12/21/16

1. 12/21/16
1. Woken by “I”. Try to one-up her normal grumpy boot-up process.
2. The rest of the day is a mix of reading, playing in the snow, participating in random conversations with the grandparents.
3. Highlight: All the present cousins (us and all the Markhams), including M, goof around outside with the football.
4. Highlight: Get into a heated discussion with Grandpa and the folks about whether the Hamilton cast members’ speech to Pence was an acceptable way to convey their message.
5. Highlight: Right before I go to bed, chat with Gayatri, end up with excess energy, and somehow a random hankering for the ridiculous mindless twitch game Avalanche. So I pull it up and manage in ten minutes of frantic key-bashing and instinct-relearning to get past the 300-foot mark. Makes me think of how my buddy Henry B. typically concludes his blog posts.
6. G’night y’all! Live well, and have a merry Christmas season :D

12/8/16: Holiday Special

1. 12/8/16
1. Finish E&M
2. Scramble to class w/ Brandon to turn it in
3. Grab breakfast w/ Brandon at the Bean and Bagel
4. Go to Quantum (had to attend the last class :)
5. Back to SPS lounge, show Jacob the ridiculously trivial conservation of angular momentum proof. See Hira has hung up our poster--it looks amazing :)
6. Meet Johan in CSE. Run into Max and talk math for a bit.
7. Johan sadly doesn’t have time for the full run and lunch, so we go play some badminton at the IMA.
8. I, hungry and alone, run back to SPS lounge. Everyone has already eaten lunch, and I forgot my coat at the gym. So I go get it and while I’m at it challenge a dude I’d met earlier to 1-1. Get some good hoops in.
9. Back to the Ave to get lunch, go to Which Wich where I hadn’t been in forever.
10. Grab some groceries for dinner.
11. Back to 2104, do some work.
12. Xin makes hot pot for dinner! He’s borrowed a friend’s setup. We cook pork, weird fish balls, and other things. It’s very good,
13. But I have to rush to film club! We watch the “Star Wars Holiday Special”, a real thing that was made in ‘76 when Star Wars was in like Flynn. It’s super hilarious, an incredible montage of 50’s domesticity, 70’s consumerism and cheesy “computer” graphics, and the uniquely Star Wars distant future.
14. Go to EJ’s afterwards, fun hanging out with Film Club people. During the movie, it had started snowing :). Beautiful fat flakes, floating down leisurely.
15. Return to 2104 to find Xin, Brandon, Evan and Matt hanging out. Hang with them for a bit then retire to the room. FInish one quantum problem, remember to Venmo-request Brandon for grocery money and in the process verify that my 2104 food spending habits are actually cost-effective. I’ve barely spent any more money this quarter than the amount I would be mandated to spend on food if I had a dining account (ok, I did spend $150 of dining account money) but still not bad.
16. Write this journal and hit the hay. Life high five y’all!

12/7/16: One-Liners

1. 12/7/16
1. Tutorials
2. StatMech with Olmstead, cool experimental perspective
3. E&M, run into Locke in hbar
4. SPS meeting & lunch, ideas for next quarter
5. Go to RSO office with Hira, set up poster
6. Draft cool poster design
7. Run to meet with Kyle
8. E&M
9. Good meeting with TA grad student Kyle to talk about grad school
10. Practice music while Hira works on poster
11. Concert call
12. Run back home for omelette
13. Concert call 2 for massed song
14. Hang out with Eleanor, others in green room
15. Concert! Goes well, we sing great :)
16. Hang out with friends from choirs (Alex, Savanna) a bit afterwards.
17. Meet folks, go to Oasis, “I” gets bubble tea.
18. Back to the house, work on E&M homework, figure out tricky problem with Brandon.
19. Hit the hay!

12/6/16: Quiet Amidst the Storm

1. 12/6/16
1. Slept in a little bit, caught up on quantum reading, delicious oatmeal breakfast
2. Went to music building, worked on CaC presentation
3. Met with Michael, who really liked the website we had built him.
4. Grabbed lunch at the HUB, ran into Evan, ate together
5. Returned to Paccar to prep the presentation.
6. Presentation was a bit of a struggle for me, just wasn’t in the right state of mind, but I got through it. We got funded (actually the judges told us we needed to ask for more funding so we could put together a better portfolio of design and photography work for our sales effort. (We’re contracting with student friends of ours to offer these services.)) Plus one of the judges offered to mentor us for next quarter, he seems like a great guy and a solid businessman.
7. Glee rehearsal was solid. We sang well, everyone had clearly prepped for the concert. At the end David played for us a) a song we’re going to sing next quarter, a quasiclassical irish piece which sounds really cool and b) us in concert singing Canst Thou Love Me, Lady, a piece where everyone sings falsetto and where we actually all sounded really good.
8. Back to 2104, help Xin with his embedded systems programming assignment. Part of his code goes from not making any sense to being readable and being something that ought to work, and yet the project still doesn’t pass tests. Hope that works out!
9. Go to Mongolian Grill with Xin; it is delicious.
10. Run to the gym to get some exercise in before end of day. People are still there hooping, can’t believe it. I get into a game, lots of fun!
11. Back to 2104, clean the room, do laundry, fun conversation with Molly in the hallway. Write this log, shower, throw my laundry in the dryer, and sleep.

Solution to the Plane Boarding Puzzle

This started as a simple response to Aunt Joan's proposed solution and turned into... um...

Ahem.
The clearest rigorous argument for the 1/2 result, I think, is like this. Think of it like a game: if the 100th guy gets his seat, we win; else we lose.
Also, change the rules and make the people more aggressive: so if you find your seat is taken, you don't move; you kick the offending fellow out to a random seat. This doesn't change which seats are occupied at any time--the thing which actually matters, since we're trying to figure out whether the 100th seat will be occupied when the 100th guy boards. But it makes it so that there's only one guy in the wrong seat at a given time--namely, the original confused guy.
So if the original confused guy gets kicked out and lands in his own seat, at that point everyone who has boarded has their assigned seat. So everyone else can board without confusion, and the 100th guy gets his seat--we win!
On the other hand, if the original confused guy gets kicked out and lands in the 100th guy's seat, he won't be kicked out again until the 100th guy comes to board and finds his seat taken. So we lose.
And in fact, this is the only way we can win or lose, because by the time we get to the 100th guy, either his seat, or the original guy's seat, will be taken by someone who got kicked there.
But, (the punchline), the win condition at each step (kick into first seat) is exactly as probable as the loss condition (kick into last seat)
So the total probability of winning must be the same as the total probability of losing--the situation is symmetric.
QED! :D

12/5/16: Almost... Done...

1. 12/5/16
1. Today was a homework day.
2. Woke up bright and early to try to finish StatMech. Didn’t quite finish it. When I got to class, my buddy Erin asked me whether I had finished it :) It was quite a homework. Marcel’s really throwing everything at us at once.
3. Go to work in the h-Bar, crunching on the Bo and Whimsy website (which we’re making for another CaC team who are making a children’s book (Bo and Whimsy)).
4. Duck into the lunchbox but since I’m live-chatting with a rep from Squarespace don’t hear the full story. Get my pizza, ask a question, and when the lunchbox devolves into talking about grad school prep, I bounce.
5. Go to the 6th floor data science center. Brianna had told me their group often studied up there. Lo and behold, they were there in a group room. I said hi, then went back to work.
6. Finish up the layout of the Testimonials page. Pick some cute hand-drawn fonts (Squarespace has integration with everything, including a vast repository of fonts called TypeKit). Fix a few other things. Then try to eliminate annoying extra whitespace that appears to be a bug in the template.
7. Hacking around with injecting CSS is going nowhere. My computer dies, so I run back to 2104. Send the proto-website off for review to the Bo and Whimsy team, then pack off to the gym. Get into a good intense game of ball that we should have won :)
8. Return to 2104, on the way back stopping by the 8 for food. Chow down, shower, then off to meet the CaC team to go over our presentation, which is happening tomorrow. Damir and Zoltan magically are able to present perfectly without practice. I, however, will need to rehearse :D
9. Run over to Open Flight Studio for the Monday night dance! At first Holly is the only follow, but since the leads prefer to sit around and talk anyway, I get some good dancing in. Then Rebeca shows up and the party gets started. Lots of fun dancing, especially with Holly, who is like an idealized model of a follow (from a physics viewpoint; you give her momentum or angular momentum, and she maintains that momentum until you next change it, which is the height of technique, and quite difficult). Learning how to discard all your practical assumptions about real-life follows and dance with an ideal follow (the opposite of what you have to do in physics) is interesting and allows the development of new moves :D
10. Get into an argument with John about the viability of a math IDE after finding out he works for fledgling SAGE Math, a competitor to Mathematica. He (strangely) doesn’t give my ideas much consideration, claiming that what I’m trying to do has already been done. (If so, why do people still use pencil and paper?! And no, a notebook where you can ask Python libraries questions about mathematical objects doesn’t qualify as a proof-writing environment). He does seem knowledgeable though; perhaps I will write up a carefully argued summary of my proposed functionality and see what he can carefully argue in return.
11. A few last dances, then back to 2104, where I study up for Quantum. Somehow in the process I get linked to the Tensors section of the Mathematical Physics textbook I never read since I never took 228. Start reading that, it’s very good, clear conceptual explanations.
12. Write this log and hit the hay!

12/1/16: The Happenin' is on a Roll

1. 12/1/16
1. Sleep in until 11:30 (!)
2. Get moving quickly on Entre executive summary. Follow up with some restaurants on the Ave, get a delicious cheap gyro at Samir’s, one of the places interested in our services.
3. Scarf down the gyro at the SPS Lounge before leading one of the SPS lab tours. Get to see Wiggins’ (a biophysicist) lab but don’t get much detail.
4. Go to CSE for a quick study abroad advising appointment.
5. Meet Creating a Company ppls in class. Do some work, run to Wells Fargo to set up our bank account, to nobody’s great surprise they can’t do it until tomorrow. Return to Paccar, a bit more work.
6. Glee rehearsal! It only lasts 30 minutes since Meg and Jeff have to run off to a Chorale concert, which I consider going to but…
7. Go to the second SIG Saloon event! Johan is getting everyone pumped to spread the gospel of the SIGs (Special Interest Groups in CSE). Talk more with Ryan Benmalek about his AI SIG, plus meet this math/CS guy who’s interested in doing a Math SIG with me. However we can’t reach common ground as to the format.
8. Run to McMahon, get a slice of pizza which I joyfully consume on the way over to Film Club.
9. Watch a tremendous movie called Sing Street about a high schooler at a tough school in Dublin, a delightfully confident con man, who forms a band in order to woo a girl with a mysterious past.
10. Strangely inspired by the kid, I go into total confident-social-game-player mode, and surprise myself both with the effectiveness of my strategies and the joy I derive from the conversation--my new social anxieties resulting from nuanced awareness of social gamesmanship slip away immediately. I begin to realize the sense in which my esteemed father reaps such delight from everyday conversation; something I had realized in the past, but such a counterintuitive result for me that it takes many passes to sink in.
11. Meet new people with surprising charm and ease on the way over to EJ’s; where, strangely, Alex and Fielder await the Film Club crowd; apparently they both independently couldn’t make Film Club and decided to meet us afterwards. In my strange state, I somehow end up having the best conversation with Alex (and Fielder) I’ve had in months. The confidence and aloofness and detachment from the content of the conversation are a facade, but the merriment is real :) One particularly hilarious sequence:
1. Bring Alex a glass of water.
2. She says “for realsies, or are you just putting this over here to drink later.”
3. (ten minutes later) me, after (I thought) Alex drank the water: “Where’s my extra water?!”
4. Alex: “You just drank it!”
5. /me looks down at my hand;
6. /table explodes in laughter
7. /me slaps the banister and runs down to get Alex another water
12. Also listen in on Jamie and Greg’s political conversation.
13. Go to Odegaard, work more on the summary. Edit and organize the work of the others (this seems to be the badge of my tribe after the Alpha internship: others hack away, then I come in and try to make sense of their hackery.) But it’s fun!
14. Return to 2104 (on the way back running into Jasdeep who recognizes my singing voice in the quad) write this log, and crash.

11/30/16: Happenin' Part 2

1. 11/30/16
1. Another eventful and relatively balanced day!
2. Go to tutorials today since I missed them on Monday. Tutorials themselves are boring, but get to meet some new people, explain some concepts. Get into an interesting discussion with Kelsey from Putnam club and TA Kyle about the smoothness of wavefunctions.
3. Between tutorials, move the food drive boxes as somebody was caught stealing from them (!).
4. StatMech! Feel that I’m understanding solidly what’s going on, and manage to answer somebody else’s question in class. Afterwards, ask prof. Marcel whether he’s doing any research currently; he’s not but he brings up the idea of small reading groups, 2-3 students, on the topics of quantum computing and neuroscience (which happen, ridiculously, to be my top 2 most intriguing topics right now).
5. Meet with Miranda for lunch! Fun conversation over Motosurf about research and CS classes.
6. Return to SPS lounge, SPS meeting uneventful. Do E&M hw, Yujin agrees to turn it in for me. Also pound out E&M tutorial in record time. THen run over to CSE.
7. Meet w/ CaC team, then run up to study abroad info session.
8. Basically get convinced I have to go abroad. Everything that’s different about student life there vs. here is a plus for me. All exams, lots of freedom, crazy school-run events…
9. Swing lessons! Advanced we learn how to dance to slow music, which is interesting. Special rhythms for blues music, random :)
10. Intermediate is more Charleston stuff, finally learn Partner Charleston. It’s great :)
11. Team FOOD! Convince people, for once, to go to Mod, quick enough that Trevor and I can go.
12. Study in Foster for a couple hours, then back to 2104, eat ice cream, do more work, laundry, email, write this log, hit the hay.