Borne back ceaselessly into the past

Borne back ceaselessly into the past Someday I must tell you how I did it. Whoo! Its been a while, hasnt it? Sorry about that, chief. Basically what happened is that I had to do a Web Lab for 10.302: Transport Processes. What that means is we went into a lab in the secret sub-basement of Building 66, pressed on on a heater, and let it heat up for 20 minutes while the a computer recorded the temperature. Sure, that sounds pretty easy for a lab experiment at MIT. But the real challenge is to explain why it heats up, thermodynamically, electrically, and philosophically. So, twenty hours of MATLAB and Excel later, Ive got a beautiful data report ready that my partner Nia 07 is printing out in dazzling color as you read this, and nary a good nights sleep in three days. DID YOU KNOW? Building 66, designed by MIT graduate I.M. Pei, is built in the shape of a 30-60-90 right triangle. Building 66 also exemplifies the principle that when your MIT education brings you boundless wealth and power, you should still never donate a building to MIT, because nobody will ever use your name in referring to it. Sorry, Ralph Landau ScD 41, but you should have known better. If you lay down on your stomach at the 30-degree (or pi/6 radians, if you prefer) vertex, you get a most spectacular vertigo-inducing view of Ames St with essentially no ground below you. Uh, or so Ive heard from one of those crazy hacker types. Dont look at me, I live on West Campus. Oh, but my life has been much more interesting than that in the past week; its just that I havent had any time to tell you about it! I discovered whether humans swim faster in syrup or water, hiked five miles, and jumped from a 165-degree sauna into a 36-degree river. So, I hope you dont mind me writing entries this weekend which recount some of the non-transient-analysis-related aspects, even if I have to dig back as far as last Thursday to do so. Also, Sams Mom is here for Family Weekend. Wouldnt it be nice if I could convince her to write a guest entry? No, thats not gonna happen.