venta

Every so often - most recently, yesterday morning - I am confounded by the fundamental bastardliness of inanimate objects.

I was in a hurry putting the recyling out; the bag ripped and threw empty tins and bottles across the floor. I was in a hurry putting the rubbish out, so the binbag refused to come out the bin, and then the back door lock jammed...

Now, on a rational level, I'm quite well aware that being in a hurry makes you more inclined to make these kinds of mistakes. The binbags are made of plastic, are not malicious, and do not exercise free will any more than the laptop did when it sat madly spinning its hard drive and refusing to respond to any input.

( On the other hand... )

At the weekend, I spent a lot of time clearing out old files of work and notes from school and university.

In a way, I'm sad to see them go. The approximately two-foot high pile of A4 waiting to go out and give our recycling collectors a grave risk of industrial injury represents such a huge investment of my time and energy. I'm not honestly sure I would ever look at the stuff again, though - even the university lecture notes I keep intending to re-visit could probably be more usefully imbibed from books.

In particular, I lament the passing of my A-level physics notes. Writing notes in class was not as fraught as university lecture note-taking. I had the time and the inclination to take proper care over each page. My handwriting is even, the lines are neatly ruled, the diagrams carefully drawn in pencil and labelled.

Worse, it seems that almost the entire physics course has now fallen out of my head. "Using a Tangent Magnetometer to Investigate the Horizontal Component of the Earth's Magnetic Field" reads one tidily (double-)underlined heading. I did that? Yikes. Right now, I don't even know what a tangent magnetometer looks like. Or what it measures. Yet apparently I wielded one, shortly before I learned to use a cathode ray oscilloscope.

Flipping through the pages... what is the Hall Effect, anyway? Judging from the mark of 32/38 on the piece of work entitled "Comprehension of the Hall Effect", I only had a fairly hazy idea at the time. Shortly afterwards, I was using a Hall probe to measure the C. C. C. Inexplicably, the entire lab report fails to mention what C. C. C. actually stands for.

It feels wrong to be throwing away such a huge chunk of my life. But, ultimately, not quite as wrong as it feels to be giving up so much storage space to things I fundamentally don't need :)