Saturday, March 22, 2014

A Dangerous Idea... Almost Makes...Sense

I've been listening lately to the soundtrack for Baz Lurhmann's The Great Gatsby. It's an interesting soundtrack, produced by Jay-Z including everything from this Jack White cover of a U2 song (Love is Blindness) to a songs from Andre 3000, Florence and the Machine, and a bunch of music you wouldn't expect to work together but it does.

This week has been quite stressful, and from about Tuesday on I've been sleep deprived. What have I learned? I have made it pretty far with what I want to do, yet I have miles and miles to go before I sleep (see? I can't even be original I've stooped to stealing from Robert Frost for heaven's sake!*).

Stress is an interesting thing for me. I produce some of my best work under deadlines and under crazy stress, but if I get past a certain point I just stop. Stop everything. It's really counterproductive, kills my grades, and drives those around me (family and my few close friends) into maddening confrontation. But unfortunately, like I said, I do some of my best work in my dizzying solitary stress circle.

Dizzying solitary stress circle? I like that, but it seems like one of those "writings of a madman" you'd see painted on the walls in a comic-sans-esque manner.

In Physics this week, we watched one of those Mechanical Universe videos. According to our physics teacher, these were originally on laser disk, and then migrated to VHS tape, and now is on DVD. It always (and I mean always) starts in a CalTech lecture room with the same guy explaining some physics concept and it fades off to some voiceover lady with 80s echo-synth background explaining math derivations. Every time they go to have some historical background, they cut to these historical dramatizations of Newton just creating things, and Keppler as a mathematical wanderer, and it goes on.

It was through this sort of bizarre historical dramatization that I learned that Newton went insane. Like, literally insane. Now I'm not sure how they determined this, or how he became insane, considering he was a solitary individual who was obsessed with math, gravity, and how it all coexists (I think he was insane the whole time, just good at hiding it...). Newton was brilliant, but he was still crazy.

In completely unrelated news, I am in talks with WYEP and Reimagine Media to start a podcast. We have already recorded at least one episode of it, but we are in the process of finding a home for it. Hopefully in a weeks time I'll have a link where you can listen in.

I'm in the middle of planning my eagle project as well as about ten thousand other projects. Sorry it's not all that coherent. Though I love writing, and I love posting here and talking with people (who never comment) about stuff I write about here, I have to have my priorities straight. My posting schedule and sanity suffers immensely for this.

*See what I did there? I cited the source, sort of.

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