I just came back from a great class day, so I'm all fired up to write! Exclamation points! The course in question is called Human-Computer Interfaces: Theory and Practice, and is cross-listed in the CS and Music departments whilst being administered by CCRMA, an entity about as independent as they come (which means not much) at Stanford. It seems to have a lot of royalty money from research and discoveries made there, and so has lots of dope equipment. And a foosball table in the lounge. May I mention that this lounge, and this Center, is located in the building that used to be the University president's home? And that it also has the ancientest elevator ever? Said elevator is of the metal-caged design seen encapsulating young women in Hitchcock movies, and is functioning.

Right. So. This ultimate aim of this course is to build a hardware and, optionally, a software interface to a computer music instrument. For the past four weeks we, a class full of CS and music majors, have been being taught the underlying electrical engineering to help us accomplish that. By the father of digital sound and a Xerox Star developer. The TAs are pretty damn knowledgeable, too (at least relative to us), as are a small handful of the students (a Japanese SONY researcher and a co-inventor of one of the output technologies we're learning in the course come to mind). The rest of us just sit in lab and wail, "Bi-uuuuhhhhl... my (insert thirty dollar, quarter-inch sensor) doesn't wuh-uuuurrrk. Um. Oh yeah. This circuit has no power source."

Anyway, the past four weeks have been rather fun but mostly humbling as heck. Today, we finally started to brainstorm ideas for final projects and the entire atmosphere of the class lightened up and sped up. We all left laughing, which is a great sign.

Then I pumped out a rather decent summary of last Friday's French discussion during my lunch hour, and headed to Psych131, otherwise known as Language and Thought. The professor's name is Herbert Clark, and anybody with the first name Herbert has got to either:

1. reside in the domain of the Herberts, Dilberts, and Alberts (okay, my brother's name is Albert, and he is great. But! See number 2.) of the world, or
2. have a rather spectacular sense of humor about it.

The professor seems to be of the latter species. Plus, he's a rather goodly pianist, so he uses music metaphors a lot, which make sense to me. So, lecture is pretty good, and usually very easy to comprehend (especially if you've done the reading, since he wrote one of the two texts we're using). And, are you sick of my commas, yet?

Today, however, said professor was in the Netherlands, so he arranged for one of his postdocs, Daniel Richardson to guest speak on the subject of language processing and visual tracking during it. I'd heard the basic premise of his talk before in a previous class, but he delivered it about a billion times better, with some cool experimental data on the cohort model (basically, process of elimination&the remaining possiblities at each stage are cohorts of one another) of arriving at the final verdict on an auditory signal is made, and also how being a speaker of another language affected such processing even if that speaker wasn't in the other language's "mode". For example, Russian-and-English speakers are shown the four objects <marker, pencil, dot, book> and told "Point to the marker," they will consider both the marker and the dot, which is "maka" in Russian. This effect is even further amplified when Russian folk songs are playing in the background, etc.

Richardson spoke quickly and fluently, packing lots of thoughts into the allotted fifty minutes, and made enough little great poker-face comments (in a British accent, no less!) to render the whole thing pretty memorable. And, he'd just acquired Keynote and had had a ball with it while preparing for the presentation, so we had some good laughs courtesy of the information.

Then I rushed off to French, where we spent two and a half hours analyzing Pascal Quignard's L'occupation américaine, almost literally line by line. This focus and depth of literary analysis is heightened by the fact that our instructor is the French wife of a Modern Thought and Literature professor here (you know, those nihilists). I don't think I've properly done literary analysis since high school—every fuzzy class I've taken here has been political or analytical philosophy, wherein the writers want you to get their message rather than have to hunt and grope blindly for it under the layers of Metaphor and Symbolism^TM. Let alone a foreign language. Sheesh.

Anyway, it's quite refreshing, if challenging. I tend to think in more complex terms than my French vocabulary allows, so I'm still working on dealing with that. But it's good for me, and today I felt especially on—a welcome counteraction of last Friday's very distracted and stumbling attitude.

After this marathon of a French class, I really, really needed to not look at text, so I hauled out my bike and went for my first ride in a week and a half (Ultimate's sort of taken over. Oops.). Things that made me smile during this ride:

1. The dudes riding the other way who saluted me on their honky bike bell.
2. The man on a motorcycle at a stoplight who'd just picked up his daughter from elementary school, and turned to say hi and tell me that usually they went home on a tandem.
3. The guy who absolutely yielded to me when I had to cross the part of Sand Hill Road that is basically a freeway on-ramp.
4. Alpine Road being done being repaved, and that repavement being smooth as buttah.
5. Passing all of them stopped-still rush-hour cars at a leisurely 20mph coming back into campus.

Plus, dinner was really good! Am I done now, update Nazis?

You're just the ones who didn't get phone calls, anyway...