...but first, a more pressing matter: I need to get a new computer. Doing a bit of looking around I think I'm probably going to get something from Lenovo, they look to offer the most good-stuff-per-dollar. Kind of annoying that there's no option to save money by, y'know, not getting Windows, but so it goes. (Dell excluded, it seems the places selling laptops with Linux preloaded sell them for *more* than the big manufacturers - which I assume has to do with the big manufacturers A. being big and B. getting special deals. Annoying. Oh well...) So... there's no big downside to this I'm overlooking, right? So far the main complaint I've seen about their stuff is that it's a bit heavy, which strikes me as not the biggest concern. In any case, I'll figure out the exact model later... where by "later" I mean "tomorrow" because goddamn I don't have a computer. (Man, I hadn't realized how cheap laptops had gotten compared to a few years ago... even the cheapest models seem to offer more than I'd know what to do with...)
Here's also something unrelated: Some weeks back I found a piece of paper in my coin pocket on which was written, IIRC, "HB558". I might have that wrong - I remember it was 2 letters followed by 3 digits. Maybe it was "NB558". It seems to have become unreadable recently so I'm no longer certain of the exact sequence. In any case, I have no idea what its purpose was. I suspect it may have been left by a time-travelling future me, in which case I guess I've just screwed everything up by rendering it unreadable. Oops.
In any case! Went to see Heidi down in Rolla over spring break. She lives in a house called "Spotty Thorpe" with 5 other people (currently - Kasih, Kiley (Heidi's boyfriend), Maggie, Ben, and Keith) and 1½ dogs (Zoë, and some of the time Lily). Oh, and a snake (Brutus). 6 people is a hell of a lot less than 60 people so there was quite a bit more downtime than when, say, returning to Tufts House... also due to the timing I lacked consistent computer access (Heidi and Kiley each offered me the use of their computers, but neither being portable, I kind of lacked the ability to, say, get done tedious calculations I meant to do while simultaneously participating in conversation). Oh well, I got done considerably more of my algebra homework than I would have otherwise. Which, to speak of it, I still need to finish...
Brutus is apparently a very timid (and, generally, static) snake. Kasih used to feed him live mice, but after he got injured several times when they fought back, he is now a snake that is afraid of his own prey... so now she feeds him dead mice. Unfortunately it takes him quite a while to realize that these are food. Worse yet: When she dangled the dead mouse in front of him, and he eventually struck... he missed. Twice. I tried, but I couldn't hold the mouse steady, with the result that the rapidly swinging mouse scared him. We eventually resorted to just dropping it in, so I missed seeing him actually eat it.
I've often had dogs lick my face, this is probably the first time I've had dogs lick my ear. (OK, that I remember. I guess it must have happened before at some point.) That was kind of disgusting. Also, Zoë seems to be kind of dumb. And also usually very static. Maggie thought maybe she could teach her to fetch a glove by putting bacon inside it, but as much as she apparently loves bacon, it couldn't get her to walk towards the glove. Lily, by contrast, seems to get super excited about everything.
...yeah, I spent a lot of time playing with the dogs. Zoë is usually pretty static but as soon as Lily appears the two start wrestling and don't ever seem to stop. At one point they were doing so on a small couch and I was waiting to see which would be the first to knock each other off, but apparently their contest was closer to wrestling than to sumo.
There was a magnetic periodic table on the fridge, with one magnet for each element. Nicely enough, they had laid it out long form, instead of doing the usual lanthanides-and-actinides-on-the-bottom thing. Yes, I removed every single element and put it back where it was (to the bemusement of all the inhabitants). This turned out to only be necessary for boron[5].
I actually played quite a few games of Flash Duel against Heidi. She won the first one, as Jaina vs. my Setsuki, but I won the rest. (I think I need to learn that just because you're playing Setsuki, doesn't mean the optimal strategy is "stupidly rush in all the time".) She spent quite a bit of time inbetween games commenting on the characters' flavor. E.g. "Valerie is so stupid. She's a
painter? How is that supposed to be badass?" Naturally I then had to beat her with Val. :) Also commenting that Grave is hot, then later commenting that Jaina is hot[3], then later commenting that she was going to make Jaina's card have sex with Grave's. Me: "That's her brother."
Since I was using Heidi's computer I noticed she has HPMoR bookmarked. :) I wonder if she's still reading it? I didn't ask her, I should. Then ask her whether she knows it's written by Eliezer Yudkowsky and how it affects her opinion of him[4]. :)
Kasih made me (by which I mean "strongly encouraged me, and I didn't have much better to do at the time") watch a terrible movie called "But I'm a Cheerleader". (Why are you all so happy that is not a happy ending goddammit the correct thing to do there was to do *nothing*! Among many other things.) Conclusion: Just more evidence that I really don't like these so-called "so bad it's good" movies. OK, I usually like, say, MST3K, but sometimes... I remember watching their "The Touch of Satan" episode back in Tufts House with Ian and Laura, and I found the movie to be just so bad the commentary couldn't make it funny.
Dererrer's tag came off in my backpack. Will have to find some way to reattach it.
Rolla's math department is apparently quite terrible; seems like Heidi wants to transfer somewhere else, though whether she's yet looked into anything concrete, I don't know. She's taking some geometry class, which will apparently *eventually* get to non-Euclidean stuff, but for now had just been Euclidean stuff, working from Euclid's five original axioms... "But... Euclid's original axioms don't actually work!" "Yeah, the professor mentioned that - and then entirely glazed over it thereafter."
You can see a hell of a lot more stars in Rolla than in Ann Arbor, that's for sure.
Ben is apparently the only one there who plays much in the way of video games. Disappointing. They say there aren't even a lot of Smash players around! Now how is that possible? Heidi was ecstatic when I was able to identify her rendition of Ice Cap Zone on the keyboard. Apparently she and her siblings worked out the different parts of it and practiced it, some years ago. Meanwhile I didn't know she played music at all...
Anyway though I didn't necessarily see all of them all that often[0] basically everyone at Spotty Thorpe is pretty cool! I am undoubtedly leaving a lot of stuff out. But I need to go to bed. (Somehow I seem to have ended up on just as bad a sleep schedule as before. That wasn't supposed to happen...)
Here's something else only tangentially related. Have you guys seen this book, General Topology by Willard? I picked it up recently, wish I had done so earlier. OK, I seriously doubt I'm ever going to need most of what's in there - it's a textbook on general topology, after all - but it looks like such a better reference than Munkres that I don't even care. I originally was looking at it because I wanted to learn uniform space and proximity space stuff - no, I don't really need to know this stuff for anything, it just feels like a gap in my knowledge I should fill. I've probably told this story here before, but let me retell it - when I first learned the idea of a uniform space I thought it was so cool, and apparently I went around talking about it a hell of a lot... so much so that Lucas bought me a book on the subject ("Topological Uniform Structures", Warren Page) to shut me up, which worked. Unfortunately, much later when I decided to actually start reading it, I found the book pretty impenetrable. Even later I stumbled across Willard and found a much more comprehensible exposition of the subject... in any case, seems Heidi always wants more math books, so I figure I'll send my copy of Page to her. :)
Snippets: (Provided without attribution or context. Some of this may have been said by people I haven't even mentioned above.)
"I'm not going to drink rubbing alcohol while I'm having sex!"
(Very approximate.) "Oh man, I feel like I'm going to have a heart attack." "I'd offer you some aspirin, except actually what I have is Tylenol, and I don't actually have any."
-Harry
(Been a while since one of the old journal-style posts, eh?)
[0]Or mention them much here. I feel like I've mentioned Kiley way less than is warranted here, versus how much I interacted with him. Oh well. I can't be bothered to remember everything. So let me just point out that Kiley has a really cool cloak. OK, it's not actually that cool, but it's an actual cloak, as opposed to just a blanket or something, which is automatically cool.
[3]I hereby post this footnote as a ward against any terrible puns by anyone familiar with the characters.
[4]Heidi is very much not a transhumanist, and certainly not what you'd call a rationalist. She disagreed rather violently with both
The Simple Truth and
Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism, calling the latter "childish". Don't quite recall but pretty sure she subsequently had some nasty things to say about EY as a result.
[5]Hey, that reminds me, I never *did* get those magnets on Grant's fridge... man, he probably doesn't even have that same fridge anymore...
