8/26/2025

 soo school has started and i also have to work on college applications :| i guess this post will just be mainly some things i've read in school

i really like this picture so i'll put it in first

source: quanta magazine

ten martini problem! Hofstadter butterfly is a real life phenomenon. scientists wanted to determine the energy levels of an electron in a crystal grid placed near a magnet, so they need to solve a particular formulation of the Schrödinger equation. hofstaeder did a bunch of numericals with the old calculators to produce this butterfly pattern that showed the solutions following the cantor set when the alpha values were irrational, yet no one could prove it, until people "patched" a proof piece by piece, and then finally they got a more elegant proof :D.

a week ago i watched Soul by Pixar because it was recommended by my existentialism class' teacher, and it was a really good movie. i love pixar movies!! (well my favorite movie has been inside out for a long time) i think ultimately these movies are very inspiring; joe gardner feels his life finally has meaning when he has something external (playing for dorothea williams) but meeting 22 reverses his ideas as he sacrifices himself to satisfy 22's desire to just live for the sake of living. my life is kinda parallel to joe gardner's in that i'm passionate about things but i need some sort of external validation for them (i.e. getting a specific job, attending a specific college) so i hope i can improve in this regard, though it's definitely not easy because unfortunately life is not a movie :)

i finished reading cat's cradle and it was a very fun read! when i was first reading it i actually thought it would be like one of those world war 2 investigative stories where we get to learn about the guilt the inventor of the atomic bomb carried, kinda like oppenheimer but in book form, but instead it turned into a whimsical fantasy once the narrator landed in san lorenzo, which then made the book a literal fever dream. i mean, you've got this hot lady, people doing this ritual of Bokononism in which they intentionally believe in lives, have some sort of feet mingling(??) to gain truth, then the narrator gets asked to become the president, and then the whole world dies because of this invention of the guy who made the bomb called ice-nine that freezes every body of water and kills you if it touches your lips?? idk the ending was pretty unsatisfying and absurd but in that sense it was a work of art. as expected of a work titled cat's cradle, it seems like man can try to create meaning in the world, but this process is very easy, just as easy as destroying it all. this strikes me pretty deeply because i used to often make the starting formation for the cradle wrongly and more simply than intended that made the game unplayable... but that method is actually the base for the eiffel tower formation :P ah back in the days when playing cat's cradle was THE thing (photo below taken from a youtube video)

in my multiversal fiction class we watched a couple movies. first we watched buckaroo bonzai which is a very old multiversal film, the plotline seemed quite standard in that somehow there are aliens and some fight is going on with the very bahahaha villain. but it was pretty funny since there were a lot of absurdist elements, other than the fact that there was only one female character and she was basically the person held hostage 💀💀. apparently the film was a flop; the cgi was very intriguing. the next film we watched was last action hero and i liked it a lot more, this little boy has a golden ticket that transports him into a movie on the screen, and the villain gets the ticket and the main characters have to adjust to both life in the movie and in "reality" (which is still a movie unfortunately). 

anyways i hope to watch / read more interesting things to procrastinate my college applications 🤩