This is pretty much the only course I’ve ever taken where the class size is too large to have an active discussion. It’s in a lecture hall with stadium-style seating, and class participation (and attendance) is measured by clicking a button on an RF remote which is linked to one’s student ID number. The prof periodically throws out questions in his presentation, and by submitting an answer with your remote, you verify that you attended the class. Not exactly foolproof, right? But that’s not the subject of this post.

Let me stress that I know very little about the hard sciences. It’s just something I never really cracked a book on, and it’s a hit to my pride that I’m so weak in this area. Nonetheless, I have skills to avail me!

Today, the professor tossed up this question on the presentation, and we had to vote for what we thought the correct answer:

When an air bag deploys, what actually happens?

1. Air is pushed into the bag from the outside of the car.
2. It’s not actually air, but a liquid that fills the bag.
3. A chemical reaction forms a gas.
4. Gas is already present and expands in the bag.

Now, knowing absolutely nothing about the subject matter, but knowing on pretty solid ground that I’m attending a chemistry class, which answer am I likely to pick? Probably the one that says chemical reaction in it!

This is particularly surprising to me, because the prof’s questions aren’t always so remedial. Take, for example, this answer set to a prompt about why an unopened soda can expands on a hot day:

1. The expansion is due to the decreased solubility of CO₂ (g) in water at higher temp, so the dissolution of CO₂ (g) is exothermic.
2. Energy is always required to dissolve a solute molecule in water, because to do so requires the breaking of hydrogen bonds within the water.
3. The dissolution of a gas into a liquid corresponds to an isothermal compression of the gas.

Not the most taxing exercise, but it’s also not insultingly obvious: all the options have very chemistryish jargon in them.

I’ll add that I’m well aware that the choices in the first example all somehow relate to chemistry, but I’m focused much more here on the reasonableness in the design of the answer choices. I wonder whether being a professor myself will give me more insight on this matter, or just numb me to being disinterested in it myself.

I had my first class of the day cancelled, so I lay out on the grass, in the sun, and examined the veins inside my eyelids. There was a breeze, and big tree near me, and irritating dance music blaring from the quad.

After an hour and a half of lolling, I convinced myself to get up and spend some time in the library.

The chemistry textbook I needed was checked out, so I read for pleasure. And it was grand.

The list of candidates ran as follows. Already I have a pretty good idea who will be appointed.

The Culture and Communication Department will be bringing in three candidates for the faculty position of Assistant Professor of Anthropology.

Please join us for their research presentations.

Friday, January 30, 2009

Brent Luvaas will be on campus on January 30, 2009

His research presentation will be from 3:00-4:00 in Room 114. The title of his presentation is “Globalization Goes DIY: The Politics of Place in Indonesian Indie Music”

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Janet Alexanian will be on campus on February 5, 2009.

Her research seminar will be from 3:00-4:00 in Room 114. The title of her presentation is “Contested Visions: Cultural Politics and Anxiety in Post-Revolutionary Iran”

Monday, February 16, 2009

Stephanie Sadre-Orafai will be on campus on February 16, 2009.

Her research seminar will be from 2:30-3:30 in Room 114. The title of her presentation is “Casting as Practice, Casting as Metaphor: Rethinking Media and Multiculturalism in the New York Fashion Industry”

Unfortunately, I’ve already decided I won’t be attending any of these sessions, as a professor (of sociology–damn!) who’s rather dear to me teaches a class at all the prescribed times.

Naturally, I’d love to meet these people and feel them out for teaching talent, but I think that this Dr. Luvaas has the position in the bag. Applying for a position at a university with an already booming Music Industry major and a rapidly expanding Media Studies division in Communication and giving a presentation on globalization, politics, social space, and indie music, and located in a classically hip anthropological place, is smart.

And before you say that it might just be mere coincidence that his topic so uniquely suits our university’s tastes, I submit to you that the chap has a rather broad swath of ethnomusicality credit to his name. Also, it appears that his dissertation was chaired by Sherry Ortner, which would definitely spruce up the pedigree around here. (Ortner, though quite a figure herself, studied with Geertz at the U of C.)

The department here already has a solid assortment of females as assistant professors (they outnumber males, actually), so I can’t even see a female hire out of motivation for political correctness or diversity mandates keeping him away.

Sorry I won’t be around to take classes with the guy.

This past weekend I spent in Tainan, a stunningly beautiful coastal city with warm, warm weather. I saw many temples, was cooked dinner by Buddhist monks, and declined an invitation to stay with them overnight so I could participate in the morning prayer. I did manage to stay for the evening prayer, though, which made for an unforgettable experience.

Today I had a written exam, for which I had to write solely in Chinese characters, by hand, with a freaking pen (typing Chinese characters is no long a problem, nor is reading, but writing? that’s another story), and that went quite well. Then this afternoon I had an oral presentation about all the traveling I’ve been doing. I’ve another, similar one on Friday.

I’m going to go out to dinner tonight and take it easy.

Till another time.

Now I can pay off that $1,400+ ticket I charged to my credit card with a $1,500 limit.

I shall also buy lots of cocaine.

=D

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/22/calloo-callay-im-going-to-taiwan/feed/ 5 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/22/o-the-day-art-died/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/22/o-the-day-art-died/#comments Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:48:32 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/?p=586 I have several hefty exams tomorrow. Today I had my midterm for Data Analysis, and I finally freaking know what a z-score is!

Because of this work before me, I holed myself up in my room and got promptly to procrastinating. Unfortunately, I was met squarely with this for my efforts.

How the hell am I supposed to blow off work when I can’t even read my feeds?

Christ, how I hate downtime.

I need signatures and scads of paperwork from various officials. And I have nothing.

So, I wrote an e-mail to the scholarship committee, donning my most humble of humble miens, explained that I’m an epic douchebag failure.

I’ve already heard back from someone within the scholarship organization, someone who either works in a west coast office or has a brutally dominating boss, given the timestamp on the e-mail, and it’s all good.

Everything works out. Always. I learn no lessons.

Ever.

Today I had to head to campus for classes and meetings with various faculty and administrators. I received a new parcel of research work from my mentoring prof and discussed my upcoming trip to Taiwan with the coordinator of the program I’ll be taking part in there.

This evening I haven’t done much of anything productive. I sorted through some pictures of travels during the last few weeks I was in Europe, but nothing’s uploaded yet.

I miss my old life. But I guess that’s par for the course.

I just heard back regarding the scholarship this week, and the news was good.

May 30, 2008

Dear Conor,

Congratulations! On behalf of the Freeman Foundation and the Institute of International Education (IIE), we are delighted to inform you that you have been nominated to receive the Freeman-ASIA Fall 2008 Award for your proposed study in Taiwan.

Not too shabby, eh?

In communicating with my advisor at the university in Taiwan, I’d gotten a little overzealous and gone over the credit limit. Apparently there are 15-20 credits of language and culture courses which I must take, but I’m exploring the possibilities of just attending other classes and then not testing in them. Even that would still be killer.

So, here’s to learning languages, to meeting people, and to trying all kinds of alcohol on the face of the earth.

I was fortunately able to find two professors to fill out a checkbox-based online recommendation for me, which really seemed to be an exercise in generating multiple-choice variations on the theme of “Will this applicant spend all his time eating mescaline, or will he attend classes?” I didn’t want to influence the professors too much, but I’m hoping—at least, for the sake of the application—that they said I tend to be of the latter category.

The deadline is tomorrow, so I should get back to work.

I think it would just make more sense to test me on whether I can get these damn partitions in order and playing nicely together. Although I guess I should wait to see whether I actually can do that, before asking to be graded on it.

Well, I need to get going. Ran into Jesse on my way home from the exam, and he said he’d pick up a bottle of “Wodka” for tonight. Then he asked how the exam went, hesitated, and said, “OK, two bottles of wodka.” I said Carl took the exam, too.

Three bottles it is! See you Sunday.

I love this crap.

Source.

Fortunately, pretty much all the nouns for this class are in English, given that they’re all computer science terms. This is excellent and facilitates gratuitous Wikipediaing in search of answers. Check out this sweet entry I just found.

“When two trains approach each other at a crossing, both shall come to a full stop and neither shall start up again until the other has gone.”

—Illogical Statute passed by the Kansas (USA) State Legislature, early in the 20th century

It was in the entry explaining the concept of deadlocks. Isn’t Wikipedia grand?

So eventually I do make it into the kitchen, and behold a table full of engineers bent over their diagrams, reams of graph paper piled around them, pens retracing uncertain lines of graphite.

I don’t feel combobulated enough to handle an omelette, so I pour all my ingredients into the pan and then just scramble it. Win.

I sit down with my tea as a spot is politely cleared for me, and listen to the scratching pens and hissing of old-fashioned pencils. To the clacking calculators. To the silent textbooks, which no one opens.

Poring over a diagram of something I’m pretty sure was mechanical, one of the engineers cries out, “How can there only be one degree of freedom?!”

I replied, “Whoa now, that’s a pretty deep question. Let’s just focus on the math, OK?”

Yeah, I’m a jerk like that.

This isn’t at all a bad way to live. I woke up today as the shadows were growing longer, but that’s what Sundays are for. They’re there to be skipped, forgotten, lost in a haze of comfort and smiles, a cup of tea imparting exothermic delight to the side of your hand as it rests upon the mouse.

I’ve been lost in a wonderful cycle of hermetic studying and post-exam binge drinking. Wasted last night away–pun intended–at Hofbräuhaus and then followed it up with Rockstudio. I reckon I have one more day before I need to hit the books again. I lucked out in that my exams are spaced out by several days in each case, rather than all piled up on the same horrible morning.

Life is good.

I pound on Jesse’s door to see whether he’s up, as he has to take the exam too, and turns out he was in the shower. Meaning he’d gotten up before me and was really just rubbing it in by smelling good. I went to the exam in my sweatpants.

Outside, we’d just missed the tram, so we decided it’d be better to walk than to wait for the Saturday morning schedule to hook us up with a ride. It worked out fine, because the test actually started at 8:30am. Looks like of all the things we studied, the when and where of the exam hadn’t made the list.

The exam itself could have been worse. There were actually several sections where the professor wrote the questions in pinyin underneath where she wrote the characters, so those were pretty easy for me. A vocab word or two failed me, and I know at least one instance where the grammar was so complex, I got a little mixed up, but other than that, it was OK. When it came to the all-characters translation part of the test, I was tired and not at all in the mood for tic-tac-toe.

As the waves of characters washed over me, I was quite sure I recognized one of them as ¤ε, which of course isn’t a Chinese character at all, but that’s really what it looked like. Apparently it was the word for “to eat.” Damn. Really looks like this: 吃

Given the amount of questions I know I missed, like that example, I estimate I got a low-to-mid-B. Not bad, but nothing too great.

I’m excited about the prospect of learning more in the coming months. Our professor has agreed to hold a Monday night “off the record” session, as Chinese III isn’t officially offered next semester, and of course our whole group leaped at the chance to do it. It should get started in March or late February, so I’ve a month reprieve.

I’ll probably make an in-depth post later on about what I’ve learned so far, as I find it pretty groovy, but in the meantime take a look at the Wikipedia article on Chinese radicals. It explains how characters are broken down and categorized, something that I learned too late but nonetheless helped me a ton in committing characters to memory.

My awesome bros in back home hooked me up with a copy of Team Fortress 2 for the anniversary of my birth, and so I was socially obligated to play it with them. And to bug them to play it with me more because I kind of sort of may be addicted to it. The gameplay is wildly fun, class-based team FPS, so much so that I can forgive it for having a ludicrous artistic style.  No screenshots at the moment because I haven’t installed any screenshot applications on my recently reformatted Windows partition yet.

Between Will, the Philly crew, Cihan in Berlin, and Carl downstairs, I’ve had a delightfully difficult time not gaming. This afternoon Carl and I were pressured by the Germans to organize a LAN tonight, but we both exhibited remarkable fortitude and declined.

Given that I’m at my computer, and not gaming, I’ll try to make one of my “takin’ a break” activities posting to the blog.

Final exams are drawing nigh. This is the last weekend for fooling around before I have to hit the books.

For the record, I really enjoy the fact that final exams are worth 100% of my grades. It at least motivates me to study for them, and it also means I can do fun stuff like travel and game during the semester, while studying only occasionally.

Here’s to procrastination. What can go wrong?

// Getting_shit_done.odt : base of operations

#include <hot_tea>
#include <chips>
#include <string>
#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

string homework ("What's all this bullshit right here")	// OK to substitute actual work
HANDLE hMutex;						// Oh man I love mutexes
volatile BOOL cont=TRUE;

pwn main()
{
	while (cont == TRUE){
			WaitForSingleObject(hMutex,INFINITE);	// Keep eyes open
			cout << homework;			// Here's the moneyshot
			ReleaseMutex(hMutex);			// Now anything can happen
		};
	Sleep(14400000);	 				// All I have time for
return 0;
}

I know what you’re thinking: the while statement is unnecessary.

Oh, but it is. Oh so necessary.

Until tomorrow, when madness reigns no longer over the altars of thought.

Clark, now facing a $50 fine if convicted and loss of his rifle, refused to say anything about the incident to police, leaving the motive unclear.

Seems like a deep guy. But not as deep as I am.

This story reminded me of an episode in my past where I was a bro. There was a project freshman year where we had to invent something and then write a poem about it. Naturally, I wrote about a traffic light camera that was disguised as an owl, but was really a ninja.

You can tell this was written years ago, because ninjas were still cool. I also had roommates obsessed with ninjas and robots, as I think will be obvious by the text.

Robot Ninja Justice Death

Twinkling stars adorn the firmament above
The placating coo of a lonely mourning dove
Reminds me of the hour: just minutes till dawn
And miles to go, before I sleep; I yawn
Hazy memories of the night behind
Swim round my head and through my mind
For serious, I cheated on my wife! Oh well
I hate her more than morning wood before the bell
A light turns red, so I slow my ride
But no one around, not on either side
And not in front or back, so I run the light,
Thinking no one will see, but out of sight
Atop the bar that spans the street
An owl sees, and in him burns a vengeful heat
I roll out from the crossroads, think all is well
But soon I’ll bear the baddest wrath of hell
Delivered by a ninja I mistook for an owl
That can unfold, transform, and make a howl
Which curdles blood, raises hair, and terrifies
He lands in kneeling ninja pose, and in his eyes
Burn the demons Justice and Honor with an eerie glow
His sword he draws and strikes a blow
Across the windshield, turning glass to dust
A might smiting of a million knives, swift and just
My eyes, they vomit blood—I scream:
“How can even a ninja be so mean?!”
And he intones, “I’m also a robot
With a bloodlust and sword. Now whatchu got?!”
And as my sorry, bloody life ends in woe
I murmur, “Why?” And he, to my lifeless, spurting corpse, declares: “I KNOW!”

Man, those were good times. Iambic pentameter makes everything better.

I really like the guy—he’s the bro I went to Florence with—so I’m honestly not stressed about it, especially because our presentation isn’t due until next Thursday. So when we see each other in class tomorrow, we can work out details for meeting times over the weekend, and of course, since it’s 2007, I’m sure we’ll get a lot done online.

It’s just funny that I’ve rarely had positive experiences when it comes to groupwork. I know I’m not alone in that, either.

Well, as I told J:

I’m so glad our private university education is preparing us for how much we’re going to hate working in groups IRL.

Fail 4tw.

Yeah, so you know how I left Fluid Dynamics early today? Right, I missed the blowing-things-up lab, I know. I had to leave early today because I’m always getting to my next class late, and in the beginning of the period, the prof seems to say a lot of really important stuff. For example, last week I guess he said, “No class next week.” Damn it.

We all had a good laugh at Alex because it would really suck to be him. The story was also pretty well told, to his credit.

Well right now I’m sitting in the classroom for my e-society class, doing nothing. It’s 8 minutes past the hour, which means that the class is cancelled, because I believe the Earth will sooner be swallowed up by the sun than something start late in Germany.

I did indeed call my buddy Fred, who went to the Prato conference with me, and he confirmed that it was cancelled. I lose.

I’m going to enjoy speedy-fast internet here for a while, then trek back home. There’s a concert tonight I may or may not attend.

Well, as I’m coming back to stock my room with yet another case of beer, I bump into Carl, who has to go grocery shopping. Blast. I get one-man peer-pressured into tagging along, and do indeed scoop up some healthy comestibles and shove them in my bag before hustling off to class.

This Monday evening class is on a different campus, about twenty minutes distant by foot. Since I was at the grocery store, I had to hustle to keep that at twenty minutes. It was a delightfully frigid autumn night.

I get there about four minutes late and plop down in the lecture hall, stripping my coat off and dealing with my hoodie by rolling up the sleeves. The room is warm. The prof is lecturing about different elements and their radioactive properties, and it’s all pretty badass. Then his assistant wheels out a cart of contraptions, and the professor bids him turn off the lights.

They use a magic lightning gun and zap cool glass tubes and bright colors flash and breakdance within. It’s like I’m tripping. The room is warm, the lights are still out.

Zonk.

The lights come back on eventually and I kind of wake up, happily snug in my hoodie. Then the professor remembers a certain glass doohickey that he forgot to zap and clicks the lights back out.

Zonk.

Man, I felt like a bird. For the rest of the lecture I was totally narcoleptic, and it sucked, because the material was fairly interesting. I mean, radioactivity is thumbs up, right?

Came home and was lazy about dinner, just made some store-bought tortellini. Tomorrow morning I’m going to dump a little bit of everything I bought into a scrumptious and massive omelette.

Life is good.

Zonk.

I know I’ve promised several times before to provide a full schedule of classes, but of course I never got around to it. Such sloth is part of my charm, I like to tell myself. When I’m not too lazy to do so, I mean.

Expect sometime this year that I get around to relaying how things are going here in regard to classes, but don’t hold your breath. The truth is, there are just so many more interesting things going on! Obviously there was Prato (I know, I know, I still have to make a full post talking about the conference!), a night of cultural exchange among nations (*cough* beer pong), last night a heaping pile of chocolate-covered fruit brought home by one of the Germans from a job at a chocolate-covered fruit stand… it never ends, man.

I am kind of applying myself to my schoolwork, it’s just that I’m finally studying things that are so interesting, it doesn’t feel like work. Now, I’m not taking nearly as many courses here as I should be—I think I’m registered for only five or six exams, when apparently Germans usually take like ten or twelve classes per semester here (around 40 hours of class per week!)—but several of them are pretty 1337, believe me.

In particular, I’m fond of my Operating Systems class, for which I was in the labs for hours this morning trying to finish an assignment on understanding threads and interrupts. Also, there’s the famous e-society class, which landed me the trip to Prato, and after that, I absolutely love my Chinese II class. Even though I’m getting absolutely schooled in it.

And tomorrow’s Tuesday, which means three and a half hours of speaking Mandarin and getting yelled at if I speak any German. I guess I should be studying.

But there are still so many feeds to read….

We end up dawdling much longer than I’m comfortable with, and at my insistence, Fred finally gets up and moseys to the terminal with me. He assures me that in Germany it’s always possible to get on the plane at the last second, and so he routinely does that when traveling.

Well, the woman at the gate says that usually works when the plane is parked at the terminal, instead of across the tarmac, meaning passengers must be bussed there. We missed the plane.

After Fred hangs his head in shame for a little while, we head over to the Lufthansa Customer Service and start begging. The chipper CSR at the counter assures as that we can hop on the next flight to Florence, only an hour or two away, for a measly fee of 650€ per person. One-way.

Yeah, right. So we haggle and beg and say we’re students and flirt while gagging and eventually we get it down to 250€, round-trip. Nope, huh-uh. We fling a little more woo, watch what sticks, and eventually we walk away having paid 50€ each to hop on the next plane to Florence. Our existing return tickets would be honored. Onto the plane!

Then, once in Florence, we set out immediately to find ourselves a hostel, so we could ditch our heavy backpacks and cruise the city for a good afternoon, in preparation of going out at night. We had researched a few hostels while still in Germany, but hadn’t booked any rooms, because the phone numbers on the website didn’t seem to be working.

That’s right. We went to Florence, on a Saturday, without having booked any rooms. This proved to be a problem.

We visited every hostel we’d written down, and were told at each one that they were completely full. I learned how to say “completely full” in Italian pretty quickly:

We asked for recommendations for places to stay. We tried hotels, even though we didn’t think we could afford them. Every place was booked up solid through the weekend. One hotel clerk felt so bad for us that he said, “Moment. Internet.” He then sat down at a computer and proceeded to Google every hotel and hostel in Florence, and he printed us out a sheet, then even marked the ones he recommended we try first on our map. Quite a guy, him.

But unfortunately every single place was full. We’d now spent the entire day trekking around Florence, crossing the river many times, trying all neighbors, even far from the city center. It seemed pretty hopeless. We started to plan for sleeping outside, and even staked out a nice place by the river, where we thought we’d be left alone by the cops, and it wouldn’t be too cold.

While watching the sun set over the Arno, we pulled out our map and many lists of accommodations and triple checked that we’d hit everything and more. It was around this time we remarked that there was technically one hostel left, but it was directly adjacent to the train station, so it would absolutely be as packed as everything else. But it was getting dark and cold, and there would be food by the train station, so we figured we’d walk there.

Good thing we did. There were two beds left in the whole place, and we got them, for only 21€ per person. Sweetness. Free breakfast, free internet, the works. And the place was gorgeous, stocked with many pretty traveling English-speaking girls.

We were in a room of 20 beds or so (co-ed, oddly) and our room let out onto a rather beautiful courtyard, in stereotypically Italian fashion.

At the hostel, we ditched our bags and washed up. There we met a chap named Matt who was visiting from New York City. He works as a talent agent for voice actors, and apparently does pretty well for himself. He’d been in Florence most of the week already, so he knew some good places, and the three of us went out to dinner and enjoyed some nice Italian wine and succulent steak.

After dinner, we found a bar and got dizzy. Fred and I slept almost all day on Sunday, and awoke to find that Matt had already left for Rome.

See all Florence pics here.