Fan Fiction the First: Freedom Edition

In honor of recent events (and the Fourth of July!), a brief Fan Fiction post--a Fagnette, if you will.

Once upon a time, in the highly fictional world in which Shane did not go to Texas Tech for graduate school, he was not recently mugged at screwdriver-point. The End.

I'm sorry I can't stop making terrible jokes. It's just--bicycles? screwdrivers? and where did they get a tire-iron, anyway? Ugh. Just thinking "tire-iron" makes me shudder. Best of luck to Shane in his continued convalescence.

If this ends up being the only fan fiction post, at least we can say we tried, and that we offended mightily in our brief time together.

P.S. Fagnette looks really, really wrong.

It's alive!

So some people think we should use the blog again, and this time for more than just book clubbing. We'll see how it goes, I guess.

real physics, crappy book club

Also! "We" just "read" Calamity Physics, yes? I found this article on retrocausality today, it seems appropriate. I don't understand word one of the physics of it, but...retrocausality!

Such are the perils of retrocausality, the idea that the present can affect the past, and the future can affect the present. Strange as it sounds, retrocausality is perfectly permissible within the known laws of nature.[...]Dating back to Newton's laws of motion, the equations of physics are generally "time symmetric" -- they work as well for processes running backward through time as forward.

How awesome is that?

Anyway, Clint and I are of the opinion that both The Vast Unthinking Masses book club and DISPERSION(s) have died slow and painful deaths. If other members of TVUM and Team DISPERSION(s) would be interested, we could continue to update this blog with the periodic musings that would have found homes in the pages of DISPERSION(s) if we were better at meeting deadlines. What say you?

Umm...hello out there. I finished the book. Did anyone else?

No?

Well. This is turning out to be an awesome book club. I tell you what.

I don't remember any other physics formulas.

I don't know about you guys, but I've totally read the first 107 pages of Special Topics in Calamity Physics already.

How can you not love a book that starts out talking about how great professors are, and how the curriculum is some sort of divine tool to organize the chaos of life itself? And the annotations...awesome. It's always nice to have my dependence on the structure of academia justified by my choice of reading material. Sometimes the meta grates a little, but for the most part, very enjoyable.

But I do hate that I've fallen into another of those quirky high school novels. I mean, really. Has there ever been a young adult novel, or an adult coming-of-age novel, that accurately depicted high school? Maybe it's just me, and the fact that I went to a terrible public high school and was completely oblivious to high school social dynamics as well, but...who has all these kooky teachers? Cliques with goofy nicknames, and without even slightly permeable membranes? Did anyone else ever have that "golden child" no fictional high school is complete without, beloved by everyone including teachers, etc. etc.? And the study group...really? I find it all wholly alien to my personal high school experience--not this book in particular, really, just...every depiction of high school life, ever. And maybe that's the point, and I know high school (particularly from my personal perspective) is not really the stuff of legend (or even popular fiction), but I'm really sick of all the revisionist crap out there.