Lethe and other fleeting memories

Around the end of every semester, I reach a point where my only desire in the world is to have time in the evenings and on weekends when I don't have to worry about studying. Now, on Long Island, I have everything I thought I wanted... so what am I doing with my free time? Studying.

I bought a GRE study guide the last time I was in a bookstore, thinking that I should get the general GREs out of the way before school starts. Since buying it, I've been trying to go through the vocabulary list. This is a surprisingly frustrating pursuit. As I look at the words on each page I can remember having them as vocab words in fourth grade. I can remember which books they were vocab words for. I can almost remember the sentences they were in. What I can totally not remember is what the hell they mean. Apparently, reading exclusively physics literature and Terry Pratchett novels has a deleterious effect on one's vocabulary.

Then I started trying to prepare for the analytical essay section by reading the topics. About half of them involve the importance of studying/funding art... considering the effort I put into Art Hum I hope I won't have to write about any of those. The other topics are a bit more interesting. There's one about tradition versus innovation. Great! A use for the Core! I can remember this one passage from CC that would be a great example for the importance of tradition. I can remember that it was in the bottom paragraph of a left-hand page. I can remember that the book was about half an inch thick and had a glossy cover. I can almost visualize the layout of the chapter headings and the fonts and the position of the page numbers. But, to save my life, I cannot remember the title or who the author is. Apparently, a nearly photographic memory just doesn't cut it.

In which the protagonist discusses (or whines about) work

It feels kind of like I've gotten nothing done in the last two weeks. This isn't quite fair because I've only had four days of work in the past two weeks (last week I was at Fermilab from Monday until late Wednesday and this week I had Monday and Tuesday off). The major reason I feel so unproductive is because I've gotten to a point where everything on my todo list depends on the completion of one unpleasant, complicated, bug-ridden task. I wrote a bunch of code and was trying to make sure it was doing what I wanted it to... but that involved writing more code and running it through ROOT to make plots. The plots kept coming out totally wrong - but was the problem with my original code or with my ROOT macros or with ROOT itself? Today I finally killed my brain with trying to think of every possible thing I might have done wrong and asked the local ROOT guru for advice. He suggested a few things I'd already tried, then he looked at my code and didn't see anything wrong. Then he decided the only thing that made sense was that ROOT was working in some way that wasn't what we expected. So I tried storing the data I was plotting in a different kind of object... and joy - my plots came out the way I expected. Moral 1: debugging sucks. Moral 2: Instead of going through your code four million times and feeling dumb because you're clearly too stupid to recognize what stupid thing you've done, blame ROOT and move on with life.

This is a picture of the water cooler down the hall from my office. The hot water lever broke off last summer and this was how it was fixed. Physicists are awesome. :-D