December 2005 Archives

It looks like the Peugeot deal fell through. The guy sold it yesterday to someone. So, today I went to this interesting little place at 46th and Hawthorne called the Recyclery. They sell a completely random mix of used bikes and parts in this two level garage. I tested out an extremely rickety, old Peugeot, and finally decided to have the guy build me a bike for $250. Apparently he's getting a bunch of brand new 10- to 15-year-old components on Monday from a closing bike shop, so I'm going to drop by on Wednesday and pick everything out. I picked out the frame today--an old 62 cm Schwinn one--and apparently I can get it painted matte black for $75 extra. I think the current finish is good from the standpoint of deterring thiefs though. It's very nondescript. In any case, this bike will definitely be of the commuter variety: probably fairly heavy unless I go for a single-speed. Unfortunately the hills, however small, that are in between Wilson and Lewis and Clark could be a little awkward with only one gear. We'll see how everything fares on Wednesday.

When man first stepped onto his virgin lands he walked on bare feet. As the sands of time mixed in his mind he invented the wheel, the mother of transportation. Taming the wild horses and beasts to do his labor, his civilization advanced, but it was millennia before the next revolution in transportation: the bicycle.

I'm finally being forced to buy a bicycle for communting to physics next semester. I've been looking on craigslist for a really cheap road bike with a large frame and I finally found someone selling an ancient 61 cm Peugeot bike. Considering Peugeot's reputation for cars, I'm still a little skeptical. Apparently many French in the 1970s won the Tour de France on them though. It looks to be in pretty good condition and is going for $199, although I'm hoping to bargain that down a little. I never thought that I would find myself in the market for a Peugeot, though.

I'm currently sitting down to write some holiday letters to people and I'm having the worst time thinking of what to write. Normally these kind of letters are filled with random tidbits of what a person has been doing recently, and it's not like I've been idle recently. I've been really busy actually. Contrast this with the other things I've easily spewed off in last couple days: a ten-minute speech on moral systems and three essays for college. Yet I can't actually write a personal note. This is either a sign of my vast social incompetance and/or the fact that school teaches to be really good at thinking about very interesting and abstract things that are of absolutely no practical value whatsoever.

"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."

--Albert Einstein

7 applications down, 0 to go (although two additional essays are needed for damage control). Yessssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!

And this is this is precisely why we're all applying to Princeton and Yale instead of Harvard. It isn't by chance that Harvard's motto is "Veritas".

With my speech and debate performance stagnated in the "pretty good" range, I am sick of languishing in mediocrity. After spending a day recovering from the past semester by skiing and eschewing mental exertion of any kind whatsoever, I think I may be almost ready to launch a word processor and dive back in. I shall compose my very own ninth symphony, so to speak: an Oratory on a scope I have never approached before. This speech will deal with a philosophical dilemma that I have been incapable of resolving for at least 8 or 9 months. I'm not sure I can resolve the paradox, but I think I can provide insight into it. It deals with the absolute most fundamental question of how humans make decisions, and methodologies for doing so. In considering this, conventional morality and nihilism are both destroyed. We'll see how it turns out, but I think it has the potential to be intensely interesting, even if unconvincing, and that is what truly counts in Oratory.

You know that you're either going insane or things are going really badly when you're devising extensive formulas for computing acceptance probabilities, and the results are percentages that fit on one hand.

I'm doing my best to suck up to the hypism right now. It's rather unpleasant being so arrogant.

Sartre says, "Hell is other people." I say, "Hell is college essays."

In other news, yesterdays speech and debate tournament was another confounding disappointment. For some reason, people have not been doing well at all. No one debated yesterday, and we aren't entirely sure of the results because we left before awards, but things were not impressive when we left. Kim and I were the only ones to final, although two people may have placed in dramatic interp. (there was no final round for that event). This is all becoming increasingly worrisome, especially since we should theoretically be even stronger than last year when we placed 2nd in the state.

Well, yesterday it seemed that the Kadish-Anderson machine was rumbling along over all its opponents just fine at the Clackamas tournament. We were coming off a less-than-expected, but still satisfying 3rd place finish at Sprague. So it was a little bit of a let down when we didn't make the final round yesterday. Now Colin just told us that we went 2-2. Matt won't let anyone see the ballots because he's apparently analyzing them and now wants to power-match the teams. It's pretty much a disastrous weekend.