Shalom, brethren. I have spent this week of winter recess in Arizona with my family, which means I have had time to obsessively build the XFA site. I understand that many of you readers may not be programmers, but let me tell you, if you’re looking for a hot, passionate night of shameful pleasure, learn Python and then build a web app with the Django framework. I can barely contain my feelings toward Django. It is juicy, juicy sauce. If you are in fact a programmer, and have previously used Django in your endeavors, I’m sure you share my sentiment.

My compulsive programming this week has also been a time of self-learning for me. I know all you readers care deeply about even the most minute details of my work life, so I won’t hold anything back. Actually scratch that, I am going to hold some stuff back. Otherwise, many of you might be concerned I’m an egotistical sociopath, which isn’t good for business. Anyways, I have specifically been paying attention to my micromanaging tendencies. When building a web app you generally have to keep track of several moving parts (models, views, CSS styling, whatnot), and I very much tend to spend far too much time perfecting small details when much larger pieces aren’t in place. For example, you know how sometimes you go to a news or blog site that only displays part of an article, and then the text fades out with a “Read More,” button at the bottom? For some reason, I had a spontaneous love affair with incorporating that effect on the XFA site, and I honestly think I spent an hour (“…A full hour!” –Crazy Craig) getting everything right. Now, this wouldn’t have necessarily been the end of the world, except for the fact that the entire site looks like garbage right now because I haven’t started styling the site yet. The engaged reader might be tempted to ask the question, “Why oh why, Danny, did you spend so much time perfecting the text fade away effect when you haven’t even started styling yet?” Well, my wonderfully engaged reader, I don’t really have a good answer for you, aside from the fact that I derive an irrationally large amount of utility from having perfect control over small details. Some might say I’m a perfectionist. Others would be wrong.

I think because I’ve spent the last five years mostly doing physics (not hard stuff like QFT or GR or String Theory. I’m not Wolfram sigh) I’ve generally been rewarded for being cripplingly OCD about the minute details of derivations. However, recently I have been attempting to tackle more complex theories (the hard stuff like QFT and GR), and I have been running into issues because I tend to spend way too much time trying to understand the incredibly minute details of every equation instead of trying to grasp the central tenets of the theories. It's also hard because the minute details of the mathematical theory usually give me the most pleasure (the details are a bit fuzzy, but at one point I believe I was accused of having romantic feelings for eigenvalues. I can’t say that’s too far off the mark. Honestly, eigenvalues are the Django of basic linear algebra). The issues I’ve been having with these theories specifically have genuinely caused me to wonder if my brain is already slowing down, but I think it’s far more likely that my perfectionist tendencies are finally catching up to me.

So then, the ~groundbreaking~ (really pretty obvious) conclusion I’ve come to is that I have to be much more militaristic with myself when it comes to my organizational approach to learning new subjects or working on my projects. As a practical example, I will have to force myself to implement the architecture of the XFA site before I go about trying to style the thrice-fracked thing. This organizational approach is pretty obviously the best way to go, but my time of self-reflection has really showed me how shamefully unorganized I’ve been with my past projects.

As an example of this shameful, shameful behavior, for the past two semesters, I’ve been doing a research apprenticeship for the ATLAS group at Berkeley (For the uninitiated, the ATLAS detector is a detector in the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, which just so happens to be the largest particle collider in the world). I won’t go into the specifics of my projects with ATLAS, but this last semester I was primarily working with the incredibly elaborate data readout system used by ATLAS.

It’s honestly a bit painful to think back to my project this semester, because I really did a poor job learning the necessary material to do the project I was working on. The fundamental issue was that in order to understand anything about anything, you had to first develop a basic understanding of the system as a whole. This was an issue for wee physicist Danny because I’m used to reading out of a physics textbook, understanding equations line-by-line, and then watching the main ideas unfold before me like the glorious phoenixes they are. When confronted with a subject that wasn’t possible to learn line-by-line, I hopelessly floundered about like the weird fish in Harry Styles music video for Adore You.

The moral of the story is that if you’re a perfectionist, you’re annoying and I don’t like you. JK, we’re all friends here. The moral is that in the future, I’ve learned that I need to make a much more concerted effort to outline whatever it is I’m working toward, and only dive into the details when I can see how they support the bigger picture. Unless I’m just looking to trip out on some delicious math. Then I’ll just shamefully and giddily open Weinberg’s QFT book to the section about the topology of the Lorentz Group. Until next time, my friends.

The desert wind speaks death,
No violence on its breath,
In fear of seeming sad,
Calm will the zephyr add.

Great works the wind has seen,
The failure and the dream,
Now thermals shape its path,
No physics makes no wrath.

Invisibly complex,
Its self-prophetic hex,
Is testament today,
That chaos yields a way.

Now hear its diatribe,
Reality described,
No violence on its breath,
So desert wind speaks death.

Grimes, or Clare, or c, or whatever the heck she wants to be called is really just the coolest kid in school. For simplicity, I shall heretofore refer to her by her common artist name, Grimes. If for some god-forsaken reason you are not incredibly familiar with the life and masterful works of Grimes, then I can assure you that your time would be much better spent listening to even a single song Grimes has produced than continuing to read this post. In fact, if you don’t know Grimes, I urge you to spend the next 30 minutes doing the following:

1. Listen to Grimes’s top three songs on Spotify. If you are at all like me, you might think to yourself, “This really isn’t my favorite. It’s quite experimental, and her voice is honestly kinda annoying because it’s so recklessly high.” While I understand this sentiment, I entreat you to power through to step 2 in an effort to achieve Grimesacle enlightenment.
2. Spend ~10 minutes shamelessly combing through the internet for any and every detail about Grimes and Elon Musk’s romantic involvement. Because I’m such a Basic Betty, like everyone else in my academic demographic, I too have a raging man-crush on Elon Musk. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I feel compelled to love Grimes because Elon does, but I will assert that this is not the foundation for my wild, hot-blooded feelings for Grimes. Do mosey on over to step 3.
3. Watch anywhere between 3 and 5 interviews of Grimes on YouTube. This is really when I began to truly fall into deep, inescapable love with her. Not only is Grimes inherent good, but literally every time she opens her mouth, she shows an understanding of humanity and our interaction with reality that I have rarely, rarely witnessed in anyone. I certainly hope you see this as well so that we can both be in love together.
4. Listen to Violence, and then read the meaning of the song on Genius. This is really the nail that sealed the coffin of my adoration of Grimes’s mind (I recognize that the possessive form of Grimes should probably be Grimes’, but I really like the idea of pronouncing Grimes’s like Grimeses). It isn’t necessarily the meaning of the song itself that I find so compelling, but rather the fact that Grimes’s purpose for the song is entirely different than I suspected based on her lyrics. And yet, if you actually followed step 3 and watched the assigned interviews, you will know just as well as I do that Grimes is incredibly intentional with her choice of lyrics. This fact absolutely transformed the way I perceive the song, which in turn transformed the way I perceive Grimes herself.

If you followed my patent-pending quick-and-easy four step process for falling in love with Grimes, and you have not yourself fallen in love with Grimes, I can only recommend that you take a moment by yourself in a dark room to genuinely ask yourself if you’ve entirely lost touch with your sense of humanity. Perhaps you have. If you find yourself to be one such emotionally-challenged specimen, please send me an email. I am deeply interested in what may have happened in your life that has so robbed you of feeling that you are unable to innocently fall into a deep passionate love for a random Canadian Artist you’ve never heard of.

I suppose that if you are actively married or in what my junior high teachers would refer to as a “dating relationship,” you are probably a bit apprehensive about purposefully trying to fall in love with a different person than your significant other. I understand your concern, but let me humbly submit that your situation actually gives rise to an interesting opportunity. Have your significant other go through my patent-pending quick-and-easy four step process for falling in love with Grimes. Now then, it is likely that you both are trying to hide your deep, romantic, passionate love for Grimes from one another to prevent each other from becoming jealous (or whatever feeling someone develops upon learning their significant other has romantic feelings for someone else). While it may be difficult, let me urge you both to share your feelings towards Grimes with one another. This conversation, while potentially difficult, will actually bring you both closer by uniting you both together under a common, powerful, mutual emotion for a girl you both will likely never meet.

Now then, since I have solved the “significant other” issue, you, dear reader, should have at this point allowed yourself to embrace a love for Grimes that you should hopefully recognize as entirely inevitable. Given that is the case, I believe my work here is done. Hasta la vista, mis amigos.

Like so many others, today was a remarkably interesting day. As the title might suggest, I began work creating the site for XFA today. I am currently refamiliarizing myself with Django, which is a python framework for building web applications. I naturally will need to have perfect control over the XFA site in order to convey the precise information and emotion I wish to convey, and thus I feel as though I necessarily must build the site myself, instead of turning to some easy way out, like WordPress. I simply cannot convey my excitement about enacting my vision for the XFA site, and it is a gift from life itself that I have the ability to birth this site from my mind in the form of succinct blocks of code.

Now then, I feel as though I ought to expound upon my first statement pertaining to the interesting character of this very day. After a brief stint journaling, I began reading Srendniki’s book on Quantum Field Theory. Up until now I have been attempting to learn the subject by means of Weinberg’s text, but let me tell you, that book is dense. A good friend of mine suggested I use Srendniki’s text instead of Weinberg for an introduction to the subject, so I decided to give it a whirl today. I read through the first section which motivated the use of Quantum Fields to deal with the problem of unifying special relativity and quantum mechanics, and the math was quite interesting. I am currently on Winter Recess and am spending time in Arizona with my family, and at about 12 I went to play 18 holes of golf with my father, brother, and Grandmother.

It was a truly gorgeous day. Arizona can sometimes be reconkulously hot, especially when playing golf in the desert, but this winter day was wonderfully temperate, and the sky was an incredibly compelling shade of eggshell blue. Anyway, I was able to enjoy the day and the golf for about 9 holes, when I was suddenly overtaken by the compulsion to work on quantum field theory problems. Gone was my enjoyment of the day, my family, and ridiculous sport of golf. This compulsion is very interesting to me. It happens fairly frequently to me, and it honestly seems quite silly. It robs me of the joy of living and fills me with a profound sense of anxiety.

I’m going to abruptly cut off this entry simply because it’s nearly midnight, and I’m quite tired.

Stars; in your multitudes; scarce to be counted; filling the darkness.