Apathy Sketchpad

It has been quite some time since I was last able to update the site, and in that time, a lot of stuff has come to me that I couldn’t publish. Which was annoying. So here, in no particular order, it is.

Most recently, (in fact just a minute ago) I closed down an Internet Explorer window. That is, I right clicked the button down on the taskbar, and selected “close” from the menu, and Windows brought up a dialogue, as it seems to like to do these days when I interrupt it, to ask if I wanted to close Internet Explorer now, or wait. I’m not quite certain who would tell a computer to close Internet Explorer, and then think, “not yet, though… In a second,” but it’s good to know they accomodate for that kind of a person, isn’t it?

Before that, I saw an advert on the side of a phone box for 8 Mile, which is Eminem’s new film, as you probably know, and as these adverts often do, it had a quotation from a review. Now, perhaps this film is good. I don’t know. I’ve been told it’s good, but then I’ve been told a lot of things. All I know for certain is that the best quote they could find was “a cinematic event”. It just isn’t very emotional. Not to me, anyway, and not, I think, to other people. You wouldn’t be taken in by “Escapology: An Audio Recording”, or “The Ford Focus: A Car”.

On Thursday, as well, I have an exam in Quantum Mechanics, which I don’t really want to do. The way I think of it, until Thursday I know everything and nothing about quantum mechanics. If they measure my knowledge they’ll change it, and then the whole exercise is demonstrably pointless. Although that said, that would actually be something of a relief, seeing as how I’ve been quite publicly of the opinion that the whole thing is pointless from the beginning. The thing is, you see, I understand physics quite well. It’s just something to do with the way my brain is wired up. It can’t spell, and it’s general knowledge is just bloody awful, but it’s wired up for physics and it can do that well. What it is not designed to do is memorize equations. Personally, I’m quite happy to forgive this failing. Mankind did not evolve with equations in mind. Neaderthal man did not track mammoths using calculus. We evolved to kill things, and eat them. Sometimes we cooked them, and those members of the tribe evolved into Jamie Oliver, and made lots of money. There was never any merit to being able to solve quadratic equations, and when mankind invented the quadratic equation, he also invented the printing press so he didn’t need to remember things. But the university don’t see it this way. They apparently think we’re going to be in jobs that rely largely on our knowing the time independant Schrödinger equation. I can’t actually think of any such jobs right at this very second, but presumably they exist, or else why train us to do them? Come to that, though, the university seems to think we’re going to apply for jobs where we’ll be given four important projects to do, and them asked to pick two and complete them.

I can, in fact, think of a job that would require me to know the time independant Schrödinger equation, but I don’t think I want to become a physics lecturer. For one thing, it would mean hanging around with other physics lecturers, which is not something that appeals to me. I have, with help from my friends, spent most of the last year trying to minimise our contact with physics lecturers, and don’t see any reason to change the plan now. And besides, physics lecturers are a strange bunch. They try to use real world analogies to explain the laws of physics, which is a good idea, but for two small flaws:

1. The laws of physics, by definition, are the real world
2. Physics lecturers do not live in the real world.

They inhabit their own special physics lecturer dimension, where combovers look good, sandals are fashionable*, and it’s quite unacceptable to say something “sucks”, or “you’ll let the cold in” because that isn’t technically the way things operate but it is perfectly okay to say “this electron wants to be over here”.