The crowd was restless, but silent. She had been standing in the middle of the room for almost an hour now. A normal looking piece of wood, lengthwise between her palms, her head bowed. Finally, her head lofted, her eyes opened. She pulled her arms further apart, and the piece of wood, instead of falling, began to spin, floating in the air in front of her. The crowd took a step back as, an inhuman look on her face, she lifted into the air herself, each part of her body losing the sag of gravity. Mouth unmoving, a tuneless sound, like glass resonating, seemed to say "Things to do", as she, ever accelerating, floated towards one of the mall exits..

So... I got my Psych term paper pretty much done, and presented it today in class... I actually did really badly -- I probably should've printed out the relevant sections, and used my notes more -- I was trying to go from memory, and as I didn't get enough sleep last night, that was a disaster. Looking at everyone who went after me, although some people didn't do so well, noone came close to my level of ineptitude. I guess I'll just need to learn from this flop, and avoid the factors that resulted in the disaster... in sum,

• Get enough sleep before presenting
• Prepare a reference sheet that's well organized, specifically for speaking
• Remember that it's better to not be looking at the audience than to screw everything up while looking at them.

I got into one of my desired classes, we'll just have to see how the other waitlist works out. Now I'm in the position of needing to decide which of the two classes I'm in now gets tossed, Biology or Limbo programming. Next semester is likely to stress me more than this one, and doing the Limbo class instead of Biology would certainly be a way to compensate, especially as it's late at night. OTOH, the Bio class looks like child's play to me, given what I know, and if I can suffer it, I'll be open to take a Bio class on MRI if I can get them to recognize my OSU Math classes from so long ago as meatching that prerequisite. All this will be academic if the other waitlist works out -- I'll have two really cool psych classes (and will be insanely busy). In the meantime, out of courtesy to the teachers and the students on the waitlists, I need to decide which of the two backup classes to drop ASAP.

Wally appears to have gotten into something sticky -- his hair has become very matted over the last two weeks. I need to get a new cat brush, but in the meantime, I've been using a pair of scissors to cut the mats off. I accidentally cut his skin once, and he's pretty mad about that and is now unwilling to sit still for very long once I start cutting, but I've already got much of the sticky parts off, and as another upside, he'll be shedding less.

In philosophy class today, one of the other students started talking about Zeno's paradox, taking the stupid thing seriously. There needs to be people with whistles in classrooms, who can simply escort people out of a field.. If you can't tear Zeno to shreds without stopping, get out of the philosophy pool. It's like Godwin's law..

I'm again writing code generation stuff at work, this time to make autogenerated R interfaces to our codebase. It's in some ways easier, and in some ways harder than what I did before -- the C interface code was tough because I was still learning the private interfaces to some components in our code, and some of those interfaces were untested and needed some tweaks. The R code won't have that issue, but unlike with C, which I am completely fluent in at this point, I don't know much R, and am needing to learn both it and its library interface. Oh well, at least it's open source, so I can expect good documentation, community support, and if I ever really need to know how something works, I can look under the hood. It would suck to need to use that stupid microsoft developers site for anything real...

On the topic of Psychology, another amusing tidbit -- I was looking to play a particular song from my music collection a few minutes ago, and normally I need to get a directory listing to get the track number.. but suddenly the number 10 popped into my head, and although I was doubtful that that was it, I gave it a shot... and it appears that the song "earth" is indeed track 10 on that CD. Yes, that's statistical-type knowledge that hopfield can explain, again :) Speaking of which, here's the departmental homepage of John Hopfield, who invented that model that captured my imagination so well..

I guess all that's left to do is to write that Philosophy term paper by next week. I wish I had had time to start on it earlier...

Life isn't always interesting...