i’m having another one of those thesis hatred moments… thankfully, my embittered friend kindly re-reminded me that i was on severe crack for thinking that grad school could be fun…. and yes, i’d rather read another book. ::slap:: won’t let myself. won’t let myself.

luckily, i’m not alone. there’s grad school barbie – am i delusional or outright masochistic? of course, some brilliant grad student has made an entire procrastination site out of grad school comics..

and finally, while i may not believe in the existence of hell, i still appreciate the grad school comparisons:

TOP TEN SUBTLE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GRAD SCHOOL AND HELL:

10. It doesn’t rain in Hell.
9. Everyone has heard of Hell.
8. It’s a lot more fun getting into Hell.
7. You can’t fail out of Hell.
6. At least you can sleep in Hell.
5. Hell is forever; grad school just seems like it.
4. People smile in Hell.
3. You only have to sell your soul to go to Hell.
2. There are hot men and women in Hell.
1. You wouldn’t tell a friend to go to grad school.

Ok, so even when i bounce spam, i keep a copy of it for myself, for curiousity sake. I mean, how can i study the digital realm without paying attention to what hell people go through in dealing with nuisances? Well, today definitely irritated the hell out of me. On one of my websites, i keep a public email address for fans to contact me with more information. After i receive a valid email from them, i put them into a list of non-bouncable people so that they don’t continue to get messages saying that this email address is invalid. But, needless to say, 99% of the traffic to that email address is spam, based on web robots. Well, today, a Mr. Nick Blackman from a valid roadrunner domain in Rochester NY decided to spam bomb me (and perhaps many other netizens). Every 2-3 minutes, i received a 40KB scr virus from him, along with notices of someone named Amy’s address and forwards about a friendship screensaver. Knowing full well that he was getting a bounce for every message, i ignored him. But, after the 20th message, i decided to contact abuse@rr.com. They did nothing. After the 700th message, i actually became noticably irritated. I mean, i know how to script out my mail to /dev/null, but i know that most people don’t and i had to imagine how many people had their email systems crash due to Mr. Blackman. Needless to say, roadrunner never responded to any of my 6 messages of abuse. So, instead i just have to wish a digital curse on Nick Blackman for his irritating while loop, which is currently at the 1477th message.

But, apparently, i’m not the only one with a spam problem this week.

I’m having a dimensional moment… [yeah, yeah yeah, blame it on the beach.]

Imagine the space of all people, all personalities, all personal characteristics. There are certainly patterns in people, in their behavior, across different people. One can think about stereotypes, about what behaviors result from personality differences. Yet, think about the typography of the space of all people. Imagine that each person is simply a line through all of the dimensions of possibilities, yet along a typography that has plenty of holes such that certain characteristics cannot exist without other characteristics.

People always ask me why i’m obsessed with observing human behavior, why i’m obsessed with the patterns that people form in their actions, why i’m so curious to see the role of stereotypes and expectations. I’m fascinated by the typography of personal existence, of the dimensionality of people. I’m in love with the possibility that a model could be constructed of human existence, yet know that the model still exists in the realm of chaos, beyond our basic understanding. But as i sit and watch people, i am fascinated by the intersections that form, by being able see some of the relationships, see the holes within the space.

Ah, how i still adore the bridge between the sciences and humanity, to see the beauty in human behavior. Thinking about social psychology as a mathematical form, about behavior as a modeling opportunity…

Oh, how i’m itching to be thinking about modeling and dimensionality again. My hypertext roots are aching. After thesis… after thesis… ah, what a mantra.

Well I think we’ve sorted all that out now. If you’d like to know, I can tell you that in your Universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and there’s all sorts of stuff going on in dimensions 13 to 22 that you really wouldn’t want to know about. All you really need to know for the moment is that the Universe is a lot more complicated then you might think. — Douglas Adams, “Mostly Harmless”