Laziness, and Twitter

Argh. I suck at this "regular updates" thing. Okay, here goes.

1. I HAVE A PHONE I HAVE A PHONE I HAVE A PHONE. It cost me 8 pounds at Asda. It is pay-as-you-go T-mobile (doo-doo-doo-DOO-doo). It can do three things: Call people, send texts, and get FM radio (what?). Exciting, huh? This is a good segue into #2, which is:

2. I drunk-dial. A LOT. I discovered this one morning when I woke up after a night at Revenge when I went to send a text and found that I had a balance of 9p. I've been told that I was really excited by the song that was playing (I have no idea what it was, but it was probably Disturbia) and wanted Pat to hear it too.
...
Pat's in Chicago.

3. I am going home on either the 12th or the 13th of December, depending on the suckiness of British Airways' changing-fee-fuckery / the University of Sussex's changing-exam-schedule-fuckery.

4. I have a weird cold that keeps disappearing and reappearing at odd times. So odd, in fact, that I turned down one two three four invitations to go out tonight because I was lying in bed, drooling, and hallucinating. Seriously. I dreamed I was a zombie made out of chocolate. What the hell?

5. I remembered Twitter exists and added it to my sidebar! I also added Stephen Fry as somebody that I plan to creepily stalk via the Internet "follow". Man, I think he might be slightly addicted to Twitter. Look at all those goddamn tweets.

Also, I must use this space to briefly complain about how much I hate the Chinese and the Spanish. Okay, so the one Chinese girl and the one Spanish girl who live in this flat are hardly a representative sample, but shut up because I want to complain.
Apparently it is acceptable social practice, in these respective countries, that if there is a kitchen available for use... any kitchen at all... no matter how many people share it... it is PERFECTLY acceptable to take it over for SEVERAL HOURS EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN NIGHT and sit around and LOUDLY COOK FOOD with your LOUD FRIENDS while YELLING LOUDLY in your LOUD NATIVE LANGUAGE. And then when you're done, it's also perfectly acceptable to LEAVE THE FOOD YOU PREPARED LYING AROUND FOR DAYS AFTERWARDS. ESPECIALLY IF RAW BEEF IS INVOLVED. GODDAMN I HATE YOU CHINESE GIRL.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Meteors and other small things

So the Leonid meteor shower is soon... the 17th, specifically. Unfortunately, because the shower is periodic, it's hard figuring when to go outside to stare at the sky and go "Look at that!" Fortunately, NASA solved this problem for us. All the way up to 2050.

The Fluxtimator is a Javascript applet which calculates when you should go outside based on your location and the date. In case your location isn't on the drop-down menu (which is pretty likely), it lets you put in coordinates. Which is useful if you've installed a GPS tracker inside your head or something, I guess. To be fair, though, I'd probably install a GPS tracker in my head, given the chance.

Anyway, I have also discovered the most perfect drink ever to be created. It is so good, I forgive England for the complete lack of sunlight and the fact that it gets dark at like 4:30. In fact, it is so good, the Muslim Law Council gave it a pass despite the fact that drinking it should technically be illegal under Sharia.
For the last few weeks, I kept noticing people drinking this stuff called Lucozade. I mean, they drink that shit more than Americans drink Coke, in that everybody, including my professors, are continually knocking back bottles of it. Curious, I bought a bottle. Excitedly, I took a huge swig.
My first impression was somewhat underwhelming ("What the fuck is this carbonated vinegar?!"). Not to be put off by this, I drank the entire bottle. The taste did not improve. I chalked it up to the English and their love for food that tastes like crap and went on to other things.
Half an hour later I had the most intense caffeine buzz than I have ever had in my entire life. I love you, Lucozade. More than you'll ever understand.

Woooooooo

Fun fact: When I went to my math lecture this morning, I was still kind of drunk. And my prof (who has now identified me as Knows Lots of Math Girl) decided to use me to explain to my row how to multiply matrices. Queue me trying to explain how to multiply nxn matrices through a haze of Fosters and residual "NA NA NA NA NA NA NA HEY HEY HEY GOODBYE"-type feelings and you'll see why nobody got much work done today.

Also (click for full image)


And that's all I have to say about that.

Ice IX: Electric Bugaloo-ine

I am now smiling the rueful smile of someone who's just watched her prof destroy one of her favorite books for reasons she really should have realized earlier.

The basic premise of Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut) is that there's a nuclear physicist who is brilliant, but easily distracted-- so much so that no one is allowed to ask him questions, because he will drop everything else to work on that problem until he's solved it (sound familiar?). Anyway, one day a general complains to him that his soldiers' boots are always getting stuck in mud, and if he's so smart can he think of a way to keep his men from getting stuck all the time? So the physicist goes to think about it, and for weeks he considers the problem, until finally he comes up with a solution.

Here it is necessary to know that water comes in different phases. Sure, everyone knows solid, liquid, gas etc. but at different combinations of temperature, pressure, etc., water will have different structures for complicated molecular reasons.

The solution is to come up with a phase of water where the structure is solid, i.e. ice, but would not melt at 0 degrees C-- in fact, the material he comes up with (ice-nine) melts at 45.8 degrees C. Because this is a Vonnegut book, of course, a seed crystal of ice-nine gets dropped in the ocean, destroying all life on Earth pretty much instantaneously. I asked Dr. Lawless, if this scenario were to actually occur for reals, how long would it take for the oceans to be converted to this new phase of water? Because I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be instantaneous.

Welp, turns out that it couldn't happen at all, because for water to actually become more ordered (to change from a fairly random liquid to a highly ordered solid) would require a HUGE amount of energy to be put in. Which, all things considered, is something I really should have realized before. It's pretty basic thermodynamics. Also, I have a huge blind spot when it comes to Kurt Vonnegut.

This post brought to you by "I have no lab today, therefore am spending my time thinking up silly things to post on the internet and considering how awesome it is to not have a lab today."