mystery
I got on the bus tonight and dug out of my bag my copy of Essays on Actions & Events by Donald Davidson. Certain essays in this book were required reading for Boardman's "Theory of Reality" class in Winter Term 1997, and I've been re-reading a few of them. I had marked my place with a piece of note paper at the end of my morning bus ride, and I flipped through the pages looking for it.
Instead I opened the book to a page of lined looseleaf paper folded quarterwise. On one side the following four lines were written in pencil:
Medicine
Herbal throat drops
Anaesthetic throat drops
C
This was easy enough to explain. I took the course in winter 1997, and in about February the flu was going around. I evaded it thanks to having been vaccinated (I felt sick for about half a day), but cedarlibrarian was not so fortunate, so I was keeping her supplied with remedies and the occasional milkshake from the Grill. This was a basic shopping list to remind me of the kinds of things I needed to get. The "C," of course, refers to a vitamin.
Then I unfolded the paper to a half-sheet. Here were scribbled in pencil, crosswise against the lines:
"place"?
"elliptical"?
"standby positions"?
and then, written underneath that in pen:
1.678x107 it.
1:22 am --> 2:28 am
w/25
I'm baffled at what this is all about. I can't imagine that it related to any of the classes I was taking: philosophy, the French "cours experimental" and intro to comp sci (CMSC 5, which I should have foregone in favor of going straight to 15). And I don't know what else I would have been doing that would have involved these words, numbers, or times. Maybe the stuff in pen does relate to computer programming -- I suppose maybe I wrote a routine that performed 16,780,000 iterations in an hour and six minutes (who knows what "w/25" is about, though). But back then I didn't have access to a computer I could program on at two in the morning. I don't think I had a Pascal compiler or interpreter on my old Mac.
Anyway, that's the weird piece of paper I found in my book-turned-time-capsule.
Instead I opened the book to a page of lined looseleaf paper folded quarterwise. On one side the following four lines were written in pencil:
Medicine
Herbal throat drops
Anaesthetic throat drops
C
This was easy enough to explain. I took the course in winter 1997, and in about February the flu was going around. I evaded it thanks to having been vaccinated (I felt sick for about half a day), but cedarlibrarian was not so fortunate, so I was keeping her supplied with remedies and the occasional milkshake from the Grill. This was a basic shopping list to remind me of the kinds of things I needed to get. The "C," of course, refers to a vitamin.
Then I unfolded the paper to a half-sheet. Here were scribbled in pencil, crosswise against the lines:
"place"?
"elliptical"?
"standby positions"?
and then, written underneath that in pen:
1.678x107 it.
1:22 am --> 2:28 am
w/25
I'm baffled at what this is all about. I can't imagine that it related to any of the classes I was taking: philosophy, the French "cours experimental" and intro to comp sci (CMSC 5, which I should have foregone in favor of going straight to 15). And I don't know what else I would have been doing that would have involved these words, numbers, or times. Maybe the stuff in pen does relate to computer programming -- I suppose maybe I wrote a routine that performed 16,780,000 iterations in an hour and six minutes (who knows what "w/25" is about, though). But back then I didn't have access to a computer I could program on at two in the morning. I don't think I had a Pascal compiler or interpreter on my old Mac.
Anyway, that's the weird piece of paper I found in my book-turned-time-capsule.