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13.9.09

luck?

From strange places sprout
Beautiful things, if you take
Time to notice them.


I've had a rather strange set of days lately, but I still find myself learning from them, so it's all good.  I think that this blog is going to be rife with these bullet-pointed lists... and for that, I apologise, but I really don't have time to commit coherent and flowy thoughts to text right now.

  • The play on Friday went really well.  We performed in a really strange space: it was essentially a garden party (so acoustics were terrible) with audience on three sides.  Weird.  I have to decide if I'm going to do the real VIDA play or not.  Argh, time commitments.
  • Memory structures are really interesting.  So working memory is usually about 8-10 items; an average person can remember 8-10 numbers or whatever at a time.  This is why we chunk for things like phone numbers and addresses: remembering a number as thirty-three twenty-four is less mentally taxing than remembering it as three three two four.  I remember learning about a guy who could memorize huge sequences of numbers because he correlated them to running times; he was a distance runner, and it was easy for him to "chunk" in this way.  When Alex came, he remembered where he was based on the location of the fraternities and sororities in town, which I thought was a riot, since I've never even bothered to learn any of their names.  I find myself attaching thoughts to objects, and seeing or handling those objects can spark my memory.  Anyway, that was random.
  • Bikes are awesome.  Roy, Chet, Jill, and I spent some time volunteering at the Bloomington Bike Project yesterday afternoon, and we learned how to rebuild headsets (that's basically all the parts of the bike at the front: the handlebars, the front fork, and all the ball bearings and stuff).  The headset that I was working on was apparently pretty strange and sexy; instead of a compact/connected ball bearing setup, mine was built with the ball bearings just loose in grease.  It was both messy and awesome to rebuild.
  • I got nominated for the Churchill scholarship, which, if I get it, would mean that I could get a master's degree at Cambridge (in England) for free.  That would be ridiculous.
Anyway, I have 547 meetings to go to this afternoon, not to mention that I still have analysis homework to do.  So I gotta peace out.  Sorry for the hurried post..

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