My blog is broken. It will only let me post under the date stamp November 29. And the order keeps getting screwed up.

So, I'm moving to another blog, which is sad because I really liked this one. New link: http://teneyes.blogspot.com.

Rani Mukherjee and the rest of the Bollywood crew have officially arrived in New Haven. Nobody has any clue where they are shooting......


http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/2005/12/bollywood_comes.html

Even though my father had driven in London before, trying to manuver our rental car was a thoroughly chaotic experience. Most obviously, the cars are on the other side of the road and outfitted only with Standard. To compound the problem, London doesn't have the neatly divided gridlock system of America. The city, and really all of England, seems to have grown without any foresight whatsoever. Highways, streets, driveways and alleys all run helter skelter and intersect in dizzying traffic circles.

We also didn't bother to get complete driving instructions and so found ourselves saddled with the additional problem of trying to gather our bearrings in a place where most street names are not marked. At one point, we stumbled into a smoke-filled pub (The Hound and the Partridge) and asked directions of a drunk Englishman who made us buy him a drink before we could proceed any further.

It was frustrating and fun.
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More details on London are coming. When I finish my English presentation.

I'm getting annoyed by all the people hawking T-shirts for The Game (annual football game between Yale and Harvard that mostly serves as an excuse for students to get ridiculously drunk). Seriously, we all have at least one article of clothing with "Yale" on it; what's the point of another one if all it does is insult Harvard?

I think the Harvard-bashing thing gets out of control. They seem much less concerned with insulting us. Our constant bickering makes us look like the losers with inferiority complexes. Even at Bulldog Days, I remember, the Dean of Admissions inserted a few obligatory jokes about how dumb/freaky/annoying Harvard is. Who cares!?! I'm sure a lot of people from here end up going to Boston for grad school anyways.

On Cross Campus today, when I finally lost it and told someone I didn't want to buy a shirt, the salesman looked at me, poker-face, and said, "Well Jesus isn't coming to The Game but He still bought a shirt." Right.
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If anybody reading this is in Math 115 and has Alina Marian as their teacher, they should definitely join the facebook.com group "Mathemalina" which is mainly dedicated to her adoration. There's a love sonnet on it that is copied here:

"How do we love thee, Alina Marian? Let us count the ways.

We love thee for your skip when we correctly integrate.
We love thee for plunging straight into math when you're a few minutes late.
We love thee for the way you call solutions "cute."
We love thee for the way you deftly differentiate a square root.
We love thee for the way your accent graces our ears.
We love thee for the way you shape our latent math careers.
Whenever you keep us late to teach us more, our hearts truly surge.
Oh Alina, our love is an infinite series that you have taught us to converge. "

You see? Yale students are good at both rhyming and ingratiating themselves with their teachers.
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I just finished writing a chemistry test. Upon asking classmates what they thought of it, I found that the universal opinion was that it was dead easy. I did not think so and neither did my brother.

There were so many little tricks! You were apparantly supposed to memorize the exact reaction of Al2O3 with HCl and NaOH. Yet so many people left the classroom explaining at length how much they hadn't studied and how they knew they had still aced the test. How do people do that without studying? They just happened to know, offhand, that Al2O3 can form AlNa(OH)4?

Gah.

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I really don't know how I'm doing in school, grades-wise. I always knew where I was in high school. But here, everything is curved and so predicting your grades is mostly a guessing game. The average and standard deviation on the test become really important and a 67% can somehow be parlayed into a B.

It's very confusing, and I miss having the 0-100% scale. I have no idea what my GPA is going to be this semester and it's really bugging me..........

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Perspectives on Science questions still aren't up yet........how unfair is it to give us two days to do a problem set?

I'm going to have to work hard on this one, also, because the lecture made very little sense to me.

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There's a facebook profile for Rory Gilmore (a fictional character on the WB TV show Gilmore Girls who attends Yale University). Anyways, students from all over the nation have facebooked her and left droves of comments on her wall....apparantly under the delusion that she exists and actually goes to Yale.

Posts range from the stupidly effusive:

"Rory i am so happy you and your mom got back together....now her and luke can get married!!!!"

to the somewhat disconcerting:

"I wish Luke was my DAddy!!!!"

Now, after every episode, crazy people visit her wall and give her advice. I hope people don't actually think she exists.

Although, Iwas going to personally welcome her back to Yale (she left for a little while and returned as of yesterday's episode).

Fall leaves

What Crystal thinks I look like

Yesterday, as I was flipping channels, I landed on Fox News.

At the bottom of the screen, on the news ticker tape, it said:

"TOP STORY: PARIS IS BURNING"

The headline is a little more dramatic than the actual events. There was apparantly a slew of arson attacks in France; Fox interpreted this as meaning the entire city of Paris was on fire. They also took the occasion to invite a French expert who they ensured spoke in a thick accent and made inane comments about America.
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I'm studying for the second Math midterm. Because the first one didn't go so well I resolved to redouble my efforts for this next one.

However, despite a weekend's worth of studying, I can still only answer a spare few questions on the practice test.

The people in my class seem to have no difficulty at all with this material. One girl can discern the convergence of a series in her head. So everytime our math teacher asks us to make a guess as to the convergence of a series, the Converger will thoughtfully survey the question and then after a beat, correctly solve the problem without making so much as a scratch on a piece of paper.

One time our math teacher asked me what I thought of a problem, and I said I didn't know. She looked at me and asked me, "Could this be more convergent?".

This isn't even a higher level math class, with genius math majors. Everyone is just good at everything here.

Why is it that in Math there's no in between? Either you're stupid or a math genius.

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I had to co-lead a discussion section on Stem Cells for one of my half-credit courses, "Perspectives on Science" which is for people with "unusual preparation" in math and the sciences.

Although we started out carefully analyzing the basic scientific principles, we ended by shouting haphazardly (most notably our facilitator, a professor, who became very red in the face). It was strange to see that a room full of intelligent people, who were intimately familiar with the actual science behind stem cell research, could not discuss it rationally. How can we expect the government to be any better?

Rachel interjected at one point, near the end of the discussion, trying to be reasonable and fair but everyone ignored her and went back to the screaming. It was chaos.
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Chemistry test came back. Yay, I did better than the last one!

It's by far my favorite course, I think, next to perspectives. Mostly because my classmates are so colorful. And because of our professor, a young-ish English fellow who is witty in a very British kind of way. He also has a very characteristic greeting with which he starts every class. It kind of sounds like he is calling souls from the land of the dead, "Helloooooo!"
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If Nick tries to relate a story about me being confused about fertilization, ask him for context. We were talking about chickens!
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The carollineurs finally played something decent and fitting: Harry Potter. And I missed it!

On the subject of things I missed, I also definitely didn't go to the YSO Hallowe'en show. Shara made it sound like I missed a watershed moment at Yale, so I'm feeling like an idiot for not going. Carl reminded me I had three more opportunities- but still, I missed Dean Salovey relating the integral of e^ x to sex. Get it?

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I did, however, make it to the YUAGS (Yale Undergraduate Anti-Gravity Society) show which involved people juggling fire. It was pretty cool, although I was frightened the entire way because a) I thought I was going to be pushed off my precarious perch on the lip of the giant "pool" in the middle of Beinecke b) I thought someone was going to put the Commons on fire.

I might be wrong about the acronym YUAGS. I get my acronyms confused; there are more here than IB, and that's saying something.