feather2pixels

Well, feather2pixel tip-riders, it’s vacation time. Thank god for that. Actually, the party kind of started on Friday. I gave every member of the Instrumentation class a pop quiz stapled to a $1 scratcher (or as Dirty Jay calls them: Vallejo City Bonds) and we were off to the races. This was question number two:

Given an instantaneous, sustained Vin that occurs at t=3 in the form ΔV(t)=2cos(ωt), please sketch a portrait of the instructor below:

Click here for a collage of the highly disturbing results.

I will come clean and admit that it’s actually Sunday night–the party’s been on for quite a while. If you want to call it that. Mostly, I have been catching up on some much-needed rest. I don’t remember the last time I slept in.

Some mildly interesting things happened this weekend. The most unexpected of them happened yesterday in the middle of the night. I was stumbling down Valencia street and who did I run into on the corner of 22nd, but Williams the Border Collie. Williams was a co-worker of mine at the Exploratorium for a year and a half. She was the warmhearted Field Trip Explainer. We rode bikes together and generally got on well. After the work year ended, though, nobody ever heard a peep from her, despite several months of voicemails. After a while, I didn’t know what to think and kind of gave up. I was a little pissed.

But there she was before my eyes. It’s extremely hard to get Williams’ attention, but when you do, you get a lot. I don’t think I have ever met a more compassionate person.   Her face lit up and she walked home with me. We sat on my porch, talking for a while and it made me feel a little crestfallen to think that so much has changed for both of us since we last spoke. The world of Field Trip Explaining feels like a long lost childhood.  We walked to a cab at the corner of Mission and I told her I missed her. I do. Right before getting in, she gave me a big hug and you know what? It’s been a long time since I got a real hug.  It’s something I don’t think about that much.  I think really needed it. Thanks Williams.

Students were bitching about writing reports in my motors lab the other day (Well every day, really, but the other day in particular). I told them that I would have no problem accepting a haiku instead if it were absolutely perfect, describing the experiment and results as well or better than a report. I think that’s actually a lot more difficult, but god dammit if Baby Bluehawk didn’t step up and do just that :

Today at the academy I watched formation. That’s when the corps of cadets (i.e. all the students) assembles by unit in the promenade and subjects itself to inspection and random drug tests. That’s right, drug tests. This has got to be one of the only colleges in the country where the rate of drug use is higher among the faculty than the students (except perhaps Humboldt State, where it’s probably 100% across the board). But drug testing is a requirement to work on board a United States ship so nobody really has a choice in the matter.

Another strange maritime fact, this one a cold war relic of Nixonian-sounding origins, is that to this day the United States neither admits or denys that it carries nuclear warheads on any of her ships. That is to say the U.S. government will not officially deny that our training ship, which was originally commissioned as one of three special oceanographic vessels for the Navy, is not armed with nukes as it sails around the world every summer. Because of this, the country of New Zealand has declined to let our ship–or any ship affiliated with the U.S. government–call in their ports. We did stop there a few years ago, when a more sympathetic Kiwi administration was experimenting with a rollback in that policy. Then 9/11 happened and stuff.

Anyways formation is cute. There is some yelling and the kids stand at attention. If they look really bad they may get demerits.