What a beautiful book.
fin
Starbucks Lover
I’ve learned a new word to describe an incredibly specific event:
Mondegreen: mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning
Surprisingly, the Wikipedia page never mentions the Taylor Swift song where people all think it’s “Starbucks lovers” instead of “list of ex lovers.”
And here I was for a few weeks thinking it’s a love song about selling out and corporate greed.
Blue toon in a white dress
Otherwise known as a SMURFETTE, and unwitting namesake for a principle describing how in many popular culture “a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined.”
Honestly, what a great name for an absolutely terrible trend in media. Maybe Joe Biden can learn something about this.
Bay Leaf
The recent Sunday crossword puzzle had a clue relating to the source of bay leaves, whose answer was LAUREL. I was curious afterwards and stumbled upon two horrifying uses:
- They’re used in entomology as an “active ingredient in killing jars.” Apparently, the tender leaves releases vapors which slowly kills small insects. It turns out, the essential oil concentration is the active ingredients and not some intrinsic mechanic property, which really begs the question of why people fall for those MLMs shelling oils.
Speaking of…
- Maybe burning a bay leaf does have noticeable effects on the human body as this website suggests, but it seems there’s a non-zero population in the world who like to think that burning this dried plant leaf can also bring fame and fortune. Maybe it’s because it’s the color green? Maybe because bay leaf sounds somewhat like bay life, and San Francisco is part of Silicon Valley? Maybe it’s just humans wanting to believe in the supernatural? Or just an attractive person able to convert superstition into a successful YouTube career?
On the issue of using them in cooking, I firmly believe they are overhyped and doesn’t really contribute much.
aperçu
The Dutch House
I don’t understand how a book like The Dutch House can be so captivating. There are no overarching villain, nor fantastical world building or gimmicks. The sole driving force lies in the ability of Ann Patchett to deliver a soulful story stemming from the Cinderella-esque expulsion of two siblings, Maeve and Danny, from their family “home,” the Dutch House.
The two trudged into the future, with Danny obtaining a medical degree but ultimately eschewing it by becoming a real estate investor while Maeve became a successful CFO figure in a frozen vegetable company, while never letting go of the past, returning to the edges of the Dutch House time after time; partly out of habit, and partly to reminisce. It was in those quiet times where the author really shined and captured my attention, and drove me to keep on reading. Turns out, I have been and will always be a sucker for good prose.
I know I am facing a lot of personal issues this quarantine, and the following quote resonated:
There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.
I am at a crossroads in my life with finishing up my degree. I’ve just been through a tough breakup. I will land on solid ground though. I need to focus on not what I have lost, but rather what I can achieve:
I’d never been in the position of getting my head around what I’d been given. I only understood what I’d lost.
Sixty Days Later
The year started off like any other year, with the exception that there were significantly more ophthalmology based puns, until a little virus blossomed into a pandemic. The resulting quarantine is messy: toilet paper became a commodity worth it’s volume in gold, Zoom overtook Skype as the de facto way to FaceTime people, and the Baskin-Robbins logo is associated with Joe Exotic.
Another tragedy is my haircut. I’ve never really liked how my coiffure looked after an appointment, and I always say “it’ll look better after a few days.” This was a lie. The truth is, my hair didn’t get better. It was moreso I settled. It was (and still is) basically an unhappy relationship.
The barber always asked me how I wanted it cut, and I always replied “It was four weeks ago since my last haircut” then they trim off four weeks worth of hair and happily take my twenty dollars plus tip. The problem is, I usually never liked what my hair looked like four weeks ago, nor that haircut from eight weeks ago ad infinitum. Just a reminder, my hair looked like:
Please ignore the Transition glasses.
Within the last few months, I actually became more comfortable with my hair. And now, with this stupid quarantine, I’m going to stroll into the barbershop looking like the Geico caveman
and telling them “It’s been … two months since my last haircut. Please save me” and they happily take my $20 with tip.
Composite exponential limit
This nice problem was in the analysis section of Putnam and Beyond: prove
\begin{align*}
\lim_{n\to \infty} n^2 \int_0^{1/n} x^{x+1} \, dx = 1/2.
\end{align*}
The solution is quite nice, and simply relies on the fact that $\lim_{n\to 0^+} x^x = 1$, hence for $n$ large enough, we can approximate the integral with $\int_0^{1/n} x\, dx$ instead.
There’s an easy generalization of this problem:
\begin{align*}
\lim_{n\to \infty} n^{k+1} \int_0^{1/n} x^{x+k} \, dx = 1/(k + 1).
\end{align*}
Generalizing this fact, we don’t even need the composite exponential as the proof just need a $f(x)$ to be a function such that $\lim_{x\to 0^+} f(x) = 1$ with an integral bound approaching $0$.
Celeste Ng; Switch Switching
- Recently finished reading Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You in some five days while in Florida. I’ve never read a book written by an Asian-Americnan author before, nor one where Asian-American issues are discussed at great details. A central tenant of a character, wanting to fit in but couldn’t, resonated with me. The issues I faced when I first moved here were less significant than the ones in the book (which took place in the 60s), but this concept of wanting people to figure out one’s differences from something else besides my skin color still holds today.
- The left controller stick of my Switch has been suffering greatly from drift recently, and I finally managed to fix it. The parts were quite cheap, with the tools included from Amazon. It felt quite nice again to work with my hands and really made me want to go do some small projects in the Brown design lab.
A Simple “Conforming” Tetrahedral Mesh of a Cube
My adviser told me about this meshing of a cube (or any hexahedral) into 6 different tetrahedrons which is easy to draw. For the sake of exposition, we will consider the cube $(-1,1)^3$ The procedure is as follows:
- Draw a diagonal from $(-1,-1, -1)$ to $(1,1,1)$.
- Now, project the diagonal to each of the 6 faces of the cube, which will result in a mesh of the cube.
While the procedure is simple enough, the individual tetrahedrons were a bit difficult to visualize. To help with that, I’ve made a small Mathematica script that one can play with:
From that, we can easily see that mesh now.
So what does the “conforming” part of the title mean? Of course, there is an easier way to tile the cube using only 5 tetrahedrons, but if you put together multiple cubes, one have to be careful of how you orient them. Using the above meshing, as long as the cubes are not too distorted and can easily create the tetrahedral mesh by drawing the diagonal in the same direction.
For example, below we have a eight hexahedral elements laid in a cube, but there are three slab, three columns, and two cubes (with one significantly smaller). This whole thing was needed so that I can construct something as anisotropic as the mesh below without resorting to fancy software.
