I considered that perhaps I will bequeath my boat to the Williams College Women's Crew program, like the proverbial white elephant: Too valuable to throw away, but so incredibly annoying to keep around. Ha. Actually, I rather like it myself, and I am not going to give it to anyone, most especially not to a program with which I am at serious odds. It's going to be an awesome boat, and I want it on my wall, to remind myself of how incredibly awesome I am.

Back to the oars. Several days ago I had the bright idea that, since the blades are irregularly shaped -- no right angles -- rather than taking a thin sheet of wood and cutting out eight individual irregular shapes, I could make a very long thing the right shape -- a super-thick blade or a "bladular prism," if you will -- and then cut thin "coins" off of it, all of which would be exactly the same shape. Brilliant. So I chose a nice chunk of reddish wood that nobody would ever use for anything else because it was so irregularly shaped, and after many cuts, did just that. So now I have nine (just to be safe) lovely identical reddish wood blades. Of course, this means that the blades are flat; I gave up on the idea of making them curved or spoon-shaped (which is how they actually are) because it would be inordinately difficult, they would probably not match, a lot would break, etc -- and it wouldn't really add much.

To attach them to the 1/4" dowel "shafts," I looked at my pictures and decided that on real oars, the shaft extends a little under halfway into the blade. Using the jigsaw, I cut a 1/4" wide, 1.5" long bit out of each blade, parallel to the bottom of the blade. (You will notice that when the oar shafts are parallel to the water, as at the catch, the bottom of the blade is also parallel to the water. The top of the blade is not, because the top and bottom edges are nonparallel.) The dowel fits snugly into this groove, and I will later glue it in, fill in the gaps (made by the cylindrical dowel connecting to the flat wood) with wood filler, and sand it all down so smooth you won't know what hit you.

04.08.15
I did not work on my boat today, but I had a major revelation. "What are you doing this summer?" asked Wren. "Well, I went home and worked for six weeks, and I'm also making this boat. Not a real boat -- a crew boat about five feet long," I replied. "Oh, you mean a model?" "Yeah, a five-foot model of a crew boat."

Mon Dieu! I'm making a model! I'm one of those model-makers who spends hours and hours gluing little pieces together, and at the end, all there is to show for it is... a model. Not even anything useful, just a little model to sit somewhere and collect dust. In the beginning, you have to find somewhere to put it. If you move, you have to find a way to pack it so it won't get broken, and then you have to find another place to put it. You can give it to someone, but then they have to deal with the same issues. You can sell it, but then you get $15 for something that took you 100 hours to make. When you die, your heirs have all these things that you valued a lot but that they don't care two pence about, and they have to figure out something to do with the remnants of your silly little hobby. Bah. A model, indeed.

04.08.14
Seeing as how I had such nice holes in my boat, it would have been difficult to resist the temptation to cut some lovely dowels, put them in and glue it all together. So I did not resist. I went ahead and did it. I used a hand saw to cut all the dowels to the right length, and to cut the end of each 3/16 dowel at 60° to connect at the oarlock. I used wood glue to attach them to the hull and to connect the 3/16 dowels; I braced the 1/8 dowels to hang in the air about 1/2" above where the 3/16s came together. This was very cool: it had outriggers! Yay! If I painted everything right now, it would truly pass for a rowing boat. Cool.

Much as they looked like outriggers from afar, though, they were not yet functioning, because there was no oarlock. After much pondering, I decided that I would use string for the oarlocks, because this would be pliable, allowing the oar to move through its whole sweep, and making it less liable to break, which is important in such a high-stress pivot point. So I tied little loops of string, and loop-secured it to the 3/16 connection, then slathered everything with wood glue, especially where the top of the loop connects to the 1/8 dowel at the top. (Later I will paint everything grey and black, and you won't be able to see the glue. Plus, wood glue allegedly holds with several tons of strength, so the more of it, the better, right?) I stuck a dowel through the oarlock loop and tried out the rowing motion, and it seems wonderful.

04.08.13
Today I began to work on my boat again. My plan was to do the outriggers (known as "riggers" to crew people), so the first thing to do was to figure out where they went. Essentially, I have this boat, with stern and bow decks and then a big open part in the middle where nine people are supposed to go, eight the same and one different. I decided that the rowers should all get the same amount of space, and the coxswain should get 3/4 of that amount. The inside of the boat is 46" long, and 46/8.75 = 5.25, so the rowers each get 5.25" and the coxswain gets 4". Fair enough. So with a pencil I marked inside where the dividers between spaces will go, which is where I will eventually (when I figure out how they are going to work) put the footstretchers.

So now I had the footstretcher locations marked off. Excellent. But where do the outriggers go with respect to the footstretchers? Outriggers have three main parts: A metal rod coming out perpendicular to the boat, and then two metal rods on either side. So it's like an isosceles triangle with the altitude drawn to the unequal side. They are more complicated than this explanation suggests, but I will explain the particulars later. In any case, I went back to my photographs. At my first race, my mother took lots of pictures at every stage -- launching, racing, docking, putting in the boat into slings -- so I have a lot of different views of the boat. I finally decided that the footstretchers should be halfway between the aft (sternmost) outrigger rod and the middle (perpendicular) one, and that the outriggers should form equilateral triangles with the hull.

On close inspection, one will note that the aft rigger rod and the middle one are thicker and connect to the bottom of the oarlock, while the forward one is thinner and connects to the top of the oarlock. The oarlock itself is an upright bar connecting the two, with a gate that swings around it. I decided to make the thicker rods out of 3/16" dowels, and the thinner ones out of 1/8" (which is the smallest they come). Thus, I needed to drill three holes -- a 3/16 straight in, a 3/16 at 60°, and a 1/8 at 60° angled the other direction. I used the drill press (a spinning drill bit that you pull down with a handle to make a perfectly straight hole) and held the boat on its side. To make sure that it was exactly on its side -- because otherwise the outrigger would tilt skyward or seaward -- I held it against a board that I knew was cut at 90°. So those eight holes were easy enough.

Before I could drill the 60° holes, I had to build myself an auxiliary contraption, because I needed something to hold the boat against to make sure that the next holes were exactly 60 -- not 58, not 62 -- degrees; otherwise the outriggers would be different lengths, which means that eventually, the oars would enter the water at different angles (bad, very very bad indeed). So I screwed a small piece of wood at 30° from horizontal to a larger board, and then put the board against it so that a vertical hole would be at 60°. But then I realized that I wouldn't be able to use the drill press because the boat is too long, so I needed to drill the holes by hand. Another board, a few rubber bands, and a few hours later, I had my holes drilled. And that was enough for one day.

04.08.12
This summer, I am making a model of an eight-rower rowing shell. I made the hull in June, and I am currently in the process of trying to get myself motivated to do the rest. The boat is just under five feet (60") long and about 2.5" wide. I made it from a two-by-four, which is a type of board that is two inches thick, four inches wide before they plane it and sand it and make it all smooth and perfect.

First, I cut the board to make it 60" long. Then we (my dad helped) used a table saw to cut long triangluar (at least at first) strips off the side of the board to make it semicircular instead of rectangular. Using a jigsaw, I cut the ends to make them pointy for the bow and stern instead of square. Then for the imprecise part: I used the jigsaw to cut off chunks of the bow and stern so that each would come up to a nicely tapered end, like a real boat. As this was very imprecise, I later had to fill in the errors with wood filler.

All those things, you can pretty much tell from looking at the boat. The following things, though, you wouldn't necessarily realize. I took the boat and sliced it in half parallel to the waterline. Then I took the top part (the frustum, if you will) and cut it in half the short way, as if to separate rowers 1-4 from 5-8. I drilled a couple of holes in the semifrusta (okay, enough pseudo-math language) and used the jigsaw, on an 18° angle, to cut out the inside, leaving me with just the outer rim. Then when I glued everything back together, there was space inside for people to fit.

At this point, everything was a little rough, so I did a lot of sanding with the power sander (some even before gluing it all back together) and some filling in with wood filler. Then I drilled two important holes: one skinny one all the way through the stern deck for the rudder, and one wide hole aft of that in the stern deck for the stern cap. I glued part of a piece of a plastic plumbing connector piece into the wide hole and cut part of a plumbing cap for the stern cap. The last thing I have done, so far, was to paint everything, except the interior, with white latex. That's all for now -- more later.

04.08.11
My dad sold my car. Now I don't have a car. This is very sad. I liked my car, even if it wasn't actually my car, per se.

04.08.07
Today I learned many things. I learned about Mr. Parris's path to a Ph.D, and I learned about Lyme Disease.

Before today, my knowledge of Lyme Disease was as follows: You get it from deer ticks. Deer ticks are small. If you get a tick, take it out, make sure you get the head out, and then flush it down the toilet. There is such a thing as chronic Lyme Disease.

Now I know that Lyme expresses itself in many forms. This makes it very difficult to diagnose, and in fact the average time between onset of symptoms and diagnosis is 24 months. Mackenzie was telling us about a little boy who goes to the same doctor with her. He was having behavioral troubles at school, and a psychologist diagnosed him with the most severe case of Bipolar Disorder she had ever seen. It turns out that he had Lyme -- as soon as they treated the Lyme, the bipolar disappeared.

As it turns out, Mackenzie didn't get this disease in Nepal -- she got it in her hometown in Connecticut (the Lyme Disease capitol of the world, incidentally) when she was six years old. They knew she had Lyme, and they treated it in the standard method at the time, which was two weeks of antibiotics. But it didn't get rid of the Lyme, and so for all this time, the disease was living in Mackenzie's body. Everything she has done since age six, she did with Lyme Disease in her body.

When she rowed, she put stress on her arms. The Lyme moved into her arm muscles and gave her the symptoms of the injury that she was treating with ice every day after cross country practice. When she ran, she put stress on her lungs, so the Lyme moved into her chest and gave her chest pain. It may be a stretch to say that Mackenzie's extraordinary intelligence and deep thought put stress on her brain, but in any case the Lyme moved into her nervous system and made her thinking fuzzy. This is why it was so hard to diagnose -- a sports injury, chest pain, clouded thoughts -- who would guess it all had the same source?

Nonetheless, when she first got sick, they tested her for Lyme, because they knew she had had it before. It came back negative. Odd? Well, they tested her blood, and at that time it was not living in her blood; it was in her muscles and her nervous system. Ouch.

Anyway, now she has the diagnosis and she's getting treated and life is ever so much better. Mr. Parris asked Mackenzie if she was feeling better, and she put her arms out and said "look at me!" She can walk around now, which is a major improvement to her quality of life. Mackenzie looks just like she did when I ran with her in the fall of 2000, which is a huge improvement over what she's been through. A return to endurance sports is not in the immediate future, but she is glad to be where she is now. Mackenzie plans to enter Princeton a year from now with the class of 2009.

04.08.06
This is my last day of free broadband Internet until August 30. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Today, George W. Bush is going to Stratham, NH. Jeanne lives in Stratham, and her word was that the picketers were already setting up. Yay, New Hampshire! Get up early and protest stupidity until sunset. Sounds like a plan. Here, courtesy of, interestingly enough, India, is the latest stupidity from our brilliant leader:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we," [Bush] was quoted as saying.

However, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush's misstatement "just shows even the most straightforward and plain-spoken people misspeak. ... But the American people know this president speaks with clarity and conviction, and the terrorists know by his actions he means it."

Afghanistan & Iraq: George W. Bush is from Texas. He may not be a native Texan, but that is where he lived when he ran for President, and that is where he goes on vacations. Without Bush, we wouldn't be in these wars.

Vietnam: Lyndon B. Johnson was from Texas; he was actually a Texan and his presidential library (which I visited) is in Texas. Without LBJ, we would not have gotten into Vietnam.

(WWI & WWII: Caused by other nations; not our fault.)
(Revolutionary & Civil Wars: Texas wasn't a state yet. It became a state in 1845.)

Mexican-American War: Yeah, I don't think that would have happened without Texas. After all, that's what the fight was about...

Mrs. Gong is Gloria's mom, and she is not a Republican.

Humor for the day:

"You know what I just realized? It isn't a given that Kerry will win. There are actually some people who think Bush should be President."
- Gloria's cousin's co-worker at Harvard

But back to my original point: This page has been getting a lot of hits lately. Thus, I will try valiantly to put something interesting on it. Apparently I have been doing okay in this regard recently.

If you would like to learn about one Williams student's experience teaching adults at a volunteer organization in Washington, D.C., here is a good "Late Summer Diary Entry" about it. An excerpt:

I work ... as a teacher at SOME's Center for Employment Training, a school for unemployed adults in the District. Our program consists of general education in English and math, which prepares students to earn the GED, along with vocational training - in nursing, building maintenance and repair, or computer skills. Our students generally graduate with a job that pays a living wage; many students have also gone on to college. I teach classes in English and tutor students in computer skills. Due to the recent departure of a senior instructor, I am now responsible for creating lesson plans and developing the English curriculum.

The work is rewarding. I believe I have found my vocation. Teaching is enjoyable and engaging - so much so that my initial reaction now on reading TS Eliot is to question his grammar. It's a great pleasure to help students - all of them older than me - understand something for the first time.

But that is not the only change -- the filing system has also undergone a major upheaval. You see, Jeanie has been working as the receptionist (or "secretary," or "administrative assistant") here for 14 years. This is her room, and the files are her files. When she left for vacation, the files were in four file cabinets, each three files across and four files tall, for a total of 48 filing-units (I believe I hereby coin a new term.) Bill, the Director of Housing, had previously asked her to condense three of those filing cabinets into two smaller cabinets, effectively reducing to 28 filing-units. Jeanie described this request to me, telling me how impossible it was and how difficult it would make everything, and as she was of this opinion, she hadn't ever consolidated the files. Well, Bill met me with the same request on Monday morning, and within a few hours (after all, it did involve moving 5000 folders, plus the 1000 hanging things that hold them, plus phone books and other miscellany) the job was done. I even organized the hanging things in descending order according to the frequency of their reflected light (a funny joke for physics people.) Jeanie said it was impossible, but I did it.

The consensus in the office is that when Jeanie returns from vacation on Monday morning, she will have a heart attack. I do hope this is not the case, as I became quite fond of Jeanie during the three weeks I worked with her. Nonetheless, it is very likely that she will be shocked (they changed something!), incredulous (how could they change something?), inconvenienced (where are the M's?), indignant (it worked better the old way!) ... but it is unlikely that it will procede to the extent of cardiac arrest. I hope.

In other news, you should start planning for the Olympics. All the running events worth watching are in the evening, most from about 8-11 p.m. I am a bit irked that neither of the schedules I looked at (the one at the official Athens Olympics site or the one at Runner's World) said what time zone the times were in. I would think either Athens time or Eastern time, but those are kind of different, so... I have found that the most interesting racing to watch occurs in long track races. Short track races (100, 200, 400, 4x100) are over too fast, without enough opportunity for tactics and too many endings that require a photogate to call. Once you get multiple laps, it gets good. You get the people that go out too fast and then die; the ones that start out ahead and stay ahead despite other runners' valiant efforts to catch them; the pairs that pass each other repeatedly, first one ahead, then the other, so that you have no idea who will pull it out at the end; the kick in the last 150m; the kick starting 750m before the end where you think it can't possibly last but yet the lead just grows and grows... these races are awesome. They make me want to run. I really am glad that I'm a runner.

Note: If you would like a reference to you removed from this page -- whether it is explicit, implicit; shrewd, crude, rude; glad, sad, mad, bad; referential, deferential, or preferential -- notify me at once and I will remove it promptly, usually within an hour of the next time I get Internet access. (But honestly, why would anyone want that? It's a great honor to appear on this page.)

Note: If you would like a reference to you added to this page, please notify me at once, and specify whether you would prefer it to be explicit, implicit; shrewd, crude, rude; glad, sad, mad, bad; referential, deferential, or preferential, and I will add it promptly, usually within an hour of the next time I get Internet access. (Because it's a great honor to appear on this page, and doesn't everyone want that?)

04.08.03
I am now, officially, for the third time, officially one of the "things" that is considered all things Eph.

Oh, and there is a reason for which I put "perfect man" in quotation marks on 07.29: There is no such thing. I don't mean that there aren't great men out there; I am not one of those man-bashing militant females; I see no reason to be. Truly, there are very good people out there who happen to have a Y-chromosome. But there is not a perfect man. Ayn Rand has her idea of a philosophically perfect man, but Howard Roark went seven years without speaking to the woman he loved, and he was fine with that, which I don't consider "perfect." In fact, few people would agree on what would make a perfect man, which is good, because if we all had the same set of characteristics we considered perfect, then (a) if such a man existed, everyone would go after him, and (b) if no such man existed, every woman would be unfulfilled and thereby unhappy. This would be an altogether untoward state of affairs, and naturally it is better the way it is.

In fact, if perfection existed, it would be a problem. The very existence of differing wants and differing characteristics is essential to the genetic variation of our species. Over time, nature (or rather, environmental stress) will select the desires and characteristics that are best adapted to the conditions of life, and deselect (i.e. kill more of) the others. For instance, women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 are more likely to produce healthy babies. Thus, men who prefer women with a WTH ratio of 0.7 end up being more reproductively successful, so there end up being more of them around, so there end up being more 0.7 women around, and everyone is happy! But just think if every woman liked the characteristics of one particular Mr. Perfect, and Mr. Perfect happened to prefer 0.5 or 0.9 -- think of the unsuccessful reproduction that would ensue! Incidentally, a WTH ratio of 0.7 (circumference of waist/circumference of hips) is also a pretty good indicator of overall health for women, as is a BMI (weight in kilos/(height in meters)²) of 18 to 20. (Both also lead to the lowest mortality rates.) So that's what natural selection would call "perfect."

But really, that's only what nature would call perfect right now, or rather, from the Greeks (their statues were 0.7 too) until now. If there were a worldwide famine, who would care what men preferred? The skinny people would die and the fat people would live. Or what if the ozone got really thin, as it is doing in Australia, and skin cancer became a pandemic? Then the white people would die and the dark-skinned people would live. Et cetera. So there is no perfect; there is only preferable, and that is what you make of it.

04.08.02
When I said "I have jobs that involve sitting in front of a computer with nothing to do," I didn't mean that I have nothing to do, per se. When the phone rings, I answer it on the first ring. When Carolyn gives me papers to file, I finish filing them within 60 seconds. When the mail comes, I sort it within five minutes. This sort of thing. So while there are indeed lots of things to do, there is also a lot of time during which there are no little endless tasks with which I can busy my fingers. Thus, I do what any self-respecting person would do -- I read the news! Just a clarification. It has nothing to do with the fact that Kathy was reading my blog, no nothing, of course not...

Here is your humor for the day.

"We're living in the middle of a witch hunt and fat people are the witches," said Marilyn Wann of San Francisco, a militant member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. "It's gotten markedly worse in the last few years because of the propaganda that fatness, a natural human characteristic, is somehow a form of disease."

...fitness experts persist in believing that a person must have a low fat-to-lean body mass ratio in order to be considered fit. As result, most fitness professionals promote weight loss and the achievement of an athlete's conditioning as the primary goals of physical exercise.

...fat people be trained to lead fitness classes and serve as role models for health and fitness regardless of size.

Educate the public, the media, and potential dieters as to the low long-term success rates and possible negative health consequences of weight reduction dieting.

Now, I suppose I am not really "one to talk." After all, I have never dieted myself down from extremely overweight to normal so that I could say, "see? it's possible!" But indeed, when I was in middle school, I was in the 25^th percentile for height and the 75^th percentile for weight, and my pediatrician sat me down and had a little talk with me about how each day I should choose one dessert that I really wanted, and have just that one dessert. (At the time, I was thinking, "you don't live with my mother, do you?" because my mother is not someone who has, or advocates having, just one dessert per day...) But then I started running, and a few years later I started going to Exeter, and the combination of those things -- 30 miles a week, an active lifestyle with lots of walking and stairs, and very little time to eat -- dropped me down to I don't know what weight percentile, but low enough that my parents told me I would have to stop running, and my doctor threatened me too, if I didn't gain enough weight, so...

04.07.30
Today I am going to tell you a story. This story is about J. Mackenzie Hawkins.

In the fall of 2000, Mackenzie Hawkins ran cross country. By trade she was a rower and a winter-trackster (that winter she was winter track captain and MVP) and would have been doing fall crew, but for an injury to her forearms that left her temporarily unable to row. Mackenzie joined the ranks of PEAGXC, devoted herself to the sport, and ended up on the varsity team as our sixth runner. What set Mackenzie apart in each of these sports was how hard she pushed herself: The previous year in winter track, while running the final race of the season against Andover, she was in second place -- until she collapsed, just meters from the finish. Indeed, at our first cross country race of the season at Manchester, I knew that Mackenzie was close behind me, but I did not realize that she was running so hard that she lost consciousness for the last bit of the race and although she kept running, she could not remember anything. My guess is that her performances in crew involved a similarly exemplary level of effort.

Mackenzie was accepted to Princeton, and I think she applied early, because I remember a conversation on the cross country van where someone asked her what she wrote about in her essay. The essay question was on the order of "if you could improve any one of your skills, which would you choose?" She wrote that she would choose to improve her singing abilities, because although she loved to sing, she wasn't very good at it. Mackenzie, as you may guess from this anecdote, is just about the kindest person I have ever met. The summer before her senior year, she went to Tibet; the summer afterward, she was planning to be some kind of counselor/teacher in Australia. (For a photo, click here -- she is the one kneeling next to me.)

But in the spring of her senior year, Mackenzie got sick -- so sick that she had to go home and stay with her mom for a few weeks. She returned for graduation, perhaps a bit before, but nobody knew -- the doctors couldn't figure it out -- what was making her so sick. In fact, she was so ill that she couldn't go to college in the fall, so she deferred her admission to Princeton. The doctors thought she had picked something up in Tibet, but still -- no answers. While at home, she baked cookies with individual notes attached for each member of the following year's PEAGXC team, knitted a hat for Mr. Parris (telling him that she was practicing her grandma skills), and wrote him several letters. In the spring of 2003 she also responded to my note to all the PEAGXC alumnae and wrote a message for Mr. Parris's book. But they still didn't know what was wrong with her.

As it turns out, Mackenzie has Lyme Disease. It's okay if you get the disease if you catch it early -- they give you shots or pills or something that kills it off. But they certainly didn't catch it early, so now she has it as a chronic condition. At this point she has deferred from Princeton three years in a row, such that she would be a senior this year, except that she hasn't gone yet at all. Mackenzie lives in Connecticut, so she came to the cross country championship race to see PEAGXC last fall, but she can only be up and about for a half an hour at a time, so she didn't get to see much of Mr. Parris as he dashed around getting runners to their races. She has to be on an IV, and she has weeks when she is really, really sick. This is a really sad thing, because Mackenzie is just about the nicest person I know. Thus, Mr. Parris and I are going to visit her next weekend. The morals of this story are:

(1) Mackenzie is awesome.
(2) Don't get Lyme disease.

The reason for which the search Diana is annoying on Google pulls up this page is that I used the word "annoying" (to describe typical blog formatting) four times in one paragraph in my first post, which you will find if you scroll way down this page.

You know how online diaries like Xanga have a "currently listening to" feature where you can post song titles? And some blogs have a "currently reading" feature. So, I will tell you that I am currently reading the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, specifically chapters eight and nine, which concern friendship. I was reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, in which she constructs her idea of the "perfect man" (philosophically speaking). This man, Howard Roark, seems to be completely self-sufficient, so I wondered: are people supposed to be so self-sufficient, or do people essentially need other people? Aristotle, who lived c. 350 BC, does an excellent job of answering that question so well that you would think he was writing it today. (He maintains the latter: people need other people.) Excerpts from the Aristotle:

"For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods..."

"But it is not only necessary but also noble; for we praise those who love their friends, and it is thought to be a fine thing to have many friends; and again we think it is the same people that are good men and are friends."

"Surely it is strange, too, to make the supremely happy man a solitary; for no one would choose the whole world on condition of being alone, since man is a political creature and one whose nature is to live with others."

"Although Williams now officially stands above the field of Div. III schools – numbering 424 institutions in all – in both the athletic and academic arenas, the Ephs can also lay claim to being the first of the 1,006 NCAA colleges to be named tops nationally in academics in the same year it earned the highest distinction in collegiate athletics."

"An unprecedented number of top academic accolades were garnered by Williams students, including two Rhodes scholars, two Marshall Scholars, two Truman Scholars, a Watson Fellow, and 21 National Science Foundation honorees. In such a year it is indeed gratifying to also be recognized for the excellence of the Williams athletic program, as represented by the Directors' Cup."

And an update: Jenna figured out when my birthday was because my mom invited her to a surprise party for me on July 27. (I obviously didn't know about the surprise party, so I created my own party and invited my own guests -- more guests, and a wider range of guests, which made for a much better party than it would have been otherwise, I do believe.) So Jenna is not psychic and, as would have been more likely, she does not have an unbelievably retentive memory for random facts like her two-years-ago captain's birthday. Whew.

Also, you have doubtless heard (from my post five days ago, if not in the rest of your life) that there is a lot of animosity towards the USA in other countries. I have just been reading a very good article illuminating the misconceptions and misrepresentations of America abroad, which focuses particularly on European anti-Americanism. An excerpt:

"Though fewer than 14% of Frenchmen have visited America, 'most have strong views' of it; indeed, 'Europeans who have not been in the U.S. . . . have the strongest opinions' about it, and malice toward America is inversely proportional to the amount of time individuals have actually spent there."

04.07.28
I have just learned that there are some people who actually read this. Whoa! Cool! Hi, Jan. Such people may have noticed that I have been writing more posts recently. This is because I have jobs that involve sitting in front of a computer with nothing to do. That condition leads me to browse the news, which leads to my posting things about the news. Hence, the recent focus on political issues. Today's post will be a digression from that norm.

It appears that, despite their intellectual prowess, Exonians are not so good with directions. First, I wrote 155 instead of 108 in some directions, which messed up both Lauras. Then, Tyler went left instead of right, and ended up driving around Durham. But the real problem was, I stipulated that presents were not allowed -- because I did not throw myself a birthday party to get presents; I invited people to my house because I like them -- and yet they brought them anyway. Fortunately, three people followed my request, though one was by accident. These silly Exonians, sheesh. Well, at least they have excellent taste. And if you are one of those people and you're reading this, well, thank you.

Additionally, my cooking was not a disaster. Someone told me that Indian food is too hard to make, and that I wouldn't be able to do it. So I made Indian food each of the past two weekends, and it has turned out quite well. But then I was told that people wouldn't like it, and I shouldn't serve it, and upon reflection I decided that maybe that was true, that spiced lentils would not be everyone's cup of tea (obviously; they'd be their bowl of lentils... never mind.) So I made pizza, in a new special method. But then at the last minute, I decided to heat up the dahl (lentils) just in case anyone wanted to try them, and when Emma walked in she said "whoa! something smells good!" so I went ahead and served it, and really it was not so bad. (But it was good I had the pizza, because it has a wider base of appeal.) I gave the leftover dahl to my parents to take back to Deer Isle, because they don't have the opportunity to eat such excellent cuisine as often as I do, given my exemplary culinary skills. The idea here is that if I practice making Indian food enough, I will get good at it, and everyone will be very impressed with my mastery of Indian cooking.

Yesterday was, as I so craftily suggested, my 19^th birthday. My parents surprised me by coming home from Deer Isle. This was despite my request, several days ago, that they not surprise me by coming home. They proceeded to take out the compost, take out the recyclables, take my spoon, and take my car. (I managed to get my spoon back, but they would not relent about the car.) Thus, instead of my trusty 1992 Mitsubishi Expo-LRV, I now have to drive a 2001 Honda Accord. I feel like I'm in a bow-loader: I'm really low to the ground and can't do anything about it; the steering is funny; it doesn't stop very fast; and the whole situation feels a little tippy and uncontrollable. There are differences, though: In a bow-loader, there's all this nice fresh air rushing at you as you cut through the water; in the Accord there is a pungent sickly smell that permeates everything. In a bow-loader, you can tell if you're going slowly on no pressure or if you're doing a fast power piece; the Accord doesn't seem to know the difference between 30 and 50 in terms of feel and noise. But now this is my car for the time being, and plus, it is a nice enough car, so I guess I'm doing all right.

In other news, I recently composed a bio of myself. If you happen to have forgotten, or are interested in, all the things I have done and the awards I received, check it out. I prefer the list form; if you would like to read paragraphs instead, there is this version too. Several months ago I took the "college" page off of my site, because I figured I was done with the admissions process and that it would be considered bragging to display my admissions record, but I just learned that Jan was looking for it, found it was gone, and wanted it back! Now you can find that, and much more, in my bio, which erases the danger of sounding like I am bragging about college, because in fact I probably sound like I am bragging about everything in it. But like the wise man said, "it ain't bragging if you can do it." (Dizzy Dean)

04.07.27
This post is brought to you by the letter D and the number 19.

More reasons to vote Kerry:

Ten Things You Don’t Know About Our Dad By Alex and Vanessa Kerry

10. He believes chocolate-chip cookies are one of the four food groups.
9. He wears Hawaiian shorts over a wetsuit and swears it's the style
8. He used to be mistaken for a Beatle
7. We weren't allowed to go on dates unless we had a two-thirds house majority
6. He can play the ‘Star Wars’ theme song on his bass guitar
5. He rarely needs caffeine (his kids are another matter)
4. He thinks he speaks Italian—but it is mostly menu items
3. He is better versed on pop culture than his kids
2. He believes chocolate-chip ice cream is the second food group
1. He once owned a beat-up taxi that he and a friend named Baxter

Three days after Bush’s remarks, the Los Angeles Times reported that the White House found the comments in a Dartmouth undergraduate paper posted on the Internet and lifted them out of context. “It shows they didn’t read much of the article,” commented Charlie Trumbull, the author.

04.07.26
This is, after all, as it should be; it's just too bad it took a stupid president and an unnecessary war to make it happen. In the words of the polarizing filmmaker:

"It's really cool now to talk about politics, and this is the first time I've seen this happen in decades, really," Moore said Sunday. "Being apathetic right now is very uncool."

In November we will have a national election to choose which of three men -- George W. Bush, John F. Kerry, or Ralph Nader -- will be the President of the United States of America. This is an important election. To be elgible to vote, you must register to vote at your local town hall or other central voting location. Please register. Please vote. This public service announcement is brought to you for the benefit of those for whom the above information is not totally obvious.

In other news, a sonorous snippet:

"Diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem."

This just in: I have been added to the EphBlog Blogroll! Of course, this makes sense, seeing as how I am an Eph with a blog. This puts me in the company of the likes of Aidan Finley, Sam VanVolkenburg, and someone named John Phillips -- neat, eh? EphBlog is a wonderful site with lots of people who post interesting things about "all things Williams, past and present" and has hosted some very interesting discussions.

04.07.24
More good news, as of Thursday 22 July:

When asked if Kerry would have the respect of world leaders, 63 percent said "yes." When asked whether they think Bush has such respect now, 43 percent said "yes."

A note about margins of error: To figure out how many people they actually asked, take 1 over the decimal accuracy squared. Thus, here they queried 1/(.035)², or about 1000 people. (In fact, they say they asked 1005 people.)

I recall one night when the national news was presenting a poll of who supported Kerry versus Bush, with a +/- 6% accuracy. They were making all this fuss about how the standings had changed by a few percentage points over the past week or so -- when obviously a few percentage points of difference means nothing with 6% inaccuracy, and plus, they surveyed fewer than 300 people. Bah.

Oh, and if you take a poll and want to figure out what your accuracy is, take 1 over the square root of the number of people you surveyed. So if you survey 25 people, your margin of error is 1/5 = .2 = +/-20%. If you survey 2500 people, your margin of error drops to 1/50 = +/- 2% (pretty good.) This breaks down at the extremes, because if you survey every member of the population, clearly you have no margin of error, but the math will tell you you do, since your pool is not infinitely large. And yet, as we know from the dismal percentage of people who actually take the effort vote, you will rarely be able to survey the whole population. So everyone over the age of 18: GET OUT AND VOTE!

04.07.23
From the same singer (Linda Ronstadt) who got thrown out of the concert hall for endorsing Michael Moore and Farenheit 9-11:

"This is an election year, and I think we're in desperate trouble and it's time for people to speak up and not pipe down. It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know."

04.07.22
Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's:

In a polite society, you don’t go up to a person and look at them in the face and say, "You’re a liar." We think it’s a lot more dignified and there’s a lot more decorum to say, "Excuse me sir, your pants are getting a little warm, don’t you think?"

Additionally, South African Philip Rabinowitz, the world's fastest 100-year-old, recently won a 100m sprint in 30.86 seconds in Cape Town. Whoa. That's about 8-minute mile pace, so it wouldn't be universally qualified as a "sprint," but you know what? When you're 100, and you're still pushing your body to run faster, man, you can do whatever you want. (Factoid courtesy of Newsweek.)

04.07.21
Jenna knows when my birthday is. How can this be? How on earth did she remember when it was when I didn't even tell her? This just goes to show you that Jenna is indeed the most sociable and considerate person I have ever met. But I knew that already. Well, thanks, Jenna!

For anyone who is wondering, eggs are fine to eat three to five weeks past the sell-by date. I was under the impression that I had no eggs, so I was not eating eggs, until... I found eggs in my refrigerator's egg section! Thus I did this snippet of Internet research and found, on reputable food sites, the welcome fact that I will not die from this morning's breakfast.

04.07.11
I have now started working seven days a week doing two different jobs. My full-time job entails filing folders, unfiling folders, copying papers, folding papers, and putting papers into envelopes. At some point they will even let me answer the phone! I have also become the Queen of the Folding Machine, and my PR is currently tri-folding 1500 sheets of paper in 10 minutes. Soon I may be allowed to design a bulletin board! The possibilities are endless. The most exciting part of this job was on the first day, when I had been working there less than two hours, and I collapsed in the lobby. It was a rather eventful way to begin a new job, let me tell you.

My part-time job is to sit and read a book in the computer lab, and every so often (a) tell someone where the printer is, (b) tell people that they're not allowed to eat, or (c) tell a female who is headed for the men's room that the women's room is on the next floor up. My brain is having trouble with all this multi-tasking, but I think that somehow I will be able to handle it.

But I like them. They're good jobs, and not too strenuous. This whole working thing is pretty neat: you do a job that's not so bad, and then in return they give you money that you can use to buy yogurt, milk, bagels, and postage. It's a pretty neat little system they've got there. I think it's called "capitalism."

04.06.26
Mr. Parris has changed the default 3-D graph of Winplot to my favorite graph! He did this even though it has a 0/0 in it. Wow. And he made it my favorite color, the Exeter red! You should check it out -- Winplot is a most wonderful program. You can get it here.

04.06.20
So, Emily graduated from high school! It seems like not very long ago that she was an angelic little five-year-old, but I guess it has been a while. And she won! She got the most awards and scholarships of anyone: the "teacher's pet" scholarship, the "four years of French and music and going to a selective private college" scholarship, and the honor medal. Truly, what is in that water on Garrison Lane, eh? Well, she had a good role model... just kidding.

04.06.01
For anyone who was for some unknown reason wondering, I did run the VCM. Scott ran very fast and I shuffled in to the end. I was 48th out of 106 in my age division. I was the 418th female out of 939 females. So I was very much in the top half. The RehabGYM relay team finished 226th out of 396 teams (not in the top half.) It was not a very good time, either in terms of stopwatch numbers or in how it felt, but at least I know that I can cover 26.2 miles without training very much first. Hmmm...

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