It’s been a dead sprint to the end today. The end, however, is Monday. Having finished — the definition of finished is a bit flexible, so I revise — having started a new section, the last section, of the third chapter, I have decided to take a break. Rest-time activities include push-ups, showering, and looking at graphs of Ian’s thesis.

Ian lives down the hall and also does general relativity-type things. While I’m wrestling with mass of gravitationally bound systems, he’s trying to detect isolated black holes through gravitational lensing effects.

Lensing works something like this: a heavy object, like a neutron star or a giant loaf of bread, causes space to dip down. Light from an object behind the bread, like a neon sign, travels in all directions, including toward the loaf of bread. Light rays which were very close to each other but hit the bend around the loaf on opposite sides cross in front of it. If we’re just the right distance away from all this wacky bending, we see not one, but TWO copies of the neon sign. This is how lensing works, roughly.

But that’s not really what I meant to write about. It was this:

Tonight Eda and I went to Adams’ dining hall for dinner. She suggested that we eat out, but I told her I couldn’t. “Broke?” she asked. And that got me thinking, I need a job. I’m broke because I don’t work. So, because I’m broke, I should work. And then I thought some more. Idioms just don’t respect causation. Funny.