Random thoughts at 3 am

1. Pursuit of Happyness is a fucking ridiculous conservative wet dream. It's got everything: the rags-to-riches story, the ball-and-chain wife who won't support the breadwinner's dreams and aspirations, and, in a moment of utterly orgasmic conservatism, the IRS coming and whisking away Will Smith's last bit of savings just as he's about to get on his feet. All it's missing is the voice-over that says, "...and so, if poor people would just get off their asses and work really hard, they could end up millionaries like Chris Gardner if they really wanted to."
2. I just went back through about 3/4 of my linear algebra text book, reminded myself what the fuck eigenvectors are, tried to wade my way through the professor's notes on dynamic chemical networks, and finally had to look up what the fuck a Jacobian was on wikipedia. My brain hurts. Math is hard!
1. Side note 1: Math and science articles on wikipedia have the most remarkable (and infuriating) ability to be totally opaque to people not already familiar with the subject matter.
2. Side note 2: I loved Harvard, but its math courses were fucking terrible for those of us who are not math majors. Which is to say: math courses were taught by math majors at Harvard who, being math majors at Harvard, were completely unable to think like, relate to, and finally teach us normal mortals. Going back through my textbook, I am realizing how little of linear algebra I actually understood.