Fellow UNL Student,

The football team is fired up to kick off the 2005 season next Saturday against Maine at Memorial Stadium. We are looking forward to you and all of the student season ticket holders being at our home games throughout the year.

We have worked extremely hard in the off-season to make this a great year for the Huskers, and we are planning to have the type of season that our fellow students and all of Nebraska will be proud of.

The student section is the key to getting Memorial Stadium rocking on Saturdays. We need you to wear Red, get fired up and make it a little tougher on the opponent. Believe us, the home crowd at Memorial Stadium makes a difference and we know the students are the loudest people in the house.

Our team wanted to give the students a sneak preview of what to expect from your 2005 Huskers, so we decided to invite all UNL students to Memorial Stadium this Sunday night to check out our practice. The students who didn’t buy season tickets will get their invite tomorrow, but we wanted you to be the first to hear from us. Only UNL students will be there, so we hope you will come by and help us get ready for a great season.

The gates will be open at 6:45 p.m. There will be free hot dogs and Pepsi [free food is the definition of graduate school -- tdaxp], and a chance to hang out with your friends while watching a little Sunday Night Football—Husker Style.

Make sure you have your student I.D. and come to Gate 24 on the Southeast corner of the stadium. For once you don’t have to drag your backpack around campus (they wouldn’t let you bring it in anyway). You might even get a chance to hear from the two of us and Coach Callahan.

The team is planning a few new things on game-day to get the student section even more involved, and we’ll let you see that on Sunday. See you Sunday night and Go Big Red!

Daniel Bullocks
Cory Ross
2005 Team Captains

Have to celebrate Tommy Lee Goes to College somehow

What more selfish litany is there other than

1. God
   
2. Family
   
3. Self

?

Which one more dedicated to Quality? Or Victory? Or Individuality?

I love grad school.

I had a fascinating and epic conversation today with a brilliant student of music. Beginning slowly enough with a litany of obscure vocab and strange names, I soon discovered

• Making great music is the same thing as winning wars
  
• Musicology = Warfare Theory
  
• Music = War

As Mark Safranski might say, we had some serious leveraging of vertical domain knowledge through horizontal concept transfer. That so many concepts — methodical warfare, super-empowerment, deconfliction, the importance of quickly cycling the OODA loop and fast transients (whether through instinct or fingertip-feeling). It was as if the young (and breath-takingly beautiful) music student was John Robb or Nellie Lide, but was expressing the exact same thoughts in music theory instead of warfare theory or marketing theory.

Over the past week

• I have nailed down my research interest (Early Christianity as an example of asymetrical warfare)
  
• Identified how different specialities of political science are able to support the thesis
  
• Now have concrete examples of how every “humanity” is just the study of human struggle, except it uses different words

(And let’s not forget Larry’s comments, which bridge humanities and hard sciences.)

I love grad school.

Among other things, today’s adventures:

1. Finding out that a guy I thought was a janitor is a brilliant autodidact, able to discuss comparative religion, Boydian theory, and ethanol manufactury far better than I can.

2. Free alcohol with wonderful company from Embassy Suites (not technically a UNL perk, but hey: it was awesome)

3. Midnight pancakes, with all the above

“Frequently Asked Questions,” St. George, St. Joseph & Assumption of the BVM UCCs, downloaded 20 August 2005, http://stgeorgemission.org/FAQs.html.

How many Eastern Catholic Churches and Rites are there?

There are eight rites in the Catholic Church and twenty-two Churches:

In the Roman Rite there is the Latin Church. Within the Latin Church there are sub-rites that include the Anglican Use, Ambrosian, Bragan, Carmelite, Carthusian, Dominican, Mozarabic and Tridentine.

In the Armenian Rite there is the Armenian Church.

In the Byzantine Rite there is the Italo-Albanian Church, Melkite Church, Ukrainian Church, Ruthenian Church, Romanian Church, Greek Church in Greece, Greek Church of Former Yugoslavia, Bulgarian Church, Slovak Church, Hungarian Church, Russian Church, Belarussian Church and the Albanian Church.

In the Alexandrian Rite there is the Coptic Church.

In the Maronite Rite there is the Maronite Church.

In the East Syrian Rite there is the Chaldean Church and Syro-Malabar Church.

In the West Syrian or Antiochene Rite there is the Malankar Church and the Syrian Church.

In the Abyssinian Rite there is the Ethiopian Church.

Cecilia, Farrah, Texas Dave, and tdaxp need to know.

Say you were floating in a perfect sphere. The lighting is ambient, the sphere is of reasonable diameter, and your side of the sphere is perfectly reflective. What do you see?

1. Are you blinded because the light level keeps increasing and it is impossible for light ot escape?
2. Do you see pure white, because color is adative?
3. Some superposition of different parts of yourself?

The obvious was to solve this would be with Lightwave or Blender… but a blog post is way cooler.

World Youth Day 2005

Also:

tdaxp is the 417th most popular blog in the world!

… at least, according to Feedster Top 500

Shockingly, somehow tdaxp came out ahead of

• 424: Vodka Pundit
  
• 444: GM Fast Lane Blog
  
• 449: New England Journal of Medicine
  
• 457: Samizdata
  
• 462: This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow

I mean, Vodka Pundit, a blog by the Vice Chairman of GM, even The New England Journal of Medicine.

Fricken sweet

Of course, then the reality of the power law hits me..

Fricken awful