university libraries @ 1:36 pm

I spend at least an hour or two in the Ugli almost every day. I realized I have gotten completely used to people openly eating and talking within the library – not just in the lobby and cafe, but right next to the stacks.

I wonder if it was always like this in the the Ugli, or if it is as recent development. Although I didn’t spend very much time in them, I always got the impression that the the Rock and Gelman were super quiet food-free spaces.

Interestingly, the one thing I don’t see a lot is people napping, which I both observed and partook in both the Rock and the SciLi. I am 98% sure it is because there are few if any couches here. It’s all blocky wooden chairs and tables.

tags: brown, gwu, pensieve, umich

experience @ 9:57 pm

My political science professor at GWU always told us that the obituaries are the most interesting section of a newspaper.

Joseph Weizenbaum, Famed Programmer, Is Dead at 85:

The seductiveness of the conversations alarmed Mr. Weizenbaum, who came to believe that an obsessive reliance on technology was indicative of a moral failing in society, an observation rooted in his experiences as a child growing up in Nazi Germany.
…
Mr. Weizenbaum also believed that there were transcendent qualities in the human experience that could not be duplicated in interactions with machines. He described it in his book as “the wordless glance that a father and mother share over the bed of their sleeping child,” Ms. Turkle said.

Lazare Ponticelli, France’s Last Veteran of World War I, Is Dead at 110:

Survival in itself is not necessarily an achievement, and Mr. Ponticelli said in an interview with Reuters last year that he “never knew how I got to this point.”
…
Mr. Ponticelli’s view of war was dispirited. “You shoot at men who are fathers,” he once said, according to an obituary by Reuters. “War is completely stupid.” He kept his many war medals in a shoe box.

(In the course of writing this post I came across this slightly worrying blog post from two years ago about aforementioned professor, who also wrote a recommendation for my transfer applications. The last time I talked to him was when I ran into him on the street second semester freshman year and told him I had gotten into Chicago. I hope he has fully recovered.)

tags: evergreen, gwu

discovery @ 6:42 pm

It is so nice out today. After dinner Peter and Dan and I kicked a soccer ball around behind the Watson Institute. There was another person there with ball by himself and it turned out it was a guy in my UC152 class, Conor. He played with us. (With a soccer ball, it’s not called catch. What is it called? Played kick?) I found out to my great amusement that he transferred to Brown from GWU, just like Dan and me. I can’t believe I didn’t know this out until now, or that I easily might never have found out. He also seemed very much like a Brown person.

The combination of soccer, the weather, and being around people made me happy (before dinner it was Jessie and her friend Alex, before that Patrick in the suite). I was also very happy to find today that Maurie is going to be home for the summer.

tags: brown, gwu, happy

early thanksgiving @ 7:46 am

Spent copious amounts of time at both the Ratty and Art House last night. I’ve realized if I spend enough time at the Ratty I usually run into someone I know eventually. And by run into someone I mean they find me because I am sitting at a table with my nose in a book. Which brings me to another point: the Ratty is a good place to do homework when you are alone. There is an ideal level of white noise and once you have finished eating there is really nothing else to do there besides read or study.

I went to Art House to see Jessie. They were having a Thanksgiving dinner there last night, I guess because some people would not be around next week. I saw everyone, or at least I think most people, in Art House for the first time. Everyone was very nice. It reminded me of Snapshot at GWU, the photography Living And Learning Community (LLC because everything at GWU has to have an acronym) I was in freshman year. Although the time we tried to cook we mostly failed and burned a bunch of sausages and biscuits in the oven. My contribution was grilled cheese, I think. Art House managed much better, people made real food like turkey and yams. Also Art House has a kitchen that isn’t half the size of my room at GWU, perhaps that could be something to do with it.

The end of the story is that I stayed up until 11pm and then I woke up at 5:15am. I stayed in bed and pretended I would be able to fall back to sleep until 6 and then I got up and did laundry. Oh well. It’s almost 7 right now which is when I would usually get up. Time to put my clothes in the dryer.

tags: brown, friends, gwu

yearbook project @ 10:13 pm It has finally happened. I have started to digitize my high school yearbook photographs. It is very exciting. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. The value of digitization probably never occurred to me before I started working at CDI. I’m scanning the photos at 300 dpi. Nothing compared to the 600 dpi that images were scanned at for CDI, but still more than the 200 dpi that my scanning program recommended for photographs. I’m learning some good habits. Recording metadata. The rolls are organized in folders numbered chronologically, the file names are based on captions. In Flickr I am recording additional text that I originally wrote next to the photograph, or anything extra that occurs to me as I sift through them. I have only finished four rolls worth of photos so far which comes out to 57 photos (only about half of each roll ever made the cut for the yearbook). A long way to go for senior year, and even longer if I decide to also digitize junior and sophomore years. I am hoping that now the people who would look at my yearbook during class in high school can find the photos and look at them any time they want, anywhere.

I suppose I am also hoping that this inspires me to take more pictures next year at Brown. At GWU I took a miserable single roll of film. The first half was from the very beginning of the year before I had given up on the place and when I was still optimistic that I would be happy and have lots of friends and know enough people that I felt comfortable around to actually make a real yearbook. Didn’t happen. I took some at Brown but nothing compared to my high school yearbooks, probably because they are all digital to begin with and I don’t have the satisfaction of sorting picking up the photos from CVS like they are a present and sorting through them and cutting them and arranging them and sticking them in a black sketchbook.

I forgot to mention this yesterday but I started reading The Da Vinci Code again. I still can’t get over how badly it is written, but this time I read far enough in one sitting to get hooked. I like being in the middle of a book. It always gives me something else I could be doing, something to do, a purpose. The trouble with this book is that it is going way too fast. I did find some of Mummy’s old college books which will be dry and academic but perhaps interesting and should last a lot longer than junk-food-esqueDa Vinci.

Mummy has started to call Charlie “Zack” by mistake sometimes.

tags: animals, b-cc, books, gwu, photography, web

ovation @ 4:01 pm

Professor Morone concluded PS22: “City Politics” today to a standing ovation of ~450. He pulled out a digital camera to photos of us. It took about 5 shots just to cover the width of the lecture hall. It was heartwarming and pretty spectacular. I would like to be a professor like that but I doubt it will ever happen.

For those of you playing along at home, other classes that have ended in applause:
* PS105: “Ethics & Public Policy” last Wednesday when Professor Frazer gave his last lecture for the class
* PL8: “Existentialism” last semester when Professor Reginster gave his last lecture to a full house (okay, so the class was over-registered — but everyone definitely showed up on the last day)
* PHIL 120: “Symbolic Logic” (GWU) with Fleishman. This is the only class of under 20 people where there has been very enthusiastic applause. Also, my only GWU period that ended with applause, as far as I can remember.
* PS 11: “Intro to Political Thought” with Tomasi. I am pretty sure we applauded at the end, but I have to admit my memory is foggy because the class ended during reading period.

Classes which should have concluded with applause, but did not:
* PHIL 801: “Justifying Punishment” (GWU) with Professor Brand-Ballard. The class was mostly a bunch of indifferent freshmen who didn’t appreciate the class.
* PSC 2: “Intro to American Politics and Gov’t” with Professor Sigelman. Sigelman was awesome and really knew what he was talking about, but as far as I can remember, no applause.
* AP US History with Mr. Monteleone. But I guess you don’t do that type of thing in high school.
* AP Calc AB with Mrs. Silberman. Math I suppose is not so conducive to enthusiastic applause. Also AP classes never end with a bang because the test is so early, they always just sort of trickle to an end…
* Humanities with Mr. Boswell. There were some bad (i.e. deadly silent) moments, but this was the most interesting class I took in high school, and the most like a college class. It made me want to do philosophy in college.

tags: brown, gwu, happy, story