Avocados and Sudden Epiphany

At the beginning of last semester our RA, Travis, had put paper Lego minifigure heads on the doors of the rooms on our floor, labeled with each person's name. We thought that was great, but this semester he left it up to us to decorate our own doors. My roommates set about drawing door signs for themselves with crayons (as it turns out, as soon as you abandon your stubborn teenage pride you grow back into coloring with crayons) but I wanted to do something better, because that's how I roll. I'm still working on my own sign, but I decided that wasn't enough, so I made one for the entire apartment in photoshop. Behold.

Yeah, this is probably proof that I've been listening to too much Retro Wave while doing homework.
As a side note, that chrome effect is WAY harder than you think it is. We're talking, like, six layers of gradients.

As I hoped, everyone loved it, and we're going to print a big one to put on our door. Basically we want our door to say you wish you were as cool as us, because nothing strikes fear into the hearts of your rivals like laser grids and neon pink. While talking about the sign and its overwhelming 1980's influence, we theorized a substance that is, in fact, the condensed and purified essence of the eighties, which we named Compound-80. A single drop of Compound-80 can turn a normal group photo into the gloriousness you see before you.

Now, I expect you want to know what's up with the title of this post, but by now you should know that I always get around to it eventually. This story has little to do with avocados, although I just recently discovered that avocados actually taste okay. This is a story about chemistry.

Back in my sophomore Honors Chem class, we learned about a special number. It is called Avogadro's number (or Avocado's number if you have any sense of humor at all), and it is defined as 6.022 x 10^23. That seems kind of random, much like the quantity e in other realms of math and science, and naturally my classmates and I wanted to know what the heck it meant. My teacher explained it as the number of atoms in a mole (a mole is a measure of matter to chemists, and a small, furry burrowing creature to everyone else), such that a mole of a particular element had mass equal to the atomic mass of that element. It made the math easier, but in practical terms that definition made NO sense whatsoever. It all seemed much too arbitrary.

Three years later, while teaching myself chemistry again, I finally realized something: Avogadro's number is the number of atomic mass units in a gram. For some of you that clarification might not help at all, in which case I'm sorry, but for me it was like harp music and beams of light descending from heaven as I rose to a new level of sublime enlightenment. I had never thought of the quantity as a unit conversion factor, and that realization alone will make Chem 105 as much as 12% easier. Don't ask me where I get my numbers--they're just as fake as all other statistics.

So either you learned something just now, or you're saying to yourself Will, you idiot--it took you three years to realize that? If the latter is the case, you aren't entirely right. It only took me a matter of seconds to learn the truth. It took three years to occur to me to Google it.

Hic Manebimus Optime!

Who's Up For Round Two?

I think many of you likely noticed that I went dark at the very end of my first semester, and this is my first entry since. It seems that when finals week arrived and the demons were at the door, I had neither the time nor the presence of mind to advertise my situation, but right now I think it's only fair to provide a short recap of how things went down.

First of all, I'd like to express how fantastic it is to have a window in which I can take tests whenever I want. Definitely an advantage over high school, where everything was rigidly scheduled. Beyond that, I think finals week wasn't as bad as it was cracked up to be. This is not to say that it wasn't stressful, because I narrowly avoided a few nervous breakdowns through a Pavlovian self-reward system of unhealthy foods, but I found that none of my tests were really that... hard. Perhaps I was lucky, but I like to think that with good preparation, exams do not deserve the irrational fear we have for them. I'll see whether my theories hold after my second semester.

As far as grades go, which my earlier posts should indicate I have a minor obsession over, I think I did respectably well. Despite my 90% on my calculus final I only eked out a B+ in the class, which was disappointing at best and discouraging at worst, but I'll have to live with that. Getting a grade with a B in front of it was a first for me, and somewhat of a rude awakening, but I had to realize that it hardly spells doom for me. I secured an A- in physics and A's in all of my other classes, for which I'm touting a bit of well-deserved pride. Even that dance class, which I was so worried about the entire semester. I had to fight tooth and nail for the extra credit I needed, but I got it.

My first semester taught me quite a bit, but not really in the subjects my classes covered. I had to learn how to survive on my own, communicate with strangers and coexist with other humans, which was quite a struggle for my cloistered, introverted, borderline-isolationist self, but has definitely molded me into a better person. This semester I plan to work on time management, habit building and actually reading the textbook, so we'll see how that goes.

Here are some nice clouds, just for fun.

This brings us to now. I fully enjoyed my three-week break to relax and decompress, as well as not having homework over Christmas for the first time in my memory, but all good things come to an end. It's the dawn of a new semester, full of gloomy January weather, a wealth of uncertainty and the looming threat of Chem 105. It's currently the most oft-failed course at the University, and I didn't exactly have a good experience in tenth grade chemistry, so it has become cause for major concern. I'm not worried about failing, mind you, but the average grade is far lower than I'd like, so it's going to be a battle.

I think that's all I can really say for now. The next few days will be devoted to finding patterns in my schedule and developing a sensible routine, which is going to take a lot of mental dedication--perhaps more than I'm willing to give it, but options are few and time is short, because the sooner I can find my rhythm, the better. Ready, Go!

Hic Manebimus Optime!