so, i was looking up websites to learn cantonese, and i found a bit of surprising info. i never knew before that hong kong is now supposedly the center of “pure” cantonese, as opposed to guangzhou before. and apparently, the way older people speak is different from the younger people. older people differentiate between ng and ‘o, g and gw, and n and l, while younger people don’t. since the distinction between these sounds is blurring, no wonder why i was always so confused about which consonant to use when i tried to speak cantonese…

the trees look dead. but the grass is hanging in there.

sigh. i have fallen in love with the vitali chaccone, jaejoong’s “forgotten season”, bach chaccone, and dbsk’s “doushite”… and many more. all right. back to work!

Today, our clocks went back one hour. I was so surprised when someone told me about it at breakfast! But strangely, my phone did not automatically reset the time, even though its alarm function did and rang an hour later than I expected it to…

I need a dustpan.

OMG! self defense simulation tomorrow! i gotta fight off the bad guys! aaaahhhhhh!

Yeah, I know. Lame pinyin, but I still haven’t figured out how to get Chinese on Vista. So anyways, it snowed on Friday! When I walked out the dorm to go to physics, I was confused by all the white dusty things whizzing around. And it turned out to be snow!

so, in science and music, we finally get to the awesomer stuff! we learned that pitches are not just sound waves in the air. if you have a regular rhythm, and speed it up, eventually, you get a pitch. and you can combine rhythms to get intervals! An interval of a fifth has a 3:2 ratio of the frequencies of the notes of the fifth, but it can also be formed by a 3:2 ratio of rhythm -which means if you have someone tapping triplets and someone else tapping eighth notes, speeding that up will produce a fifth when we get past the point that our ears cannot distinguish the rhythms, and instead, perceive them as pitches! wow. super long, totemo luosuo de sentence….

the gift certificate i received is only good for entertainment stuff, not clothes. sad.

oh, right. i forgot to mention the flaming speaker. so, the science&music professor hooked up his iPod to a hollow tube. somehow, there’s gas pumping through the tube. the top of the tube has a row of holes, like a wooden flute. he lights a tiny flame in each of the holes, so when he turns on the iPod and plays music, the music is transmitted into the tube, varying the (gas distribution, flow?)idk, but you can see a wave of the little flames, growing shorter and taller. think: little flames=people’s arms doing the wave in a stadium. that’s what it looks like. and when the bass line beat out the rhythm, the flames flickered in time with the beat, and had especially dramatic flickers when there was an accent. wish i took a video of it and could post it.  it was truly music+physics.

I have not played my violin in a week. This is due to my studying before and after dinner. Sigh, I miss it. So I will play it today, even if it’s just a little while. Chaccone rules! and so does a lot of other things ^_^

Well, is it just me, or is this Chinese “Level 2″ class going a tad too fast for level 2? One lesson per week, and so many characters, new vocab, new but unofficial vocab, and the teacher speaks mostly in Chinese -really, really fast sometimes!

TAs grade our physics problem sets Which means that the first time the professor grades any of our written problem-solving will be next week, on our MID-TERM. the TAs are only sophomores, too O_O but they seem nice enough. The physics lounge somehow attracts more mosquitoes than any other place in the school. But I still go there for the homework help sessions.

That Ouran host club anime is…beyond rationality. I used to hate it, but my new buddies helped me rediscover it. Ouran silliness is the perfect antidote to the educational overload on my tortoise-like brain.

Aaaand… I’ve switched my cell phone charm from the mt fuji/upside down cupcake to the piggy! It’s just as kawaii as its predecessor! yay!

Yay! pigscanflytoo has joined the realm of physics blogs! check it out at pigscanflytoo@wordpress.com

Let’s see, so far, I’ve quit orchestra. I’ll take up either taichi or mixed martial arts, most likely taichi. Currently obsessed with trying to play River Flows in You, Falling Slowly, and a Howl’s Moving Castle Song with amy: me on violin, her on piano. We have practice rooms in the basement of my dorm, but the piano is terribly out of tune. Certain octaves sound almost like really sharp major sevenths… that’s probably not the right terminology, but you get the idea

The practice rooms have the same noodle-y wall coverings that resemble pollock paintings, just like at Iolani.

What’s really sad is the fact that one of my best lunches here was not in the dining hall, but in my own room today. I had a bowl of instant noodle, with instant veggies and instant shiitake mushrooms.

We are using DataStudio and motion sensors in Physics! It is weird that the lectures are so basic and tedious, and so are some of the homework problems, but certain problems are so much more difficult… But me and amy are sad that we are using excel and not Graphical Analysis. Aaaaand, guess what we’re going to use in Calc? Mathematica! yay!

Today consisted of mostly laundry and room cleaning. Totoro!

well, today i had my first orientation activity: a hike up Mt. Greylock, the highest peak in MA. The hike took about 2 hours up, and 2 hours down. As expected, it was rocky, and i was always behind the rest of my group but i got my exercise. the view is not so spectacular though, since the clarity and beauty of the farmland scenery below was obsured by a thin white mist. that, and farmland isn’t so great to look at anyway. even though i don’t like being a tourist of farmland, rural massachusetts is quaint and charming. ^_^