Autumn Prose

As Autumn dawns there is always a drastic change
in my attitude that resonates
through every chord of my body.
Manifested as a goofy smile--
or perhaps some giddy bounce in my step.

There is just something intoxicating about autumn--
the leaves that fall,
The brisk scent
The sense of purpose
There is a certain decisiveness to it all--
which has the singular effect of inoculating me to outside worries

Autumn to me is more than a season,
Its the season with my favorite childhood memories
Memories of catching leaves
Of running through the chilly air
Of cold rain on my cheek and Cold sweat on my back
Of tricks and treats and Halloween
Scary Movies with me clutching the blanket with white knuckles
Turkey dinner with mouths full of stuffing.

Autumn prose is such poetry--and living for it--such a sweet melancholy symphony.

Faffing About at RPI

Currently I am sat in my room watching "Tales from the Darkside" on the SciFi channel (which has actually undergone a recent name change auntie Gianna style to SyFy) while waiting for class to start--PHYS 6900, Physics Colloquium. It is Ten-Thousand degrees in my apartment (plus or minus five degrees) and the fan isn't helping very much anymore. It is becoming truly unbearable--my own private hell from which I cannot escape.

I blame the heat for my slightly delirious state these days--which seems to carry over into my dreams. For example, last night on the phone with my sweetheart I was given an errand to pick up cereal from the supermarket for when she visits. I suggested a granola-like cereal and Farah was quick to remind me that she can't have nuts (I remember most of the time okay!). Incidentally, "Grape Nuts" do not contain nuts, so I would have been safe either way, but I believe the incident lead to the dream I had--I drempt that I bought Cocoa Pebbles--but that when I opened the box, it was FULL of almonds. Needless to say Dream-Ben got slapped haha!

Another microdream I had was even more disturbing: I drempt that I took up smoking. The only thing I remember about this dream is that in my dream I took up smoking to deal with the stress of graduate school and qualifying exams and I really liked it--and it was awesome. I also remember trying to hide it from my friends and family and Farah (wow all words that start with F...suspiiiiiiiiicious...)--while simultaneously rationalizing how many times I should smoke per day to not get super-hooked...very weird...very crazy...

In the mornings I watch PBS-kids before class--its a good way of warming up for the day--and oddly Sesame Street and Arthur reruns have a way of getting you ready for school in a way that Spongebob cannot!

Here is me getting ready for my first day on the job as the Teaching Assistant of "Earth and Sky".

And here is my favorite MIT engineer being adorable as usual.

Till Next time...
-Ben

New Life at the Bates' Motel

One of those sayings I really tend to abuse is an old one from an old show which I forgot the name of. To "get the hell out of Dodge" means to leave town abruptly and without turning back (referring of course to Dodge City, Kansas a frontier on the old west...yes, cowboys and outlaws and all that jazz). Wednesday around 10am I found out I needed to be at RPI on Thursday for a meeting at 10am. With 24 hours to pack, rest, and travel I feel like I can invent my own variation of the saying--to get the hell back to RPI.


So here I am back at RPI--and to describe it in one word, I would choose "ugh". My second choice, however, would be desolate. Picture as evidence. That one vehicle you see in the lot is mine, and its taken in the lot my room oversees. The apartments on the left are where I am staying--each unit is two levels, four people with full kitchen, living room, and bath. There is literally noone around, I think I saw two of my roomates for about ten minutes yesterday but that may have been a hallucination based on my need for company. A long way off I can hear the slow, deliberate rumble of progress and traffic, but here its a ghost town.

First impressions of my room: old. Actually it kind of has a Bates' Motel atmosphere to it--as if not just one, but several people have died here. So disturbingly old is this place that I was absolutely positive that if I were to disturb the furniture setup or open the cabinet drawers after sundown that an evil spirit would hiss and fly around the room. Fortunately this did not occur--I am well-moved in.

Further adding proof to my idea that this is a den of ghosts and murder was a present I found in the bottom drawer of the cabinet. I have proof now that the prior residents were girls--and fashion conscious girls at that. In this picture Ben is saying, "come on, really?!?" while gesturing at the abominations.

Today my goal is to recover all or most of my things from the fraternity house--or at least what has not been ruined. It still astounds me how efficiently--and completely--things can be destroyed (yes, destroyed is not even overkill in this case) when they are left there. From the emails I've been getting, this summer has sounded like a particularly crazy one, hopefully my bike is okay!

So just now a huge obnoxious noise bellowed from the main campus--my first thought was monster. My second was air raid. Turns out it was a test of RPI's alert system. A man's voice came on after the crazy siren, but, due to echo I couldn't make out a single word he said--not very useful in an emergency haha!

Below are pictures of my room after being moved-into. The before pictures are basically this but with no stuff in them--and the bed was in a weird orientation--swapped with the desk, so I fixed that problem REAL SOON.




It occurs to me that I didn't even blog about my adventure to Boston! Ugh I have so much to catch up on! I can't promise that I can ever get to that, so here is a picture of my sweetheart FARAH <--named so that everyone knows its her :) packing her bag and checking that she has all her paperwork for the fiftieth time.

Oh my God the RPI alert thing has turned into one huge screeching tone and I feel like my head is going to pop--I have to stop sorry!

-B

Unified Field Theory as a Pipe Dream

Not much in physics bugs me--most likely because I am not very well-versed in sciences in general. I did not read that guy's book, I didn't attend that seminar, and to be completely honest, the answer to "did you do your homework?" falls somewhere between "uhm..." and "hahahahahaha! seriously!?!".

But one thing--above all others--does. It is the idea of the Theory of Everything. It has many guises--and many refer to it as Unified Field Theory these days. Unified Field Theory (a variation of the theory of everything which reduces all to field equations) is a type of field theory that would allow all that may be thought of as fundamental forces and elementary particles to be written in terms of a single field (thank you wikipedia!). This condenses all force, all matter--into one equation (complexity unknown).

Sure this sounds difficult, but possible, right?

Wrong.

Let me explain.

So there was this smart guy named Gödel--a mathematician. He axiomated an approach to logic and validation in the form of two theorems that reference eachother that established upper limits to all but the most trivial mathematical systems. These are called "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems".

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" is capable of proving all facts about natural numbers. Basically, no theory or set of theories can prove everything about numerical processes.

The second incompleteness theorem shows that if this system is also capable of proving basic facts about the natural numbers, then one arithmetic truth the system cannot prove is the consistency of the system itself. Or, that if the system proves something about natural numbers, then the system cannot be proven to be true.

The ramifications of this should be startling--basically any theory that involves the natural numbers cannot be complete--it is either missing some element or it itself cannot be proven to be true--it is a theory that proves incompleteness reigns.

Any "Unified Field Theory" will certainly be a consistent, non-trivial mathematical theory--and therefore, by these, it must also be incomplete. Unified Field Theory brings us nowhere--good news for us physicists!

Q.E.D.

Christmas in July

So this past past weekend was atypical for me in that it was a weekend where I went out with a bunch of ladies, had deliciously girlie drinks, and celebrated Christmas (trust me, that link is worth it) amongst complete strangers and good friends.

Actually that sounds like most of my life...

On Friday I had the privilege of escorting my sweetheart, her temporary roomie (and my carpool buddy), my old (actually bordering on saurian) NASA friend, and our resident wedding planner (and all around gossip girl) to see "Inception". I have to say this movie was amazing in the same way that Vanilla Sky was. As it were, it is more similar than that--because I have no clue what happened in either of these. Granted, I have the attention span of a goldfish--and going to see any movie more complex than Star Wars for me is like walking into an aviary full of nitrous oxide and trying to play Scrabble with the Kookaburras while they stand around arguing about East-Asia Politics, but it is my personal opinion that these movies are strenuous no matter the audience.

The following day, after checking out the coolest restaurant this side of Chinatown (with the best Spinach and Brie sandwich ever), my sweetheart and I found ourselves at a Christmas-in-July party at my friend Henry's place. The rest of my friends arrived later on in the evening--and an epic celebration of holiday cheer and general debauchery ensued.

The picture is proof that I should have been a photographer--barely captured before the train scooted by! ;)

Brush your teeth and floss once a day!

Happy Christmas!
-B

My New Favorite Band?

So for the past five or so months I've been looking for a "new favorite band".

Naturally this is an odd thing to propose--but my argument is at least valid--my current favorite band is "The Misfits", a band that has been around for thirty-something years and is no longer producing new material reliably. When Danzig left the group, the band changed, but to be completely honest, I liked Graves better in some cases (and to be completely honest, I liked Danzig's material better when he formed his own band). Graves has since left. This has left me stagnating in the same songs without anything new for AGES.

Just a few days ago I found "The Creepshow" which fits the mold remarkably well. They've got the whole psychobilly/b-movie punk thing going on.

Still haven't decided if they are "favorite band" good, but I haven't found a point against them yet.

Here they cover a Misfits song--Halloween:



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And on an unrelated note, this website is ridiculous--and rated PG-13.

-B

The Things I Dream about When I Dream about Things

So lets get one thing straight--the things that I dream about when I dream about things at best mimic reality--but more often then not, do not correlate with any forme of reality that could ever possibly exist

Q.E.D.

To me at least the discussion is quenched, but perhaps I could bear to elaborate--for the good of all three of you out there reading this (if there still even are three).

When I was younger, I had a recurring nightmare of being lost in a funhouse version of my Pennsylvania home--and always finding my way to the basement just in time for the octopus monster with the sharp teeth to wake up and capture me. So often did I have this dream that when I would become very sick and start having minor hallucinations (which is not, contrary to popular opinion--linked to psychosis, mind you--and completely natural), I would be scared that the octopus would come back. Eventually, this problem sorted itself out--DreamBen promised the nefarious cephalopod the ghostbusters in return for his amnesty and I never had the nightmare again.

Last night I woke up quite surprised that I WASN'T at that same bus terminal I always visualize when I try to visualize Paris. Now, I have never been to Paris--I don't even know if there are bus stations the way I visualize them in France at all. I read a short story a million years ago where I managed to visualize an odd bus station with the Eiffel Tower in the background and an amber-striped, deep violet sky where the sun has recently set. I'm not quite certain why I was in Paris--nor why Mara, Farah and Marc were there (although the later two of these seem to make more sense than the former), but there we were and I was being criticized for being late to the terminal because, "the lions can't wait forever, you know!" and suddenly I was overcome with vertigo and I had to wake up--quite disoriented, and quite confused. Sometimes, despite the fact that a dream is ridiculous, you wake up and are not sure whether the dream was that crazy situation you just escaped from--or that warm, wonderful circumstance you have just entered. Feeling me?

Below is my favorite of the 4th of July in DC pics from this year--maybe someday I will treat this thing as a normal person's blog! :P

-B