Utopia Is A Moment At Your Side

That's the only thing that Scottland wrote on the little card that he sent me in the mail. :) He's arriving this evening for his Semi-Monthly visit. It'll be really nice to see him, especially since the the weather in Davis has been decidedly more winter-like the last few weeks and the lack of insulation in my house is definitely noticeable.

About a week ago, I had a dream about Olga. In the dream, she and I were playin Euchre (sp?) and she was teaching me how to play. Only, in the dream, she kept changing the rules on me in ways that were advantageous to her. It was a very frustrating dream but also mildly amusing. In the end, I accused her of simply making it so that the game was completely random and stated that there was no point in playing a game that was completely random. Only, I think in my dream I was really talking about graduate school.

Ahhh graduate school. How I love to hate thee. I ended up doing as poorly on my mathematics mid-term as I had suspected I did, although the rest of the class did better than they had expected so I ended up towards the bottom end of the grade range. I secrely fear that I had the lowest grade in the class, but I don't want to ask. The professor reviewed the midterm the next day and while some of the solutions to the problems were non-obvious it was clear that the problem with the mid-term was not it was too difficult. It was definitely a bit too long since it took the professor almost two and a half class sessions to explain the solutions. It was still obvious to me that I would have done better if I had simply been more relaxed about the test when I took it. I probably would've been able to think the problems through a bit more and would have done better.

I spoke with Professor El-Farra after we got the tests back and his attitude was very sympathetic. He said that I needed to do more practice problems because that's pretty much the only thing that helps you when your problem is simply one of problem solving speed. So, somehow I need to fit in doing a slew of practice problems.

Anyhow, there's lot's of other stuff going on right now, but I guess I'll save those for other posts when I get a chance. In the meantime, here's a cool webpage that allows you to simulate orbits around a black hole. You'll have to play with it a bit to figure out how to make it work, but it's kind of neat in that it shows how relativity causes orbits to precess around the center of mass.