Things I Learned Today
05 17 2001
I'm way too excited about going home to be learning anything at this point I'm afraid.
05 16 2001
Famous Canadian writer Robertson Davies was a Carl Jung fan and his oldest daughter is a practicing Jungian psychologist.
often, all it takes to stop or achieve something is enough drive and will.
life is all about priorities and we often forget that we can't have it all, especially since there are only twenty-four hours in a day.
everything in life is relative and it's crucial not to lose your perspective.
05 14 2001
Today Jake taught me the details of black and white photography and how and why you can create a camera solely from paper.
05 13 2001
Birth-order studies indicate that last children show greater creativity and original thinking than earlier-born children.
Longitudinal studies of schizophrenia have generally shown that it tends to be inherited.
Memory formation is disrupted most by depressants.
Denying unpleasantness is most likely to cause diseased of the immune system.
The expression of fear tends to develop last among infants.
05 12 2001
All of the physics information below is paraphrased from the elegant universe. Any factual errors are mine.
The ancient Greek results for measuring the ratio of a circle's circumference to its radius, which is 2pi, holds true for circles drawn on a flat surface. But if a circle is drawn on a warped or curved surface, its usual spatial relationships will also be distorted. The circumference drawn on a curved surface of a sphere will be less than the one on a flat surface.
Although black holes have a reputation for rapacity, objects that pass by them at a "safe" distance are deflected in much the same way they would be by an ordinary star, and can proceed on their merry way. But objects of any composition whatsoever that get too close - closer than what has been termed the black hole's event horizon - are doomed: they will be drawn inexorably toward the center of the black hole and subject to an ever increasing and ultimately destructive gravitational strain. For example, if you dropped feet first through the event horizon, as you approached the black hole's center you would find yourself getting increasingly uncomfortable. The gravitational force of the black hole would increase so dramatically that its pull on your feet would be much stronger than its pull on your head (since in a feet-first fall your feet are always a bit closer than your head to the black hole's center); so much stronger, in fact, that you would be stretched with a force that would quickly tear your body to shreds.
If, on the contrary, you were more prudent in your wanderings near a black hole and took great care not to trespass beyond the event horizon, you could make use of the black hole for a rather amazing feat. Imagine that you were able to discover a black hole whose mass was about 1000 times the mass of the sun, and you were to lower yourself to about an inch above the black hole's event horizon. Gravitational fields cause a warping of time, and this means that your passage through time would slow down. Since black holes have such strong gravitational fields, your passage through time would slow way down. If you were to hover there for a year and then return back to earth, you would find that ten thousand years have passed since your departure.
When light shines on certain metals, they emit electrons. Metals have the property that some of their electrons are loosely bound within the atoms. When light strikes the metallic surface it relinquishes its energy. This transferred energy can agitate the electrons in the metal, and some of the loosely bound ones can be knocked clear off the surface. The frequency of light (its color) determines the speed of the ejected electrons; the total intensity of the light determines the number of ejected electrons.
If a particular experiment involving an electron is repeated over and over again in an absolutely identical manner, the same answer for the measured position of an electron will not be found over and over again. Quantum mechanics shows that at a microscopic level you cannot possibly know a particle's location and velocity with total precision.
The probability rules of quantum mechanics show that if you walked into a solid wall every second, you would have to wait longer than the current age of the universe to have a good chance of passing through it on one of your attempts. With eternal patience and longevity, though, you could - sooner or later - emerge on the other side.
05 10 2001
No matter how alone you think you are there are other people in the world who think and feel exactly like you do about certain issues. You're not alone.
Root canals seriously suck.
Your ideas of who you are often skewed. You're not as ugly as you think you are. You're not as fat as you think you are. You're not as stupid as you think you are.
05 09 2001
Sometimes it's better to move on than to keep asking why me. Life can be crappy but the power to make your worthwhile is in your hands.
If a stored procedure has many if statements, Sybase sets the plan the first time you run it so if the parameters change the second time, it still uses the plan of the original compilation.
If you have a crush on someone, it's better to ask them out soon rather than letting the feelings fester.
The Three Penny Opera features Mack the Knife.
05 08 2001
It's possible to do really well in a class (exam) by merely listening to the lectures intently.
Some people don't suffer from feeling shameful.
Theory of Relativity and Quantum Physics are mutually exclusive theories.
Life is not always fair, awful things can and do happen to amazing people.
05 07 2001
The new movie Knight's Tale is supposed to be based on a Chaucer story. Chaucer actually "borrowed" the idea for the story from Boccacio.
Light falls on objects and results in the four aspects of light/shadow:
Highlight: The brightest light, where light from the source falls most directly on the object.
Cast shadow: The darkest shadow, caused by the object's blocking of the light from the source.
Reflected light: A dim light, bounced back onto the object by light falling on surfaces around the object.
Crest shadow: A shadow that lies on the crest of a rounded form, between the highlight and the reflected light.
The three main attributes of color are:
Hue is simply the name of the color.
Value is the lightness or darkness of a hue, relative to the value scale.
Intensity is the brightness or dullness of a hue, relative to the utmost brightness available in pigments - generally color straight out of the tube.
The important skills to draw well are the perception of edges, spaces, relationships and lights and shadows. But the most important thing to remember is to always draw what you see and not what you think you see.
The goal of a successful manager is not to manage his people but to teach his people to manage themselves. Specifically by teaching how to set efficient goals and giving negative and positive feedback immediately.
05 06 2001
Sometimes it's easier to draw an object by only drawing the negative space surrounding it.
It's easier to solve a GMAT question if you simplify it and cross off impossible answers.
When Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was published by Ballantine, they censored 75 sections from it, which is of course extremely ironic since the novel deals with issues surrounding censorship. When students let Ray know about it, he got it reset and republished. Also two main characters in the novel are named after a paper manufacturing company and a maker of pencils, Montag and Faber, respectively. Funny enough, Ray didn't notice this until much after the novel was published.
05 05 2001
In New York City, as you walk downtown, below Houston the avenues become shorter than streets. While an avenue is four times as long as a street above SoHo, a street is four times as wide as an avenue below SoHo.
The Latin word for left is sinister which means bad, ominous or treacherous. The Latin word for right is dexter, which is where dexterity comes from and it means skill. In French left is gauche, meaning awkward and right is droit meaning good, just, proper. In English, the word left comes from the Anglo-Saxon lyft, meaning weak or worthless. Right comes from the same root, reht, meaning correct. Talk about bias in language! paraphrased from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
When one Apollo astronaut teams landed on the moon, they named Dandelion Crater there to honor Ray Bradbury's novel Dandelion Wine.
Flaubert's Madame Bovary was considered to have played a strong role in the realism era but Flaubert considered himself a romantic and didn't like to be labeled a realist.
Cinco de Mayo is a cultural holiday signifying victory in the face of great odds and patriotism. It is not Mexico's independence day, which is September 16.
List of interesting organizations that offer volunteer or internship positions in New York City: association for experiential education, playing to win, channel 13, new age travel, five rivers environmental education center, and national wildlife refuge system.
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