This month was Burton-Conner’s Annual Apple Bake: a culinary competition between floors that can only really be described as Iron Chef Apple, but with college students. This year, our floor (Conner 2) submitted 43 entries and won $420 in prize money. This is perhaps slightly more interesting when considering that there were 76 total entries, and $500 in prize money to be won. We are a bit enthusiastic about Apple Bake, you see.

I wound up winning first place in entrées for my Apple Bacon Cheddar Omelets, which I finished at the absolute last minute and without recipe. I’m not really a fan of cooking from recipes. The way I see it, when you start cooking, you should probably have an idea of what you want the final product to wind up looking and tasting like. From there, you draw on your skills and ingredients (and fancy kitchen gadgetry) to get there. And so, with 10 minutes remaining before the submission deadline, I pulled out my chopped onions and apples, my smoked cheddar and gouda, and my delicious bacon, and started throwing things into a hot skillet. A few dashes of sea salt and a sprig of parsley later, they were done.

When you learn differential equations, you never learn how to solve just one particular equation. You learn methods, pattern recognition, what to do when you have a square hold and a round peg, and how to draw hundreds of little arrows with remarkable efficiency. Cooking should really be the same way, except maybe direction fields don’t make omelets taste any better at all. I’ve got a bunch of ingredients floating around, and the solution I’m looking for is the tastiest one. Hopefully it’s a stable solution, but not always (soufflé anyone?). If the problem is at all interesting though, it’s probably one you haven’t seen before. Improve, adapt, overcome. Make the best damn omelet the world has ever seen, despite the fact that you ran out of eggs and maybe you don’t have a skillet either. Just because a few recipes happen to call for eggs and a skillet doesn’t mean every omelet needs them. Throw some tofu and cheese on a piece of tinfoil placed over your stovetop.  Blam, instant omelete-esque.  Mmmm…aluminum.

So learn yourself some Laplace transforms, and maybe you’ll cook a bit better.

The fire alarm went off a few days ago, and the firemen didn’t manage to turn off the flashing lights for quite some time. We were allowed to go back into the dorm after a few minutes, but the lights kept flashing. And all of the alarms were emitting a low, crackling noise. Like a wire had been severed somewhere. Not many people had returned yet, since we had just all been let back into the building. As I walked down the almost deserted hallways of my dorm, I thought to myself, “Wow, this would be a pretty good beginning to a zombie movie.”

As a side note, it seems like all of my blog posts are set in “a few days ago.” This is really just code-speak for “some time in the past which is not so far gone that I have forgotten to write about it.”

Imagine if our humble floor in Burton-Conner were the only remaining bastion of humanity, with the rest of campus, nay, the rest of the world overrun by hordes of flesh-craving zombies. Slow-moving, dimwitted zombies, of course, but zombies nonetheless. This being a movie, of course, means that the residents of Conner 2 would all fall into clearly predefined zombie movie stereotypes:

Leader

Someone would clearly have to be the battle-hardened leader of our ragtag band of zombie killers. This person seems a bit cold at first, and might even argue fiercely with the other characters, but ultimately this all stems from a deep desire to fend for the group’s best interests. If this person does end up dying, it is always near the end of the movie at an emotional low.

Big Brother

In any group of friends, there tends to emerge a big brother figure. The Big Brother is, in many ways, similar to the Leader in that he/she feels personally responsible for everyone else in the group. Instead of appearing cold and distant, though, the Big Brother is immediately likable and generally funny. Unfortunately, the Big Brother will almost always die saving one or more of the others in his group, inevitably due to a mistake on their part.

Smart Ass

The Smart Ass functions as the comic relief of the zombie movie, and may or may not actually kill zombies himself (this character is also almost always male, for whatever reason). He has seemingly limitless supply of one-liners and smarmy comebacks, and never hesitates to throw in a healthy dose of sarcasm at inopportune moments either. The Smart Ass is inevitably killed off in an amusing and somehow not tragic death as the movie progresses, since he also gets exponentially more annoying (and less funny) as time goes on.

Eye Candy

An unfortunate reality of most zombie movies is a small host of clueless teenagers, generally of the aesthetically pleasing variety, whose only purpose is to provide for pretty things to look at and a number of special effects laden deaths with satisfying little character development.

Love Interest

An even more unfortunate exception to the Eye Candy character, this person (almost always female, not necessarily true for plain Eye Candy) functions as a girlfriend of sorts for one of the main male characters in the movie.  Because of this, the Love Interest is practically immune to death, as long as the male character remains alive.

Traitor

Whenever someone gets bitten by a zombie in any zombie movie, they will always hide the wound and infection from the rest of the group until it’s too late.  Barring that, someone will end up betraying the group to some evil external group (faceless corporation, Nazis, etc.).  Karma usually operates here, and dictates that the Traitor die a messy and crowd-pleasing death as a result.

After my 6.034 (Artificial Intelligence) class let out a bit early today, I had to make a trip over to the bathroom. Now, in the building (Stata Center) where I have that class, that bathroom (and indeed, the entire building) is very particularly designed, and the stalls in the bathroom are very particularly arranged. It just so happens that the stall that I went to was occupied by another person. I started thinking: what exactly are the considerations that a guy makes when he’s picking out a bathroom stall? Do these conditions change when choosing a urinal? These questions, inevitably, led to myriad other equally nonsensical formulations and conjectures about how people go about walking and sitting the way they do.

As with any imperfect solution to a complex problem, our path finding algorithms occasionally fail us. On my way to 7.012 (Biology) lecture, I noticed a person stop dead on his tracks, and after a brief pause, let out a long, frustrated “ffffffffff-”, the beginnings of a drawn out expletive seemingly expressed through the deflation of his hopes of getting to class on time. Often, the problem isn’t finding an optimal (or any) path to a destination, but finding an optimal seating position in a class, or the least awkward urinal in the bathroom. Surely, I can’t sit too close to the front, and risk looking overly enthusiastic about learning, nor can I sit too far back and look like a deadbeat who’s only there to catch up on the sleep he missed because he was playing Super Smash Bros. And surely, sitting immediately adjacent to someone I don’t know is right out, unless, of course, that someone is an attractive individual whom I might want to introduce myself to. If I arrive late to class, I certainly cannot walk all the way across the room to sit; I take the nearest available seat instead.

It’s an interesting question for me, sitting here between classes and watching people pass by: finding destinations, empty seats, power outlets for their exhausted laptop batteries, the best tastiness/(time*cost) ratio for a late breakfast, the most amusing company for an evening’s debauchery.

When you boil everything down, people, in all of their irrationalities and idiosyncrasies, do actually operate based on real motivations and principles. I make no guarantees as to the quality or consistency of said motivations and principles, but behavior is generated by something. Even “random” behavior in people isn’t truly random. Tell a room full of people to arrange themselves randomly, and they wind up spacing themselves out, instead of truly randomly. +10 points to the first person who points out that reference. Note: points cannot be redeemed for cash, food, favors, or just about anything except self-empowerment.

Or maybe I’m just thinking too hard.