Perhaps I shall spare a sentence for each of the classes I attended today. At dawn I experienced the beautiful formalism of the creation and annihilation operators as they wove their intricate web of commutator relations that leads unerringly to the solution of the Quantum Mechanical harmonic oscillator. We had a guest lecturer in Classical Mechanics; he style of teaching could only be described as aggressive. I spent my final class of the day on the generality of Fourier constructions and enduring the ferocious quibble over inconsequential perturbations to inner product definitions. 


Luckily a new One Piece chapter was released today, but this was counterbalanced by the news that such an event will not occur next week! Oh well; at least the manga is still selling decently. Already owning all the translated volumes, my next purchases will probably involve Nausicaa and a tempestuous dale.  

Hail to the king, baby.

I have quite a bit to say about the Towers of Midnight, but I shall hold back for now. Instead I will focus on the famous work Atlas Shrugged, the novel I read prior to undertaking this new challenge from the Wheel of Time. Also, it is entirely possible that I am the first person to ever need to make this distinction, but Rand Al'Thor is not Ayn Rand, and any I refer to in the rest of this paragraph will be the latter of the personages. I picked up Rand's enormous tome of a story (over 1000 pages in what is surely 8-point font), knowing absolutely nothing about her or her books except that this one was pretty famous. The story is set in a sort of parallel-universe United States wherein socialist ideology has begun to take root and is told almost entirely from the perspectives of two tycoons of business: Dagny Taggart is the vice president of the country's largest railroad and Hank Rearden is the founder and operator of the best steel company in the nation. Rand chronicles their heroic tribulations as the world slowly turns against creative thinking, self-efficacy, and the can-do attitude (the ideals that Rand believes best embody the capitalist spirit). They battle their way through rank upon rank of sniveling bureaucrats (one of these is named Wesley Mouch, quite possibly the most loathsome name since Dickens penned the fateful letters: Uriah Heep) only to be confounded at every turn by some unknown force. Someone or something is taking the "will" or "spark" out of the world and our two protagonists try desperately to keep their companies afloat and discover the identity of this mysterious phenomenon. Rand's writing and storytelling are fantastic, but her philosophical points are frequently heavy handed. I never finished Atlas Shrugged (I stand snagged at around page 750), simply because I feel as though I get the point its author is trying to make: hard work and caring only for yourself can be noble qualities. I do vaguely wonder if anything near the book's end will present a new idea or argument, but my bet is that this is not the case. 


Since today is a One Piece day, I shall present another villain from Eiichiro Oda's marvelous series: Marshall D. Teach, otherwise known as the pirate Blackbeard.

Blackbeard is the quintessential pirate in Oda's series and his heart bares the same color as his facial hair. He carries three pistols and a bottle of rum on him at all times, likes to wax philosophical about the powers of fate and seizing the moment and belts out laughs with a malicious, "Zehahahaha!". Teach became close companions with a crew of pirates and eventually killed one of them after more than a decade of friendship just to fulfill his mad plan for world domination. As a result, he gained possession of the Yami Yami no Mi (the Darkness Fruit) giving him all the powers of a black hole. His rap sheet also includes swindling the World Government, inciting murderous riots, and breaking several fiends out of maximum security prison. Recently with the aid of his dastardly crew he managed to take down Whitebeard (the world's strongest man and a truly noble privateer) with a cowardly attack on the wounded and aged pirate, gaining the power of the Gura Gura no Mi (the Earthquake Fruit) in the process. He now reeks havoc across the seas as he searches for the greatest of all treasures, One Piece.