Updates on my Life 3/30/22

Today's gonna be another personal blog: I think I need to take a break after the 8 straight days of philosophy. I had a stats test today, and between her first two AP periods I was the only one with a raw 100. As another indication of the difficulty of this test, our teacher said that if I was the only one with a 100 she would raise the curve for everyone else. The chem test I took today I thought was pretty typical in difficulty. Normally I'd go study with some friends, but I wanted to try studying by myself and then using a multi-sample T test to determine if there's any benefit. That means I'm going to have to ask our chem teacher for standard deviations and means of the pasts tests. Since I don't remember my raw scores either, I'll have to ask for them.

I finished chapter 5 of Crime and Punishment today. I think that the book is definitely getting more interesting. I found Rodya's dream to be really interesting. Thus far, I've found his behavior to be depicting the point of moral relativism, and I think his dream shows that as a child with his father's stability he acted morally under the socially accepted definition. But now while in poverty Rodya really struggles with remaining moral - his struggle with Dunya's marriage for him and the drunk girl being stalked are causing his a lot of angst. We even see him change his decision with the drunk girl and police officer. Perhaps I'm reading in between the lines, but I thought that maybe Rodya suspected the police officer to also be wanting to rape her. The desire for her to get a cab immediately and not have the officer follow her seem to suggest a mistrust. in addition, the officer seems so eager to follow her - perhaps to rape her himself. Thus rodya's decision to let the officer do what he wants is an expression of his acceptance of moral relativism of his powerless position to change the girl's circumstances, and he knows that they need to be changed. We see this theme enforced again as Rodya losses money to the officer (possibility even to a bad agent), but as a result of his morality he doesn't try and go back to get it. The environment is the money and his morality is being strained. I didn't really understand Marmelov's whole digression in chapter 2. Maybe its to show his morality, his kindness in listening to the raving man and encouraging him to reconcile with his family? I feel like there would be more effective ways of doing this then just spamming someone's life story in a chapter.

Today our exoplanet workshop paper got published! Here it is if y'all want to read it: https://app.aavso.org/jaavso/article/3816/.