and behavior, and aspects of consumerism and the comfortable life seem to be everywhere. you pick up "sky mall" and start dreaming about a more comfortable life, one where you have a huge bathroom and a tub with massaging jets, nice shirts and ties, a labrador retriever who sleeps in his cedar-lined wicker basket bed. as ashamed as i am to admit it, the in-flight consumer experience gives me hope for my future. despite myself, i am comforted and inspired by it. reading brown's book did not exactly reinforce this, but it didn't contradict it either. the main character, miriam, is somebody who has built the second half of her life around "comfort."

tonight i went to germ polett's party. he had an interesting lineup of guests: ken lieck, ethan from the orange mothers, john erler, doing some sort of sketch art in the kitchen. i think graham shelby mingled very close by to us near the back of the yard. tall man. leather jacket. the voices of austin independent radio were there, and i didn't feel compelled to say ahem, hey have you ever heard MY show. it seemed that they were trying to pick up chicks and that perhaps i needed to be doing the same thing. i have a soft spot in my heart for one chick right now, and i've allowed my feelings to remain hidden for so long that i'm terrified to approach her.

This is my first entry. Endele yii ha! Part of happiness is being understood. A hit or miss process. Less missing might occur if I leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Paper notebooks were not causing me to articulate a purpose that others could understand, anyway.

The thought of the day regards angular momenum and figure skaters. I'm not sure that any physics student has studied the concept of angular momentum without the example of the figure skater. She pulls in her arms, decreasing her moment of inertia, thus increasing her angular velocity. It's an algebra equation set in motion. The picture in the textbook took my mind completely off of physics, though:





The sight of butt crack invariably takes one's mind elsewhere. In this case, the sight evoked a sense of empathy for humanity. This was in an engineering physics textbook. The readers are interested in building cell-phones, SUVs, smart bombs, etc. The idea that this audience must rely on a figure skater to understand a key concept says something about not taking too much pride in technological dominance. Mainly this: the things we do to express ourselves have value beyond what we may immediately understand. And people who build technology owe a debt to the figure skaters of this world. --GLS