Musing : Confusing : Deluding

Even if I didn’t sign up for Linear Algebra (the course I’m least committed to taking), it doesn’t really improve things. It’d just leave big gaps in the middle of my schedule.

As is, Wednesdays look really fun, though…

Weee!

(by Schedulizer)

A cell phone is a poor substitute for a camera, but it’s all I’ve got right now.

I don’t like lab reports. Especially when I thought I followed the lab report guidelines to the letter, and I received a 47 (yes, 47%). Especially when my rewrite, which was OK’d by the TA I talked with, only merited a 58. Especially when corrections receive a 20% reduction, and 0.8 * 58 is 46.

So by putting several afternoons into rewriting my lab report, I lost myself one point.

Oh well, next one’s due Friday! *grin*

It’s louder than a drunken weekend night here. Hordes of people running around the campus screaming and yelling “OBAMAAAAAAA!” It feels like we’re part of a revolution.

I have a new piano instructor here at Cornell: Blaise Bryski. He seems a very interesting fellow (read: he’s eccentric and sometimes incomprehensible, but he has good ideas and I like him). So far we’ve done more talking than playing, but it’s valuable talk. There is a lot I do not know.

One thing he said last week still stands out in my mind. “You’re looking for the blank page,” he said. That is how you interpret a score. You’re looking for the idea that the composer tried to write down. The writing is only an approximation of the idea, after all, and an anachronistic one at that: we don’t know exactly what those phrasing marks meant to Schubert in 1824!

Luckily, I only have to look for the blank page. I’m not expected to find it. Michelangelo: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” I am not there yet. More like here (also Michelangelo): “A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.”

Amy and I went to check out the Cornell astronomy club last night after she finished work. They have a pretty big telescope, actually, and a bunch of smaller ones. The big one was pointed at M13, and the manageably-small-but-still-powerful one was pointed at Jupiter, revealing 4 moons.

This picture has nothing to do with Cornell, but I liked it. It’s from Astronomy Picture of the Day, a wonderful NASA site that posts a new astronomy photograph each and every day and has archives stretching back more than ten years.

This image, also from APOD, makes a nice desktop background if you’re looking for something interesting but calm enough to stay in the background.

After 3 classes on speaking and comprehension, all of a sudden we are expected to read. My total reading vocabulary? Four words. (I would type them here, but WordPress doesn’t seem to preserve the encoding.) I can understand and say many more words, and I can count to 20! I don’t remember nearly everything that’s been presented, though. So many words have been thrown at us. This class is intensely immersive. It’s difficult, but very good. And I’m taking it with Sara, so I have someone to commiserate/study with!

This is my friend Sara. She doesn’t think it’s a flattering picture, but I like it, so I’m posting it anyway. (Mwahaha.) My phone’s camera continues to do strange things with lighting.

From a few days ago, when it was sunny. The indistinct quality of picture that my phone’s camera often produces is appealing to me, somehow.