UW Update Friday 6/5/15

1.     UW Update Friday 6/5/15

a.     Woke, physics. Everyone cheered at the end of class for Garcia, applause which he heartily deserved.

b.     Several people asked me about the lunch, which is good—looks like it’s gaining traction.

c.      Linear. Big recap day 2. Our postdoc teacher is the awesomest—as an aside, she dissed the other postdocs, claiming very plausibly that they were smart people but “said mean things about students” and had no patience for those less savvy than themselves. She’s also making us all breakfast before the final if 80% complete the feedback form, which we just did. I remember thinking of doing something almost analogous with cookies when I was dreaming about teaching calculus at WCC.

d.     This whole day I was feeling a bit drained, but I managed to write some decent emails before CSE 311.

e.     311 was neat. We talked about Turing machines and undecidability. Again, I can’t figure out whether paradoxes that arise via self-reference, in this case proving the impossibility of writing a program to show that a general program halts on a given input, get to some fundamental issue of self-reference within programs more generally, or whether by eliminating self-reference (as apparently some mathematicians did in a now-dominant branch of set theory (vs. so-called naïve set theory)) we could make halting decidable. Everyone cheered for James at the end of the lecture; in his usual iconoclastic way, he looked askance and said “I’m not sure what that was for…”.

f.      Grabbed lunch with Johan and another dude, Vivic, who, as it turns out, is transferring to Brown (the UW was too big for him). We ate outside and ended up having a long conversation and trying to solve 311 extra credit problem.

g.     It was 4:30 when I walked back to Haggett. I wrote another email, worked on the CSE hw more, then decided to shake my annoying brain-friedness by going on a run. I went through the lake-side wilderness to Laurelhurst and back. The wilderness was beautiful, and the grass smelled sweet in the warm sun. By the time I had returned and showered, I was totally energized. Did linear hw. Grabbed a calzone at the 8 and talked to Luke from physics while he ate. A good fellow, Luke was frustrated because he’d had to ask for an extension on physics hw after completing it late at night, then sleeping through the class. We talked about mechanical engineering, his intended major, and the strange fact that he’s held out on getting a Facebook account. I tried to convince him to get one for networking purposes (he’s fairly introverted, so he’s reluctant).

h.     Took my calzone to the lounge and ate with Nicholas and Sasha. A bit weird since I hadn’t talked to them for a long time, but it worked.

i.       Did CSE hw for a long time. I had almost finished when I was overwhelmed with exhaustion, wrote this log, and retired.