So finally I read the bit of the physics textbook that was supposed to contain my best friend in physics laws: the second law of thermodynamics. And I suppose in a way it is. It takes something that seems obvious to everyone (like that hot tea will get cooler the longer it stands there not hotter) and explains it in terms of science. But this isn't your normal science of this is right and that is wrong, it explains it in terms of probability. Something hot cools down as time goes on because that is what has the largest probability of happening. It's the key word of probability that makes things interesting. If we flip this statement around it means that while it is extremely unlikely that hot tea will get warmer if you happen to have a cup on your table, there is the tiniest chance that it could happen. The seemingly impossible is actually possible. So the next time someone tells you that nothing is impossible, don't laugh or dismiss them, because even science agrees.
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At the moment I am in the middle of my mid-semester break from uni. One week to rest, catch up with study and with friends. A week away from the relentless pace of uni. A week with a chance to think.
I'm beginning to realise that I am not as fine and I'd like everyone to believe. The workload of uni is really getting to me. I can't seem to balance it and I don't know why. I don't have much time during the week and on the weekend I never seem to end up doing anything. Half of the holidays have gone by and I have barely done anything. Most people I know seem to be able to do uni and keep a job, still having time left over for various parties and social get-togethers. Sometimes I can't help wondering if the reason I can't is because I'm lazy. Maybe I should be forcing myself to study even if I feel completely drained. Maybe what I call drained other people consider normal. But that's the problem. I don't know what's normal anymore. Is it normal to be this tired all the time? Is it normal to randomly have no appetite some days or to have some days where everything is an effort? What if it is? It would mean that I'm just acting stupid all the time. But if it isn't normal, it would mean that something is seriously wrong with me. And that's just too scary to consider. I'm too tired for all of this. I'd say I'm too young for all of this but then there are eighteen-year-olds in worse situations than this. Which almost takes away any right I have to feel sorry for myself. Sigh. Happy Easter everyone! I think everyone, whether they celebrate Easter or not, can appreciate this Easter video: In my opinion, when someone is doing a particularly hard physics (or other) problem, they go through 5 stages.
First is Denial. They will reread the question again and again in the hope that it will magically become easier. However, this is unlikely to happen so they move onto the next stage... ...Annoyance. Common thoughts and exclamations include 'You've got to be kidding me!' and 'Why professor/textbook/teacher, why?'. The third stage is Procrastination. This stage is usually bypassed if the question is due next period. Otherwise it may continue for weeks on end until the person is forced past it by the threat of a deadline. The fourth stage is Intimidation and Discouragement. The person is considering doing the question and is scared or discouraged at the momentousness and difficulty of the task. And last but not least is Acceptance. This is where the person starts doing the problem for real. They've accepted that it's hard but will try anyway, even if they end up failing. In the case of REALLY hard questions, this stage will not be reached until the last possible moment, unless the person has an unusually good work ethic (I don't). I really haven't been writing for ages! Guess I haven't been in the mood for it. Anyway, I'm now about to start week 3 of uni and so far it has been exciting, wonderful and kind of intimidating.
The first thing I noticed is that there are so many people! I can barely recognise who I've meet before, let alone remember everyone's name. I'm in two faculties, engineering and science, and each has a few hundred first year students. And there are so many boys. I've been in a single sex school from year 7-12 so it's been a bit weird being completely surrounded by the opposite gender, and there are a lot of them since engineering has a 20% girl enrolment and all the subjects I'm doing are stereotypical 'boy' subjects. My subjects themselves are absolutely awesome. Physics and engineering dynamics are at a draw as my favourites. Both lecturers are great speakers, breaking up the content with jokes and funny stories. Physics is especially good because we get to use these things called clickers. They pretty much function as a remote device that lets us answer multiple choice questions anonymously. Every so often a clicker question will come up and we'll get the chance to try our hand at the new concept. This is where the awesome bit comes in. We're actually encouraged to discuss the concepts and to work out the question with the people around us. I find it an awesome way to learn and there's no way anyone could every fall asleep in my physics lectures. Engineering dynamics is pretty much awesome because of the one-joke-a-lecture rule. The lecturer has promised us that there will be at least one joke slide every lecture. Because of this it is definitely the class I laugh the most in. I've learnt that banana plus banana does not equal dog (from a class about the importance of units) and that Isaac Newton, while being a brilliant thinker, was not a very nice guy (see the list of sins he made when he was nineteen). Astronomy/Astrophysics is my easy subject. It's actually got quite a lot of work for an easy subject but as it doesn't require any knowledge above year 10 level it is so much easier than my other subjects. I've got the same lecturer for astro as for physics which means the lectures are quite good, except minus the clickers and the awesomeness of physics. Okay, when I said all my subjects were awesome I was lying. Three out of four are awesome. The last one just sucks. I hate uni maths. Listening to someone talk about maths for an hour is a COMPLETE NIGHTMARE. The maths itself is reasonably interesting but I generally switch off after 5-10 minutes because the lecturer is so BORING. To make it even worse his handwriting is horrible and if you stop listening for just ONE SECOND you have no idea what he just wrote. Sometimes even if you are listening you have no idea what he just wrote. The lecture theatre is full of whispers of 'What is the word after *insert description of part before illegible word*?'. Other than that, uni is pretty awesome. It takes me over an hour to get there and I have three nine o'clock classes so I'm currently quite sleep deprived, but as I get used to going to bed earlier that should fix itself. The classes have been doing quite a bit of revision so the content has been reasonably easy (but still not that easy!) and hopefully I'll be okay with the hard stuff. I'll try to write more often but I'll see how it goes since the work is already piling up! Finally I can access the weebly editor again. My internet slowed down over a week ago so I’ve only been able to load the mobile version of facebook and the text versions of everything else, but every time I tried to access weebly the browser just froze. It's not freezing anymore, but it's still dodgy and not up to speed. I really hate my internet provider.
On the up side, I found the Gutenberg Project, a website of free ebooks that are not copywrited anymore. I found it when looking for an ebook version of Les Miserables and it turned out to have quite a few classics that I’ve been wanting to read out of curiosity. So I’ve been spending the last two days downloading as many familiar-sounding books I could find and playing minesweeper on the computer while waiting for the epub files to slowly download. Downloading large quantities of ebooks without worrying about how much internet I’m using up is really the only thing good about the slowdown. I’ve been needing to register for things for uni (post about all that later) and working out how to do all these things is stressful enough without super slow internet to increase the time you’re in suspense about whether something’s worked or not. There have been so many time when the page has just froze and refused to load further and working out how to work the library session booking system yesterday made me finally lose patience. I wanted to deregister from a session and it wasn’t letting me. After many times logging off and then back on again I thought to actually read through all the things on the page before logging off. Turns out the computer had been asking me if I was sure and I’d been closing down the browser instead of clicking yes. It’s so much more frustrating when it’s your fault and not the computer’s. So, yeah, I started a post just before the internet slowed down about uni and I should finish and post that soon. I haven’t posted for well over a month! I've been thinking about using an elimination diet for a while to try and improve my general health (meaning the migraines and random headaches that might be weird versions of migraines, since other than that there is nothing wrong with my health). An elimination diet works by eliminating the food groups that are potentially causing me problems and reintroducing them for a day and waiting to see if I feel worse or the same. If I feel worse I'll know I should stay away from that food group and if nothing changes I'll know that it's pretty much safe. The original plan was to start the diet after June exams this year but with school and everything it was a bit much to change my diet so drastically. Plan B was to start it after exams. Hasn't happened yet, so I'm going to break it up into smaller pieces and use the new year as motivation.
The plan is to make one change a week, starting from the new year. Firstly, I will take a week to get into the habit of going to sleep between 9 and 10 each evening and waking up at 7 or 8 in the morning. Then I will take a week to get used to finding time to exercise each day. Then I'll start with the elimination diet, eliminating one food group a week, starting from the easier ones and getting to the harder ones in time. I'm going to go by the suggested food groups to eliminate here (put in order of how I plan to eliminate them) which are food colourings, artificial sweeteners, high sugar products like lollies, chocolate, peanuts, dairy, wheat, soy, corn and gluten. After a month or so I'll start reintroducing the groups by eating them one day and waiting to see what happens. So, I'll probably finish sometime in June. It's definitely going to be hard but I'm determined to see it through. It probably also helps that by writing about my intentions here, the plan becomes more real. So to make it official: I vow as my new year's resolution to start and stick with this elimination diet until the very end as well as to keep a regular sleeping pattern and exercise at least a bit each day. I hope everyone celebrating Christmas is having a lovely time. If you're not already in the Christmas spirit, here's something to help you along! (although if you don't celebrate Christmas, it's still very much worth watching) I've been stuck in writing my first prompt for more than two weeks now. I think it might be because I favour writing in first person and for the first prompt I want to write in third. Or it could be because I'm trying to make it too perfect the first time around, ignoring the fact that I can edit it later to my heart's content if that's what I really want. Yeah, probably that.
It's been holidays for me for a while now, and I've pretty much been sitting around and doing nothing. Well, except for going to the movies and the beach once. My sleep habits are now horrible, which is quite bad, especially because as Christmas approaches I have more and more stuff to do. I spent the whole of today out, talking to uni advisers about course choices and helping mum with the Christmas preparations. Tomorrow my family is invited to a family friend's place which means that I only have Saturday to find presents for a Kris Kringle that one group of my friends hastily put together not too long ago. Our last chance to exchange presents is on Sunday, at least if we want it done by Christmas. After Christmas I'm going away for a week on Polish Camp so I won't be able to continue writing until January. So much for my Summer Writing Challenge. On the bright side, the break might help with the part I'm stuck on. I think I'll continue to try and finish all 30 prompts by the end of February; it's not like I've anything to lose. I've been wanting a set of ramekins for a while now, and yesterday I finally got my mum to buy me some. Now I have four ramekins with a red outside. So excited! The possibilities for quick and easy recipes are almost endless!
Today, I tried the ramekins out for the first time by making chocolate pudding. It turned out much better than expected. They were moist on the inside and not too sweet. I halved this recipe but baked it in my four 9cm ramekins at 160 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes. Next time I think I will put more of the sauce mixture on top and bake it for 10 minutes instead of 15 as the top was a bit too crispy. Here's a picture of one of the puddings: |