this is what you shall do

a Walt Whitman poem that one of my college professors had taped to the side of his desk, the side that faced the chair students would sit in when they came to see him. I think about it every so often, sometimes it makes me feel bad about myself, sometimes it makes me feel better.

This is what you shall do:

love the earth and sun, and animals,

despise riches,

give alms to every one that asks,

stand up for the stupid and crazy,

devote your income and labor to others,

hate tyrants,

argue not concerning God,

have patience and indulgence towards the people,

take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men,

go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers of families.

Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life:

re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books,

and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

quotes of the day

"Don't be seduced by the precision of the numbers!"
~ guest instructor in my toxics use reduction planning course. He said this on three separate occasions during a single day of class. The quote was also prominently featured in the "Internal Rate of Return" slide of his power point presentation. The "numbers" in question include such things as "incremental cash flow," "net present value," "time value of money," and "risk-adjusted value," none of which has ever made me feel particularly seduced, no matter how precise. But the instructor's vehemence on this matter made me think that he had, possibly on more than one occasion, been seduced by the precision of the numbers, and maybe I should be careful. I've never been seduced by the precision of a number before, but I imagine if I did, I'd feel really dirty afterwards.

"Osama bin Laden has a John Edwards bumper sticker on his cave wall."
~ Bill O'Reilly. I can't even get into this one, just wanted to share it.

"I'm having surgery on my arm next week. So I'm just waiting to hear if they got that stuff in Guadalajara."
~ a guy at work, talking on the phone while I eavesdropped furiously, hoping to hear that someone I know is trafficking drugs, or even just getting some for himself. Much to my dismay it turns out he was talking about something totally boring. He's having arm surgery, so he can't go down to Guadalajara to do a lead-free manufacturing workshop that he's coordinating, but he's waiting to hear if they got the solder and parts for the demonstration. No office gossip, no fascinating shenanigans. Dammit.

"Let's make this a plagiarism-free year!"
~ graduate coordinator in an email explaining my program's plagiarism policy. This one really needs no explanation. Oh no, wait, maybe it does, considering the amount of students in my program who worked incessantly over the past two years to make my life a living hell, plagiarizing for fun and profit.

i just met my high school self, and it was depressing

lately I've had delusions of grandeur involving me writing a lengthy blog post that encompasses all the stuff that's been going on for the past few weeks. that's not going to happen, and I'm in a hurry to share this gem I just found upon rediscovering my TI-86 (more later on why I've been forced to rediscover it...)

:yO.ANN.YOU.SHOULD.LI
KE.USE.YOUR.BRAIN.MOR
E.AND.YOUR.TI-86.LESS
...AND.THE.ONLY.REASO
N.YOU.BEAT.ME.ON.THE.
COMBINED.SAT.IS.CAUSE
.I.HAD.SOME.IMPORTANT
.SHIT.ON.MY.MIND...

I thought that was just hilarious, for the obvious reason (it's ridiculous) but also because the "use your brain more comment" was painfully true. A good 50% of the time I spent in high school chemistry and math classes was wasted in that manner, writing programs back and forth on graphing calculators. Another 25% was spent playing Tetris on the calculator. And for the final 25% of class time, I would make other programs with all the formulas and definitions that might be on the exam, e.g.:

ph=-log h+
log= -log oh-
H+=antilog(-ph)
ph+poh=14
kw=h+*oh-=1.0*10^-14
pH=pKa+log (bs/ac)

WHAT? I have no idea what ANY of that means. Antilog? Am I on crazy pills here? I feel like I'm on crazy pills here.

In college the TI-86 slept for the first three years, then I busted it out again for the single solitary science class I took to fulfill the gen ed requirements. I should have taken geology or "forensic biology" or one of those other blatantly easy courses that humanities majors took to fulfill the requirement while maintaining GPA. But I had a crappy GPA anyways, and my roommate and I thought it would be FUN to take a mechanical engineering class instead, mainly because it was twice a week in the afternoon, instead of three times a week in the morning like most science classes. We thought this would allow us to continue our debaucherous lifestyle by night while learning cool stuff about airplanes by day. HA. That was among the top five mistakes of my college career, and that's really saying a lot.

Anyways, the class was a disaster, but the subject matter provided a lot of good fodder for immature jokes about "thrust," "yaw" and "skin friction." In the TI-86 I found a ton of haiku we wrote, mostly involving the professor and the TA "inducing drag" on each other, and some junk like this:

:flaps incr camber an
d lift. roll ailerons
pitch tail chg dir
:yaw rudder
:elevator horistab
:vrot is tang to blad

WHAT? All of this was kind of fun to find again after all these years, but in a way it's extreeeemely depressing. I mean, I was writing all this in the calculator so I wouldn't have to actually "learn" it, but I did "know," albeit in the most rudimentary sense, what I was talking about. That's right, there was a time in my life when I had some concept of sine and cosine, and just a few years later I actually understood (kind of) how an airplane stayed in the air. These days, if it weren't for the many chemistry textbooks that live on my staircase, I couldn't even tell you the difference between an acid and a base.

I guess it's all relative, because back then I couldn't have told you how to say "nail polish remover contains acetone" in Spanish. I also didn't know the mortality rate of the Lowell mill girls, or the historical trajectory of computer and electronic component manufacturing employment in Essex County. But do any of those things actually matter?

I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm spreading myself too thin over the years. Let me put it this way - I started nursery school when I was four years old. I'm now almost 26, which means I've been in school (in some capacity) for 22 consecutive years. Yet by some miracle, I'm still not an expert, or anything close to that, on any one thing. You know, that whole "little of everything and all of nothing" thing? Blech. I've learned and forgotten more information than I can fathom, probably due to the fact that I'm constantly switching gears, or the fact that I have the memory of a goldfish. Either way, the other depressing result of this is that I'm basically unqualified for any job that I might actually want.

(Yes, I have stopped "wanting" my current job.)

green journalism

I heard a story on NPR about greenwashing, the long-time bane of my existence. it almost made me want to start writing some thesis again. but anyways, one of the commentators was talking about "green journalism," and it made me think of this piece I read a long time ago by Jack Shafer, editor at Slate:

Often as sensationalistic as its yellow predecessor, green journalism tends to appeal to our emotions, exploit our fears, and pander to our vanity. It places a political agenda in front of the quest for journalistic truth and in its most demagogic forms tolerates no criticism, branding all who question it as enemies of the people. (read more)