the elves of Red China can hear extremely low frequencies

The friend who aggressively urged me to attend the school I attend was rolling high on Ecstacy (if that is the streets' spelling) at the time of the urging and added, in a burst of sobriety, that it would be extremely hard, but that I would love it. It occured to me that the acronym of the school sounded much like "a mess of E," but I wouldn't doubt his heart, despite the goofballs. Basing it much on this Chi-town encounter and the taste for challenge it put in my mouth, I signed up. I now stand nearing the crest of my time here. Here's my snapse of the bittersweet bleaknesses and promises foreseen in the coming quarter.

Every lecture and lab I need attend this quarter meets in a tiered brick building with three stories. It's essentially a maze that might inadvertently benefit students by forcing them to plot complex three-dimensional routes through it. I've been told it takes spending years as an instructor in the building before it is mastered. I generally end up ten minutes late on a catwalk above some massive machinery on the first day of class, not quite sure of which floor I'm on. With all classes meeting in this labyrinth, it feels more than ever that education is a fulltime occupation, in a centralized job site.

Last night, in my one-hour break between my two-hour classes, I became hungry. With the cafeteria closed, and the Greek place up the street sounding like an expensive habit to begin on my first night on the 'job,' I retired to 'Lee's Lounge' in search of a sandwich of some sort. There is a framed picture of a young bearded man in the lounge, and I assume he is the Lee after which the the nook is named. Given the dedication, I doubt he's alive. Despite his bright smile, his face is a bit ominous when it's the only one in the place.

Seeing no one in the lounge, it became easy to deposit $1.30 in a vending carousel for a smoked polish sausage. Without anybody but good old Lee to witness me eat it, I wasn't locked into purchasing something from the machine with a slightly higher value of health, or less phallic shape. I often refrain from ordering extra mayonaise on sandwiches, or opt for something consisting of white meat and lettuce, if there's a pretty stranger to impress in the line behind me. Tell me no one's ever influenced themself in this way.

In the silence of the empty tables and chairs, Lee's bright stare, and the lights' florescent glare, I chewed into the microwaved polish sausage. Incising the membranous casing revealed the well-marbled meat plasma within. The bun turned to dough where I gripped it. I sipped coffee from an uncovered paper cup. The anti-romantic routine of the next 10 weeks stretched out before me, and it had beauty.

En route to the orientation for an electronic communications course, I realized I had to return to the lounge for my schedule, which I had misplaced there. Other students had taken up positions at the tables. Before spotting the yellow paper atop the microwave, I was going to ask a young lady, who was sitting at the table I had sat, if she had seen it. Upon requesting her attention, I was shot a cold, afraid look. I can only try to dispell to myself that many nights of meloncholic solitude in Lee's lounge has hardened this one.

never even ever ever even ever ever ends

This could be it. I have exactly two hours of classroom-continuum remaining until all of my achievements in this school's technical calculus battery are summed, and I am ranked. The topic of neverending math equations here at /#blog may end (or converge absolutely).

I think back to advanced chemistry my senior year in high school and our introduction to Casio scientific calculators. My lab partner received a great deal of joy by organizing a table of all the sine, cosine and tangent functions of the number 69, then instructing others on the slack-off side of the room to take the inverse function of the decimal values. Sure enough, '69' popped up on the LCD. Switching to hexadecimal mode, letters 'A' through 'F' were accessed, and decimal number 2645 was added to the table with instructions to swap base modes. This yields A55. Still, it bothered him that he had no way to generate the number 311. He was leading the running joke about this number, jesting an intense fascination with the rap-rock forerunners. But inverse trigonometric functions will only return up to 180 degree readings.

Finally, I'm taught something useful by a math teacher. This is, of course, also in jest, but I did learn a function recently that will create a division problem from a repeating decimal. Just as 0.3333, repeating infinitely converges to 1/3, the number 0.69696969... can be attained by dividing 23 by 33. To get 0.311311311311... one need only divide 311 by 999. Or, of course, 140/333 = 0.420420420... It works for any number of obsession and by priciples of infinite series.

It may have been nice to have this knowledge in my fourth year of high school to entertain the imaginations of my chemistry class and myself, but I'm sure it will be nicer to know it, and all else I've absorbed, entering into the advanced electronics classes to come. Although, imagine what I might be capable of in the parlor because of higher mathematical education. On several occasions at a restaurant beknown to many beknown to me, I realized one large soda and one basket of fries tallies up to $3.14. I gripe at the check "I didn't order pi."

s.o.m.e. school in the midwest

In appendage to the previous post, I was learned in the ways of 'squirrel cages' today. They happen to be a main piece of hardware found in induction motors.