04:35:17 Thursday April 01 2004
Yet another day. I got up early, procured myself some donuts, and got some very solid work done for Katy. I had Indian food for lunch with Lehmann. He was a bit slap happy from sleep deprivation, which made him more (not less) fun to be around. After lunch there were many meetings, all short thank goodness.

This afternoon I caught the last half of a talk entitled The Constants of Nature by Professor John D Barrow of Cambridge. I missed a lot, but his primary hypothesis was that the fine structure constant was changing very slowly (logarithmically) over time. I am not completely sure that I buy it. I am still processing.

This evening I tried to get some cs590d done, but it just wasn't happening. I need to dive into that code and fully grock, but I just can't seem to keep it all in my head at once (probably because I am uninterested). I gave up on that and spent a few hours putting together a small hack/April fools day gag for tomorrow. The grad house has displayed poorly printed copies of photos from mars and the moon in the little Plexiglas frame that resides in the elevator for several months. I have been tired of them for some time, so I replaced them with little displays depicting Hoth, Arrakis, and other fictional planets. Mine are actually much nicer than theirs. I wonder how long they will stay on display if I don't remove them.

I learned a new term today: glamourbombing
That link won't make a whole lot of sense until you understand that there are people out there that believe that they are secretly deep inside fae (a class that includes elves, fairies, pixies, and whatnot). The only reason they look human to you and I is because so many people don't believe. Glamour is a type of magical energy produced by believing in nonsense. I like the idea of random absurdist art, but the physical universe already fills me with so much wonder and awe that I don't think I will be contributing to the glamour any time soon.