Reading Define Print

I don't want to say I've been neglecting this blog, but since the last time I posted, I got a girlfriend and the Higgs Boson was discovered. It's been a while. Also, I'll get to the punny title in a second.

Why has it been something like 3 months since the last time I posted? Well, three reasons.

One: university. It hogs your time. You think you're out and it keeps pulling you back in. It's not like at high school where you do your stuff, then go sit down. You're going and going. Free time becomes a commodity.

Two: Karin, the aforementioned girlfriend. I can assure you, when it comes to priorities, make no mistake in that I place Karin far above my blog. Thus, it suffers.

Three: I have Twitter, which has become my vent to the world. I also go on Facebook, but Twitter is much more of a window into my world. If you're visiting the blog, you get to see my Twitter feed on the right. I use Twitter because I can easily get it through my phone.

So: for all those of you who have been eagerly awaiting my return, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, I have returned! The bad news is*, all of those three things up there still exist. So no guarantees on scheduling. But you knew that already.

So what does someone who hasn't posted in three months talk about? Well, whatever the hell I want to. Today, I've decided to talk about words I like. Because I can. And I suppose my blog title gets to live up to its title every now and then.

Bayard - noun - A person armed with the self confidence of ignorance. It sounds like something from "The Devil's Dictionary", but in fact it comes from the OED, by way of "Reading the OED" by Ammon Shea*. It's this sort of word that amuses me - it says so much in so little. I, in fact, have written quite a few myself about university. And now you have an explanation for the title of this post. But first, allow me to show you how it's done with some excellent quotes from "The Devil's Dictionary."

Admiration - noun - Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.

Bore - noun - A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

Philosophy - noun - A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Scriptures - noun - The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

Year - noun - A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

Yes, Ambrose Bierce (the author of said Dictionary) hated everything, but damn, that dry wit is hilarious. Why do I particularly enjoy this sort of thing? It involves clever, concise wordplay, and that is one of the things I really enjoy, comedy-wise. Douglas Adams was a master of this, as was Joseph Heller. In the field of modern novelists, Bill Bryson is also great at this.

Now, without further Apu*, I present my very own attempt at making something like this.

All-nighter - noun - slang - A ritualistic celebration of caffeinated beverages.

Asia - proper noun - Where UNSW students come from.

Brochure - noun - See "bookmark."

Chemistry - noun - See "physics."

Class - noun - Where one is if not climbing stairs.

Computer - noun - The most effective study tool; the least effective study tool.

Distraction - noun - See "fail."

Examination - noun - The period following an all-nighter.

Holiday - noun - See "sleep."

Ink - noun - That which runs out during examinations.

Lecture - noun - An optional class.

Lecturer - noun - A person employed to move through the slides on a PDF

Lunch - noun - food eaten at 3 p.m.

Non-examinable - adjective - invisible; irrelevant.

Non-trivial - adjective - Excruciatingly difficult.

Reference - noun - a way of increasing the length of an assessment.

Russia - proper noun - Where mathematics lecturers come from.

Physics - noun - See "mathematics."

Study - verb - The act of checking Facebook with a myunsw tab open.

Trivial - adjective - Obvious to the lecturer.

Upstairs - adjective - Not worth going to.

OK, that's all for today. A final note that I wanted to slip in somewhere - at the time of writing, this blog had 493 views. The great and powerful Arceus approves. Also, Googling 'Wayward Letters' gets you this blog as its first link. Move over, Daily Mail. Anyway. Thanks for reading, and with any luck, I'll be writing again soon.

AB

Life, the University and Everything

Hello friends, companions, people who stumbled across my blog expecting regular updates (and boy, would you have been disappointed), and welcome to Wayward Letters, where the word "coherent" isn't in our dictionary*. No, this blog has not been cast into the annals of the internet - it's still kicking - but it hasn't been posted on.

If I were a cruel person, I would just end the post there. But I won't.

There is a reason I haven't been posting recently, though, and it's not laziness or procrastination (for a change), but university. And it's a lot different to high school, that's for sure. My free time has been impacted on drastically, and there's always more to do. And the free time I do have, is usually spent catching up with friends. And so Wayward Letters becomes Wayside Letters*. But, I'm here now, in my mid-semester break, and I have some time. So now I get to talk about my experiences in university. Cause I can. And because I feel like it, I'm putting in list format.

1. Everybody wants to be there

High school carries an air of "oh, we have to be here." It's less so in senior years, but it's still there (e.g. English). In uni, everybody has chosen to be there, and so that attitude is more or less non-existent (at least in Science courses - I've occasionally heard differently in Commerce, but I can't speak from experience). So there's a passion for a course that isn't seen a great deal in high school. In high school, I was the science nerd. Now I'm a science nerd. And that is awesome.

2. Everybody is friendly

Point 1 sort of carries on to here. You always have some sort of link to other people in your course, and that just provides a friendly atmosphere. So you make a really wide circle of friends, and there's always a friend in your course.

3. Nerdiness is now cool

Hello, students, look at your hjgh school, now back to uni, now back at your high school, now back to uni. Sadly, you aren't at uni, but if you stopped going to high school and switched to university, it could seem like you're there. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re in Pokémon club with the nerds your nerds could be like. What are you wearing, back at me. I have it on; it’s a science shirt with two references to that webcomic you love. Look again, the webcomic is now punny! Anything is possible when your school is like a university and not a high school. I’m on free Wi-Fi.

But, it's not all fun and games at university, my friends, far from it.

4. Imagine the HSC workload every day

Oh my, how I wish I was exaggerating. Whatever little free time you had during the HSC, halve it, and that's almost as much free time as you have now. There's a lot of work. I mean, it's about stuff you have a passion in, but there's a lot of work.

5. 9-3 is a good day

My Thursdays are 8-6. Every week. It takes an hour to an hour and a half to get to or from uni. I have a long Thursday. Sleep is for the weak!

6. Stairs stairs stairs stairs stairs stairs stairs

In my university (UNSW if you're interested), there are stairs everywhere. I swear, I have to climb three stories worth of stairs to go to upper campus. There are a lot of stairs. On the plus side, exercise.

So my view of university so far? It's pretty damn awesome, if you can handle the workload and sleep deprivation. I really like the atmosphere of university. It's awesome.

Well, that's all the time we have today (there's probably more I can say, but you know - effort). A small feature I will mention before I depart - to the right you'll see a Twitter feed. Yes, I recently got back into Twitter - I have an app for it now that's draining my phone's battery life like a vampire with tapeworms (yep, that's the analogy I'm going with). My battery gets low quickly is what I'm saying. Anyway. With that, I shall depart.

AB

2nd Rock from the Sun

I was originally going to call this "The Fact Zone: Venus," and have yet another label to use along the lines of "The Plug" and "Opinion Time." But really, I don't feel having another umbrella I can put posts under, if that makes sense (and if it doesn't, I don't particularly care; I can't think of anything better). So we get "2nd Rock from the Sun," which is a sneaky reference to one of my favourite sitcoms, "3rd Rock from the Sun" (where Joseph Gordon-Levitt sorta started out).

Venus. I'm talking about Venus. The planet, not the goddess.

You may be asking why (and it's a fairly reasonable question). Well, I happened to be surfing the net, as I do, when I came across a certain fact - the first one listed below. And I was sad, because I realised I'd forgotten it. Or at least put it in the back of my brain. Reading it gave the reaction of "Ohh, that's right" rather than "I knew that." And I was a tad saddened, because I've been a space nerd ever since I can remember - I brought books about space to school in Kindergarten, for example - and I realised I've been neglecting it recently. So in deference to my younger self, I present awesome facts about the planet Venus, arguably the most interesting planet in the solar system apart from the one that has life on it.

Just a quick disclaimer: I'll be doing the general facts from memory, but may refer to Wikipedia now and then for the specifics. As in, I'd be able to tell you the general idea whenever, but I wouldn't be able to explain the details. But here I can. Anyway. Without further ado, onto the show.

Venus rotates backwards, and pretty damn slowly. There are a couple explanations, my favourite being an asteroid or something hit Venus, messing its rotation up. So it rotates backwards - in other words, the Sun seen from Venus (if you could see it - more of that later) would rise in the west and set in the east. Except it would take a long time to do it.

Before I say exactly how long, I want to briefly mention the difference between sidereal time and solar time. Solar time is the thing we usually measure - when we say a day is 24 hours, we're talking about solar time. Sunrise from sunrise takes 24 hours. However, this is different to sidereal time, which is how long it takes for a planet to make one complete rotation. This is because solar time takes into account orbiting the Sun. Let me try and explain. As the Earth orbits the sun, it moves slightly along in its orbit (duh). So once the Sun goes back to its original position, the Earth has already moved slightly along its orbit, so it takes a different amount of time for the Earth's rotation to compensate for its orbit. This picture explains it better. Short version: I'll be talking about sidereal time for the moment. When I say sunrise to sunrise, that's solar time (if you're interested, Earth's sidereal day is actually slightly less than 24 hours - 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds to be more precise).

Anyway. Venus's day. It takes Venus 225 days to make one complete orbit around the Sun. It takes Venus 243 days to make one complete rotation (sidereal time, for those keeping score at home). Yes, you read that right - Venus's day is longer than its year. If we talk about solar days, it's 117 days from sunrise to sunrise. Still - pretty damn long. Well, that's enough of days and rotations. Let's move onto temperature.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system. It is the second planet in the solar system. This rather odd discrepancy is due to its intense cloud cover - Venus has experienced a runaway greenhouse effect. On the surface, it is pretty much 467 °C at all points on the planet at all times of day. Why? Because the atmosphere is 97% carbon dioxide. And because carbon dioxide is that dense, the pressure on the surface of the planet is over 90 bar. In other words, the pressure is over 90 times stronger on Venus than on Earth. For a frame of reference, that's the pressure you would feel if you were about 900 metres underwater.

That's not all though. Not by a long shot. Venus is thought to have active volcanoes. Yep, active volcanoes. Now, we say "thought to" because there have definitely been lightning strikes, and for Venus, the explanation for that is volcanoes. It can't be the clouds, because for some reason, it's not those. The clouds don't form a huge problem on the surface - when it rains, the raindrops evaporate in the atmosphere, just because it's too hot. I say raindrops instead of water because it's not water. The clouds are made out of sulfur dioxide, so it rains sulfuric acid. Yep, just keeps getting better and better.

There's a lot more awesome things about Venus (it's the third brightest object in the sky, it's the only planet named after a goddess), but I want to end on the exploration of Venus. You have heard all the things about how Venus will kill you, so imagine how difficult it must be to get probes on the surface. So what do you do? You leave it to the Russians*, with their Venera program. The probe that lasted the longest lasted for less than two hours. Now, how do you think they got the photos? If you said glass lenses, you were wrong. If you said diamond lenses, you have probably heard of this before. But well done, you were right*. Diamond lenses had to be used. And, the cool thing, the diamonds are still there. Venus can't destroy them (cause diamonds are a girl's best friend. Get it? Cause Venus was a goddess? The only "feminine" planet?*). So if you're looking for gigantic diamonds, you know where to go - the planet of fiery, acidic death!

Well, that's all the facts I'm going to say about the planet Venus. And in less than two weeks. Slightly less. But less than two weeks. Slightly. Anyway. Next post may be about Sad Sphere. Or Electrode and Diglett. Or Slender Man. Or League of Legends. Or whatever. Remember: Rule #1 of Wayward Letters: There are no rules!*  Yes, I didn't feel like the obvious Fight Club reference. And with that out of the way, I'll end the post.

AB