Risk is being played at my dining room table. Every once in a while, I hear someone shouting loudly, "You fucker."

Current Music: DJ Sammy, Heaven

Current Reading: Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology

Current Mood: Better than earlier in the evening.

I hate olivine.

ESA(20031101.1)

My Roommates are So Cool

Thanks to one roommate, I now am able to surf the Internet from my hard-drive deficient laptop. (And I get a cool penguin on my desktop as a bonus!)

The other roommate just surfed the Internet and discovered that I may have invented the term "sainted blasphemer" for Nietzsche. Please, anyone, disabuse me of my originality.

Colonization Equals Vergil

One of my new housemates happened to mention Areopoesis to a certain English professor. He asked what it was about. I told him. He asked if it had Vergilian overtones. I asked him how he knew. He said, "there aren't too many epics about colonization." He's got a point there. Hence, I added an allusion to Donne in the beginning of Book IV.
Usual respect if anyone can guess why.

ESA(20031027.1)

Costume Designs
I presented my costume designs for Othello today. Opinions were mixed. On one hand, one person in my class silently mouthed to herself, "Wow!" On the other hand, when the whole class came together, I saw that nothing had particularly grabbed them. They hadn't seen Iago as the entirely too perfect soldier. They hadn't seen that Othello was a disenfranchised servant of the state who had the soul of the senator. They hadn't seen that Desdemona longed for her own military adventures. Because my designs bridged two periods with some parallels but somewhat different fashions, there was something jarring about my designs, but they were forced to admit that they worked as outfits.

NCWFC-Los Angeles Review
When all is said and done, I think I will beat the forecast models and the National Weather Service during this period, and I have to say I've learned a great deal about how Los Angeles weather works this time of the year (and probably other times of the year.) There is a tension between the clouds and fog of the marine layer and bursts of warm, dry mountain air that continue to be heated by compression as they move as northerly surface winds towards the south-facing coastline. Unfortunately, the masses of air involved likely are of a size that is less or around the resolution of the models, making these tensions very difficult to predict in the big picture.

Next week: Billings, MT (it's windy this time of year, hee.)

ESA(20031023.1)

Word Coining

Despite my mother's best efforts, I like to coin words. Hence, my friends occasionally ask me to coin words for particular occasions. One recent entry in the Dictionary of Spinatorean Words and Phrases:

ouadidocracy, n., Gr. ouai [damn] + didein [give] + kratein [rule]

government by people who give a damn.

Why Not Another One

The Anglican Communion, n. Lat. Anglicana [English] + communio [commonality]

A group of autocephalic and autolaotic Christian Churches who recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury as their Bagehotic Patriarch of the North. The Anglican Communion also can be defined like a donut according to the procedure outlined in Simpson et al. (1990). In this case, the donut is faced in divided philocatholic and evangelical Protestant flavors and filled with a mainly creamy center infiltrated with a vexing stream of spongy jelly filling.

Citations
Simpson, Homer, Carl Carlson, and Leonard Leonard, "Mmmmwahhh, Donuts: The Modeling of Complex Structures as Forms of Donut, " Springfield Nuclear Power Plant Safety Office Technical Report #1, 1990.

ESA(20031021.1)

Blues 'N Ribs
I went last night to this delightful COUP event. The food was reasonably good, though the ribs lacked certain juiciness and subtlety of flavor. While in the vegetarian food line, I met some 1Ls (first year law students) who thought that Blues N'Ribs was some sort of graduate school mixer. I graciously disabused them of the notion. They also seemed to be trolling for undergraduates (including briefly me) in fairly sleazy fashion. Throughout the line, all I could think to myself was Tin's famous line, "Please, standards!."

After ditching the scary law students, I saw Written in the Sand, I think, who played generally loud and fast rock until they slowed for a while to a somewhat waltzy beat. Of course, that gave everyone who was dancing a chance to waltz and waltz we did. Our ancestors would be ashamed of us. Then I went out to see an impromptu blues band that had developed around a B-J first year who spent the summer playing down in the Delta. He was good and his bandmates were fairly skilled too. Then I went in to see the Better Boyfriends, who I thought were a band, but they are very weird lip-synching comedy troupe. My more experienced friends claimed that they weren't particularly good last night, and I suppose that's a good thing, but I have to say that their attempt at some sort of Satyricon was fairly good, but I certainly would have drawn a line at the drunken Jesus (in a deacon's stole) bit, though the Richard Burton character was hysterically funny, especially when he did a rendition of "Brandy."

Episcopalian Jokes
For some reason, these seem to have come into fashion, but no one seems to know enough of them. For your further erudition, please read the posts here.

ESA(20031018.1)

Hmmm....

The sun knew it and the moon
Veiled each other, awe-struck
The earth could see and trembled.
Yet one stood by and realized
The very start and planting
Of understanding the happ'ning
Now it is enough for some
For else entirely too much.

ESA(20031017.1)

Save The University of Chicago (Cont.)

Since the quality of students admitted to the College will be important for the economic strength and intellectual environment of this University for years to come, I propose that we change rumors into results and vagaries into numbers. Many years ago, one Ivy League university faced a crisis in its admissions strategy,

"While [University of Pennsylvania President Sheldon] Hackney gave form and financial strength to the most successful ideas for educational reform that emerged from the conflagration of the late 1960s and 1970s, the University faced a new challenge in undergraduate admissions. The demographic explosion known as “The Baby Boom” finally had stopped filling the undergraduate applicant pool of the colleges and universities of the United States. Like the boom itself, the contraction of the college-age population had been observed, as from afar, by the colleges.

"The Provost’s Task Force on the Study of Admissions in 1978 saw demographic change as an opportunity. The declining birthrate in the Northeast and more steady birthrates elsewhere again would give the University opportunity to promote “geographic diversity” and make the University truly national by shifting recruitment time away from the Northeast. Indeed, the Task Force recommended that admissions resources be shifted from selection to recruitment as much as possible. Part of that shift could happen by reducing the labor needed for selection. The application could be simplified. More importantly, interviews seemed far more important to the applicants than they actually were and required too much effort to schedule. While the report recommended that more alumni and faculty read applications, acting as a counterweight to the temptation to make quantitative judgments, the Task Force was recommending that the University gain more applicants by not trying to learn as much about them. Moreover, the interview, which in 1972 seemed to give insight into the motivations of students, was not being used in the admissions process.

"Yet the University was facing an uphill battle if it wanted to compete with the other schools in the Ivy League for the United States’ best students. Demographics scholar Robert Zemsky had found in 1976 that the University’s image problem was not some sort of mass psychosis on campus, definitively determining that the University was the Ivy League “safety school” for the best applicants and the Ivy League “reach school” for the second tier of applicants. For instance, admitted students chose the University of Rochester and Pomona College over the University of Pennsylvania. For purposes of admissions, the University did not belong to the Ivy League" (Nicholas Heavens, "The Pursuit and Control of Quantity: Undergraduate Educational and Admissions Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, 1955-1985," [unpublished], 2002).

The third paragraph gives an overview of Robert Zemsky's study of the University of Pennsylvania's admissions pool. His analysis was able to show the kinds of schools to which University of Pennsylvania applicants applied, the schools to which they were accepted, and the schools which they chose. From that point of view, he could determine student bodies who chose and were chosen analogously to Penn. What we need at Chicago is a similar study that shows what schools admit similar classes to the classes we admit. We also need to study the intellectual environment that exists at those schools. If we start looking through the looking-glass to the analogues beyond and find that the added intensity which the faculty demands and the love of knowledge itself which is beloved by many of the alumni and much of the student body is at risk, then we need to tell Ted O'Neill, "Teddy, you've got some 'splaining to do."

P.S. There is hope in the Class of 2007, though and this blogger who compares chemical bonding to romantic relations is just one humorous example that the "uncommon" Chicago student is still alive and well in the admissions pool.

ESA(20031015.1)

Save Ferris, I Mean, the University of Chicago

Yet is she really in need of salvation, my alma mater? Some are beginning to think so. Between 1996 and 2008, it seems likely that the enrollment of the College will grow from about 3600 to 4800. At the moment, the growing enrollment of the College and the desire of the Housing Office to increase the percentage of enrolled students in Housing has forced University planners to start making some hard choices about selling dormitories, building dormitories, and figuring out where to put them.

The planning for new dormitories has become public. Other issues involving growing enrollment are less public. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a significant shortage of classroom space. Math classes have been moved to Pick and Judd. Core courses in general have been moving farther and farther from the center of the campus. For the sake of the students who take them, it might be best if classes in the Core be retained in the core, the Main Quad that is the pomerium of our scholarly city. Concentrators can stay in one or two nearby buildings on the edges of the campus, but those who take Core courses need not to rush from one side of the campus to another. Wide spacing of Core classrooms impairs reflection and it impairs discussion, as classes build in trickles of punctuality and unavoidable latenesses.

Worst of all, the quality of the College classes may have suffered from the efforts of the Office of Admissions to increase yield. The year my class entered, there was an imputation that most of my fellow classmates were Ivy League rejects. While it was technically true in my case, such nomenclature did not reflect that I had selected Chicago on its merits as my first choice. I came for the Core and generally have not regretted my choice. This summer, I realized that the kind of students who enter Ivy League institutions and those who I thought most fit the University of Chicago were vastly different. The general direction of a U of C student is a need to know. The general direction of an Ivy League student is a need to know X,Y,Z. As one might remember from the Republic, the love of knowledge itself makes one a philosopher. An unbridled and unmingled love for X,Y,Z simply makes one a conoissueur. This year, I have heard rumors that the Ivy League admissions pool and the generally anti-intellectual climate that often lies beneath those elder universities to the East has been admitted within these walls and occupies the purple and orange monster who sits to the north of Bartlett Quad. This state of affairs cannot stand.

Nor can the Faculty of the College afford to remain silent if all desire for knowledge itself is lacking in the matriculates. One professor was telling parents on the first day of Orientation that the Faculty had repudiated the reforms of Hugo Sonnenschein and wished to bring a greater "intensity" to the College. Yet a pool of Harvard rejects only will accept the rumored increasing vacuity of "faer Hahvahd."

The Lambeth Talk

(With apologies to Noel Gay and Douglas Furber)

Lambeth we sometimes see,
The buildings are red the grass is green.
It hasn't got the Roman touch,
But that's never mattered very much.

We speak the Lambeth way,
And find that people are a bit too gay
And when we have a bit of speech
Oh,Boy.

Any time you're Lambeth way,
Any evening, any day,
You'll find us all
Doin' the Lambeth Talk,

Every little primate "Hal"
Is a good old Lambeth pal,
You'll find 'em all
Doin' the Lambeth Talk.

Everything's too free and easy,
Too "do as you darn well pleasy",
So we've made our way there
Gone there, stayed there.

Once you get down Lambeth way
Ev'ry ev'ning, ev'ry day,
You'll find yourself
Doin' the Lambeth Talk.

ESA(20031014.1)

P.B. Satire, as Erasmus showed, is probably a form of prayer.

The Magnificent Three
Otherwise known as

1. The first and second rows of GEOS 23101.

2. The guy with the hat, the guy with the shaman stick, and the gal who still is willing to talk to them.

3. The University of Chicago's National Collegiate Weather Forecasting Contest team.

I'm still trying to get to know them and the other two members of my GEOS 23101 class. And yes I'm obsessed by the NCWFC and Aubade and the House and school, always obsessed by school...

ESA(20031013.1)

Fun Little Facts on My Quest to Understand Entropy

Those who have been reading this blog since the beginning will recall that I am on a lengthy quest to prove that Planck's Constant really is the fundamental quantum of entropy. And so whenever I learn new facts about entropy, I like to write them down here.

1. First, the potential temperature of a packet whose state changes in accordance with adiabatic, reversible means is directly proportionate to its microstates. In other words, high potential temperature packets have high entropy and low potential temperature packets have low entropy, which to a first order approximation greatly simplifies the entropic analysis of mesoscale and synoptic systems.

2. Crystals tend to the highest symmetry possible, because higher symmetry means a greater number of possible positions for any individual atom (i.e. microstates). Hence, crystals tend to have high entropy. Hence, we have the cool third law of thermodynamics, which says that a perfect crystal at absolute zero has zero entropy, which would be more obvious for less regular structures. Unfortunately, water ice mau violate the Third Law of Thermodynamics (possibly because of quantum effects, thereby introducing our happy friend, Planck's Constant.)

ESA(20031010.1)

Heh, Heh
X: You're the forecaster right?
CS: Yes.
X: Did you manage to get anyone else?
[CS indicates behind him.]
CS: Yeah, everyone who normally would be in this row.
X: When I was at Y, we used to have a pool for the first snow of the year, a couple of dollars each...which was quite the sum of money. The janitor won all three years.

Note: Y is one of the most prominent participants in the NCWFC.

ESA(20031006.1)

Ask A Stupid Question
One of the professors in the Department thinks he's found a way to empirically determine the predictability of the atmosphere based on completely atmospheric data. It's a really clever method that finds situations of similar geopotential height over the world and determines based on how they diverge from another according to a Lotka-Volterra model (typical predator-prey model). Unfortunately, he didn't quite explain how one gets the ten day predictability limit, but if he's right, a theory that could derive such wonderful elements from first principles would be very cool.

To explain it more simply: imagine that the system of the world is a computer: the laws of nature are the processor and it has various forms of memory whose storage time you can calculate. Basically, the claim is that the memory of the atmosphere is around ten days. Looking in the memory of the atmosphere, you can say something about its behavior for up to ten days. Otherwise, the memory off which the program of weather calls is wiped on a ten-day cycle. The argument is that the memory of the ocean, land, etc. is more important in determining long-term atmospheric behavior.

Anyway, the experiment was run on data that is for a low-level of the atmosphere, where atmospheric turbulence might be expected to disturb "information" very quickly. After the talk, I asked the professor whether higher levels might have longer memories. He answered that much longer memories than ten days seem unlikely. At the moment, he is working on doing his experiment on a vorticity factor (insert hand-waving explanation here) that is known to be isentropic, that is unaffected by turbulence enough, only to be affected by thermodynamic considerations or something to that effect. Next week, he promises me the results. He believes the memory will be limited to twelve days. We shall see.

ESA(20031003.1)