It's not often you get a day that lasts 25 hours. Despite the rain, I think I managed to enjoy mine pretty well. Most of it was spent huddled indoors swathed in blankets and tales of the Dragon Reborn. I really wish we had a fireplace; when you factor in the smoldering scent of the smoke, the toasty, somnolentic glow and the zenlike, crackling dance of the flames, it's clear that few things can contribute as astronomically to a room's atmosphere as a fireplace.


Given my distinct lack of such a item (and my town's strangely fanatic stance in that vein), I turned to the next best thing: my kitchen. First I prepared enough cinnamon muffins for a weekworth of breakfasts. Next I used the combined powers of tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, black olives, spicy italian sausage and just enough garlic in a pan that was surely meant to hold but half the deliciousness that was greedily prepared within it this day. The sauce may even outlast the muffins; yet ironically it is the more delicious of the two that will surely be devoured from the face of the earth first, so whichever remains will earn only the shame of defeat for its endurance.


I declare that the time is right to unleash the villainous Kefka Palazzo!

Archfiend of Final Fantasy VI, Kefka is like other mad villains in that he sets out to destroy the world. Kefka is quite unlike these others in that he succeeds. At first just a foolish pest and oft-ignored advisor to Emperor Gestahl, his absolute lack of morals, insane fixation with magic and sheer bloodthirst slowly gain him influence within the war-mongering Empire. Kefka's insanity should not be understated, and is best evidenced by his bone-chilling laugh. He tortures his enemies, kills his friends, poisons noble warriors, incinerates towns and lords over the shattered world like a god. Kefka is absolutely one of the greatest game villains of all time.

A fair portion of the quantum mechanics homework was done in today, which means the beginning of this week should prove a little more laid back than usual. It (or rather, we) will be even more laid back if my roommate and I can snag the leather furniture set we saw on craigslist. I will probably need all this extra time and comfort to dispatch with the penultimate installment of the Wheel of Time series.

The Wheel of Time is one of the three ongoing fantasy series that I have invested time into, and it is by far the most expansive and I mean that in every sense of the adjective. I am a huge fan of the immense scale, vivid characterization and positively dense worldbuilding that the Wheel of Time brings to the table. The thing is, Robert Jordan's series reminds people why volumes are named after the physical concept of taking up space. If you are unfamiliar with the series, realize that by adding more characters when he should have been killing old ones off and contorting subplot upon subplot into his tale the author finally realized (after 11 novels each spanning about 800 pages) that he had written himself into too big a hole to write out of and did the only reasonable thing he could given the circumstances--he died. My friend Andrew and I immediately took up the task of untangling this literary Gordian Knot (invoking a stratagem very similar to that of Alexander the Great), but our version gained little notoriety and was quickly forgotten. The task (and Jordan's notes) were then passed onto a young, superproductive fantasy author named Brandon Sanderson. After adding two books to the collection, he now claims that the series will be completed with but a single additional tome, and I shall weigh in on this affirmation once I have finished The Towers of Midnight. I have started treading into the publication, but I will say no more for the sake of those who are in a similar position.

In case you are interested the other two series that I mentioned, they are The Song of Ice and Fire and The Kingkiller Chronicle. I assure you that I have strong opinions about both (tirades stick in my throat even now), but the time to share them has not yet come.

I would end myself if I allowed this post to conclude without mentioning the king of the fantasy genre: J.R.R. Tolkien. His Lord of the Rings series (in cassette tape form) kept me sane across great stretches of America on my way west. I shall probably be bringing you many of his villains in the future, but for now, face Smaug!

Main antagonist of The Hobbit, Smaug the Magnificent is known by many other, even more grandiose epithets, and for good reason. One of the last great dragons of Middle Earth, Smaug rests atop a treasure who vastness is beyond imagining. For centuries dwarves mined, wrought, forged and gathered the jewels, gold and wealth of the Lonely Mountain, and it was all stolen from them in an instant when the mighty red dragon descended upon their horde, claiming it as his own and slaughtering all who would deny his stake. His chief powers are flight (stealthy gliding if need be), an armored body that is beyond the weapons of man, a breath that is unto the sun's inferno and the guile and cunning that comes only from plotting evil for ages unending. He also possesses a fondness for riddles and revenge. He is laid low only through the combined powers of a quick thinking hobbit, a helpful thrush, a man of old blood and a legendary arrow.

Graduate students will do anything for free pizza, and I am no exception. Today I sat through a distinctly uninteresting discussion about time management just for a few slices of saucy sustenance. Luckily I was in the best possible company; Vlad, the first year graduate student from Russia was to my left, and he is the most sincere person I know. After about thirty minutes he turned to me and in his thick and uncompromising Russian dialect said, "I do not understand this American thing; everyone come in room and talk about feelings. Is useless. Where is pizza?" Well said, Vlad, well said.

I managed to quickly complete an assignment on Fourier series this morning, so that won't be bogging down my weekend, at least. For those who don't know, Fourier analysis is actually a very interesting (and unbelievably useful) tactic wherein on can reconstruct functions as sums of sines and cosines. Looking at the image below, first one, then two, then three and lastly four sine functions (in red) are added together to approximate the step function (in blue). An infinite series of sines will actually perfectly mirror the original function. This step function was one of those I did, by the way.

I also accidently set a variable equal to an integral whose limits of integration were functions of that same variable. This caused mass confusion and lots of transcendental solutions. Mayhaps I shall ask the renowned solver of PDEs, Dr. Philbert Science if he has seen the like before.

I suppose I should also mention the door to my office. You see, my office has two doors (both metallic), one leading into the Physics building, one leading to a nice, outdoor porch sort of area. Either can be used to access the room. There is, unfortunately, a problem. There is direct sunlight on the outdoor exit from approximately 8:30am to around 11:00am this time of year. This sunlight causes the metal of the door to expand and on clear days from about 9:45 to 11:30 in the morning, the door expands to the extent that it cannot be closed. Soon I intend to deal with this imminent security threat. Soon.

Onto more villainous paths! Today I present the world's most evil lawyer: Manfred Von Karma!

A truly sinister prosecutor with a perfect record of convictions, Von Karma is the second of the villains that I have presented to sport a cravat. When it comes to law, he is the best of the best. His objections strike fear into defense attorneys and judges alike, and he will stop at nothing to get a Guilty verdict. His desire for perfection is so great that goes to absurd lengths to coverup the blackmails, forgeries, assaults, and even murders that he commits to get his way. It takes a stroke of genius (and a metal detector!) from the rookie Phoenix Wright to bring his empire crumbling down upon him.

Racquet sports are some of my favorite due to their quick pace requiring rapid reactions and intuitive play. I find racquetball to be particularly enjoyable because of the extra walls. One usually thinks of walls as limiting influences, yet counterintuitively they substantially increase the number of different shots and positions that a game can evolve into. You simply won't find as much crazy play in the wide open courts that tennis, ping pong or badminton provide. In other words, to play inside a box you need to think outside the box. 

My friends and I have invented a three player variant of the sport that is currently called, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!" (for example: this). I say "currently" since the rules of the game mandate that the champion choose a new moniker for the sport. In any case, it's packed full of "Allys", "Oops", overly convoluted scoring systems and a victory condition that frequently involves double, triple and at worst (best) quadruple jeopardy.

I shall not bandy nor mince in response to alleged contradictions declared herein, oh no. I shall simply OBJECT! As far as I know, nothing prevents an artist from having multiple muses, nor a does a professor cry out in aghast disbelief if a paper possess two sources. I simply wished that Neville's metallic sheen not be tarnished by this slapdash amalgamate that so often tries to pass itself off as coherence.


As to my life today, it seems as though little of consequence occurred. Yet, perhaps hindsight shall prove otherwise. For now, I am slightly sick, but such nuisances are passing, especially with the aid of eight grapefruits.

As to today's villain: I promised explosions, but I shall deliver so much more. Detonations are commonplace in the world of James Bond, but Goldeneye uses these expanding spheres of inferno as building blocks to create the wondrous intricacies of intrigue, terrorism, betrayal, vengeance, and furnishes it all in spades. Welcome to our programme, Alec Trevelyan. 

Former partner of Bond himself, Trevelyan is presumed dead after a mission in Russia goes horribly wrong. As it turns out, 006 survives and seeks revenge against M16 for his fate. Alec's hideous betrayal leaves the British Intelligence agency in a terrible position; one of its own top spies (capable of matching Bond suave for suave and debonair for debonair), with all the confidential information in the world at his disposal, now has it in for England. After much thought, he takes over the Russian underworld and conservatively settles on setting off the Soviet-era super-weapon Goldeneye on London. Of course, it all ends with 006 and 007 going at it, mano-y-mano, with the fate of the free world in the balance. "For England, James?"

My preferred kind of poetry, hands down, is epic poetry, and this is due mostly in part to the literary devices that it employs. You may have noticed that my first blog post invoked a muse. This was, as you now know, a homage to the likes of Homer, Virgil, and Dante. My favorite rhetorical device however, remains the epic simile; a predisposition for logic and mathematics (which, when you really get down to it, are mostly about drawing parallels and looking for patterns), probably factors heavily into this selection. But what sets the epic simile apart from your run-of-the-mill, garden-variety, salt-of-the-earth, dime-a-dozen, not-worth-writing-home-about, humdrum standard simile? Volume and depth. A terrible poet might pen, thumb and forefinger on chin, eyes speculatively upraised, mouth carefully arranged into a faux-thoughtful grin as he shakes his head back and forth, as if in disbelief at his own genius, "my love is as big as a mountain." John Milton, caring not at all about his demeanor, scrawled that Satan was:

"...in bulk as huge 

As whom the fables name of monstrous size, 

Titanian, or Earth-Born, that warr'd on Jove, 

Briarios or Tyhpon, whom the den 

By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast 

Leviathan, which God of all his works 

Created hugest that swim th' ocean stream: 

Him haply slumbring on the Norway foam 

The pilot of some small night-founder'd skiff, 

Deeming some island, oft, as sea-men tell, 

With fixed anchor in his skaly rind 

Moors by his side under the lee, while night 

Invests the sea, and wished morn delayes: 

So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay..."

Ahhh...that's the stuff. Of course, analysis can always go on--sometimes the most interesting part about an epic simile is where it fails to apply. 


Today was a day of tests, of challenge. Some problems tend to get a lot more interesting if you view your struggle with them as a personal duel, scoring points as you drive relentlessly towards the truth. I was caught off guard by a momentum transform, but otherwise things went as well as can be expected. The homework grind now begins anew. And always remember: "Divide by two but once, lest you divide by four."


Groceries will have to be purchased tomorrow, and the grand opening of a Trader Joe's Market will hopefully facilitate this need. Also, why do people rail so frequently and vociferously against the passive voice? They are jealous, that's why.


To compensate for all this artsy-fartsiness, I vow that tomorrow's villain will be from an action movie (that is to say, he will have caused actual explosions), but my policies being stalwartly against the famed bait-and-switch, today's villain of choice shall be Milton's Satan:

Satan is an extremely interesting character for far more than his already-mentioned size. Cast down from heaven for revolting against God's omnipotence, he acts (oddly) as the epic's hero for the first few books of Paradise Lost. His soliloquies about revenge and repentance are especially engaging. Satan's most frightening ability is his fantastic charisma, with which he, in Saruman-esque fashion, manages to convince a good portion of heaven's angels that things would be better than their current perfection if he was in charge and later rebamboozle his army out of justifiably despising him for earning them eternal damnation into hailing him as a hero. 

For those unaware, I'm a pretty big fan of manga (and for those who still derive little meaning from this sentence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga). I follow several series that are published weekly, others that are updated with painfully little frequency and still others that are rarely translated. My favorite is Eiichiro Oda's fantasy-adventure masterwork One Piece. The chapter that was released today contained this bombshell (worry not, I expect most of you reading this are far from the blast radius):

I teach a lab section every Tuesday and Thursday, which I find to be enjoyable and sometimes pretty useful for my comprehension of basic physics (in particular, the recent refresher on principle rays was illuminating). I had originally intended to compile documentation on the worst measurements that my students would manage to produce on the acceleration due to gravity, but my plans were quickly thwarted when I was assigned to teach the third quarter of introductory physics; gravity is old hat to these weathered veterans of Newton's Laws. Of course, this merely delays my schemes, as I have already requested to teach the second quarter next time; providing counterexamples that involve the students not flying off into space and not being compressed into a millimeter thin paste is an inevitability. 


Tomorrow will truly be a day of reckoning; consecutive midterms will test my mind and my metal. I eagerly await the challenge.


Since I have now broached the subject of One Piece, I would be rude to so quickly abandon it. When a new chapter is released, expect that I will post a character from the series. Hence the villain of this post will be none other than one of Oda's greatest antagonists, Crocodile.

This cigar smoking, hook wielding, coat and cravat wearing pirate is, unbelievably, even more dangerous than he looks. Known as Mr. Zero and the head of a secret organization called Baroque Works, Crocodile's malevolence cannot be overstated. With conspiracy, theft and murder as his tools, he attempted to fool a country into overthrowing its government so that he could gain control of one of the world's most devastating weapons. Even supposing one can counteract his labyrinthine plots, stopping him physically presents an even greater challenge. Crocodile possesses the powers of the Suna Suna no Mi (Sand Sand Fruit) meaning not only that his entire body is actually composed of sand making him nearly impossible to damage, but worse that he can manipulate the material at his will, giving him the fearsome powers of sandstorms, flight and instantaneous desiccation. After being defeated he declined to escape prison at first citing that "he didn't feel like it," and deigned to leave his cell only because wanted to try to kill the strongest man in the world. Yeah.

Mondays are heavy class days. The inherent total immersion does wonders for comprehension, but being tossed (in a semi-conscious Monday morning haze, mind you) from antisymmetric quantum waveforms to torque-free body-frame inertial tensors to tridiagonal vibration matrices leaves one a tad rumpled.

My students face another quiz tomorrow, presumably on geometric optics and electrical point charges, packing my office hours with bodies that were themselves jammed with questions, causing me to arrive late to a rather dense discussion on the makeup of spacetime. According to what I witnessed of the talk though, my tardiness could also be attributed to random distortions in the fabric of reality, so I suspect the department will let it slide.  


The Giants have won the World Series! My town's primary celebration methodology seems to involve shouting and pyrotechnics. I can only imagine what it's like a scant tens of miles to the west... 


As for today's villain, I default to British Fiction. I present the king of London's kingpins and one of the world's most notorious criminal masterminds, Professor Moriarty.

Any who can claim to rival the deductive powers of fiction's most intelligent and famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, to the point of being his archnemesis clearly are to be reckoned with. A master of disguise and feints-within-feints, Doyle also writes that the Professor is actually a student of mathematics who penned a thesis on the Binomiel Theorem. Whatever his upbringing, Moriarty is rotten to the core and acts as a sort of invisible mafioso in the London Underground during the series; in fact, it takes years for Holmes to recognize that there is a subtle directing force behind much of England's crime. Matching Holmes not just in wit, but strength of body as well, Professor Moriarty actually manages to ambush and kill the detective sending them both plummeting to a watery grave at the conclusion of a climatic battle at the top of a waterfall. Doyle revives Holmes (in classic comic book fashion) years later to continue the series and appease his fans.