11/28/16: The Happenin'

1. 11/28/16
1. Well, today has been a very eventful return to campus.
2. Spend the morning finishing StatMech hw, run to class.
3. Hang out for a bit in SPS lounge, work with Jacob.
4. Head home, make myself lunch (+ 2 extra sandwiches) and read E&M.
5. Spend a productive Leroy-isolated 20 minutes crunching emails and researching classes.
6. Work on quantum hw while simultaneously planning several lunches with friends.
7. Go to gym with Xin, play some badminton, work out a bit.
8. Run home, shower, off to Putnam session! Work some very interesting problems, most of which end up simpler than they appear. Here’s a fun one that with sufficient thought, any one of y’all could solve (Thomas’s genius solution requires no computation). There are 100 people boarding a plane. They all have assigned seats (out of the 100 total on the plane). But the first guy forgets his boarding pass. So he sits in a random seat (with high probability, displacing someone else).
9. Each subsequent boarder then either takes his seat, if it is unoccupied, or moves to a random open seat, if their seat is taken.
10. The question is: what is the probability that the last boarder will get the seat she was originally assigned? (Comment if you’re stuck and want the answer).
11. Good problems (probability, lots more fun for me than dry series summations and geometry), good discussion--though the session leader withholds pizza from us for an extra 20 minutes :)
12. Afterwards, chat a bit with Peter, Thomas, and Kelsey who’s majoring in physics.
13. Then it’s off to swing! To my surprise, the place is packed. Sophie is back from Europe; she’s taking the coordinator role, and she invited all of the old Monday night regulars. I get lost in the dancing pretty fast; work on some more following with Alex, invent a few new moves…
14. Return to 2104, work a bit more on QM homework (I killed the last exam so I don’t have to write this one up too carefully) write this log and hit the hay.

11/19/16: Home Sweet Home

1. 11/19/16: Home Sweet Home
1. Wake up, to my surprise, in Bellingham.
2. Go ice skating with M, which is lots of fun. Haven’t done that in forever. M tries to teach me some spins and backwards stuff.
3. Bagels!
4. Go to Ferndale YMCA with Mom and Iz and play Wallyball. They teach me how to spike, which is fun.
5. Go to Grandma’s to watch the game. Get to watch the first half and eat some delicious grilled cheese sandwiches before I have to go.
6. Take the Bolt Bus home. Read up on the foundations of relational databases on the way back.
7. Go to Winnie’s birthday party! Meet up with some physics TAs; don’t know anyone else. Man, that girl has gone hardcore physics. Interesting conversation, but the party breaks up soon after I get there.
8. Whereupon I go to Jacob’s party! Where, to my greater surprise, I don’t know anyone either. But everyone is friendly and I get to know lots of people. Most of them are not from the UW (?!) but from a summer camp that Jacob worked at this summer.
9. Get to talk to both of Jacob’s roommates; interesting people. One of them is a bioengineer interested in brain-computer interfaces.
10. A girl named Emma who I hadn’t even been introduced to at the party drives me back to 2104. There, I unpack and hang out with Xin for a bit, end up reading about perceptrons in this really cool book Xin gave me, called the New Turing Omnibus.
11. Write this log and hit the hay.

11/17/16: Sanity Doesn't Desert Me for a Day

1. 11/17/16
1. E&M exam. Wake up, eat a hearty breakfast of eggs and english muffins, chat a bit with Jan, and study a few last problems. Then it’s off to Physics.
2. The exam itself is actually fun! I feel very solid, catch myself making mistakes and fix them, pace myself perfectly. And it turns out I extrapolated intelligently from the equation sheet and studied exactly the right things. Makes me think I should just go ahead and take the second quarter of E&M next quarter and not devote too much time to it.
3. Hang out in SPS lounge, work on website for CaC. Use Squarespace live chat efficiently to sidestep frustration.
4. Go running with Johan! This was so long overdue. We meet in CS, dump our stuff in the gym lockers, and hit the trails. That dude can really get me excited about CS stuff and the “ambitious student” lifestyle in general. We talk about some special interest groups within CSE he’s organizing; I might go to the first meeting for that tomorrow.
5. I try to explain quantum to him and fail (I need to up my game for Christmas), while we jog through Laurelhurst.
6. Get smoothies at Cafe on the Ave and then pupusas at Guanaco’s, before parting ways. I go to Paccar for CaC; the start of the class is lecture-y and slow, but it doesn’t last long. Get to catch up with team and then work with Damir on the website.
7. Lavin All-student meeting. Tasty sandwiches. Chat with Michelle, Kasey, dude who always comes to lunches (Kevin). Keynote not super interesting.
8. Glee rehearsal! Arrive late but have a good time.
9. Practice glee for a bit then…
10. Film Club! We watch a bizarre movie about a French factory worker who has to convince her coworkers to vote for her to stay on, versus them getting a bonus. World of scarcity for legit sure. Kind of grim but the ending is uplifting.
11. Film clubbers walk to EJ’s afterwards. I sit on the sidelines for an intense conversation about gaming consoles and then politics.
12. Return to 2104. Xin and Brandon are cooking dinner, though it’s like 11pm. Go work on website a bit more, then crash. Night!

11/15/16: My Life in April

1. 11/15/16
1. E&M lecture OK. QM lecture a catastrophe; Cobden falls apart after the class asks too many bad questions at the start of the lecture.
2. Have lunch with Sam Kinn from my neuroE class. He recently graduated and randomly messaged me. Interesting lunch, but our talk centered on future plans and so was mildly stressful.
3. Ran into Preston, a freshman visitor to the SPS last year, now a sophomore running his own independent research project. Crazy!
4. Meet with Creating a Company team. Get deadlines straightened out. Then Li and I interview some business owners. Meet one older guy who’s been running a restaurant since the 70’s, seems like he really could use our help.
5. Run to 2104 and eat a banana and read the rest of Venkat’s latest phenomenal rf article: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/11/10/king-ruinous-and-the-city-of-darkness/#more-5663
6. Glee. Good rehearsal. Get hit by a fire alarm in middle of it.
7. Go to practice room and practice Glee songs for a bit, then catch Judith’s concert competition. (Lie in April fans, I wish I had video of it. Crazy plate of shrimp I just watched that anime).
8. Judith plays amazingly, ridiculously well and pwns her competition.
9. Hang around for a bit afterwards then run to 2104 and cook myself a gigantic omelette with lots of onions. Eat it. Xin brings me ice cream from ricks :) and I work on understanding the discrete Fourier transform, which has been popping up a lot lately.
10. Hang out with Brandon.
11. Write email, do quantum hw, and hit the hay.

11/14/16: ETH Lunchbox and Learning to Follow

1. 11/14/16
1. Tutorials! Try hard to pay attention to the laggard material and catch all the little details.
2. Get the SPS food drive boxes in position and make signs for them.
3. StatMech, interesting proofs.
4. Lunchbox, guy from ETH (the place I want to study abroad next year) who’s coming here to help Microsoft build a quantum computer. He describes quantum computing in the clearest way I’ve heard yet and gives a lucid description of Shor’s algorithm for factoring, plus describes the physical system (a topological insulator) that is the current hot darling qubit candidate. Get to talk to Judith a bit at lunchbox.
5. Do quantum homework for a couple hours.
6. Walk to the gym only to realize I haven’t packed shorts. Go back to the house, do more work, bike to the gym. Get into a fun game of basketball.
7. Return, grab dinner with Xin and Lisa at a new place on the Ave called just “BBQ Chicken”, whose graffitied red awning is so sketch I’ve avoided it for two years. But the fried chicken XIn orders is awesome, much better than my bibimbab bowl.
8. Afterwards get bubble tea, then run over to the monday night dance. Only Alex and Kostya are there; Alex is hosting for the Monday. They entreat me to stay, which I do gladly. Try to get Lisa and Xin to stay with very limited success.
9. Alex is learning to lead and I teach her how to lead a swing-out, while simultaneously learning to follow one.
10. After a while Ky, the HCDE PhD student, comes in. He’s a beginner lead so we teach him to swing-out. I’m having a blast teaching all the subtleties of technique and diagnosing sticking points, I feel like a new math tutor fresh out of Calc 1 from WCC. Alex looks a little surprised, like she didn’t realize my pedagogical side extended from math to dancing.
11. Dance a bit more with Alex, bid farewell to Kostya and Ky (and to Diego who walks in at the end, running on 2 hours of sleep after a rough night. Man, that guy is so awesome. He’s not afraid to say he just couldn’t sleep, and gumptionful enough to still make an appearance at the dance after what must have been an exhausting day.)
12. Return to 2104, hang out with Xin and Brandon for a bit, finish quantum. Then hit the hay.
13. Note to future self and all you struggle-bus passengers out there: there were also struggles this day. They are too strange and intertwingled to mention. At this late hour, I cast a Leroy's Shroud upon them and walk my mind in another direction. Good night y'each!

11/9/16: Calm in the Eye of the Weirding

1. 11/9/16
1. Scrounge around physics and chemistry loading docks for cardboard boxes, to use for the SPS Thanksgiving food drive.
2. StatMech is very interesting and confusing.
3. In SPS lounge, work on putting together and decorating boxes with professors’ names; print out a load of box labels.
4. Meeting features an officer of a club called the Astro Undergrad Engineering Group, who’d reached out to us last week. Not as much interest from people in it as I thought!
5. After the meeting, the first SPS pickup frisbee is a semi-success. Not enough people for a full game but those who come have fun (Jacob W, Sam, Kyle)
6. Run back home for a shower, do a little work, then off to Odegaard to do some physics tutoring.
7. Work with a young woman from the Honors section, lots of fun, she wants to know the interpretation of and context around everything. Get to explain Laplace’s equation, cuz it comes up randomly in her calc homework.
8. Work on E&M in Ode (which I’d solved the preceding night, now just writing it up.)
9. Go to advanced Swing lesson. We learn this killer new basic step (the kick, kick, rockstep) and how to use it for both Charleston and the 6-count basic.
10. Duck out a bit early and take a bus to Greenlake to meet, with CaC team, someone from a previous CaC class who’d worked on a similar idea. Only make it for the end of the meeting but Rachael has lots of good advice for us and seems excited to help. Will probably hit her up with some follow-up emails.
11. Head back to U-district, study for CaC test in Oasis with delicious taro bubble tea. Then go to team food, which is packed. Hang out with Alex, Diego, John, and the crew. Relax and have a good time. Get to talk with Savanna a bit as well.
12. Go to Paccar and ensconce myself in a team room, finish E&M. Question my understanding of method of images over a facepalm-like minus sign neglection.
13. Return to 2104, study more for CaC test, hand over hw to Brandon, help Xin figure out where he went wrong on a stats question, etc. Write this journal and hit the hay!

11/1/16: Quantum Questioning

1. 11/1/16
1. Quantum is neat.
2. Walk with Jacob and ask questions of Prof. Cobden; eventually end up in his sweet 5th-floor office.
3. Return to SPS lounge, do math with Jacob (we develop a new, much improved notation for wave variables that I’m going to use from now on that brings out the correspondence between the time variables like frequency, period and the space variables like wavenumber, wavelength). Jacob really likes it :)
4. Eat lunch.
5. Work out another weird thing from quantum that mathematically is very simple but whose implications are really neat (it explains why large objects move at the expected, classical velocities even when exposed as the high-space-frequency waves they are). It relates the speed of a wavepacket whose momentum representation is pretty tight (we know from the wavefunction the momentum is within some small region of momentum space) to the derivative of the space-frequency with respect to the time-frequency (instead of just being the ratio of the space frequency and the time frequency, as it would be for a single wave).
6. Go to Cafe Solstice to meet this girl Melina, who’d asked my number at the crazy packed party, I went to after the Lavin party last Friday.
7. Go to CaC. Neat panel of entrepreneurs, one of whom worked on this really cool, simple-to-understand product named KickStart.
8. Talk with team, get a few things sorted out; talk with the KickStart woman Chie, who’s trained as an engineer, but mostly worked on marketing. Interesting story; the product engineering and approval was pretty fast, but figuring out that a) they needed to price low enough to get covered by insurance and b) they needed to market to patients was tricky.
9. Glee!
10. Return to 2104; Xin and Brandon are cooking dinner. Unfortunately, they got the wrong kind of curry paste. So I bike to QFC and get the correct kind, then sit and do E&M hw while they make dinner.
11. Dinner is tasty, Evan joins us for a bit. Afterwards is pumpkin pie :)
12. Head up and finish E&M. Also read the first chapter of “Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes, which is already very awesome.
13. Hit the hay! ‘Night y’all :)

10/31/16: Halloween Party

1. 10/31/16
1. Miss tutorial (again). Wow, my memory is really bad.
2. But, have enough time to study for statmech! Midterm is tough but I feel pretty solid.
3. Afterwards, run up and down the Ave hunting for halloween costumes. Red Light is way too expensive, but while hunting around in there I get the idea of being a conehead zombie from HvZ.
4. Get a cheap, pretty orange tie from Goodwill to go with my HvZ bandanna, and some green makeup.
5. Grab my blazer and fancy pants from home and run to lunchbox.
6. After lunchbox is the SPS Halloween Party! We get probably 20 people, a good turnout. I bring lots of apples and oranges and peanut butter and caramel.
7. People goof around and play games on the blackboard, I meet some new people, and some people I haven’t seen in a long time (Alanna from Honors floor)
8. Play a game of Resistance (I totally fool Isaak). Xin joins in.
9. Costume contest! Finally manage to get Kyle a T-shirt (as a prize) and we get lots of good pics.
10. Play frisbee outside with Frank, Kyle, the guy from the Putnam Club (Rory) and a new girl whose name I can’t spell (she said it sounded like “nuzzle me” (?!)).
11. After that is the movie. We watch Alien, which is tremendously cheesy. I guess Alien 2 is the one with “game over, guys! Game over!”. Entertaining nonetheless.
12. Bike home, eat a sandwich, take a shower. Decide to make this week’s quantum hw the one I drop, and spend my time working on the E&M hw instead (I have catchup to do before PhysCon). Have fun working on that, it’s tricky and requires me to read the book.
13. Hang out downstairs for a bit doing laundry, observing Selorm and Sammy’s pizza shenanigans.
14. Write this log and hit the hay.