New Blog! Go to https://spencerpeters.github.io/blog3/zurich/ for all my study abroad adventures!

https://spencerpeters.github.io/blog3/zurich/

7/27/2017: Move-out!

1. Breakfast with Venk from the house--we make eggs and bacon.
2. Drop off the bike I borrowed from Xin. Go into the lab to write one more thing into my example script and see if I can fix an opaque bug with the camera interface. No luck on the latter, but I call it quits in time to make it to the Indian buffet for my last meal in Seattle (note: last in this post and probably subsequent posts means "last for 6 months". Take Cody's bike and haul up the Ave, savoring the echoes of the past all around me.
3. Indian buffet is delicious! Read a crazy Ribbonfarm about millenials.
4. Return to my house for manic packing and laundry. The fam shows up and we go through our now-routine shoveling-and-cleaning blitzkrieg.
5. Grab snacks at QFC, then watch a volleyball game, the first of the season. It's very exciting and nail-biting but the Dawgs lose, to some goofballs out of Omaha ;)
6. Go to Spaghetti Factory for a delicious meal, then back to Bellingham. I watch some more category theory videos on the way back and hanging outside the house, work out a bit with my stretchy thing of +1 Spencer, write this log, and hit it.

7/31/17: What is? my life? Pretty great / but bizarre, man

1. 7/31/17
1. Wake up at 5:30 to email Marzhauser, whose German time zone is the opposite of mine, with some tech support questions. Planned to call but was too bleary to be cogent. Went back to bed.
2. Woke up again at 8:30, but could scarce rouse myself until 9. Compensated for my sluggishness by hustling myself out the door with a snack bar for breakfast.
3. My real breakfast was waiting for me in the lab. The microscope I’m working on is usually quiet in the morning, so I’d left my stage on it and planned to reinstall the manual stage in the morning. Instead, one of the lab’s grad students, B, was impatiently searching on my automated stage, turning the knobs attached to the stepper motors by hand (questionable) and with a 1kg slab of dense copper propping up the sample (quite untenable). I didn’t realize how heavy the copper was at the time, so I let him continue searching while I waited for the salesperson from Olympus to arrive. Checked out the coaxial drive, sent some email.
4. At 10 sharp my fine pal Brendon from Olympus arrived outside the lab. I showed him in and explained our predicament. Namely, the motorized stage, which I bought on eBay and was designed for a slightly different microscope, couldn’t be mounted high enough to focus on. All the while B continued searching; I had to ask him to take a break.
5. Brendon assessed the situation with a pro’s eye, and though no immediate solution sprung to mind, he promised me an evaluation soon. So we went to look at the range of travel of the stage, since I’d gotten some weird behavior trying to calibrate it on Sunday. We rearranged cables, booted up the controller, started moving the stage, and lo and behold, the X-axis motor was sticking! Unbelievable. I immediately picked up the 1 kg slab of copper and realized perhaps B’s impatience had been disastrous; the stage is rated for 500g at most. Brendon and I didn’t make much progress diagnosing the problem. I showed him out kindly, and then disappeared in a funk of frustration.
6. After that I got some messages from Gaya. We talked for a while; it was good, we needed to synchronize up. And after that I was ready for lunch. I was very ready.
7. So I hauled my sorry borrowed 1-speed (my bike was stolen from my fenced front yard some weeks ago) to Safeway. [Sorry pal, no complaint intended.] There I acquired veggies and meat and bread and all the necessities; I retired home, where I had a quick talk with my coworker and housemate Andy. Finally, I made myself a delicious lunch.
8. After lunch, I worked a little bit on Babak’s paper, then I biked to the Study Abroad office to ask an insurance question. That resolved, I headed to Babak’s office to check on the status of the research project. He’d made significant and clear progress, enough to get me excited about the paper. He even said that the paper was the first paper he was really happy with at this stage, of all the many papers he’d published en route to his PhD.
9. I had to duck out of the meeting to change into Unit Disk attire and meet the team on the turf fields. My buddy Peter from Math 33x joined. The first round of playoffs, the other team was a no-show, which was disappointing. We sat around, and this goofball Jacob (definitely a dos, in the familial lingo) posed an ill-framed question which I nevertheless endeavored to take seriously. Of course, Swati and the other optimization students actually knew what they were doing, so it was fun.
10. Our second game was the final, against the Mechanical Engineering Mudflingers. The Mudflingers were serious adversaries, and the game was hard fought, extremely hard fought. I played as hard as I could, and the results were high-variance--I made some crucial mistakes, but scored 3 of our 5 goals and assisted a fourth. Unfortunately, the Flingers exploited one of our weaker players for goals, to dominate us 10-5.
11. After that, I managed to convince nearly all the team members to go out for food, which was really fun. I got to talk to Sean, the team captain, about a dynamic father-son duo at MIT who farmed papers from other teams with “open problem sessions”; the other teams, including Sean’s, got prestige from working with the duo, but the duo got names on papers with very little work. And apparently writing papers in math is as much of a painful process as I was experiencing in the Databases lab, even when the results are done and proved. It seemed strange to me that in math, where the results are well-defined, hard earned truths, that the truths couldn’t just be catalogued in a giant database of known propositions, but that an explanatory paper laden with boilerplate needed to be written; and I said as much to Sean. He said steps were being taken in the database-of-truths direction in some fields, eg. the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, and something similar in graph theory, and that these steps proved very valuable. Also got to talk to Molly, a 1st-year grad.
12. Walked back to CSE with Swati to get my bike, singing all the way. She has great enthusiasm for singing and goofy rhymes :)
13. Went to physics to collect diagnostic information from the stage, and tested the motion again--this time, no sticking! How strange. Found also that some *&()*$)( had taken my power adapter--I would need to recover it in the morning.
14. Returned home, got insurance, wrote this log, wrote diagnostic emails to Marzhauser, and collapsed.

5/30/17: The Life of an Academic Socialite

1. 5/30/17: The Life of an Academic Socialite
1. Crazy day! Starts off slow, I wake up late and start on work; but it heats up real fast. I go to a Theory talk that Prof. Suciu mentioned, which is really really fascinating. It’s about extracting information from untrusted data; more precisely, suppose some fraction alpha of your data is drawn from a distribution whose parameters you want to learn; but the rest of your data is either 1) drawn from a different distribution with some constraints or 2) adversarially chosen; the very worst case. Under which circumstances can you recover the parameters of the target data with high accuracy? The game gets even more interesting if you get a constant-size amount of data that you know is drawn from the target distribution. An example is, you have a big pile of Amazon reviews and you want to extract the preferences of the student demographic. But you don’t know which reviewers are students. Turns out, if enough of the reviewers were students, and enough reviewers reviewed multiple products, you can hire a constant number of students (much much smaller than the size of the review dataset) and extract accurate estimates of student preferences even on products that none of your hired students reviewed--all without attempting any classification of the reviewers into students and non-students--using methods in matrix analysis. I thought it was crazy.
2. I talked to Akshay for a bit, then stayed late to ask the fellow a question. He answered me, but then had to go to the Theory lab for the next section of his visit. I shook his hand at the door of the lab, almost left, but then I thought, what am I doing? Why would I pass up this opportunity?!
3. So I crashed the Theory lab, met a bunch of cool people, including one guy Jaden from Thomas’s grad real analysis class and a girl Swati from swing dancing working in convex optimization.
4. From there I wrote an email, changed into nice clothes, and headed to physics to get inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma, the honors society associated with our department :D, along with (of course) Jacob W., Yujin Park, Justin Bureau, and Isaak Nanneman. The one outlier was a dude named Felix Leeb, who I’d never met. Prof. Olmstead ran the ceremony, where we signed our names in a red book from the 30’s--the entertaining bit was that we all couldn’t figure out how to use the twist-tip pen that we got as inductees, to sign the book :D
5. After the ceremony, we dined on delicious food--I got to talk to Logan, a really bright grad student headed to CERN, plus I got to meet Felix. Then Prof. Cobden and research assistants showed up to get the free food, and I got into a good conversation with him and PhD student Boris about the computer vision project. I also managed to ask him about getting paid; unfortunately he says he’s struggling to pay his grad students this summer. I also got to meet a freshman who wants to take grad quantum his first quarter, which is pretty awesome.
6. Dropped off a tray of antipasto at the SPS; took 3 bags of brie, delicious meat rolls, and fresh fruit home; then went to the Glee Banquet (crying laughing emoji)
7. The Banquet fortunately didn’t involve all that much food. Good conversation though! And officer elections for next year were hilarious. I ordered a beer, which was fun.
8. Hit the gym for some awesome games of hoops :D
9. Returned home and started writing down what Jacob and I had come up with for classical mechanics.

5/29/17: Memorial Day Brunch and a Watery Ride O'er Liffy Swells

1. 5/29/17: Memorial Day Brunch and a Watery Ride O'er Liffy Swells
1. Brunch with the Mercer crew! I hustle to pick up my bike from West Campus and then bike back north to get cheap produce at Rising Sun.
1. Pick up Gaya at Terry and proceed to Mercer, where we immediately start cracking (eggs). I delegate the processing of all my veggies to a swarm of eager threads and begin blackening peppers and tomatillos for salsa.
2. Gaya takes up the noble “potato captain” role and busily turns a mountain of diced potatoes into a delicious mountain of cooked and seasoned diced potatoes. Meanwhile, I finish the salsa (will it blend??); my threads terminate with piles of bell pepper and mushroom for the eggs, which Trevor expertly cooks alongside Gaya and myself.
3. We chow down on the eggs and potatoes, as well as a huge pile of waffles Meera has been tossing out from Trevor’s waffle maker.
4. We hang out after for some Cards against Humanity with Gaya’s set.
2. I run over to Maple for tutoring with Shana. We find a study room facing out over the courtyard where a raucous carnival is taking place, shut the window, and get to work. Shana, organized as always, has a long list of problems and concepts to review. It’s a lot of fun, and I pull down a good $33.
3. Head to Terry and study on the roof with Gaya. Then I realize the IMA is closing too soon for me to get in some hoops and become disconsolate; together Gaya and I come up with the tremendous idea of renting a canoe! We go down to the waterfront and rent one--after me getting my Husky card at the gym and randomly running into Professor Domingos; plus an amusing incident where I put my bag on top of a bunch of lockers and it falls behind, so I have to climb up on the lockers and extract it with our canoe paddle’s hooked handle ;P
4. We get out on the water! It’s a beautiful hot day, perfect for splashing each other. We cruise out to the Edgemoor coast, stop in at a posh garden party to ask the time, round the point for a panoramic view of more wealthy neighborhoods (and Rainier), and then row top speed back. Make it back to the Waterfront Activities Center 5 minutes before 8; just before pulling in, I jump out of the canoe and climb back in :D
5. Part with Gaya and bike home soaking wet. The rest is dinner and homework--Classical Mechanics with Jacob in the SPS, which is actually really fun--we learn a lot from each other.

5/28/17: A Beautiful Sunday

1. 5/28/17
1. Spend the Sunday in Bellingham! Have an incredible brunch of eggs Benedict, continue the discussion from yesterday about what research is and how to use it ;) take a NEW HIKE near our house with the family involving a fun conversation with I about her future ambitions as a high school and community college double agent.
2. Return to Seattle. Realize I left my Husky card at the gym, and have to go to Uwajimaya to buy an apple to get cashback to take the bus. Bus back to campus, immediately meet Gaya, who has tried to get at-the-door tickets for a crazy play. But the yokels running the play sold the tickets earlier than announced. We make a lightning dinner of tikka masala eggs and tacos with refried beans, check back at the theater--no cancellation tickets for us--and decide to go to Volunteer park. We pack blanket and frisbee and embark on a bus ride--Gaya convinces the bus driver that I’m a UW student and to let me on for free :D
3. Get off, walk through a beautiful neighborhood to the park. Watch the gorgeous sunset, which Gaya’s logistical genius has set us up for perfectly. Run into Maxwell from CSE, the nice grad student who talked to me about research and ETH. Throw the disk with Gaya and are just about to pull out the Cards against Humanity extension she gave me when we are besieged by storms of bugs. Flee the park swatting and sidestepping. Again, Gaya does the talking and gets me on the bus; back at the U-district, we use the bonus cash to get a giant sampler ice-cream bowl at Full Tilt. Eat it walking to 2104, where we study for a bit; then I walk Gaya back to Terry.

3/11/18: Quiet Saturday

1. 3/11/18
1. Wake up at 12:40
2. Hustle to laundry and breakfast and shower, then go to Indian buffet. It is amazing. I get some quantum reading done while I eat and feel so content.
3. Run to Paccar for CaC meeting. Talk about last remaining clients. Still have websites to build but ah well.
4. Return home, more laundry, print quantum stuff, get a bit of work done, then
5. Off to gym with Brandon! We play some badminton, then get into a game with this pro named Steve, an old guy, slow, but so efficient in his motion. What a boss. I play him in a game of singles and lose 21-13 despite running about 5 times as much as he does. And he’s going easy on me!
6. Return to 2104, then nearly immediately head out to meet Alex for dinner. We have some really great conversations about people, about this article on “optimal stopping theory” for relationships she sent me, about goofy stories, about the people at the Engineering Flat and various gossip related to those shmids :)
7. Run to Safeway for some milk and bananas, then walk back to 2104 with Alex. Wrap up our conversation over chocolate ice cream and tea.
8. Chat with Gaya for a bit! She’s on the strugglebus with accounting, but some goofy accents bring back a blush of good humour :)
9. Do my course evals, write this log and hit the hay :D

3/7/18: Back to the Hustle

1. 3/7/18
1. Wake up, head to CSE to work on grad hw with Laura. We struggle with notation way longer than necessary :( I don’t wake up fast enough.
2. Head to biophysics, more elasticity theory, this time more on membranes. Interesting!
3. Grab kalua pig and speed-read the paper I’m presenting to the discourse group, on a efficient, greedy discourse tree parser. I’m shocked how quickly I grasp the whole structure of the paper, given that the method is fairly sophisticated and makes liberal use of Conditional Random Fields, a probabilistic model I just learned about.
4. Head to CSE and present the paper with gusto. As usual, I defend the paper’s strategy and approximation against the attacks of the more jaded grad students. It’s pretty entertaining and I’m on point responding to factual queries. Everyone is pretty tired, however.
5. We part, not without some tearful goodbyes. Then I run into Johan and Aishu in the atrium; Aishu, who I haven’t seen in forever, is organizing some crazy cross business / CSE event focusing on agricultural technology, and we talk about that for a bit.
6. Run to Haggett, grab a chocolate milk, and do my tutorials.
7. Return to 2104, start working, then realize it’s Swing Kids pilates night. Run over to Hillel UW, which is pretty awesome. The teacher works with Ben and specializes in pilates for dancers. Pilates, from my basic perspective, is isolation exercises focused on core strength and body awareness. Learned a lot about my back musculature. The thesis is that when walking, sitting, etc, and especially dancing, one needs to be aware that most of one’s structure resides in the back, where the bones and the supporting muscles sit. Seemed reasonable!
8. Hit Som Tam, looked at Pedro’s research. Want to talk to him tomorrow about research opportunities.
9. Return to 2104, keep working. Read biophysics lecture notes, talk a bit with Damir.
10. Chat with Gaya for a bit and hit the hay!

3/6/18: The Happiest of Days

1. 3/6/18
1. Highlights!
2. Gaya brought me flowers after the Glee concert! And met the family :) Both sides enjoyed the encounter a lot.  I got to goof off with Secret in the grass, chat up Izzy about algebra. We hit Full Tilt for a ridiculous amount of delicious ice cream, then back to 2104 to hang out for a bit.
3. Then my folks dropped me off at Chili’s for the Philosophical Physical Society’s 3rd meeting. We had an interesting discussion about Germany--fun fact: Hitler was a decent painter :P And I came up with a topic for next time--a better vocabulary for describing the recursive interactions between self and environment that make me feel less like a decision-making robot than math-major-mental-models predict ;)
4. Afterwards, went to Jacob’s house. We talked philosophy for a bit, then dug into Ohm’s law--turns out a uniformly conducting medium supports EM waves, but they have a damping term! And all sorts of crazy stuff. Really really cool. Jacob and I may Tex it up over break--typeset it into a paper :)
5. Head to Terry and hang out * with Gaya for a while. Recap the fam visit happily.
6. Return to 2104, write the SPS newsletter, crash out

3/5/18: Dinner Party

1. 3/5/18
1. Woke up at noon :)
2. Made Xin an omelet
3. Went to get a haircut with Xin! My favorite place Epic Cuts was closed for a remodel, but we found a nearby place. Barbers were very entertaining, big buff dudes slapping us on the back with rugby on the telly.
4. Went back, hit the gym. Crushed Xin at badminton then played a few going-it-easy games with a few noob girls and a dude who I’d met at DubHacks.
5. 5-minute workout, then shower, towel off in the sauna :)
6. On the way back to 2104, grab some groceries for the curry night
7. Then grab some more stuff from 2104 and hike to West Campus
8. Run into Alex on the way, turns out she just broke up, give her a hug and proceed to pick up Gaya from Terry.
9. Walk over to the Engineers’ Flat, where Curry Night is in full swing. Brandon is mixing ginger * beverages, (the * is not a pointer declaration), Fielder et al. are masterminding two different kinds of curry, a new dude named Anice is chopping chicken. Gaya and I get to work. I start making greek salad and Gaya makes chai.
10. Gaya gets in a good chat with Alex while I catch up with all the engineers.
11. Once the rice is ready, dinner is served. Amazing and very classy. Fielder did a terrific job organizing. I feel like I’m at a homeschool dinner party, a far cry from the omelets and pancakes me and Brandon hacked together in the earliest brunches :D We’ve come a long way.
12. See Gaya out--she’s got to work--then sit down and chat with Julie and Trevor and Alex.
13. End up in a long EE conversation with Max; we argue about capacitors in series and springs and a possible abstraction in graph theory that connect the two :D
14. Bid everyone goodbye, head over to Terry, have a good chat with Gaya, sing some goofy songs :D
15. Return to 2104, hang out a bit with Xin, check email and Facebook, do tutorial pretest, read a math article from Dad, and hit the hay :D

3/1/18

1. 3/1/18
1. Woke up at 10
2. Read through fascinating lecture notes on biophysics, polymer folding and entropic force :)
3. Went to class, we started a discussion of elasticity theory, which relates strain (the forces on an object) and the stress (the resulting deformation) in all its multi-dimensional glory. We derived the lines of zero stretch ;)
4. Lunch culti-date with Gaya! Cultidate <- date at Cultivate, the actually quality HFS-run high-end restaurant that takes student dining money. Sat next to the ASUW president--all the HFS brass eat at Cultivate.
5. Went to Terry to study * with Gaya.
6. Frustrating work on the hotel website for CaC. The feature set of the builder we decided to use (Squarespace is blocked in China) is just too lean. Will have to talk with team.
7. Swing lessons! I was super out of it for some reason and really struggled with swing-out variations. At the end of the two hours (advanced, techniques) I just collapsed on the floor.
8. Team Food at Little Thai. Tasty, good to catch up with Savanna, talk to Nico about math memes, which is a difficult mode of conversation for me.
9. Am not feeling like doing work, so I go to the gym and play some hoops. Check in with my family about the absolutely, wildly insane thing that’s happening with my sis’s instagram account--one of her videos is on track to be in the top 3 most popular videos of the year!
10. Return to 2104, hang out downstairs and read, chat with Gaya for a bit, then hit the hay.

2/29/18

1. 2/29/18
1. One announcement since I haven’t been on the blog for so long: I got accepted to ETH study abroad! Woot woot
2. Woke bright and early at 7:30 and started crunching on biophysics. Context: I had found out I got accepted to Study Abroad the previous night, and told Gaya; then we both got sad that we wouldn’t see each other for 9 months or so after the Spring Quarter ends, and we stayed up late bawling our eyes out.
3. So! Biophysics. Very nifty stuff. We applied a vector calc equation from E&M, plus a Boltzmann-law atmospheric distribution from StatMech, to get a handle on how screening works in ionic solutions. EG, if I drop a big + into the liquid, all the little minuses get attracted to the + and their charge “shields” the +, so that the potential seen outside the screening layer is much smaller than the potential of just the +. With the strategy above we got the thickness of the screening layer.
4. Gaya dropped in for a few minutes then left; I finished biophys and turned my attention to my discourse paper. Then I borrowed a folder from Lisa and holepunched all my paper printouts, showered, and went to biophys, where we mostly went over derivations from the notes.
5. Met Ayush at the Red Pepper (authentic Sichuan restaurant) for lunch. It was tasty. He’s going on an internship binge, first Google then Facebook (cuz why not?) Says he’s giving the engineering life one more shot. Talked about grad school, different types of research.
6. Went to CSE for discourse group meeting. On way in checked with advisers--looks like I’m in for ETH on the solid :)
7. Discourse was a bit thin today, only 4 of us. Good though! Despite having only skimmed the last bit of the paper, I was able to make some contributions (I’m good at clarifying the meaning of the equations :))
8. Went over to Terry, said hi to Gaya and some RA friends and a very cute dog in the RLO. Meanwhile, Secret, is going viral and literally one of the RAs had just watched a Secret video.
9. Gaya and I go for a walk; her heart is heavy but the walk helps and we have some good conversation. By the end we’re singing together :D
10. Head to CSE, review notes on website building. End up working a lot on Alex’s study abroad essay.
11. Damir comes by, we look at the website builder and spec, divvy up responsibility.
12. Head back to 2104 where Xin and Lisa are frying spring rolls. Make myself an omelette, heat up some ridiculously spicy soup from Gaya and my date after the Lavin Gala, grab some spring rolls, and go to town. Very satisfying meal.
13. Head up to room, don’t get a ton of work done. Finish up working on Alex’s essay, get in a good Skype session with parents, put in some laundry, write this entry and hit the hay.

2/2/18: A Short Day for a Long Weekend

1. 2/2/18
1. Slept in until 12:30!
2. Did laundry, washed dishes, ate some instant oatmeal to raise my glucose levels and then
3. Did the Amazon preliminary internship assessment! This was a hour-long challenge that ended up not being very challenging; the debugging portion was trivial, and the logic portion was like a bunch of letter cipher puzzles plus some SAT-like comprehension questions.
4. Chase came over to hang out and we made lunch, then took a walk around some pretty neighborhoods north of 45th. Lots of fun conversation. Sounds like his PGPNA (D&D club) exploits are going awesome.
5. Meet Henry Banks at the Oasis for some bubble tea. Very fun! Catch up on each other’s programming projects; he describes a little memory management hack called “object pools”. We oddly ran out of conversation about an hour and a half in, whereupon he returned to the Academy of Interactive Entertainment and I went to join Gaya’s Singaporean buddies at the Kong Tofu House. Very good food, similar to the Korean Tofu House ;)
6. Go back with Gaya to Terry to work. Find the 8th floor lounge unoccupied and get rolling. After a short interlude *, I settle down to wringing the very essence of the belief propagation algorithm from a paper linked in the homework. 3 hours later, I have a decent sense of what’s going on. BP is complicated!
7. Decide to stay over in the 8th floor lounge. Send some email, write this log, and * hit the hay.

2/2/17: Work and Peace

1. 2/2/17
1. Sleep like a log.
2. Breakfast and work.
3. Grad class! Learn more Markov Networks stuff.
4. Meet Caleb (from my Presentations class way back!) for lunch. Trade stories from classes and trying to do research. Good time.
5. Try to understand my frickin’ homework. The data and starter code are presented with minimal explanation.
6. Run over to the gym to squeeze in some hoops! Get into some good games. I play well, but my technique is off--I’ve already lost the ‘twitch’ :P
7. Skip ENTRE because it’s another one of Alan’s 15 minute lectures + check in. That way, I get to read a bit of my grad class textbook--which is titillating but not relevant to the homework--and examine the provided data to make sure it’s formatted how I think it is.
8. Glee rehearsal!
9. Schultzy’s! Chew the rag with Wesley.
10. Run back home, grab my stuff, off to physics to study with Jacob, Brandon, Eric. Jacob and I spend most of the time talking about quantum stuff not directly relevant to the exam ;) Spend a long time trying to figure out this Hund’s Rules thing. Eventually come up with a nice proof for what it was we were trying to do, connecting z-angular momentum and regular angular momentum.
11. Meet Gaya for just a few moments since I’m close to West Campus :D
12. Run back home, write this log, and crash. Wish me luck on the midterm!