The best moment of my life

Tonight around 10 PM, the greatest moment of my life occurred - this one will be particularly difficult to explain.

1. We were playing a board game that you have not heard of. It does not have a Wikipedia article. Nor does the company who made it, although we have discovered that it is by the creators of Trivial Pursuit - which renders its obscurity even more puzzling.
2. To make a long story short, it's a geography game. Basically you read vague descriptions of places from cards and then fruitlessly attempt pinpoint the exact location on the planet at which they are/were located. Some are quite easy: "Ubi wasn't built in a day", but most are basically impossible. One of the game pieces effectively described our reaction to the rules of the game:
   
   
3. The game is wild, wacky stuff. Setting up the game felt akin to making final preparations for a demonic ritual, which you might get a feel for if you take a look at these photos. A few statements in the rules are particularly cryptic, and important to my story:
   "The player born closest to March 15 plays first." (As a side note, this was me.)
   "There's something fishy about some Ubis. We are pulling your leg. These are called red herrings. When a red herring surfaces, the correct answer is 'that's a red herring'."
   "Great Caesar's Ghosts lurks within the game. A player to whom he speaks, beware! (Looking on the bright side, we could have included a dagger)."
4. "That's funny, March 15! The Ides of March!" we thought. We started to play and learn as we went along, answering a few corrections correctly, and a whole lot more questions incorrectly.
5. One fateful turn, my team rolled dual Ubi Eyes on the Ubi Cubis which meant that we could choose which accuracy we wanted to give - hexagonal or triangular, which required you to be 6 times more accurate, but is required to actually make progress in the game. We could also choose the region of our choice - AMR (Americas), EUR (Europe), WAT (Water), or UNI (Universal) - a question from each region is found on each card. In other words, we had it made - and we were already two scoring facets ahead of the other team.
6. We drew the next card from the box and read the clue:
   "AMR: Ubi 'Beware the Ides of March!""Ha! That shouldn't be in the Americas, it should be in Europe!" we thought. "That must be a red herring." We then turned the card over to read the correct answer - and to our dismay, it said something like "Et tu, Bruté?" and told us basically we lost all our points and had to start over.
7. Let me just clarify the amount of FAIL here for you - I'm assuming you are pretty lost. We had ideal circumstances. We had the privilege to choose and then chose a question which we were 100% convinced we had the correct for. We recognized it as a red herring, which requires us to have read the rules. Which in turn required us to have read the cryptic note about Caesar's ghost. We have read Julius Caesar. We had started the game with the closest birthday to the Ides of March. The question itself told us to beware the ides of march. In summary: Against all odds and all common sense we walked headfirst into our demise.
8. Andrew immediately began to sing the keyboard cat song - to play us off. If you don't already know what this is, here are some good examples of the keyboard cat phenomenon:
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io63z-aRMbg
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLSoYihTtro
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deYn_efItS0
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WSg7dcKFzg
   Of course all these videos require that you have previously been exposed to other videos. It's all very meta and if you are oblivious to the internet subculture and don't get it, I'm sorry, but you probably never will, and nothing I could have said would make this funny to you. But those of you out there who truly comprehend (there has to be at least one) will agree with me, that this moment was perfect, in every sense of the word.

It's only downhill from here.

Quote of the Year

Weisbart, on the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus:

"That's why this theorem is so nice - it takes something that really requires a lot of thought and reduces it to something that ... a 3A student could do."

Trashy

Sightings

1. In class Monday: Some littleish Indian guy wearing red shoes kept walking down the hall past our room and then walking back seconds later. He's what I imagine an Indian elf would look like (the kind from the North Pole, not from Rivendell.)
2. Walking to class Tuesday: Some girl had headphones on and was listening to loud Bluegrass music, complete with very audible violin glissandi. I suppose anything is a welcome departure from the stuff people usually listen to way too loudly!
3. Walking to dinner Tuesday night: We exited Rieber Vista just as a guy on a bike was arriving. He was pretty far from the building and wanted to make it inside before the door closed. So he pedaled as hard as he could right to the door, then slammed on his breaks just inches from the door to grab it. It was pretty hardcore if you ask me.
   

Floss

Flossing between the back two molars with a piece of floss that's too short is difficult. Torn between efficacy and frugality. I am profoundly frustrated.

Beefless

Starting this quarter, every Thursday the dining halls are beefless - which basically means all of the beef is replaced with turkey or chicken. I guess the die-hard beef fans are upset about this but I welcome anything that begets a little variety. Though I'm not entirely sure they're accomplishing much when it's only one day per week, and they're just substituting meats.

It's almost fourth week already - I think I've got midterms coming up but I don't know when. I haven't written about my classes yet so I guess I will:

Math 151A - Applied Numerical Methods - I love this class. If you've ever become disillusioned by your math classes then you ought to take some numerical analysis. For example, after elementary calculus you know how to integrate a few pretty functions in a few special cases - that's great, but real life rarely works out like the questions in your calc textbook do. In real life, you don't get functions, you get data. Or approximations of functions - and even if you have these there's a huge chance you won't be able to manipulate or analyze them by hand. Numerical analysis is all about how to cope with this sort of problem - in particular, with computers. I'm not the hugest fan of the professor, nor the TA, who spends most of his time advising us about programming in Python. Which would be nice and all if only this were a programming class - but it's not and I wish he'd discuss the actual numerical analysis a little more. The programming required is rudimentary at best, especially since we can use MATLAB.

PIC 10C - Advanced Programming - I find it funny that inheritance and other fundamental topics in object-oriented programming are taught in a class with the word "advanced" in its title. I suppose it's not that necessary in C++, but with Java these are always the first things you talk about. Fortunately this has permitted me to tune out a little, and made this class very relaxing so far. This week we switched to C# - I guess we are working towards making some nice little Windows applications, which should be handy. But of course we have to start with basic syntactical issues - and lucky for me C# is even more similar to Java than C++ is. It amuses me that writing one program in Java ever allows me to breeze through so much of this class.

Physics 1C - I hate this class. I come in every day and tell myself: "Self, this is the day you will stay awake through an entire lecture" - but it never happens and within five minutes I'm out cold. My notes are consequently a little disjointed - fragments of the second half of the past few weeks' lectures. Incidentally, I strangely recall saying most of this about 1B - physics classes must not be my thing. We'll see how the midterm goes...

Math 131A - Analysis - Another theoretical class in the same vein as 115A. This one starts with everything we've taken for granted since elementary school; for the first three weeks we have been building up from simple set theory into constructing number systems. Like defining what it means to add integers. Proving things that we have used without thinking for 75% of our lives. The professor insists that the actual analysis will start soon. I have grown to appreciate this type of material much more through 115A - it's nice to see where all of this came from.

Cell Phone Faces

Since fall, I've taken a few face photos with my cell phone when my camera wasn't handy. I should really start carrying it with me more frequently again. These will suffice for now.

On one of those self-checkout machines at Albertson's (another reason to love them!)

Kush's inadvertent fruit placement at dinner today:

On Joseph's cooler:
Oven mitt burns:

On the back of a shark-themed bottle opener: (don't ask me)On the side of Gayley Avenue:

My phone is also home to a bunch of pictures of other interesting things. But these will have to wait until I'm feeling a bit less lazy.