4/26/16

1. 4/26/16
1. Cr. Operations Expense 50
1. Dr. Cash 50
2. Whoops! That was an accounting journal entry, not a normal journal entry. Moving on…
3. O-of all the money, that ‘ere that I’ve spent...
4. Whoops, that was a lyrical refrain, not any kind of journal entry! It is somewhat related to the accounting entry above however :D
5. Ok, let’s get down to business. Or not business. Not accounting anyway! Life. What happened today? I only had one class, math--we discussed the implications of the fact that every analytic function has a power series representation, which are pretty wild and easy to derive.
6. After that, I settled down to work on my big CS homework. Put in several productive hours, then I went to the HUB for lunch. Read a bit of Disruption for Thursday’s class. The book had a lot of evidence for a reversal in the 20th century trend of declining resource prices--demand is just too great, and environmental pressures may make extraction increasingly difficult. This in itself is kind of a wild shift--the mindset that we can just keep moving on to the next mine or plot of arable land, always produce more in terms of raw resources, might be insufficient to meet demand as well as environmentally unsustainable.
7. Then I went to an astrobio colloquium, posters for which I saw around the physics building. This Indian postdoc had an incredibly entertaining and data-overloaded presentation. He argued that the reason we don’t see more aliens is that a particular kind of life-driven feedback loop is required to stop runaway positive-feedback climate processes (such as warming resulting in ice melt releasing more co2 -> runaway warming.). Life isn’t limited, recent evidence suggests, by 1. scarcity of necessary elements 2. Scarcity of habitable planets (there are WAY more planets than we thought there were recently) 3. Difficulty of basic life-forming chemical processes (studies are showing that little snippets of RNA and sugars can form in very natural ways and that life probably existed very early in the Earth’s history (suggesting that the processes that resulted in it weren’t that improbable. So this dude suggested the feedback-loop hypothesis (or Gaian hypothesis, nature protecting nature like a nature-y Gaia god).
8. Walked back to physics with a group of astrobio shmids; they were complaining that the dude’s hypothesis was as yet untestable. (He had thrown out various BS ways of corroborating the idea.)
9. Did more work, 2/3s done with CS project! Went to Glee.
10. Solid rehearsal, we sounded pretty good. Took a short run, grabbed some tacos at the 8, and went up to floor lounge for floor tradition! Got in a good, intense game of Pictionary with Siri, Ashleigh, Maddie.
11. Started working on mini-CS exercise. Really annoying C++ syntax stuff. I went over to a practice room in the music building and actually couldn’t finish the darn thing. So I spent a relaxing hour singing along to chords--revisited some songs I’d played with Alex eternity (that is 4 weeks) ago, plus a classic rendition of the Parting Glass.
12. Returned to Haggett, where I encountered Brandon with a big 226 study group. Talked with them for a bit, then
13. wrote this log and crashed.