Thursday, CH and I went to Politics and Prose, where Jennifer Gordon was reading from and aswering questions about her book, Suburban Sweatshops. C-Span was there (I presume for Book TV, on the deuce) and being the media whore I am, I stepped up and asked a question. Ms Gordon, unfortunately, decided she didn't want to answer my query and gave an surprisingly vague and uninformative response. I'm keeping an eye out on c-span.org to see when it'll be on.
After perusing the book store we went to Sala Thai to "Dine Out for Life." The food was above average. But it couldn't beat the mint, peanut butter, chocolate chip, oreo(TM) cookie, and almond ice cream that we concocted at Cold Stone.
Friday night I stayed late at work and crashed when I got home (not everyday can be exciting). Saturday was more entertaining. I went to services at Adat Shalom, a reconstructionist synagogue in Maryland. The 17-year-old boy (a guest of the bar mitzvah kid, I assume) laughed at the (flaming) gay rabbi for about the first third of the service. I wanted to reach over and throttle the kid. Hashem got revenge on the father (for raising such a son, I presume) later in the service...but the story doesn't translate well into text: you'll have to call if you're curious.
Later that afternoon we went to Puzzle Freak, in search of a good jigsaw puzzle. The first clue something was wrong was that the woman behind the counter asked if we were older than 21, and when I replied in the affirmative, informed us that there was a "back section." Turns out that the puzzles were just a front for a porn store! True to its name, the store did have puzzles, though the emphasis was really on the latter word in "Puzzle Freak." We bought a 3-D puzzle of the Earth, which we started to piece together while consuming some chewie Wookie Cookies ([insert reader's groooooan here]).
Today I went with a co-worker to the Intel STS public presentation of the 40 finalists' projects. In a sentence: I felt dumb. Turns out that I had forgotten much of theoretical computer science. After I accessed the science/math part of my brain, not too many of the projects were mind-blowing. Most added a small (and sometimes unneccesary) piece to a narrow and complex field--usually whatever their mentor was working on. The best project that I both saw and understood was an approximation algorithm to solve a (useful) variant of the traveling salesman problem.
You know, I haven't found a listing for Jennifer Gordon on C-SPAN yet either. I'm thinking maybe they'll just use it for filler. It would be a shame if we missed your first appearance on C-SPAN. Oh, and unfortunately the Orson Scott Card event was yesterday at Olsson's (Penn Quarter).
Perhaps this article will make you feel better about the Intel STS (and explain why the projects focus on such narrow fields and seemingly unnecessary topics). Note the quote from the semifinalist who says: "I'm only 17. I didn't have the background to create the experiment. I didn't know how to use the equipment. I couldn't create the hypothesis."
C-SPAN better come through...I've been watching less and less of C-SPAN recently (especially since our remote broke and it takes a while to hit channel up 70 times), so it needs a positive boost in my book.
On OSC, some of his more intolerant views (to put it delicately) have to my attention recently, so I don't feel too bad about missing the event.
I definitely found that, after asking questions related to the students' research, that they didn't have much general knowledge of their fields. One kid who worked on the materials side of quantum computing didn't seem to know much about the basics of the theory. Or, if he did, he had a very different perspective from the wikipedia article I read.