(no subject)

Ultimate Frisbee was fun tonight; we had good weather, with relatively cool conditions and not too much wind. The games were, for the most part, evenly matched and exciting, with several players on both sides making rather spectacular plays. I made as many bad throws and dropped the disc on easy catches about as much as I usually do, but I did have a good time. I don't know; not playing sports much as a child, and not having parents or older siblings to teach me how to do things like throw and catch, has left me with very little intuition for these things. By this I mean the innate ability to see some projectile in the air and then get oneself in the right place to catch it. Frisbee motion isn't parabolic, of course; I'm guessing the physics of frisbees is pretty complex. For one thing, there are the aerodynamic effects to account for. And it's rotating, on a non-fixed axis, and translating. Certainly some of its motion is similar to that of the gyroscope (a poorly thrown disc wobbles, which might be like precession or nutation?), but the dynamics have got to be more complicated than that. Perhaps P111 and the traditional Toy Fest will yield some more insight.

(Edit: In reference to the above, I did grow up with a stable family and both parents. It's just that they're both almost entirely nonathletic, and like the stereotypical Asian parents they brought me up thinking that I should spend my time studying and not playing sports. Okay, so maybe I didn't have all that much of a childhood, but I think I've improved a lot for the better since then, at least with regard to social skills. I wonder how my brother Julian managed to pick up his vastly superior athletic ability.)

But I digress. Play ended by 8:15, as we wouldn't have had time for another game before the onset of darkness. So Justin drove me over to the music building and I went to the Rita Benson Music Library for a while. Iowa's got a much better collection than Underhill, of course, it being a big research university whose music program is more like a conservatory's than Swat. I got a couple of scores for song cycles, including Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte, which we studied in Music 6, and Berlioz' Les nuits d'ete. Hey, with the latter, these are summer nights, and I've always liked these. Plus they're in French, which I understand. With German lieder I am stuck looking up translations and probably butchering the diction when/if I try to sing them. Too bad most of it is written for tenor. Only in my wildest dreams, I think, will I hit a high G full voice and with control (think "Blanzinflor et Helena").

I should ssh into the lab UNIX server and crunch through some more data. But I really really really don't feel like it right now...