laura_anne | Recent Entries

If I have been getting good but not great sleep, I can stay up 24 hours before I hit the wall. It is now hour 24. I have 4 more hours before I can crash. I would not put money on my ability to be awake through class today.

On the bright side, this is my first ever all-nighter for scholastic reasons. It's like, a rite of passage.

French is not a pro drop language! That is so deeply weird!

I needed to look this up, so I grabbed a French textbook, and was flipping through the section on weather (because weather is almost always a good place to find a subject-less construction: hace frio. llueve.) and it's full of "il fait"! None of this subjectlessness for French! But all the other Romance languages are pro drop, making French deeply unusual in that respect.

You know, until today, I had never really understood why people go to libraries to study or work - I'm much more a fan of the method where you duck in, grab your books, and study somewhere else. But since the library's open hours don't overlap very well with my preferred working hours, I had to check out the books I wanted so I could do the research after the library closed. Since I'm writing a paper about a particular cross-linguistic phenomenon and how it relates to other specific features of my several test languages, this means I just checked out 15 books. And not neat little paperbacks, either - hugeass reference grammars.

Never have I been so glad that the library is just a few buildings over.

You know that writer in your fandom who always write these crazy whacked-out sort-of-AUs, where there are all these extravagant explanations for why characters didn't really die or how canon events didn't really happen?

Euripides is totally that guy. So far I've run into Helen: Not Really In Troy! and Iphigenia: Not Really Dead!

ETA: Do you think if I'm writing a paper on differing ancient portrayals of Helen, I can get away with not reading Euripides's Helen? Because that one requires me to actually read and think critically and analyze, and there are so many other plays that I can just ctrl+F "helen" and take away a couple of lines about that slut Helen, who up and left her husband. Or that poor Helen, cruelly abducted by foreigners.

....yeah, I didn't think so.

Compiling grad school deadlines, application requirements, and so forth into a giant spreadsheet is probably useful. However, this does not mean it should be done when you need to be doing real work.

I was at work today (I have a student job at the library) and I was pushing a booktruck along when I came to a bump in the floor where the carpet starts. Used to passing this obstacle many times weekly, I have the cart a little bit of a hitch to get it over the bump and....the wheels fell off.

Man, this had better not be a metaphor for the week ahead.

my group was working on this project today, about the images of circles under polynomials, which is in turn a proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra, and we were looking at curvature and trying to find an easy to way to calculate it, so we were doing some steps and counting loops when it occurred to us: "these are the Reidemeister moves! This is knot theory! \o/"

Oh XKCD alt text, you describe my plans for the upcoming weeks so well! Granted, I don't drink so I can only carry out half the instructions, and it's more to do with FINALS and END OF TERM MADNESS than any attempt to avoid dying of swine flu, but that's an added bonus, right?

Sudden 2am epiphany: I cannot write long form fiction because I cannot hold in all in my head at once. I know that was the case for say, academic writing (and once had a conversation with a teacher about it in the midst of taking at exam), but it had not occurred to me that the same would be true in fiction, although when I put it like that it seems obvious.

Right. Found the problem, now I can start trying to find the solution.

"Hawking Very Ill" :(

(Someone handed me A Brief History of Time when I was in middle school, and it changed my life. I understood maybe half of it at the time, but that didn't matter.)

Man, I had forgotten how nervewracking it is to start a flist. Or circle, I guess. Because once you get going you can add people little by little, but since I am starting and finding new one (a more RL one, as opposed to the fannish one I will eventually import from LJ under a different name), there's this moment where you just have to jump. And deal with the fact that for a while you will have a rather small subscription list that is sort of deeply lacking in completeness. (Completeness in the mathematical sense, where if you have one element you have the element next to it to, but right now I'm not sure what the next elements are. Also, hi, this is my brain on math.)

(This is something that people who have less dodgy mental health don't worry about, isn't it?)

Hi! This is a place-holder post, and also sort of an introduction. I'm Laura Anne, and this is my Dreamwidth. When I find time, I'm going to get this all set up with a layout and a profile and reading/access lists, but right now it just...is.

ETA: layout achieved! and by 'layout', I mean 'I changed the colors to make it readable' because there's only so much i can deal with at once. basically, this meant that I stripped out all the black and much of the white. predictable, self. also achieved: hackery of my favorite greasemonkey script

TODO: -expand all
-make the sidebar behave - want usernames and username in commname, not subject and username, resp.. comment counts would be nice too. i think this is me clinging as hard as i can to flexible squares.
-header?
-borders on userpics?
-that thing where clicking on "n comments" takes you to the #coments page is not what i am used to - is this better or worse, and do i have the skills to hack at if it needed? (yes, i think)
-i can't tell links from bold.

dare disturb the universe

written in wind and running water

things i learned today, unless it was yesterday

things I learned today

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note to self

signs it's monday

sometimes i really love math

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hello, world

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