Anyways, I’m looking forward to meeting up with some of you in May and SXSW starts soon. I will try and post pictures.

I was thinking of a good way to celebrate two New York Times articles that are hot off the presses right now. The first the Fed’s $85 billion dollar bailout of AIG, and the second is an article on the habit of making absurd estimations known as Fermi Problems. So I decided I would estimate the number of semi trailers it would take to send AIG the money in 20 dollar bills. Hey, it beats doing my Mechanics homework. (Full disclosure: I allowed 1 use of Google per problem which is technically against the rules, and before posting this I checked my answers with a calculator so I wasn’t embarrassed.) Estimates after the jump.

Like most of the banks in America I have no cash on hand. So the thing I looked up was the volume of a dollar bill. According to Wikipedia it’s 6.41″ by 2.61″ by .0043″ The 43 thousandths thing was bothering me so to simplify I decided to calculate the volume of 1000 x $20 bills, or the volume of $20,000. Multiplying the last dimension by 1000, and then converting all the dimensions to feet with some estimation, I got the thousand 20 dollar bills as ~ .5′ by .2′ by .33′ or .033 cubic feet. This number is probably a little small but it’s right to an order of magnitude. Now estimating a semi at 8 feet wide and 8 feet tall and 45 feet long, we get the semi is  ~ 3000 cubic feet. The volume of the truck divided by the volume of the money times the value of the money (3×10^3/3×10^-2 * 2 x 10^4) is 2×10^9 dollars per semi or 2 billion dollars per semi. So to send all the money you would need a total of 43 semis.

Now, I was a little curious about how much the gas would cost. Since I’m not an East Coaster, I chose to Google the distance from the White House to Wall Street. It’s ~200 miles. Estimating 10 miles per gallon you get 20 gallons of gas needed per truck. Times 20 by 43 semis and there is 860 gallons of gas. Estimating the cost of gas at $5 dollars (it’s diesel) it ends up being $4300.

I’m just trying to put things into perspective. It makes me wonder how we are sending all that money over to Iraq. I also find it to be interesting that the Iraqi government announced it had a 79 billion dollar surplus last month. Hmm. This is my first time doing Fermi problems and they are surprising fun to do. Add your own ideas, estimates, and/or corrections in the comments.

Anyways, I am super busy (as I sure you all are as well) these last two weeks, and since I’m trying to get a presentation on Ozu ready for Thursday, plus the millions of other things. Our titular head submission showed pretty poorly. The sound system was all messed up so you couldn’t hear anything at all, and that definitely hurt us. We lost to a remake of Fatboy Slim’s Weapons of Choice music video with popular dining hall celebrity Lyle doing his best Christopher Walken. I’m still proud of the movie although I think we over-edited it and kind of threw away a lot of our gags. At the same time, those were conscious choices we made so even if they were the wrong choices at least it was on purpose. Here’s the Vimeo link. (updated since the youtube looked so crappy)

Picnic (How to Cook Man Meat) from Morgan Wajda-Levie on Vimeo

It’s the last year of Titular Head for me and that means that I have gots to win again. Bare Aspirations did well, but it may have also ruin all chances any of us would have of running for political office. So this movie is going to be nude-free. Morgan and I are working really hard on it and expect a link to the video after the show. Until then, SCREENSHOTS!

Basically, I think the decision will be between U Wisconsin Madison, U Michigan Ann Arbor, and U Texas Austin, assuming I get into all three , and I got into Austin which bodes well as it is harder to do. (UPDATE: I just got an acceptance letter from U Wisconsin today!) If by some mistake in the admissions department I get into MiT or Berkeley I will be in a totally different decision mode. I don’t want to go to a school with a big football program, cause game days are so annoying, but I seemed to pick like the three biggest football programs in the U.S. W.T.F.? Point of the story: Grad School decisions coupled with primary decisions leads to a very nervous Spring semester!

Here’s some Eye Candy courtesy of Bad Astronomy. Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007. Be sure to look at the full resolution pictures. Amazing! Also fun fact: we have more accurate maps of the surface of Mars than we do of the ocean floor. Effing crazy!

P.S. My favorite picture is a toss up between Number 5, 4 and 1. They are all so cool!

Anyways, I saw this today on BOiNGBOiNG, so sorry if you guys all read that blog too. But basically, congress added a line to the Higher Education Reauthorization Bill that states if colleges must police the downloads of it’s students with strict consequences for copyright infringement AND provide it’s students with DRM alternatives like Napster and Ruckus if they want to receive federal financial aid for their students. It’s pretty disturbing that the policy will punish the poorest of the nation’s students unless the college becomes lackeys of the RIAA. Granted it’s not passed yet, but I’m waiting for the amendment to the bill that outlaws libraries from loaning out copyrighted material.

I just got back from Philadelphia and chilling with Morgan. Quakers in general are super nice, and Morgan parents are awesome. There was much discussion of appropriating Grinnell dollars to make titular head films and the content of those films. I think Tim Hau is a natural choice to at least star in one of them, if we can get him!

Also I am going to apply to do a one year Churchill scholarship next year. Similar to the Rhodes Scholarship except Cambridge instead of Oxford and only for math and science. I don’t think I’ll get it, with only 12 people receiving it in the country! But Grinnell sent an email to me and a few others asking us to apply. I figure I have a decent chance of getting one of the school’s two nominations, and that alone would be good for Grad School applications. Plus the opportunity to study and get paid at the best physics/math university in the world is too good to pass up. Stephen Hawking teaches and there so did: Rutherford, J.J. Thompson, and Newton! I’ll find out if I get the school’s nomination in October, but if I want a chance I feel I need to do really outstanding on the GRE’s. I take it on August 16th so these next days are going to be spent STUDYING! WAH BA DOOP BA DOOP! I leave for CR tomorrow at 7.30! arrive at 11.40 am!

I can’t believe the Supreme Court did not side with the Alaskan Student who was suspended due to the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” poster at an OFF-CAMPUS event. (Wikipedia) Granted the poster was sophomoric, and I would understand if they held the banner at a school assembly. I guess the event was school-sponsored, but it was a public place. I love Justice Clarence Thomas’ argument for siding against free speech, “In light of the history of American public education, it cannot seriously be suggested that First Amendment ‘freedom of speech’ encompasses a student’s right to speak in public schools.” The sad thing is though this statement is unfortunately accurate, this wasn’t even at school! Some people are speculating any website accessible from school could be interpreted as ‘school-sanctioned’. Therefore if you put anything on a blog or social networking site that the school disagrees with you could be suspended. Man. I’m glad I’m high schoolers don’t have important opinions. Otherwise we could be seriously stunting the ability for high schoolers to critically think about this world. Although perhaps critically thinking is no longer the goal of No Child Left Behind Schools. It doesn’t help to critically analyze the questions on multiple choice tests. Justice Stevens had it right when he asked what the court would do if the banner was ‘Wine Sips 4 Jesus’. Honestly I think that banner is a million times more clever. Of course administrators wouldn’t touch that due to the Eucharist even though underage drinking is a serious problem.

Sorry that turned into a rant. This is why I think teenagers should only allowed to have opinions given to them. I plan on installing shock electrodes into my brood to prevent them from dissenting. THE CRUMLEYS ARE A PROUD PEOPLE! Life update after the jump!

Well I will say that State College has gotten a lot better. I finally got my bike and there are miles and miles of bike paths for me to ride on. It’s a lot of fun and it’s nice to clear my head after being in a stuffy lab all day. We have been working on a broken sputtering machine for almost 3 weeks now. I really don’t know how to work it and there is a ton of down time, and I have basically been filling that time reading books and the comics I received in various care packages. But today I was kindof sick of not doing anything productive because I basically have been half-assing this internship. Just really screwing and unscrewing stuff they tell me to. So I told myself that I was just going to read the manuals cause I have no effin clue how to work on fixing a power supply (what my mentor was doing). So I sat down and read almost all of the power supply manual and everything the 3 books we had on thin book deposition had to say about DC Magnetron sputtering. Anyways, we knew that the fact that we had a nickel target could be a issue, but I found the theory that actually showed why Magnetron makes a difference, and a few numbers that show the difference between magnetron and regular sputtering. It turns out that if you have a magnetron and want to work at 1 kW you only need 300 V to get like around 3.3 amps, whereas with regular you need 10kVs to get like .1 amp. Anyways, not to get all sciencey, but my theory is the Nickel(which is magnetic) is shielding the magnetic field of the magnetron and basically forcing our target to act as a regular diode, the voltages and currents we are getting agree with this hypothesis. So I showed my mentor all the passages that would point to this idea in the books and he was really impressed. He like told everyone in the building I figured it out and started calling it Patrick’s law. It’s kindof stupid, but it still managed to make my day. Let’s hope it was right, otherwise, my face will be red.

IN NON-NERD NEWS:

Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is quite possibly the best book I have ever read. Or at least the most enjoyable of them. I cannot recommend it enough to all of you. A masterpiece. Just make sure you read it slow because I read the first 400 pages in a day and then I really started to hate it. But I took a week off and went back and finished it. It is one of those books where you really can enjoy every sentence. If you don’t get yourself a copy I know what I am getting you guys for your birthday. Today I went back and re-read the first chapter, and Murakami definitely knew what he was doing. Thinking about how good it is makes me regret writing this crappy post. Please SOMEONE read it so I can talk to them about it.

Also I bought 2 Cds: The Frames’ The Cost and The Polyphonic Spree’s The Fragile Army. Both are highly recommended. I want to buy the new White Stripes but I am still afraid. Someone tell me if it is worth it!

Wow this was a long post, but I guess that’s what happens when it rains.

Sallie wearing fashion straight from Harajuku Y’all. One more picture after the jump!

I giv ups!

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password: