10/27/16: A Concert to Remember

1. 10/27/16
1. E&M: Finally, some new material! I’m so psyched. We exploited some neat vector calc from 33x to calculate the induced charge on a conducting surface.
2. Quantum: Talked about free particle. Most of the stuff was in Griffiths but I managed to figure out some personal questions I had about Fourier transforms while sitting in class. Sat next to Judith, who told me about a concert later that night, right after Glee rehearsal.
3. Went to gym to play hoops! Got into a good game. My vertical is really back, I can solidly touch the rim now (though my ‘bounding degrades way faster than my running as a game wears on).
4. Back to 2104, shower and a snack, then Creating a Company. Some fun exercises and class logistics. At one point Alan asked if anyone needed a break (no) if anyone needed to do calisthenics (me: yes) so Alan grabbed me and had me lead a few stretches :P I tried to do a warmup we did in Glee called “Alive, Awake, Alert, Enthusiastic” but couldn’t quite remember the stretch sequence :)
5. Worked stuff out with my team, delegated responsibilities. A productive session. Damir has good focus.
6. Busted out a list of name ideas because we need the name for tonight so Damir can print business cards.
7. Went to Glee, did a quick “interview” thingy with one of my Glee mates who wants to do computer science. He mostly asked me about the admissions process, but at the end I found out he was also more on the theoretical vs dev end, and I told him there were few like us and the research profs needed us, so if he could go pitch himself to a research prof and get work in a lab that would look great on the CS application.
8. Rehearsal was good, conductors were a little more stressed than normal, but we sang well.
9. Ran to string quartet concert in Meany. Plunked down $10, wasn’t sure what to expect. Judith was running late so I set up in one of the front rows.
10. The quartet was INCREDIBLE. Their tone was amazing, their synchronization was truly astounding (lots of passages where the different players would hand off solos or duo lines with terrific accuracy). I thought more about Fourier series :)
11. Walked out into Meany for intermission, ran into Judith. Talked for a while, met her friend cellist Isabel. (Happy birthday Isabelle back at home by the way!)
12. Second movement was also really cool. After that, went with Judith and Isabel to talk to the performers (who they’d both met in a music department seminar yesterday, even though they were from New York). Ended up going to the reception, where the amazing free food made up handily for dinner. Got into a discussion with a really friendly older fellow, a biochem professor working on gene injection via viruses. Talked about physics, which he was enthusiastic about. He recommended I visit a chemistry lab managed by a fellow named David Baker (what the frick?! Remember Rachel Park from Go Club a year ago, the one who busted into lunchbox to tell the professor about a new research tool developed in her lab? Well, she worked in Baker’s lab and really loved his research!)
13. So maybe I’m meant to check it out! The professor, who incidentally is the uncle of the Seahawks kicker Hauschka, said there were students there from all branches of science, trying to figure out protein folding. (They did the FoldIt citizen science project).
14. Walked back to 2104 singing a merry tune. Helped the Entre team figure out a name, registered my new bike lock, worked on organizing SPS pickup frisbee, wrote this log, and hit the hay.

10/26/16: Lovin' Life

1. 10/26/16
1. Finished StatMech homework (the last problem was really weird and my result didn’t agree with the one given. But hey, got me thinking, that’s what matters.)
2. StatMech class was mostly checking the validity of the Boltzmann statistical /counting definition of entropy, against what we’d already gotten from empirical thermodynamics. But Marcel also talked about how to generalize the ideal gas entropy (using, now, the counting definition).
3. Hit the SPS lounge. None of my math club buddies were there so I worked on the lunchbox and formatting the Halloween Party poster. Chatted a little with Kyle and Isaak about the newsletter. MailChimp stats are telling me about half of my 300 subscribers are opening the email, but then, based on link tracking, almost nobody finishes it. Compelling case for bullet points. At one point I nearly die laughing, when Kyle makes some goofy comparison between the newsletter and jeez, I don’t remember... Grabbed a delicious chicken fried waffle at the new food truck in Red Square and ate it during the meeting, which was routine.
4. Put up the newsletters and Halloween party flyers with Justin, who volunteered to help at no provocation.
5. Went to play basketball! Unfortunately the extra pair of shorts I’d packed was worthless without my basketball shoes, so I had to run back to 2104 and then down to the gym.
6. At the IMA I ran into Henry, an old hoops buddy of mine from WCC. We formed a team and won three games straight before finally losing the court. I couldn’t shoot at all, but I got lots of rebounds.
7. (Here I’ll note I had a bit of an epiphany the other evening (after dinner with Xin, Molly, and Brandon) when I remarked to Molly, who watches anime while doing homework and has several bottles of alcohol legitimately in her room, that if I didn’t know her, her lifestyle would seem rather dissipated. She agreed, and then said something that gave me a moment of pause: “I love my life! It’s great.” At that point I realized loving my (current) life hadn’t been high on my list of priorities. I’d been feeling that everything I was doing was just a means to the next thing, feeling a frustrating mix of ennui and treadmilling. Partially because my future plans aren’t well fixed and so aren’t a strong present motivator, partially because review in physics is frustrating, and partially because it’s become a habit to think of everything I do in terms of what it will net me. So I decided to snap the habit. Playing 4 games of basketball instead of leaving after 2 was part of it. Then, in-between basketball and swing, instead of trying to scramble and get some little things done, I just had a lovely snack, hung out with Lisa in the kitchen, appreciated a creamy glass of milk.
8. My altered mindset made a big difference at swing. I stuck around for both lessons and learned a lot of technique. Lots of fun--I felt very comfortable and at ease, not as tense as I’ve been. (I’ve noticed, at random times, a buildup of latent tension in my muscles, particularly hand and face. Will see if I can lose that.)
9. Then team food at EJ’s, good conversation with Trevor and noob swingers Sarah and Nico.
10. Now for phase 2 of my relaxation plan: be realistic about getting things done. You have to get things done in optimal and isolated conditions (at least strongly designated and mentally isolated), not in little chunks in the middle of the rest of your life (otherwise simple things, like getting a sandwich, face mental evaluation so that they can be compared against getting something done). So instead of going back to 2104, I went to a quiet room in Paccar and read about / practiced with databases for several hours.
11. Went back to 2104. (Note: Personal Journal entry). Good conversation with Xin, hopefully working out Xin / Brandon stuff. Laundry and log and sleep.

10/23/16: A "Lazy" Day (ha!)

1. 10/23/16
1. Walk with Winnie, talk about research and her misgivings about the anti-intuitive nature of 33x. Lovely walk through Ravenna. At the end, have to scramble up a steep, long hillside to make it back in time. Convince Winnie, and we have a great time scraping and hauling ourselves up the hill.
2. Meet up with Brandon and walk over to Mercer. The engineering bros’ apartment is pretty sweet, filled with whiteboards and artsy movie posters, and with a stunning view of the river. And apparently they do weekly movie nights!
3. Trevor’s cranking away on homework; Brandon and I get to the real work. Make some tasty omelettes. On the last one, realize I’ve been making a rookie mistake (not enough butter) and the quality improves substantially!
4. Eat omelets and get into conversation about different coordinate systems with Max, whose mathematical curiosity is in no way hampered by his debilitating cold. He’s suspicious that Cartesian coordinates seem to be privileged over other ways of describing space, which are defined in terms of the transformation from the Cartesian representation to the other representation. I argue, after a little thought, the privilege is all in our heads; from the math perspective, we may as well start with spherical coordinates, and define cartesian in terms of them. I’m happy with my argument and resulting perspective :)
5. French toast is a disaster. I soak the bread for way too long (off my game!). End up with a burnt eggy mess. But the second batch is better.
6. Get a quick tour of the rest of their Mercer digs. Cool, but not envious, I love 2104.
7. Then it’s back to North campus with Trevor and Brandon. Trevor’s going to meet his friend’s girlfriend, who’s going to give him advice on how to court this girl in AA that he likes. The dude is terrified, just for the advising meeting :) Interesting backstory: Trevor was at first worried that the laid-back gal was going to kill his lab grade; only later in their acquaintance did he arrive at the perspective that she knew what she was doing and that he liked her. :D :D weird life
8. Go to gym, which I have no business doing after the relaxing brunch. Xin and I play a little badminton, though Xin is devoid of motivation and I crush him thoroughly.
9. Run back to 2104, listening to epic music. Feel pretty epic. Take a shower and get dressed in nice clothes. Finish the SPS newsletter. Then go meet Judith for dinner at the Korean Tofu house.
10. I get there a few minutes early and she’s already there, headphones on, facing away from me. Miraculously, after standing there for a few moments waiting in the doorway, a combination of my blunder-checking and person-recognition abilities kick in and I see her.
11. Dinner is good, learn more about Judith’s music background, family, etc, eat delicious pork :) Think I do decent in all the social signaling categories as well. Judith’s got crazy music skillz and knowledge which makes for interesting conversation. However, her nervous energy (hopefully from her hectic day and not from the situation) is way off the charts; she’s drumming her feet under the table and periodically checking her phone (later she shows me an email relevant to our conversation, that she noticed during the meal).
12. Walk to the concert in Meany. Judith explains exactly where one must sit to get the best blend. We sit down; I run out a few minutes later to give Andrew Li a ticket, catch up with him a bit.
13. It feels like I’m in Your Lie in April. Steinway on the brightly lit stage in a huge auditorium.
14. First piece: crazy weird postmodern violin and viola piece. Then a Beethoven sonata, the end of which is really cool, but the middle is boring (agreed with Judit & Andrew). After that was intermission, talked with Andrew about CS interviews; then a piece by one of the performers, which showcased the performers’ incredible ability to synchronize on strange tempos; and finally, a piece by Janacek, similar to Grieg whose music Judith had recommended me some year ago. Neat stuff!
15. After Judith says hi to all the people she knows in Chamber Club, plus several of the performers, we walk back to the corner of North Campus we both inhabit, part ways at 2104.
16. Get sucked into a “study” session with Selorm and Sammy. Get some decent studying done for my QM exam Tuesday, but also watch Selorm’s favorite Boney M. music videos.
17. Grab Xin and Molly for ice cream break; get into a more serious conversation with Molly about voting and then about grad school. She really wants security, so my vague plans to gather a deep foundation and then own the world through multidisciplinary hustle sound strange.
18. Get into a massage circle with Selorm and Molly.
19. Keep working on Quantum, then write this log.

10/20/16: Another mad mad mad mad mad mad mad mad day!

1. 10/20/16
1. Woke up bright and early, chowed down on snack bar in torrential downpour on way to E&M. Turned in my and Brandon’s hw and sat down squishily in my soaked pants.
2. Lecture was the working through of a few exam-type problems, all of which were easy, so I settled in with some toasty Wikipedia articles on Fourier transforms, distributions, and linear functionals. I’m coming to the opinion you can basically learn math and physics through Wikipedia, once you have some sense of how both fields are structured.
3. During the break between E&M and QM, helped Jacob W. figure out what “ground” meant (with some ideal conductor problem). Basically “ground” is a connection to a giant neutral conducting object at infinity.
4. Quantum was (surprisingly) a walkthrough of a derivation I’d read in Griffiths. So I did the quantum tutorial and read more math.
5. Grabbed Jacob and went to the SPS lounge, where we worked out flights for PhysCon. Again, I got to exercise my cheapo ninja skills, found some sweet flights for Justin and I. Jacob’s mom had already booked him a more expensive flight, but I managed to convince him that he could cancel it and scored him a deal, plus -1 nights of hotel room reservation :)
6. That all took a long time, plus a lot of drama with the various airline websites. The poor fellows in SPS doing hw witnessed an emotional rollercoaster underscored with colorful language.
7. I finally got to go back to 2104 and get lunch. On the way back, stop by the Honors office and get 2 $5 tickets for a play at the Seattle Rep theater (in December) that should be $80 :D :D I’m very excited.
8. Right! Lunch. Oh, eggs, thou hast n’eer tasted so divine! With jalapenos, onions, cheese, english muffins, and all that. Yum!
9. Skipped Creating a Company to make the last 45 minutes of the CSE career fair. Talked to some Facebook reps, plus the company Marchex whose reps I’d had dinner with last year. The latter part involved a coding challenge, and so I barely got out of there in time to play one game of hoops in the IMA.
10. Hustled to Glee all sweaty and tired. Somehow, this did wonders for my voice. (Maybe muscle tiredness => relaxation => better tone)? Anyway it was a great rehearsal.
11. Xin messaged me and we met up for dinner at a new place on the Ave. Good, but small portions. Talked about a bunch of small companies with dorky ideas that had come to recruit EE students.
12. Go back to 2104. Hang out a little bit in the kitchen with Selorm, Lisa, Brandon, some others.
13. Feel a sudden crash, notice how tense I am; the ill-defined inner battles I’ve been fighting in the background all day momentarily sweep to the surface. My lifestyle takes mental work to maintain, in the sense that I’m trying to pretend, in each arena of life, that I’m hardcore dedicated to that arena, where in reality I’m split across many different things. I think it’s the right thing to do in college, but it’s tiring. The constant desire to evaluate myself, since I’m not straightforwardly evaluated by the standards of any one discipline, to review everything I do for consistency and efficiency and whether I actually want to be doing it…
14. Take a shower. That helps a little bit. Go through email and messages.
15. Read some databases slides for my research.
16. Skype with parents! This dispels my ennui with gusto.
17. Write some journal entries.
18. Hit the hay (in progress).

10/19/16: Camaraderie (Backlog is coming! Notes have been taken! Details will be written!)

1. 10/19/16
1. Wake up just in time for StatMech.
2. Class is neat; Prof. Marcel goes into some detail on something I’ve never seen before, the Legendre Transform. He gives a geometrical interpretation of it. The LT allows you to swap the independent variable of your thermodynamic function between temperature and entropy, pressure and volume, and more!
3. Go to SPS lounge for Math Club with Jacob W.! Brandon sleeps through this session, but Jacob, Keegan and I still get to talk about drag on a rocket, derive the rocket equation, talk about the definition of indistinguishability as applied to statistical mechanics…
4. SPS meeting is raucous and camaraderie-filled.
5. Hang out in the lounge working on lunchbox poster and a flyer to sell the last of last year’s t-shirts. Try, with Chris, to hang up some shirts outside the lounge with tape. No luck. Will pin a hanger to the wall, and hang the shirt on that, for attempt 2.
6. Also talk a bit with Chris about group theory.
7. Barely get a start on the E&M hw before it’s time for swing lessons.
8. Swing lessons are fun but I’m dead tired. Team food afterward is good--meet some new people, talk with Alex a bit.
9. Do E&M hw, finish early, end up playing Frisbee with Brandon in the rain in Red Square :)
10. Return, watch a bit of Attack on Titan with Xin, and retire.

10/12/16

1. 10/12/16
1. Slept in a bit, went to StatMech. More engines. Gaah! When will this review be over?
2. First physics Math Club meeting in SPS lounge. Brandon, Jacob W. me, new guy named Keegan who’s Jacob’s friend, and Tristan from 33x. We tried to prove that any vector field with zero divergence could be written as a curl, no luck. Then Jacob talked about his current math research, which was really fascinating. One problem I’d like to think about more.
3. The setup is, given a tournament--a graph whose vertices are people and whose directed edges represent who beats whom in 1v1 matchups--you can construct many different sets S of voting ballots Bi, each Bi has a ranking of the people x1, … xN, such that xi beats xj in the tournament, if and only if the number of ballots where xi > xj exceeds the number where xi < xj.
4. When you put all the candidates together though, there is a different, overall criterion for winning; candidate xi beats candidate xj iff xi is ranked first on more ballots than xj.
5. The question is, can you construct a set of ballots for any tournament of 1-1 results, where, if you look at only the first element of each ballot’s ranking (that voter’s top candidate, so to speak), you can make any person win the vote, overall?
6. This is like asking, can you put enough information in the 2nd through nth entries of each ballot’s ranking, to wipe out the entries in the 1st column that determine the overall winner, when you’re considering 1v1 matches.
7. Anyway, enough math! After that was the SPS meeting, which was a bit absentminded (partly me). Devin is stepping up in his role as Halloween Party captain though, which is great.
8. Stayed in the SPS lounge, working on E&M homework, which is still annoying review. Even more annoying was the fact that it’s hard to set up Mathematica’s system for doing units calculations right. So I spent like an hour cursing my ancestors and looking through Mathematica help / support / random StackOverflow crud.
9. Finally went outside, which improved my mood considerably. There however, I was confronted by a super sock zombie. I thought I was through, done, sunk! But I hid behind my table and fended him off with my own socks. Eventually he got careless and ran out of socks (he had a lab in 5 minutes), and I rushed him and got the stun.
10. Unfortunately, my glorious human self didn’t make the Wednesday HvZ mission. I hustled to CSE building and did some quick physics tutoring for a friend from Lavin. Then I met Andrew’s research professor, Prof. Suciu. I had done just enough prep to know what was up, but not overthink things so much that my natural math curiosity couldn’t express itself. I basically grilled the guy on what it meant to factor databases as matrices. He seemed happy with my enthusiasm, invited me to work on the project after first doing some databases homework and then meeting with Andrew. I really liked him. Friendly, explained the context of our problem within his own research and within CS. And I liked what I might be working on. The intersection of an untapped obscure region of math (low-rank tensor factorization) with machine learning! :D :D
11. So that was exciting! Afterwards I went to the advanced swing lesson and really enjoyed myself. Skipped out on techniques because if I schedule all my time I don’t pay attention to the life I’m living :/
12. Back to 2104, board game night! Got food at the 8 and ate it while we played card games, some Set (crushed Evan, yeah!) and Bananagrams.
13. Went out to the IMA, ended up just playing 1v1 at Denny field, which saved me 20 minutes of walking. Got wrecked by this energetic Asian dude Luke, who invited me to play on his team next quarter. Very positive guy, would like to play with him more.
14. Returned to 2104 to finish E&M homework, book buses home for a day between classes and DubHacks. Got into an interesting conversation with some floormates, one of whom had to deal with a good friend who wanted to be a boyfriend but it wasn’t going to work out.
15. Finished the E&M hw, wrote this log and went to bed.

10/11/16

1. 10/11/16
1. Woke up bright and early to finish quantum homework. Got stuck on the last problem, had to go to class :( Class was good though. I had to correct two mistakes Prof. Cobden made writing stuff down which would have been confusing if not rectified :)
2. Went back to 2104, made 3 sandwiches, one for me and 2 for Future Spencer.
3. Met Dimir, Li, Zoltan in Paccar. We struggled trying to come up with a business idea. I’m glad that at the least we are picky. Listed out our resources and skills, but didn’t help much.
4. Worked on StatMech hw for a while. Then CaC class. Good class, mostly a lecture from Alan and then Q&A. Arranged a meeting with Raustin, who fortunately didn’t get sucked into the other team (since they pitched a lame “better water bottle” idea).
5. Between CaC and Glee, ran to CS building for the first meeting of the reconstituted UW Effective Altruism club. (They needed 5 members to form, so Ethan told me to come.) Issa was there, but I didn’t have much time to catch up.
6. Glee rehearsal was kinda tough, I wasn’t getting the hang of our new music.
7. Walk back to 2104, grab Brandon for a good dinner at Som Tam. Get another bubble tea from that awesome new place.
8. Work on StatMech homework, finish. Go through email and messages. Molly comes in and we chat for a while about upcoming Dubhacks ideas. She has to apply to Google, (her dream job as a UX designer) in the next 5 days, so she says it’s going to be tough, but she’s still doing DubHacks because if she wins it’ll look really good.
9. Downstairs (Xin’s sleeping). Short conversation with Lisa, write this log.

10/10/16: Beautiful and Insane, this Life

1. 10/10/16: Beautiful and Insane, this Life
1. Woke bright and early for two tutorial sections. Material is picking up and I have fun. Then StatMech. Work out some interesting stuff as Marcel reviews engines.
2. Hustle to Orin’s Cafe and meet CaC team. Talk about my/Raustin’s idea (gets pretty intense, lots of good pros and cons) and work on “team contract” forms.
3. Back to SPS lounge for lunchbox with Prof. Marcel on the Nobel Prize. Place is packed, pizza is gone. I have this strange sense I’m performing some role in a movie. Marcel talks at a brisk clip about superfluidity in liquid helium. Nobody asks any questions and the silence swells to smother the room, so I ask about the topological insulators thing, (you know, pretzel, coffee cup, that thing) and what a fascinating tale that is! In short, the conductivity depending on only the topological genus of the surface of the object astonished theorists, but (and this won the Nobel prize) fell right out of the math after working with a simplified periodic-potential model. It was thrown into the paper in the last week before publication.
4. I’m sitting on the floor, eating an apple since the pizza is gone, staring intently at Marcel, asking questions in an otherwise silent but packed room--feels surreal. I am a geek in the sunlight of the spotless mind, holding the conch of discourse in oblivious hands. I ask one more crazy question about whether young researchers should go after the most “important” problems in their field as Hamming urged, got interesting answers from both Marcel and Olmstead.
5. Afterwards, hang in SPS lounge with Justin, Jacob W. We plan the first Math Club meeting for Wednesday, and book a hotel for PhysCon. This too feels surreal. Jacob W wants to book the hotel the conference is in, at $260/night; I get on Hotels.com and trade $130 / night for a < 1 mile walk.
6. Put on my HvZ bandanna and run back to 2104, make myself an amazing sandwich. Watch the final episode of April, crazy ending, not plausible but very beautiful.
7. Go to IMA, play some hoops. Play pretty well but there’s not as many people and the standard of play is not as high :) Monday, go figure.
8. Return to 2104, chow a bowl of Raisin Bran, and off to Putnam prep session. Got invited by 2104 dude Evan and swingin’ lady Savanna, so I decided to go. Guess what--half of my Math 336 class was there, in that same tiny review session room in Padelford I thought I’d never see again!
9. We take a 2-hour test (most of the sessions aren’t like this, much more discussion-based, but this one determines who is on the UW Putnam team. It’s a lot of fun, solve 3 out of the 5 problems. Get really bogged down in a stupid way on one of them, but works out OK.
10. Afterwards, discuss problems with Thomas et al. Then end up going to dinner with Will, Thomas, Kelsey (hadn’t met her, in my quantum class xD), and some n00bs from the current iteration of 334. These n00bs knew what was up, though; one of them showed us a simple solution to the hardest problem on the test, that to our knowledge nobody had solved (except this guy). Was able to get that dude on the SPS mailing list #score! Also good to catch up with Will and Thomas.
11. Return to 2104, on way back stop in at Monday dance to say hi to folks. It’s winding down, hang out with Alex and Diego for 15 minutes.
12. Back at 2104, go ham on quantum hw, still don’t finish the darn stuff, have 1 problem left to do in review-y E&M lecture tomorrow morning. But I need to sleep. I’ll do that now, actually!

10/9/16: Relaxing Sunday

1. 10/9/16
1. Woke up VERY late. Did some work/email. Went to indian buffet with Brandon, was delicious.
2. Return, work on quantum hw a little bit with Brandon, go to UW soccer game with Brandon. Xin almost comes but he instead goes to dinner with Demi and other friends.
3. Game is exciting and the level of play is incredible.
4. Back to 2104, shower, laundry. Eat some of Xin’s leftovers for dinner, watch a bit of the presidential debate with Xin and Evan.
5. More work on quantum homework, etc. Install the safety rail on my bunk (finally!), and, to my great delight, figure out how to make it so I can slide my chair under my desk (namely, remove the armrests with my allen wrench).
6. Write this log and hit the hay.