Monthly Archives: June 2005

Coolidge Playground Fun Despite Design

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Jellyfish are presently the main attraction at the New England Aquarium. And, until tomorrow, you can take in Sharks 3D at their IMAX. Today Teymour and I hit up both. I especially enjoyed the leafy sea dragons, and Teymour picked up a sea star and petted a horse-shoe crab.

The movie was narrated by a bitter and fairly British sea turtle. The sharks never ate a seal or baby dolphin, but I wish they had. Not the seal, but the dolphin, a creature I believe to be truly evil. Both the aquarium and the movie were a bit on the preachy conservation side, but given the audience and purpose of the institution, it’s to be expected.

While passing from the main building to the theater, we stopped at the seal tank. There a small, blonde girl, no older than three or four, knocked on the glass, shouting all the while, “Wake up, baby seal!” This continued nearly five minutes. Afterward Teymour remarked that he wanted children. I expressed my desire for a baby seal. Both maintain that our individual wishes are more feasible.

After what was already a full and wholesome afternoon, we went to Lane’s for dinner, which could not have been a better nor more appropriate end to the day. There he served us two nearly indistinguishable chicken and broccoli stir-fry plates, followed by two nearly indistinguishable chocolate cakes (which Teymour and I had brought, being the good guests that we are).

Then we headed over to Coolidge playground, a mere three minute walk from Lane’s appartment. Its design upheld a mix of classic and modern, which, in theory works well. It gives a clean, safe, and fun air about the playground. However, in practice, the plastic, abstract shapes just didn’t stand up to those wooden playground castles of old. The kiddie park included a spinny tulip-shaped cup ride, which reminded me of a lesson in angular momentum from my high school physics class. The same class in which we tested the science behind light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board. Both left me feeling a little woozy, but smiling. The curvy, plastic zip-lines were quite trying. But they were okay if you treated the track as a three-railed set of monkey bars. Also, it helps if you pretend the wood chip ground is, in actuality, hot lava.

I Have a Thesis Topic: The Positive Energy Theorem

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Professor Clifford Henry Taubes has agreed to advise my thesis, whose topic is the positive energy theorem. My exposition will detail the spinor proof, originated by Witten. Parker and Taubes then crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s with nearly full rigor. (Taubes has alerted me to the presence of possible ambiguities. I hope that I can find them.) I am delighted to work with Prof. Taubes — he tells great stories. I encourage you all to ask him about his brother and head cheese sandwiches. Hopefully I will work in generalizations due to Bray. What is a spacetime if it doesn’t contain blackholes, after all? I mean, really.

I may post my notes and drafts as I go along. In fact, here’s what I typed up before going to People’s Republik with Lisa Xu earlier tonight.

Thinking About the Third Grade.

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Mrs. Grant assigned her third grade reading class to design a children’s book. I tried my hand at an adaptation and extension of Goldylocks and the Three Bears sans Goldylocks. My story detailed a day before that intrusive harlot stepped foot through their door: the day they visited the amusement park. Baby Bear got lost in the maze but was rescued eventually by his parents. They may have celebrated with a hot dog, but my memory is a bit fuzzy.

The individual pages of each book were collected, lamenated, and returned. One girl, Elizabeth by name, received special recognition, however. She had written about a child’s visit to the sea shore. In her text she chronicled his litoral discoveries: a shell, perhaps some driftwood, and a feather. Mrs. Grant’s praise inspired quiet jealousy within me.

Years later (over a decade later, in fact) Elizabeth confided in me — her story was plagerized. And still I harbor a secret jealousy.

The Smokey Joe makes first celebrity appearance.

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Smokey JoeLast night marks the debut of my Smokey Joe to the world. He facilitated the grilling of hot dogs, sausage, red, green, and yellow bell peppers, portabello mushrooms, and pineapple, among other things, sources say. After some short assembly and some fire know-how and matches provided by Lane, he was up and running. Coach stopped by during the incipient moments of grill time to make sure that no beer would find its ways to underage drinkers. I politely told her that our underage drinkers don’t even like beer. Indeed they did not! They wasted a half gallon container of orange-pineapple juice and another of orange-peach-mango, making for a liquids total in excess of a full gallon. It was the most action that obtrusive piece of marble had seen since it was bathed in tye-dye materials, and then bleach, and then spattered with blood, and then water.

The Smokey Joe and I plan to take our act on the road this summer. Weekend trips include Cape Cod National Seashore places such as Coast Guard Beach and Nauset Light Beach. There are, of course, other places I’d be willing to go. So, if you or someone you know would like to venture out with me and Smokey, let me know where and when. I have a car and next to no summer responsibilities.

The Internet is Everywhere.

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Last night, Danielle and I headed over to the harbor nearest to the US Coast Guard building in the North End. There is what one might, at first glance, perhaps, believe is a scary alley populated by nogoodnick gansgters. What better place to dispose of a body than the docks next to a government building and behind what seems to be an abandonned public pool? Ah, but here the clovers grow thick and their scent mixes with the brine of the see. Across the USS Constitution and the Bunker Hill Monument shine (until midnight or so, then they shut down the Hill. Same goes for Old North Church, which, no less stunning, resides directly behind the playground — inlandwardly.)

But that’s not really the meaning of this post. What I mean to tell you is this: The internet is everywhere. With my laptop less than twenty-four hours old in hand and the Strawberry Festival Full Moon (also the Rose Full Moon to some) waxed complete, it was time to take this puppy on the road. (At this point it should be noted that Bubbles, Danielle’s iBook came along, too. In fact, I’m writing this post on Bubbles right now. Danielle has Jacobi, my laptop, held captive until she finishes another of her practice GRE tests.) Once we found parking in nearby Charlestown, she and I headed over to the clover covered patch to — you guessed it folks — study math. I hit up an article on the Penrose Inequality (gr-qc/0312047).

Not too long ago Greg Valiant told me that the CIA asks during its interviews for new employees if they have ever wanted to be a florist or had an interest in flowers, something like that. Statistically, he explained, there is a high correlation among those who have and those who suffer from, euphamistically speaking, mental instabilities. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me at the time. But I accepted this fact on faith, until now.

Danielle exhibited reservations at first, but once she picked her first clover, she, and they, were done in. The sort of fastidiousness, the calculation, the avariciousness, it all smacked of torture. And that was convenient. During our walk from the car we had discussed the merits of torture, or rather, the lack thereof. But as she ruthlessly reached for the thickest clover, no, now the longest one, oh, this one bent, I’ll grab another one, we both began to understand the wisdom of the CIA.

Of course, as she hunted her next victim, I couldn’t help myself. After all, I had successfully found and logged onto an unsecure local wireless network and emailed my excitement.

By the way, the bouqet Danielle arranged looked nothing short of magnificent. I wish I knew more about plants so that my description could mean more. It looked largely like a purple broccoli, punctuated by the long, pointy closed blossoms of some small lily-like wild plant. The bouquet symbolized all the buzzwords from a syllabus on literature: nature and the city, order and chaos, and, my favourite, beauty and brutality.

Welcome.

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Joshua is proud to announce his new weblog, hosted by the kind folks at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. Following in the long tradition of math concentrators before him, Joshua cannot muster the energy nor the determination to graduate from college. Instead, you can find him most days lounging in his room where he gazes from his penthouse view over the Charles River towards Boston. Someday he hopes to decide upon, find an advisor for, and complete his thesis. This weblog chronicles his trials and travails.