Principia Mathematica
I’m back.
Sorry, it’s been awhile since my last post here. I’ve been very busy. School work takes up just about all of my time. Lots of physics, lots of calculus, lots of electrical engineering, lots of utopia… I have so much work that I spent all of tonight (Friday night, that is) downstairs working in the study lounge. Mostly physics, and then a lot of reading. If anybody can tell me how to find the launch velocity for a satellite to Mars, it would be much appreciated… 
I downloaded a new beta of Monkey’s Audio a few days ago - version 3.95a1. I started recompressing some of the CDs I compressed with 3.94b2, and the files became slightly smaller, as promised. But it corrupted about 1/4 of them, grrr. I think there’s something wrong with MAC, but the guy who makes it insists that it’s probably a hardware problem on my side. Bad memory, or something. I’m not so sure about that. Either way, I need to re-rip a few tracks from each CD I have. Oh well. All in the name of good audio.
Download of the day: A New Found Glory - Better Off Dead.
My roommate’s birthday is on Monday. About two weeks ago, I ordered him a nice pair of headphones as a birthday present. The dumb web store messed up, though… The item has been on backorder for some time, and they didn’t email me about it or update my order status page. It just says “packaging.” Those idiots even sent me an email saying that my order had been released to the shipping department, and would arrive shortly. Worst of all, the item page on their site shows that the headphones are “in stock.” Grr! I hear a lot of stories about people getting burned by webstores, but it never really happens to me. I guess it was bound to happen eventually Oh well, I guess Tyrone will get his headphones eventually — from a different webstore. I cancelled my order.
I’m doing really well in my Utopia class. Heck, I own that class. The relationship between that class and me is one of ownership. With me as the owner. Heh. I got an A on the midterm… Take that, foul arts and letters class. I really enjoy the books, too. Right now, we’re reading Huxley’s Brave New World, which is great. I voluntarily read it in 11th grade for a research project, but it was rushed, and I didn’t really let the setup settle in my mind. It’s an amazing book. Huxley really has a way with words.
The novel starts with small parts of several plots. They’re interesting enough, because they revolve around a dystopian world almost completely unlike our own. Two women are talking. A leader gives a speech to his students. A lonely man contemplates life. The system of human birth is detailed. These parts are first given full force by the author — a few pages each. Then, like a kid with ADD, the attention span falls. Maybe a few paragraphs each. Then, less and less. A few sentences each. The reader, already full of wonder over this new society, has trouble keeping track of the separate plots. Were there three? Or four? All of the sudden the parts don’t rotate in the right order. The reader can’t keep up. He’s lost. Slowly, the time devoted to each thread shrinks to only a sentence. Just a few words. The reader is lost in a swirling, twisting consciousness of words and thoughts and opinions. The threads cross over each other, seemingly woven without pattern. And then — boom! — it’s over. The next page, starting a new chapter, greets the reader like a shelter in a drowning thunderstorm. As the reader was passing over those fragmented sentences, he was absorbing them faster, and faster, in a frenzy of partial understanding. But as he reads the hushed words on the next page, it becomes clear that all those separate threads came together in some form to make something whole — something brilliant! — right under his nose. The reader isn’t sure of what he just read, but he’s sure that he doesn’t like this Brave New World. He’s sure that something must be done about it.
Anyway. It’s a great book. I think I’m going to watch a movie now, and then to bed. #