1/30/16: A Leroy day

1. Today was fairly interesting! I'll describe it in chronological order, but with text density proportional to interestingness. 
2. Early morning, woke up, jumped in the shower, had several epiphanies about math problems I'd failed to solve the preceding evening. Bashed them out in true Leroy style, went to class, where Will went off on a crazy tangent about the gamma function (generalization of the factorial, useful in number theory) and how you can express it as an infinite product.
3. Hardware, where we reviewed the calling convention and went over some examples of the way the call stack is managed. 
4. Went to lunch with Johan. Talked about philosophy, a proof he wrote in Algorithms, housing.
5. Johan went to class, and I stood outside in the sun, thinking, "Man, it would be a bummer if it were sunny at Get the Physicists Together and all I had were indoor games!" 
6. So I returned to Haggett, fetched my big bin of outdoor equipment, took it to Neural, where there were a whole bunch of demos. Some neat educational stuff, like an arm wrestler controlled by electrical impulses recorded on the arm--the more muscle motion / muscle nerve impulses the contestant can induce, the more the mechanical "arms" doing the "wrestling" turn in their favor. Some brains in jars, oh, and I got to try an Oculus that they happened to have in the lab! Only for like 2 minutes, since I had to get to Get the Physicists Together, but it was neat. Latency was low. And combined with fairly high-accuracy sensors, (similar to Kinect), it was running a basic but powerful-feeling hand-controlled game. 
7. I showed up at GTPT one minute late; Frank, bless his heart, had already started a game of Exploding Kittens. We're slowly getting traction--Wesley showed up again, and Isaac from the Honors physics last quarter. After the Kittens games died down, I managed to get Wesley, Devin, Isaac outside for some frisbee, which turned into a fun game of touch football. 
8. After that, I returned to Haggett, helped Siri with some physics homework, met with Brandon. Brandon and I headed out for dinner at the Korean Tofu House, which was boss. We had a fairly deep conversation about the types of people we'd like to live with (since we're analyzing housing for next year.) It's amazing how people tend to fall into one of two frustrating categories: 
1.  the introvert, introdisciplinary scholar who thinks their field and perspective is the most important--that is, a person driven inside of a finite game. Often, this seems to happen because of a feedback loop. I'm working on this, thus it must be important, so I'll double down and pursue it even more unbalancedly, hence it must be of all-consuming significance, etcetera. This frustrates me because it seems like important insights come across fields and I want to communicate with people in other fields; it frustrates Brandon because it seems that specialists are shirking their responsibility to communicate with the public--n.b. the current abysmal state of layman's explanations of quantum mechanics.
2. On the other extreme, there are the lightweights who don't seem to be passionate about anything, least of all academic subjects. They are often fun to be around and good to fill out social groups, but one can't go very deep with them.
3. Where are the people who know themselves, who maintain a balanced and cross-disciplinary drive, who wear their hearts on their sleeves without breaking down, who are willing to communicate their understanding to those outside their field/in-group? Brandon and I have each met surprisingly few. 
9. We looked at some houses while we waited for our meal, then afterwards hit Cafe Avellino and looked at more houses. We found exactly 1 that seemed very promising, and plan to visit the neighborhood tomorrow. We also scheduled a visit on Monday. 
1. https://seattle.craigslist.org/see/apa/5424778087.html
10. Now, the craziest part of the day. As we walked back to campus, Brandon and I ran into Anwell, whom I knew from CSE and Brandon knew via a mutual acquaintance. He was heading to a party at Johan's, and we decided to tag along. We took the bus up to 65th, where Johan resides. The party was already in full swing when we arrived--probably upwards of 20 engineers and students. Brandon and I awkwardly joined the affray, eventually ending up in the living room. As the conversation sprawled around him, Johan sat on a couch, dialed in, working to finish his Algorithms hw before midnight. But Brandon and I met an Amazon Web Services systems engineer, some people I knew from the hackathon, a dude we knew from physics. 
11. There was a good deal of beer, and I decided this was as good time as any to try some after Brandon cracked one open. I tricd a couple different kinds, consuming probably one bottle total. And yet I felt noticeably more relaxed, more jovial. It was very strange, but pleasant. (I wonder if you can perceive a change in my writing style stemming from my mild inebriation.) 
12. After more conversation, Brandon and I headed back to campus. Brandon went with Anwell and Grant to the EEB, where they proceeded to light up the lecture hall speakers with some crankin' tunes. Brandon sent me a video :D
13. I went back to Haggett to write this log and sleep. And I think now I will do just that. Good evening all, peace and joy be with you!