self_composed | i remember everything, so who are you?

Bella attends her classes with faultless punctuality, every time. She sits in the second or third row on an aisle in the middle section of seats, in the classes that take place in big auditorium lecture halls like the main section of Bio; she's willing to put herself closer to the professors in smaller classes like OS and of course her flute chair (third; she hasn't been quite ridiculously showoffy enough to climb beyond yet) is assigned. But right now, she is in Bio, learning tidbits about auxin and tropisms that the textbook didn't cover fully. She's running at about one and a half speed, just enough that she can trivially listen to and process the lecture against her memory of the text while also permitting some mind-wandering. She liiiiiikes her cognitive speedup power.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

regularsized

"Well, I don't have anywhere to be." She glances up at the occupied bed. "How are you doing over there, Janine?"

"Recalcitrant electrons," says Janine.

"...I think that's a what, not a how," says Bridget. "And also possibly more information than I needed."

Janine giggles. "Homework," she clarifies.

"Whew."

From:

self_composed

"I'll bite. How are the electrons being recalcitrant?" asks Bella.

From:

regularsized

"They are refusing to flow in a logically consistent way!" says Janine.

"They do that," Bridget says sagely.

From:

self_composed

"They do?" Bella asks curiously.

From:

regularsized

"Two of the trickiest things in the world are subatomic particles and homework," says Bridget. "I distantly recall that they get even worse when you combine them."

Janine giggles again.

From:

self_composed

"But electrons aren't actually logically inconsistent, yes? I mean, if they are, someone needs to revise their axioms of logic."

From:

regularsized

"It's an issue of conflicting models," says Bridget. "Not that I think that's what's going on here, but the representation of electron flow in a circuit diagram and the actual behaviour of individual electrons is very different. It's a problem in microchip design, I believe; if you make a conductor thin enough, below some threshold number of atoms wide, you start getting quantum effects that turn your chip from a tiny intricate logic machine into a tiny intricate ongoing accident."

"No, I think this is just me making a silly mistake I haven't found yet," says Janine.

"Yeah, that happens too."

From:

self_composed

"I used to do that sort of silly little thing in trig all the time," Bella said. "I kept turning SOHCAHTOA into various kinds of spoonerism."

From:

regularsized

"I have never been able to make that so-called mnemonic work for me," Bridget confesses.

"Me neither!" says Janine.

From:

self_composed

"I got it memorized eventually, but it didn't help when I needed it - it got to the point where I reconstructed the mnemonic based on what I knew about the functions," says Bella.

From:

regularsized

Bridget snorts. "I think that's what we call an ineffective teaching aid."

From:

self_composed

"It seemed to help some people," Bella shrugs. "Just not me."

From:

regularsized

"Well, partially effective, then."

"Can you name any of these mythical people?" wonders Janine.

From:

self_composed

"Jessica used it all the time," Bella says. "She was who I used to study trig with the most. And the guy who sat behind me talked to himself under his breath all the time, and he seemed to lean on it pretty heavily."

From:

regularsized

"Huh," says Janine.

"It does happen," says Bridget. "In fact I dare say we're the outliers."

From:

self_composed

"None of us in this room are typical people, I daresay," Bella says. "Probably half the folks who make it to Stanford aren't. The people we went to high school with are normal - for our socioeconomic classes, anyway."

From:

regularsized

"No one I went to high school with was normal, I'm pretty sure," says Janine.

"No one I went to high school with was memorable," says Bridget. "At least not after this long."

From:

self_composed

"Did you go to an unusual high school of some kind?" Bella asks Janine.

From:

regularsized

"Yes!" says Janine. "It was ostensibly for gifted children but in fact seemed to accept anyone who was any two of rich, smart, and weird."

Bridget quirks a smile. "That sounds interesting."

"Extremely!"

From:

self_composed

"Okay, so your high school doesn't count. I went to public schools in middle-class neighborhoods," shrugs Bella.

From:

regularsized

"Same here," says Bridget.

"My school had many advantages, but no kind of normality was ever one of them," says Janine.

From:

self_composed

"I went to a big normal school in Phoenix and a little normal school in Forks and met normal people there," laughs Bella. "And a statistically typical number of abnormal ones."