Donut Burger Fantasy

I found out today that my friend and colleague Xingbo has never eaten a cheeseburger other than a McDonald's cheeseburger. That's ridiculous and will be soon corrected.

Whenever it starts to get cold and dreary like this I always go into donut burger fantasy mode for a week or so, maybe to add on a layer of fat to prepare for the ever so cold Texas winter.

I Wish Every Day Was Like Sunday

A lot of fun happened this weekend, culminating in Sunday. I took notes and this all deserves a cogent treatment, so let me chew on this one a bit!

<3

The Sun Also Rises

Everyone around me is anxious and this in turn is making me anxious, though I really don't have much reason to be. My life is pretty stable and my responsibilities are reasonable. I am employed, paid, physically healthy, and busy with my own work. Life is changing in the sense that more people whom I've become accustomed to hanging out with are leaving soon, but I always make new friends and I shouldn't really worry about that. I'm meeting goals, academically, physically and socially. I can't really tell where this nervousness comes from, it might be totally unfounded. I need a new footing but I want this to be something totally internal, a real solid anchor of my own that lets me keep sailing. Yadadaimean?

The weather is perfect today and everyone is enjoying themselves. Victory has been had on multiple fronts, and I feel that I'm going to do really well on my first test tomorrow (crossed fingers). If I'm a little iffy lately, bear with, I am a work in progress.

<3

Update Your Vocab

From now on going to work is called "high-fiving the money monster".

Who needs a house out in Hackensack, is that all you get for your money?

They (the MSC) are playing Billy Joel's "Movin' Out" in February. I am hell of excited.

Tron

I think I need a baby supercomputer to do these calculations. Or a supercomputer baby. I think they are interchangeable. I need a supercomputer, baby.

Yeah I Talk To Folks, What Of It?

I was outside the library the other night getting my Pall Mall on, and I sat down next to this Indian guy name Api and started chatting him up. He was an interesting guy who's doing a master's in urban architecture and I've always found architecture pretty interesting. I asked him about urban sprawl and he lit me up with an idea I'd never really thought of before: The primary reason behind our current trend for cities to overgrow and become the ugly, inefficient monstrosities they do is a simple lack of engineering common sense.

Every time the roads become clogged and the time to travel between two points in a given densely populated region is decidedly too long, we increase the number of lanes and highways in that area. If you increase the number of lanes, all other things being constant, the time it takes to travel between the points decreases, and decreases for further areas as well (we can't just widen one small section of a highway). It then necessarily becomes an option for those living closer into the city to move further out and experience the same time delay. So by attempting to alleviate the problem of traffic congestion, we expand the radius of population able to work in a region. This will cause buildings to be built of course, but not high density urban buildings, rather the typical short, wide spaced suburban buildings we see so often. As time goes on, the congestion reaches these further points, and we continue on ad infinitum. The other reasons to build more dense urban centers and public transportation are obvious, but this one is often overlooked I think. The whole "only build up when you run out of space" mentality is flawed, a proactive approach would be the only way to solve the problem without a complete rededication of space, which is very costly. Government engineers are nuts.