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Although I wasn’t quite dead in Denver, I sure felt close, at times. Illness is rare for me, with the last case (that I can remember) being the Venezuelan Black Plague. That same disease, brought from distant lands by Daniel “Space Monkey” Loreto, put Carl out of commission for more than a week. When I get sick, I don’t mess around.

On the flight from Boston to Chicago, I sat next to a Mormon gentleman, who also happened to be a computer engineer. He was a perfectly nice guy, but near the end of the flight he began talking about religion. He told me a story about his priest(?), who was asking a member of his church how long it would take him to calculate the intersection point of two objects moving in the air. The member responded that it would take him a while to determine the equations, measure factors like gravity and air density in the area, and so on. The priest then tossed his keys at the man, who caught it in mid-air. This, my fellow airline passenger asserted, was a profound testimony to the miracle of God’s creation.

Not being able to help myself, I responded that the comparison seemed a little rigged, as preparation time was included in one but not the other. The human body, I noted, took millions of years to evolve the physical mechanisms necessary to perform that little miracle. Even if you just start counting from birth, it takes several years of learning and practice; go throw some keys at an infant if you need proof that there’s some prep time involved. Once you’ve written the program, I concluded, a computer could calculate the midair collision of billions of pairs of objects in a couple of seconds. Most people I know can’t juggle more than three objects.

There was a moment of silence as the Mormon gentleman pondered my point. Then, seemingly undiscouraged, he asked if I had read the Book of Mormon. “No,” I conceded, “I haven’t. But I’m fine, thanks.” To a normal person, this is a clear signal of disinterest in a line of conversation. Instead, he began to describe to me the similarities between his religious text and the Bible, and then flowed non sequitur into stories about John the Baptist appearing in Pennsylvania in 1829. Those who know me might imagine the difficulty with which I held my tongue. The temptation to draw comparisons between his fantastic stories and, say, Greek mythology were strong. But I resisted, because we were almost at the gate, and all I would be doing is angering a stranger. I just nodded, avoided eye contact, and went “hmm”. He suggested I visit mormon.org, gave me a card, and we disembarked from the plane.

The weekend I spent at UIUC coincided with the Fighting Illinis’ big Final Four game. On the shuttle from the airport, we drove through Champaign, passing many bars and restaurants near campus. From the door of each establishment poured hundreds of bright orange bodies. Students, clad in their school colors, preparing for the game by starting to drink at two in the afternoon. Illinois, like Stanford and CMU, was nice. Smart, friendly people. Lots of good stuff. The hotel placed me in a smoking room, despite my voiced preference otherwise, and I was too tired to do anything about it. This triggered some allergies, which distracted my immune system, which was, finally, taken over by the cruel illness I mentioned earlier.

My flight to Denver was spent in better company: a clever six-and-a-half year old black girl. She watched the modern live-action version of Cinderella, which, she confided to me, was her favorite movie. She had a doll named Heather, who the flight attendant enjoyed pretending was a real child. “Make sure you hold onto her real tight,” the woman said, “You don’t want her to get hurt.” The little girl was amused that the woman believed her doll to be a real person, and she and I spent the flight pretending that the stewardess was a little crazy. As we descended toward DIA, my conversation with her (such as it was) turned to the subject of weather. “Do you know what clouds are?” I asked her. She shook her head. “They’re water,” I explained. “And when it rains, that’s just the clouds getting too heavy and falling out of the sky.” She stared at me, mouth parted slightly. I continued, “And fog is just a cloud that’s too low. So when you walk through the fog, you’re walking through a cloud.” The little girl gasped softly, her wonder-filled eyes growing wide, images of Cinderella walking through the low-hanging clouds flashing in her mind.

“Catching keys,” I thought, “that’s what passes for a miracle?”

The conference was in a nice hotel near Denver, and I had what they called a mountain view. It was really a parking lot view, but, sure enough, the snow-covered Rockies loomed in the distance. My talk went well, but I got rejected from a couple of fellowships. Oh well. I arranged with IBM to remain in Boston for the summer, doing research with Larry and coding an implementation of my Master’s thesis (cooperative checkpointing) for BlueGene. My decision for graduate school is due this Friday. I am still struggling. This weekend I will blog again, posting my choice. Either way, it seems my days as an MIT student are numbered. Before landing in Logan, we flew over Boston and Cambridge in the twilight. I could pick out the Great Dome, the Green Building, Sydney and Pacific, the Stata Center, the Pru, and the brilliantly lit Citgo sign. It was beautiful, but I was struck by a sudden sadness. I realized why: soon, I’ll have to say goodbye.

Incidentally, don’t ever throw your keys at an infant. It was just a thought experiment. Sicko.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 9th, 2005 at 11:47 pm and is filed under School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.