end of summer session

Today was my last recitation for the summer. As usual it was undermined by what was going on in the class. Because the class is so time-compressed, some material just gets left out. This time it was ray tracing. I'm not entirely sure how you do an optics lecture without ray tracing, but whatever. I taught the basics of it.

I was supposed to get paid today, but I didn't see a pay stub or the money. I really hope I don't have to chase down every damn paycheck.

Tomorrow I have to wake up early and go proctor the PH 203 final. There is another PSM defense tomorrow, this time in Applied Biotechnology, so I am going to go check that out as well.

I started going through my Go books again. I have a Go computer program, but it is not much fun to play against. Some of its moves are almost demeaning, it thinks I am an idiot. I also can wall off one of its groups without enough space to make two eyes and it keeps putting more stones there. The computer is a absolute bastard about invading though, so I guess I can learn a little from it.

I've been reading my Steven Ambrose book about the Transcontinental Railroad. It's interesting to see how closely tied the Transcontinental Railroad was to the Civil War. I have to say it definitely provided inspiration for Atlas Shrugged. There are people who are Prime Movers doing the pioneering surveys, designing the bridges and figuring out how to forge the path. That's pretty exciting to read about. Then there is the fuckery of the second-handers. I don't know how the damn thing ever got built.

Although the book is interesting, it is definitely not as polished as the author's other books. At one point I got to a paragraph that looked extremely familiar. I thought the wind had blown the pages back when I wasn't looking, but it turns out that the author used almost the exact same paragraph eight pages ago. The first time it was a quotation, and the second time was the author's description (which was almost identical to the quote). It just seems like the author wrote his book in the same style the railroad was built - build it fast, worry about fixing it up later.