Intellectual Wankery?
 

I made a comparision today between a discarded pile of maths on my supervisor's desk and the crumbling towers of byzantium which still today hobble the development of any real modern identity.
I think I have truly entered the realms of intellectual wankery. Any similar tales of woe or advice for a poor academic wishing to rediscover his place among the common man?

Yea, the whiteness of my hallway to the whiteness of an insane asylum makes me think my dorms harboring insane people.

BTW, did I mention I live there?

I spent forty-five minutes rambling on about the Opium Wars, the role of Emperor Qianlong in Book and Sword, Ghengis (or was it Kublai?) Khan's attempted attack on Japan, Islam and Buddhism's spread via the Silk Road, and the history and philosophy of classic Chinese Daoism.

All the guy asked me was who would I thought would win in a fight between a Japanese samurai and a Chinese martial arts master.

It was Kublai as far as I remember.
I perfectely understand such sentiments. I've had this pointed out to me many times that when people ask me questions such as the one above I will not only have a gigantic scope in my discussion I will dissect the question at every level, establishing the exact parameters of the question.

My brother and I argued for an entire 2 hour car ride in the middle of a damn blizzard about the difference in my ability to react to something in the road while travelling at 30 or 35mph. My point was that even at 30mph the road conditions were such that even if I wanted to I wouldn't be able to stop before hitting anything that showed up in the range of my headlights, so if I went 35 or even 40mph it really wouldn't matter. We then got into the physics of the whole thing and how much worse it would be and on and on... At one point we were arguing about using the force generated by the rotation of the tires in a zero friction environment to turn out of the way of danger... All in all it was fairly ridiculous and we were both right, but neither would back down and accept the conditions set in place by the other.

When drunk we tend to delve far too far into applications of philosophy into the generation of evolutionary programming and AI. People give us a lot of odd looks.

What's great is when they're further along, say six months or so, and you get to have a laugh about how little they knew. Then you go off on your new inside jokes... Ahhh, I miss gaming nights. :(

Oh man, I love that feeling. I call those aquaintances the Tenacious Ones, since they actually try to learn what the hell's going on in my lack of a life. XD

I once solved Schroedinger's wave equation for the Quantum harmonic oscillator, an infinite potential well given by a quadratic equation, on the board of the study area in the science building. Mostly I wanted to test out the moment generating function because I noticed that it had remarkable similarity to the method used to calculate the solutions for various energy levels. Needless to say it took up an entire chalkboard and I had some interesting conversations with a group of chem majors about what it meant.

Quoted for the truth

mine are more of an off white but still...at my asylum (college) they let us put up posters for color! But since my frames are heavy and I can't stick them to the walls I have to hang them from the ceiling...which is very high...and there are only a limited amount of tall things to climb on without killing myself...I mean don't they want my money? If I die they can't get it anymore.

Also just for the record yellow is considered the color of insanity rather than white...I forget what white is...