A few things. First off, I saw Andromeda for the first time ever last weekend, on the 10th! I was at Big Pine Key and… ahh, it was so beautiful! Two and a half million year old light… it’s rather sexy, actually. And now that I know exactly where to look and what to look for, I’m able to see it from my house! Oh, it’s so beautiful. It’s a whole other galaxy. Looking at hundreds of millions of stars in about one square degree of sky… all that light traveling 2,538,000 light years, only to end that ages long journey on my retina… it’s really sexy to think about. Alright, I might be just the tiniest bit turned on by space. And by “tiniest bit” I mean quite a bit, as in, a lot.
On a random note, if I ever get the chance to name a chocolate bar, I’m going to call it Andromeda for one simple reason. There’s already a “Milky Way” chocolate. There must be an Andromeda. “Large Magellanic Cloud” doesn’t sound delicious… well, to me it does, but it doesn’t really sound like a chocolate bar. It’d be appropriate for cotton candy though.Oh great, now I’m thinking about galaxy names and what kind of candy it would be. “Arp 87” doesn’t really sound like any sort of candy. xD Now to look at the Hubble Deep Field again because it’s so beautiful… and then there’s that picture of Andromeda… mmm…
Second semester is going to start… today, really. I gotta really work on my grades now. Like, really work on them. But now I don’t have college apps to stress me out. It’s also time to put this lighting to the test. Hopefully all should work out well and hopefully my dysfunctional family doesn’t get in the way again. My dad’s a little verbally abusive… but he’s away now, and hopefully he’ll stay away for a long time now so that I can get a little peace of mind…
This reminds me. No one gave me the room number of my Government teacher. I have to go to her class today, and apparently the school never gave the students their schedule changes. Ugh, yet another reason why my high school is… unfavorable… I can’t wait until I’m in a more organized college environment.
I’ve also taken up teaching myself topology. A professor friend of mine (he won’t tell me what college he’s a professor at, but I know he’s from Boston–not MIT though, I don’t think) has given me a copy of Armstrong (1983) Basic Topology, and it’s surprisingly readable. I’m working my way through it. Of course, it being a third-year topology textbook, and having taught myself only the basics of Set Theory, the book is not easy, so to speak, but it is definitely manageable. After getting through some of it, I’ll try and watch some lectures on YouTube. I’m sure there’s an OpenCourse one, but I want to see the other ones too and see which one I like the best. Virtual teacher quality matters, too!
On a side note, if you combine xkcd and SMBC together, that’s 95% me. There’s even a post that describes my “talk mathy to me” thing so accurately: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2934#comic
Ahhh…
For The Love Of Math! 
I remember seeing Andromeda in my little telescope. As Finn the Human would say, “Astronomical!”.
On the now rare times I am not in a light-polluted environment, and I can actually SEE the Milky Way in detail, it’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that there are so many stars and that we are so far away from them that both the naked eye and the camera eye can’t resolve individual stars, and they all blend in and look like a line of spilled milk.
And that is MERELY IN OUR OWN LITTLE GALAXY, from two thirds out from the center looking through to the center and everything behind.
Just one little galaxy out of the extremely large number of them in The Visible Universe. Most SF authors who write “space operas” such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Scott Sigler’s Galaxy Football League, and others, keep most of the action in just one galaxy. I don’t know off the top of my head what the diameter of our galaxy is, and how far away Andromeda is, Millions of light-years? Hundreds of millions?
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I got the reading comprehension test question wrong. But still, when that light you saw left Andromeda, I don’t think we were even homonids yet at that time hear on Earth.
I’m sure Andromeda is a good name for a candy.
And that “talk mathy to me” comic explains you! At least from what little I know about you just by typing words back on forth. btw I didn’t know that i^i is a real number!
Wish I had learned and remembered more math than I did, so I could “talk mathy” to you!
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damn autocorrect
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