I mentioned that a couple of weekends ago, Juliette and I spent some time cleaning out our office closet. Archaeologists will tell you that one of the best ways to learn about a culture is to look through their garbage, and so it is with the pile of junk I unearthed from that closet.

One of the items I discovered was a partitioned notebook from my sophomore year of college, containing notes from several classes I took that year. I think it's pretty illustrative.

From my Electricity and Magnetism class:

ρ creates divergence in an E field.

spherical conductor w/ cavity outside sphere: looks like point chage.

charge in cavity induces a – charge along cavity walls which induces a + charge uniformly around outside of sphere.

From my Intro to Biology class:

Population Regulation

Density-Dependent Factors:

• overcrowding
• lack of resources
• increased predation
• disease
• # offspring/female decreases since less females survive to breed.

From my Intro to Systems Engineering class:

II-order Systems:

I-order systems ( x′ + 1/τ x = f(t) ) have 1 descriptor (τ) & exponential behavior, step-response

II-order systems look like x′′ + a₀x′ + a₁x = f(t) but we can write them as x′′ + 2ζωx′ + ω_nx = f(t)

2 descriptors: ζ and ω_n

And, finally, from my 18th-Century Western Philosophy class:

My comment is not terribly pertinent to the discussion, but...

TALK FASTER GOD DAMNIT!!!!!!

HA HA HA! Not THIS swan!

Are you saying it's a waste of horse not to eat old horses?

It's called schizophrenia.

You better not piss off the sun god.

Get your fuckin' hand off my mother-fuckin' taco!

That last sentence was on a page with what appears to be a shopping list for the communal bar my roommates and I kept stocked.

I guess the takeaway here is that it's a good thing I wasn't a philosophy major.