Today, the deadliest shooting rampage in US history happened on the Virginia Tech campus. A lot of people were talking about it during my full day on campus today. It's hard to imagine why anyone would do such a thing. Yesterday those 32 victims never would have imagined what today would bring.

In the evening, I received an email from our university Chancellor expressing sympathy for today's tragedy, and giving the campus instructions on what to do if such a thing ever happened here.

In the morning, Ross and I went to the ARC to play basketball and lift weights, but right after we got there I realized that I left my basketball shoes at home. We lifted weights for a while, but one of the ARC staff dudes kicked us out when he saw that I was wearing sandals.

We ate outside the silo. When Ross threw some food to a duck, more ducks appeared. Finally, there was four ducks near us hoping for bits of our lunch. We observed that two of them were dominant and the other two were timid, and stayed at a considerable distance.

We also experimented by tossing the ducks some non-edible things, like pieces of our paper bag dipped in honey mustard. The ducks turned out to be much smarter than we expected, and generally stayed away from anything that wasn't food. Interesting...

When I walked into philosophy this morning, I thought I was in the wrong room, or in the right room at the wrong time. The person lecturing slightly resembled my professor, but it was clear that it wasn't him.

I sat down in the front row, and asked the person next to me "is this a sub?". Turns out my professor is in some foreign land (new guinea or something?), and our grad student TAs will be lecturing for the next few lectures. The TA lecturing today was really, really flamboyant.

It wasn't so much in how fast he talked, or his level of excitement about the subject, but more of the manner in which he (constantly) paced back and forth and lectured. When he talked about unicorns, or gave an example of philosophy that involved something being either a man or a woman, but then hesitated and said, "well, I guess it's possible to be both...", the whole class started murmuring...

Yeah...