I taught my final lab of the quarter today, though to be candid it was less of a class and more of a gluttonous smorgasbord with a few equations thrown in for good measure. You've done well when your students rejoice in being granted the privilege to bring you food. I still need to run a final exam review session and help grade the final, but overall my teaching task is nearly complete. I came strong out of the gate on homework this week too, so I should be able to start studying for my finals in the next few days. The first step will involve horrific abuse of my free printing rights.

Anyone giving serious thought to launching a lightning-based attack against me should reconsider due to certain acquisitions I may or may not have made. Just a fair warning.

One of my friends uses the "you got the thing!" sound effect from Zelda for his text message tone. Although I have many such tales, I will take a moment to spin the yarn concerning my favorite story whose main premise is Zelda-based sound effects, so gather 'round the crackling flame and listen now to the Legend of Kris. To call my high school Biology class extremely dull would take not a good Samaritan, but the greatest of Samaritans. Watching paint dry on CSPAN would have been more interesting, and the class was more somniferous than a flock of sheep counting each other on a warm, summer afternoon. Anyway, Kris turned to the handheld version of Link to the Past to alleviate these woes, and spent much of a few weeks playing through the excellent game. Just before a particularly soul-crushing lecture, he informed me that he would be facing down the final boss within minutes. Sure enough, towards the end of class, he had felled the beast. To notify me of his valiant feat he attempted to turn the volume on a tiny fraction but by some trick of fate and within the dead silence that only manifests itself during a lull in the most tragically stale of lectures, he accidently cranked the sound to its maximum limit and let blare this celebratory fanfare for all to hear. It was glorious.

Speaking of glory, multiplying matrices can be a truly magical experience, especially when the result is produced within the gaping maw of a mythical creature that was itself spawned from the hellfire of an erupting volcano (click to enlargify if you dare).

I will have more to say about Zelda and its musics when next I post, but I can't go much further without introducing its antagonist, the Great King of Evil, Ganondorf!

I told no lies about his awesome title, and Ganondorf easily lives up to it. The sworn foe of Link, this dark magician is always but a step away from dominating all of Hyrule, and his princess kidnapping powers are second in renown only to those of Bowser. His most famous incarnation is of course in immensely popular The Ocarina of Time (the awesome cinematic lasts until about 1:30, but you can check out the battle that follows if you want; note how all the Triforce holders are arrayed 50 seconds into the video!). For those keeping score at home, in that video Ganondorf not only played the organ in a malevolent manner (5 evil points) and swirled his cloak theatrically (5 evil points) but he also included the mark of a true villain: a booming and powerful laugh directed at the futility of the hero's struggles (15 evil points)! Note further that his lack of a fiendish mustache was easily countered by his blood-red, dagger-like eyebrows. I can also assure you that his menacing appearance has not diminished over time. Oh, and did I mention his propensity for transforming into giant monsters? Despite Link's best efforts, I suspect that Ganondorf will continue to be a thorn in the side of good for times long to come.

Perhaps never have I been so happy to see Thanksgiving come. While normally it acts as a simple holdover until Christmas, this year it was a blessed respite from the ongoing siege of physics work. The general mood about the department was so jovial about the holiday that it was difficult (and frankly nonsensical) not to join in. The only downside was that the usual desire for understanding was wholly replaced with a far baser yearning for completion. I shall see tomorrow if the determination gained from our turkey-stuffed intermission will be able to overpower the force that another impending holiday will surely exert.

My friend from Oregon paid a visit over Thanksgiving, and I will not hesitate to say that we managed to live the high life. We cooked up a storm on Thursday (leftovers still fill my fridge, but I must dispatch them quickly, lest they begin to linger, or worse yet, loom), surveyed the town on foot and watched a substantial number of movies including this homage to Sergio Leone and this Kafka adaptation. We also managed to fight our way through the storm-slick, gourd-colored leaves that littered the streets of downtown Davis to visit the area's best Sushi restaurant. Since our number was but two and we showed up early, we were able to take coveted places at the sushi bar itself, giving us constant access to the radiant carousel of piscine delights. My friend and I went our separate ways this morning (mine up the stairs and his up Interstate 101), each diving back into his own work.

I plan to purchase no more food until I return to the state in January, forcing me to deal with some of the more exotic and incongruous inhabitants of my pantries. I predict a positive outcome. What I do need to buy is something to read for my imminent plant trips.

The excellent storytelling of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure also managed to keep me company over the break. I now present the main villain of the series and one of the most evil personages you will ever meet: Dio Brando.

The events of Dio Brando's childhood are grim. He murdered his real father, used his superhuman charisma and intelligence to get adopted into the wealthy Joestar family and immediately proceeded to make a run at the inheritance by killing his new father and attempting to take the life of his new brother, Jonathan. The rest of his life is even more twisted. Dio abandons his humanity and becomes a vampire when he learns of the power it will bring, and he begins to delight in the slaughter of humans and the pain he can bring others. Before he can become too powerful his body is destroyed by Jonathan Joestar, but unbeknowst to his brother, Dio's head survives due to the supernatural regenerative powers innate to vampires. Catching Jonathan unawares years later, Dio decapitates his sibling and seizes his body, becoming whole once again. More than a century later Dio learns of the power of Stands, and uses his own (called The World and pictured behind him above), in his attempt to dominate the planet. His cunning, charisma and immense vampiric abilities now augmented with the power to stop time itself, his only obstacle is the great, great grandson of the murdered Jonathan Joestar, Jotaro Kujo. I have not yet finished the series, and I have reason to doubt that Dio's evil will be curtailed anytime soon.

So I stopped by the DMV today to get a California drivers license. You see, the state of California has a huge inferiority complex and constantly worries that you might like another state more than it. I now quote from the University of California Residency Regulations:

You must demonstrate your intention to make California your home by severing your residential ties with your former state of residence and establishing those ties with California.

Could they have chosen more aggressive and pathetic wording? It makes California sound like an insecure, vindictive woman who demands that you burn every object and expunge every memory that was part of your life before she came into it. But anyway, I passed the written test missing only the questions about alcohol (I have no idea which BACs are legal and what their respective penalties may be; I don't drink!). But seriously, every second in a DMV is a living nightmare within which the only escape from the ululating wail of infants (who are really only expressing how everyone feels at a DMV) is the incessant monotony of mechanically announced numbers that never quite seem to be your own. I would conclude by saying what I would like to do to the DMV, but it has already been done in a manner far exceeding any I could hope to match.

If you like Starcraft than you really must watch this video. In other gaming news, Nintendo has legally trademarked the declaration, "It's on like Donkey Kong," in a bold move that threatens those of you who, like me, can hardly avoid uttering that beautiful turn of phrase at the start of each new activity.

I am now done with all homework for the next week, so I will truly be enjoying Thanksgiving this year, especially given the incredible amount of tasty goods that magically arrived at my doorstep this morning. I can safely assume that my parents are the mysterious benefactor.

So we come to today's villain, an entire race of villains, in fact. They are the Vogons from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

I assure you that the picture is flattering. For the second time today I find myself in a position where what I need to say has already been conveyed to perfection. Here is Douglas Adam's description of the Vogons:

Vogons are one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry at you. 

That last line should be taken with grave seriousness.

Homework is blessedly ahead of schedule due to a consortium of titanic minds in the last few days in order to avoid working over Thanksgiving. Two-dimensional quantum harmonic oscillators, even when bringing magnetic fields and varying ladder operators to bear, stand little chance against an army of graduate students whose goal is to slack off next week. This is especially good since I will have company for the holiday, and we plan to cook up a storm.

I encountered a pretty good Phoenix Wright parody that other day that produced this glorious gem:

It seems as though wintery weather is finally attempting to make an incursion in to the Davis region, as highs in the 50s and rains are forecasted for the next several days. The blustery gusts that are blowing this system in right now are doing their best to finish clearing the trees of leaves, but I'd say half of them are still swarming with fall foliage. Luckily we have an Arc to protect us and ensure racquetball possibilities in the event of a downpour. 

I realized just recently that I had not yet provided any Disney villains for your enjoyment. I shall rectify this matter in this very paragraph. There are several who are worthy of mention, but one who stands towering above the rest. The Mistress of all Evil, Maleficent:

Her cunning is to be feared and her outrage at the smallest of slights is legendary. Scorned an invitation to a birthday party, Maleficent gets her revenge by enacting a vile curse upon the birthday girl, dooming her to sleep forever by pricking her finger on a spinning wheel. Despite an entire nations best efforts to destroy its strangely vast stock of spinning wheels, the witch's prediction comes true, and it is left to a prince to wake the sleeping beauty. Maleficent pulls out all the stops and famously calls upon all the powers of Hell that it might not be so. Her sorcery is mighty, but sadly she resides in a Disney movie, so the powers of truth and virtue are greater still and she is vanquished by the noble prince.

I have beaten EarthBound innumerable times and for reasons I shall describe, in countless different ways. In replaying this peerless classic, the depth of the experience comes firstly from the exquisite dialogue that is brimming with an astounding amount of truth about life and secondly from the two-pronged nostalgic assault spearheaded by the beautiful character sprites, towns and sceneries and reinforced by the brilliantly appropriate and engaging soundtrack. If I had to find a flaw in perfection, I would say that after scores of playthroughs, it is the gameplay itself that becomes the weakest link in this nigh-invincible chain. Yet who can blame it? I know of no other RPG that stands as invincible against the infinite and unyielding powers of time.

In order to rejuvenate my enjoyment of the gameplay, I often think of some additional challenge to take on in the course of saving the world. I have conquered EarthBound without making use of currency, while finding the rarest of obscure items, without dying, without using items, and most recently while toting a Teddy Bear though stormy seas, under mountains of lava, into my own mind and to the end of time itself. This type of challenge can only go so far though, and in addition to imposing trials on my in-game incarnation, I have also set my physical body to the task of beating the game in a single sitting (this takes anywhere from 15-25 hours depending on the course taken).

But how hard is it really to endure an enjoyable experience for that amount of time? I need a greater challenge, a true test of dedication, concentration and insanity. In this vein, I hereby announce my intention to complete EarthBound using only my feet.

Jumping randomly to the realm of mathematics (a treacherous domain indeed), I raise a question: have you ever wanted a function that is completely useless? A function that bears no physical significance whatsoever and whose only purpose is be shoved in people's faces as a counterexample to claims that are correct in every sense barring minute technicality? I provide for you now the villain of this post: the Dirichlet Function:

After enduring the most conventional of villains in the last post, I decided that we needed a change of pace. I reason that most people view math as their enemy anyway, so why not name a particular mathematical construct as my daily fiend? The above graphic indicates that the Dirichlet function maps rational numbers (a number that can be written as an integer divided by an integer) to 1 and irrational numbers to 0. Sadly the distribution of rational numbers and irrational numbers on the number line is flat-out horrendous and the function's insidious creator took full advantage of this fact when defining this horrid atrocity. A graph of the function would look pleasant enough, with seemingly solid, horizontal lines along y = 0 and y = 1. However, zooming in infinitely close would reveal the true terror lurking within those innocent lines: a random smattering of dots scorning symmetry, continuity and efficacy.

These recent days were dark times. In those gloomy hours the world seemed to spin by in a blur while we sat, immobilized by thought, entrapped by incalculable equations and unequal calculations. Food was spurned, games unplayed, books unread, even sleep was sacrificed and the juxtaposition of the words "free" and "time" had long lost all meaning. But arise now form your squalor my people! Lament no more! Rejoice, ye physicsfolk, for homeworks of all varieties lie vanquished at our feet! Our labors were not in vain, we have gained courage, we have gained valor, we have gained understanding. Exalt in joyous cry and let the feasting and revelry commence! Know too that our finest hour yet awaits us, and that this was merely the beginning.

*Let not that first tangle of words concern you overly much. Sometimes the sweet spice of victory is needed to season a particularly bland day.

I decided yesterday that it would be really fun to teach a class on graph theory. I ponder how this can be accomplished even now.

Since I really want to sleep for an appreciable amount of time tonight, I will cut to the chase...the car chase. For I now present Dick Dastardly!

A villain whose upper lip houses more conniving and deviousness than most criminals ever dare aspire to, Dick Dastardly is the driver of the Mean Machine in the excellent cartoon Wacky Races. Dastardly's only strategy in the races to cheat, cheat, cheat! The more overly complicated the ploy, the better. Unfortunately for our villain, the show attempted to teach kids good morals, so all his treachery was for naught, either proving totally ineffective or more often than not backfiring completely. Of course, Dastardly's main failing was his lack of savvy...his dearth of cunning...his...alright, he was pretty much an idiot. Despite frequently blasting ahead of the other racers, certain to achieve victory, he would invariably stop and spend minutes setting up ludicrously elaborates traps. Despite being the only racer never to win, place or even show, Dastardly villainous ways were still the highlight of this classic cartoon.

Surely didn't expect me to update my blog every day, did you? Those first 13 consecutive contributions were but a statistical anomaly whose magnitude can only determined to a decent degree of accuracy given more data. It is not to this end that I shall continue to provide entries, but my posts will, nonetheless, help the cause.

I am proud to announce that I have finished the second to last book in the Wheel of Time series. Things do, miraculously enough, seem to be heading for some sort of conclusion. Parties have gathered, tables are set, and while there are still countless threads of the Pattern hanging loose, many dangling yarns have finally been woven back in or, better yet, snipped right off. I have talked at great length already with those who also have read the book, so I won't bore the rest of you with any details. I will note though that the Wheel of Time has the very interesting feature of being one of the only works I know of whose scope so smoothly (and so drastically) expands as the series progresses. My friend likened it to a Katamari. 

I am not as proud to announce that, as a result, I am now a bit behind in my coursework for the coming week. Things are going to be a little ugly until Thursday. But its not like I have anything else to do now! I'll probably try to squeeze in some of this if I can. This first two parts were excellent, and you should expect a villainous profile on Dio Brando in the future.

The weather here has been fantastic lately. The blustery air is fresh and dry, the temperatures range from the high, comfortable 60s in the afternoon to to chilly 40s at night. I can see why people employ the word crisp for such situations; the syllable's onomatopoeic qualities alone make its pronunciation a palpable pleasure.

But enough banter. I know what you're all really here for: the King of Koopas, Lord Bowser!

Though it would kill him to admit it, it is due mostly to the notoriety of a certain plumber that Bowser is almost certainly the most famous of all video game villains. He has come quite a long way from his humble beginnings (this will likely remain my favorite incarnation), but his go-to crime hasn't changed: no one can match His Grunginess when it comes to kidnapping Princess Peach. In recent years Bowser's character has been imbued with a dash of humor (in the villainous comedic relief vein) and he has even teamed up with Mario on occasion, but don't let that fool you, the big guy is still quite capable of getting serious when the need arises. He commands countless minions, his fortress-like body make him nearly impossible to damage and his ability to breath fire is nothing to scoff at (unless of course you enjoy scoffing with a melted face). He isn't the most clever fellow, and for a villain he isn't particularly evil either, but when it comes to brute force you really should just get out of Bowser's way!

Expressing today's date in the concise numerical method preferred here in the US, we come up with the interesting quantity: 11/11/10. Note that I have only utilized the numerals zero and one in my enumeration, hence I will call today's date and others like it a binary date. Note that yesterday was 11/10/10, also a binary date! So why did I wait until now to mention it? Because this is the last such date this year (you should be able to convince yourself of this)! Perhaps we can ask more about binary dates, like how many were there this year? Nine in fact:
January 1st, 10th, and 11th; October 1st, 10th and 11th; and November 1st, 10th and today. I have marked them on a chart of the 365 days in this year:

But of course this plot does not hold for every year. We conclude that a year will have nine binary days if its last two digits are 00, 01, 10 or 11 and that it will have none otherwise. I have plotted such years in a century below:

Hence, each century will have but 4*9 = 36 binary days. Next year in particular make sure to treasure each such day, as one year from now will be the last binary day for more than 88 years! I think some interesting math could be done with a generalized version of this problem (why single out 0 and 1?) or better yet the frequency of more complex days, such as those containing only one digit (like March 3rd, 2033, written 3/3/33) or those that have strictly increasing numerals. 

My roommate and I hosted a party last night for fellow first year physics students. Those who have never been in such a group before cannot begin to imagine the sheer madness of our conversations. 

Although works begins to beckon again, having Veteran's Day off has given me time to race past the halfway point in my reading marathon. Racquetball too is planned for later tonight. 

It's time now for the ever popular villain of the post to rear his ugly head! Prostrate your feeble mortal bodies before the might of Ommadon!

Archvillain of the movie Flight of Dragons, the Red Wizard Ommadon represents the evil that infests the human heart. Voiced by the magnificent James Earl Jones (who we heard from earlier this week), his very presence exudes ruthless malevolence. I have high standards for villainous laughs, but the depth of Ommadon's mocking guffaws has been known to bring even the strongest of heroes to their knees. He incorporates this weapon into several fantastic speeches in the movie, each more chilling than the last. Of course, oratory is but the least of his powers. From the top of his skull-capped mountainous lair Ommadon exerts his vile will upon the world through his mastery of sorcery and dominance over the world's dragons, commanding the fiery creatures to battle at his whim. "I...am the World...and the World...is Ommadon."

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.

In Lab today my students were all finding the deflections on cathode rays caused by an external magnetic field that were itself produced by current traveling first through a wire and later through a solenoid. Our lecture series teaches several convoluted ways of determining the directions of each of these quantities through variations on the ever-popular right hand rule. Hence my students spent about an hour curling and contorting their digits in ascendingly ridiculous fashion, only to theorize answers that exactly contradicted their experiments because they forgot that the electrons comprising the cathode rays are negatively charged. One of the better, "Oooooooohhhhh, now I get it" moments so far. I should also mention that I like my students; you see, they never fail to provide me assorted cookies, brownies and other pastries during class. It's possible that I provoked a bribery arms race--the most delicious of competitions.

I spent a lot of time reading again today and managed to play some racquetball last night, and I will now have to pay for these languorous pursuits by finishing up my quantum mechanics homework. Hence, I shall jump to the conclusion of the post and introduce the Kerrigan.

Primary antagonist of the Starcraft universe following the death of the Overmind, Kerrigan was human before being corrupted by the hideous powers of the Zerg Swarm. The newly crowned Queen of Blades turns on those she once loved, fooling several parties into trusting her multiple times, only to backstab them all in the end and kill several of Starcraft's protagonists. It's extremely unclear why anyone ever trusts her. I haven't had time to journey through Starcraft II's campaign yet, but I can be sure that Kerrigan is out there scheming and murdering, all for her own benefit.

There is little to report today. I finally made a purchase from the new Trader Joe's Market that moved into town; $3 for a large amount of Soy Sauce and no tax? Sounds good to me. The fried rice it helped to produce was excellent. 


Wheel of Time reading goes well, but I keep faltering either when I come to a particularly good part I want to savor, or when I reach an excruciatingly annoying character's point of view. One of the most interesting notions to ponder when reading certain sections is, "how long would Robert Jordan have lingered on this plot point or scene?" Several times now I have laughed aloud at how quickly a situation developed or blew over completely when earlier in the series the characters may have spent hundreds of pages pondering the scenario. 


Those who know me may know about my general dissatisfaction with our calendar. It's unsymmetric, unsightly and downright boring. Recently I came up with a plan that would revolutionize calendography across the globe! Firstly, we only need 10 months; 12 is just a pain. The months will be slightly longer, and should be composed of 10 day weeks; seven weekdays followed by three weekend days. This is the key though: the months will have no holidays. Instead the holidays will be placed between the months, and shall generally be a few days in length. So after December we will have days whose only labels are Christmas 1, Christmas 2, etc...I think it would be a fun plan and makes holidays a lot more intensive and fun. I barely notice Halloween this year, for example, but if it constituted three or so days smashed between a few months, it would be a great festival. 


It's time for another movie villain, and why not aim high? If you don't know this guy, than you have no business on this blog. Here he is ladies and gents: Darth Vader.

Still one of the most feared villains in all the galaxies, Darth Vader is one of the greatest antagonists to ever thwart a hero. He wields a deadly lightsaber, flies a modified tie fighter, is capable of choking incompetent officers from across the room and rocks some fantastic theme music. His characteristic breathing inspires doom in all who hear it, and his malevolence can truly be felt through his voice. Vader turning out to be Luke's father was a fantastic twist, and the Sith Lord's eventual (and unprecedented) return from the Dark Side resulting in the Emperor's death is a moment to behold. It's a good thing no one ever made any prequel movies that may have forever sullied the reputation of an excellent series forevermore. Yessir, that would have been a disaster.

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.