What in hell?

Sept. 11 was a stunning blow to multiculturalism. The attacks showed that we have enemies who hate us because they hate both our principles and our practices. They despise the way we live not because we do not live up to our principles of freedom, democracy, and toleration, but because we do. They do not think we are multicultural; they believe we have one culture, and they mean to do away with it.

9/11 showed us no such thing. Bush and co claimed, simplistically, that "hating our freedom" was the motivation for the attack, and citing the attack as proof of that statement is some pretty circular logic.

"They hate us for our freedom" is maybe the 9/11 myth that infuriates me the most, probably because it's such a pervasive piece of neocon stupidity. Our options don't inspire suidide attacks; our actions might. Not that either one could ever begin to justify the mass slaughter that we experienced on That Day, but do we really serve ourselves or our country by mischaracterizing the attackers' motivations?

"They hate us for our freedom" is such an utterly crap statement that I have a hard time believing it made it out of the press corps. I suppose it's a good thing all those anti-smoking bills got passed in New York; otherwise liberals - who are of course deeply sympathetic to "IslamoFascists," despite our wholly opposing world-views - would be strapping themselves with C4 and heading down to the bar. Not because we jate people who smoke in public... but because we detest the RIGHT to smoke in public!

Nobody - NOBODY - is so upset by bikini beaches that they're going to kill themselves to commit murder. If the terrorists hate freedom so much, why is western europe not a smoking crater? Amsterdam, God bless it, is the closest thing to a modern-day Gamorrah; surely it is a far greater offence to shariac law than anything in NYC. So why is it not a target?

Again - and I hate the necessity of this disclaimer - I am not looking for a justification for 9/11; I don't think there can really be one. I think I am more upset by the attacks than most Republicans were, simply because I don't hate most of what NYC stands for. But part of being a functional adult is understanding those around us, including (especially?) our enemies, and we do a great disservice by lying to ourselves about their motives.

Please. Let's let go of being hated for our freedoms, and try to see the world through the eyes of someone no longer in grade school.

Current Location: Lab 420
Current Mood: annoyed

This is apropos a joke I heard today, the punchline being "Hillary is a bitch."

OK. New Rule: Conservatives are no longer allowed to insult Hillary. Only liberals are allowed to insult her. This is because the liberal criticism is "Hillary is in with the DLC, a bunch of centrist wankers who have been sinking the Democratic party since 1998", while the conservative criticism is "She has opinions! And a vagina! She's a B-word!"

Fucking pathetic, that any woman with a spine and a public face is a bitch until proven otherwise. I mean, really? Are we still doing that? We haven't found a better hobby? Fuckit. I'm sick to death of insecure white guys with tiny cocks projecting themselves on the nation. As an insecure white guy with a massive cock, I say it's time for change.

While I've got your attention, can we also get rid of the word "slut"? I can't think of a single legitimate use for the word. It's there so that we can moralize, and frankly I don't feel that moralizing has done our great nation a whole lot of good. We don't need a word for "woman who has lots of sex and isn't ashamed of it."

I'm willing to compromise here. To balance out getting rid of "slut," we can also get rid of "frigid," which means "woman who doesn't want to have sex and isn't ashamed of it." If we could just establish that there is a broad range of behaviors, and then not feel the need as a society to stick shame in there, that would be swell.

Current Music: Berlioz Requiem - Tuba Mirum

So, I've been working here for a little over a month - five weeks, today. And while it's wonderful to have a salary, and enough "live-in-the-now" money, it's the future that I find brightest. I now have forty-five dollars in my 401k, which means that if I retire right now, I get forty-five dollars. That's pretty hefty.

I could retire now and have enough "pension" to treat three other people to dinner at The Olive Garden. And it would taste even better than normal, because it would be flavoured with success.

Current Location: Lab 420
Current Music: J.S.Bach - Lobet Dem Herrn

Ugh. I feel like day-old ass right now.. If ever there was a day to stay in bed until four, this would be it. Maybe that annoying voice that says "don't go to your morning rehearsal, you're probably sick" was actually right this time. :P

About the only high point today's had was some random balding dude on the T, inking a sketch he'd made of five or six passengers watching him draw them. That was cool. The rest wasn't.

Now I've got something extra to panic about for Sunday's audition.. is it still worth going if I'm feeling totally shitty, or should I just cancel and save the grief? OK, that answers itself, but.. still. Not happy about the virus's timing. Fucking virus.

Due to construction on the Orange Line, I took a bus as part of my commute home. As most of you know, I hate buses, and with the revival of my "If Even Remotely Possible, Walk There" policy I don't even spend much time on the subway.. but anyway, bus. It was raining very slightly when I got off the bus (At Sullivan Station, my usual T stop, 20 minute walk from home), and then it turned into a math problem.

This has bugged me for years, actually: if it's raining, and you're driving a car, does the speed at which you're travelling have any effect on how much rain hits the windshield? I figured out, walking home, that the answer is yes; steeper windshields will see a greater increase at similar speeds (assuming purely vertical rainfall); a horizontal sheet of glass would see no change at all.

Because I was working it out in my head, I don't have an exact equation, because those need paper.. instead, I just worked out what impact various factors (speed of the car, angle of the windshield, speed and angle of the rain, etc) would have on how much rain hits the windshield. Given ten minutes and some scratch paper, I could give you the exact formula; it would be a single term (meaning no +'s, just *'s) with a lot of cosines in it.

Anyway, what I'm interested in now is not the solution to the problem, but how I came about finding it. I used vector calculus: treat the rainfall as a uniform vector field, and take the flux of that field through the surface of the windshield (treated as a flat plane, because a curved one would need conformal mapping, which I never learned how to do). I did it that way because I'm a physicist, and physicists get vector calculus nailed to the back of their skulls for several years when they're in college. It's been forever since I took E&M, and I can barely remember Maxwell's Equations, but the vector calculus they're based on is still second-nature. Thank you Professor Hersman!

Anyway.. how would people in other disciplines solve this? Would a Mechanical Engineer look at it differently? What about an Electrical Engineer, or a pure Mathematician? Is there another way to approach it than as a V.C. problem?

Current Mood: Le geek
Current Music: epilogue - oedipus rex - Stravinsky