I've been working on a wind turbine with some friends. Two of us kept going into school after our exams (when we'd officially left) to work on it, eliciting comments such as:
"You're not very good at leaving school, are you?"
"There's no getting rid of you!"
and "Don't you have a home to go to?"
Well, it's nearly finished and we've already given it a spin by hand - 0.1W at 1V! Too bad we didn't actually design it to do better than that - we didn't really expect it to work at all.

Spent a few weeks at an MRI centre. I always wondered why people kept suggesting that I try medical research - "You can just stay in a lab", they say, "You don't have to talk to people," they say, "but you'll be doing them ever such a service." Even just processing data is a bit too serious for me. I am rather squeamish. I found myself looking at scans of neuroferritinopathy patients (with holes in their brains caused by excessive build-up of iron, causing tremors and spasms), thinking how beautiful those scans are, then remembering they come from people who are really suffering. Then again, my supervisor was laughing as he told me about the representatives of some chronic fatigue society who were visiting the lab and had to sit down every five minutes during their tour - before quickly adding that we shouldn't laugh too much since those people were giving the lab money. So it was a good work experience dealie - I made another decision about what to do with my life (or more specifically, what not to do), I learned a lot about the physics of MRI, and the people there were really friendly. Up north, aye.

Before you think, 'Oh geez this is another I-did-this-then-I-did-that journal', let me tell you that I went to the Baltic. Artgalleryplz. Sarah Sze's thing was fantabulous [link] - very different from some post-modern stuff that's like "What? How is that art?" - you could see the precision with which she arranged everything, and all the order within chaos and such. I didn't think much of the cave photos on the ground floor - they were very similar, and when I picked up a guidebook on a bench there and flicked through it and read the word "paradigm", the pretentiousness made me laugh so hard that I left the gallery. I was sad that I'd missed Chiho Aoshima's exhibition [link] - but at least I got to see some of her prints hanging in the café.

I have the best friends ever - they invade my house on my birthday (despite my telling them that I'd be asleep all day), bearing cake and tiramisu, and press-gang me into buying a pint of cider at the pub. I took ID, hoping to proclaim my 18-ness to all, and no one asked for it. The cider tasted worse that vinegar. And then I had the stupidity to forget to bring my ID the next time I went to a pub with my friends and there they actually asked us to show ID! This was after an exquisitely civilised afternoon tea at an exceedingly posh hotel. A good day, that was.

I'm working a lot on H-A-A. Just thought I'd mention it.

I've decided to not bother with morals and principles from now on. They cause more grief than they're worth.

I don't know why people care so much about how 'natural' something is. Wearing clothes in unnatural. Cooking food is unnatural. It's not enough to dismiss something just because it's unnatural. Fair enough if it causes pain or illness or addiction, but not everything that is unnatural does. And how do you define what is natural, anyway? In a way, everything that exists is natural. Everything that happens, everything that will happen, everything that can happen, is possible. If it's impossible, it doesn't happen. While God's laws are broken every day, Nature's laws can never be broken.

Student Finance England is getting on my nerves somewhat. And general university preparation stress. But hey, I'll be raving it up for the next four years, studying PHYSICS! Bet you didn't see that one coming. |D





I have stopped watching some people. If you are one of them and you'd rather I still watch you, please note me and explicitly ask me to watch you again.