Archive for the ‘Inside Jokes’ Category

Movie seating optimization

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

My fellow XKCD nerd, Dylan, brought up this xkcd comic during a recent dinner. Then he challenged me to create an analogous chart for our dinner group, one that would maximize enjoyment based on degree of familiarity. The problem is a matter of scale. Our dinner group is too friendly. Everyone knows everyone.

The people included are:

Katie H Elizabeth Brennan Kelsey Dylan Zach K
Brooke Katie M Melissa Alex Chris Zach G Greg

I leave it to you to guess which one is which. Because it protects their privacy and because it is a petty power which I can hold over your heads.

my diagram

Of caffeine and on UDP

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

Since most of you know me personally, you’ve probably learned by now that I don’t usually dabble in psychoactive stimulants, but I got a little desperate last night. I had to finish a lab report for organic chem in my lab partner’s room. So I asked him for a Mountain Dew, my first in 5 months. I was mostly in it for the 45g of easily catabolizable sucrose. I didn’t expect chemistry keeping me up all night but that’s exactly what the 55 mg of caffeine did. If you saw the timestamp for the last post, you’ll have an idea of what I was doing two hours before I fell asleep.

After finishing the lab report at midnight, I scootered back to my hall, but I was still jumpy. My heartbeat was keeping me awake, both auditorily and pulmonarily, so I went down to the computer lab to print my lab report, which I did, in addition to finishing and publishing the previous post, checking Facebook, prelabbing for biology, and printing out all of my Anatomy lecture notes. I got back up to my room at 3:00 (My roommate was already asleep.) and tried to fall asleep again. But I didn’t, so I resolved to finish my handwritten work for the lab report. So I did. Then I tried to go back to sleep at 4AM. But I didn’t, so I looked up the effects of caffeine on Wikipedia and deduced that the Dew I ingested at 11:35 must have exaggerated effects on me, a person of low tolerance and relatively little body mass. Then I read a Popular Science. I tried to study Biology but my brain was going too fast. I was dropping packets left and right. I was on UDP.

Sidenote: You can make up the name of an imaginary drug by taking a fairy tale creature and appending some random noun. Like Leprechaun hats or Gnome crackers or Unicorn Data Peppers.

I went to bed at 5:00AM after five and a half hours of unexpected stimulation.

I woke up at 7:26, which is terrible considering my 7:30 Bio Lab a kilometer away. I arrived at 7:37 thanks to me laying out my clothes for the rest of the week and prepping my backpack during the course of the night. The rest of the class was just finishing a video on sea urchin sex. Then we got to see the process in person as our TA walked around and added sperm to our oocytes. (Awkward!)

As all we had to do was draw what we saw, the lab finished early. I was really sleepy when I got back to Harrison at 8:30. I tried to sleep. But I didn’t, so I caught up on the lives of friends from around the world. Then I went to Ochem lecture. Then I went back to Harrison where I started writing this. Then I went to lunch with some friends. Then I went to Econ at 2:30. I got home at 3:40. I crawled into bed at 4PM and wanted to sleep forever. But I didn’t. Because I had work at 5:30.