Apparently when the battery is reconnected to a car for the first time, it spends the next 10-15 minutes “learning the idle,” which determines how it is supposed to behave while idling. Any activity during this time goes into this learned idle behavior. So if your battery drains down and you have to get a jump, your car may have forgotten its idle and may need to be retrained. My newly retrained and retuned car is noticeably better. It’s amazing what a little TLC can do.

The Physics Library is undergoing seismic retrofitting and the books are temporarily stored in the Doe Core, which is one of the coolest library spaces on campus. The ceiling is so high, and there is a huge skylight at the top. The interior lighting is from what look like streetlights positioned in the aisles. It was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, they only let you have bound periodicals for 4 hours, so I had to run and photocopy the paper on limiting eigenvalue distributions for band random matrices right quick.

The library also has a bookstore, which is pretty dangerous. I should have put things on hold while I went to get money, because I missed out on getting Ash’s functional analysis book for $3. I did pick up two volumes of van der Waerden’s algebra book for $16, statistical mechanics book with an information theory flavor, and an anthology of Carribean fabulist literature edited by Nalo Hopkinson. I resisted the theater books, although they did call to me.

I was stuck for two hours behind a near-fatal pileup on I-5 coming back from visiting Dave, Paul, and Cynthia down in LA. The trip was fun, but traffic is no fun. And my phone died too, so I was really stuck. But when I finally got back I went to the Albatross with some friends and had a really great evening.

Tom “Airmiles” Friedman was on the radio today. He really ticks me off sometimes. This time he was singing the praises of globalization and praising the call centers of Bangalore, saying that India’s “success at globalization” was due to Indian’s ability to seize the opportunities presented by globalization and using local ingenuity (Injun-uity?) to adapt to the times. He said “it’s in their DNA. The Mughals come in, the Mughals leave…” There should be a statue of limitations on NY Times Op-Ed columnists. I’m getting pretty tired of all of them, including Krugman and Dowd, in case you were thinking I was biased. David Brooks should never have been given a spot. His airy generalizations are sometimes appealing, but there are few facts to back them up, and he refuses to submit himself to any sort of rigorous fact checking.

Even after all the intervening years, Quantum Leap is still entertaining.

I had to talk to the Berkeley Repertory Theater as a reference for Deb, who is applying for an internship there. It’s really nice to be able to praise the hell out of a friend to someone else. It makes you drag up all the good things about them in a short period of time. Afterwards, you look back on what you said, and how it was all true, and then say “goddamn, Deb really is that amazing.” You go, Deb. I hope you get the job.

At some point I will write about the new play by Mamet that I saw (world premiere!) a while ago, but now is not the time. I think I may have finally worked out what I thought of it. It was Doctor Faustus, but not nearly as faithful as Marlowe or Goethe. More on that later.