1/23/17: Week 4 Eye of the Storm

1. 1/23/17
1. Meet with Physics and CSE grad advisors in tight succession. Both assure me I don’t need the ridiculous amount of research I was thinking of, and the physics grad adviser even claims grades matter ;)
2. Eat packed lunch in CSE. Read my discourse paper. Run into Katie, a fellow CS-er I hadn’t seen in a long while, turns out she’s going abroad too--we get into a good conversation.
3. Biophysics! Prof. Marcel discusses different types of automata and nondeterministic automata-thingies, which causes most of the class to wonder WTF this has to do with biology. But I enjoy it. He takes a more mathematical angle on automata than did Wolfram in that New Science book I read a while back, which is cool.
4. Meet Damir in RC, work on broader marketing funnel for our portfolio. Both of us are getting excited for the first time in a while about what we’re doing, not just building websites. Learn about SEO, Facebook marketing, and different services we could integrate (like ZocDoc for dentists).
5. Finish up discourse paper, which I think is really interesting--it formalizes pretty intuitive stuff about how the focus of a discourse / conversation moves from utterance to utterance (this is a technical term!). And how this affects resolving pronouns (coref) and the feeling of coherence of the discourse.
6. Go to discourse meeting, very interesting. One of the grads is skeptical of intuitive judgments of coherence, prefers to rely on what people actually produce rather than post facto judgments. Get into a good argument.
7. Grab concert tickets for tomorrow from Diego :) Cash tutoring check
8. Return home, work on my grad class coding assignment.
9. Grab Xin and hit the gym. Play some hoops then join Xin in the pool for a few minutes. We dry off in the sauna and I walk back in my slightly wet swimsuit since I don’t have a change of clothes :P
10. Go to Som Tam, have a lovely dinner with Xin.
11. Return home and put in a couple more hours of work, punctuated by messaging with Gaya and by eating pie. I realize that a good chunk of my code can be replaced with builtin functions from numpy and scipy, which makes me very happy, since it condenses my sprawling codebase quite a bit.
12. Write this log and crash.

1/22/17: A Perfect Sunday

1. 1/22/17
1. Wake up in Bellingham!
2. Family brunch. Chill with Mom and Dad as we make french toast and bacon. Get into a long, fascinating discussion about the difference and interplay between learning by pattern matching versus more sophisticated modeling. And, which people benefit from which type of learning. We concluded that pattern matching is, for most people and most ends, easier to teach with and use than modeling; it is only for exploring new territory that having a more structured model of what you already know is useful, and then only for certain people (who typically gravitate to models even to learn static skills)
3. Delicious french toast. Dad cooks the bacon perfectly and Mom griddles the toast to perfection.
4. Uncle Tom, in giving up the ghost, generously dedicated some of his clothes to myself, and good ol’ Aunt Joan, in her bereavement, somehow found the time and energy and strength to sort and iron and ship the clothes back here with Mom. So I spend a bit of time looking through them--there is a beautiful black cashmere sweater, as soft as a well-brushed cat.
5. Almost miss the Bolt bus. The bus pulls out of the station as we pull in, but I sprint to the turnaround and flag the driver down. The guy (who is probably the most well-spoken bus driver I’ve met yet) gives me some serious flak for not being early, but he lets me in, so I shrug it off and get to work.
6. On the bus, chat a bit with Monica, catch up on all my emails, do a tutorial pretest, read up on monads, a functional programming construct that allows you to construct pipelines of actions with flexible, smart “connectors”… the time flies by and I’m in Seattle in no time.
7. Meet Gayatri at a bus stop. More accurately, I’m sitting in the bus stop reading and she stands across the road guessing how long before I’ll look up--eventually I realize and go over to cross the road.
8. We hang out in the Seattle Art Museum--it’s a free day! For a bit over an hour. We hustle around and get to see tons of different exhibits; from tribal-inspired costumes made of socks, to abstract paintings, to crazy bronze headdresses. It’s a real good time. Afterwards we walk down to the waterfront and grab selfies by the big glowing ferris wheel.
9. Then we trek to Pike Place and grab piroshkies at the world famous piroshki bakery. We eat piroshkis in glowing contentment on the way back to Terry.
10. Hang out in Terry studying. I look up classes at ETH, try to put together a convincing argument that I can graduate on time even if I miss 2 UW quarters abroad.
11. Go up to the 8th floor deck and stargaze* for a bit (the elliptic, irreferential, asterisk).
12. Return home. Run into Brandon eating dinner and catch up for a bit. Then spend a few minutes watching the Grand Finals of a big Smash tournament with Andrew and Brandon. In the final, a reckless bold Fox gets smashed by a Peach-wielding master with ridiculous and unerring precision and recovery defense.
13. Check in with Xin, unpack and clean, eat a few slices of the pie Garrett left on the counter for public consumption while reading the paper for the discourse group meeting tomorrow. It’s very interesting, talks about a quantitative framework for tracking which entities are the focus or “center” of each sentence, and how transitions between centers affect the semantic coherence of the statements as a whole.
14. Write this log and hit the hay!

1/18/17: Schmorgasbord

1. 1/18/17
1. Biophysics homework in the morning.
2. Run and grab my BP text from the bookstore cuz I can’t stand the kindle version anymore.
3. Go to class and it’s boring :( Marcel going over math we got in StatMech
4. Thought I had a lovely math insight but it wasn’t as elegant as I first thought
5. Meet Gaya for lunch at the Sunrise Griddle food truck. We catch up on each other’s days, chow each other’s food, and then hit the music practice rooms. It’s her birthday, so I sing Happy Birthday, among many tunes
6. Return to house, read quantum, look over quantum homework. In a bit of a stressed state.
7. Off to the Lavin all-student meeting. Hang out with a few folks I haven’t seen in a while and chow Qdoba. After general announcements the Exec folks bring in some former Lavin students who have gone on to do really neat things. One of them makes custom Android hardware and does OS tweaks for medical companies, etc. The guy was technically trained, but before starting the company, spent several years in Detroit, through a totally random connection, investing with a billionaire doing venture capital and trying to revive Detroit.
8. Swing lesson! Pace is slow, but catch up with a few ppl. Am planning lunch with Alex tomorrow.
9. Run home and then hustle to gym. Few games of hoops, play well but don’t get the ball much. Return home, hot shower, get started on my 515 coding project. Along the way, discover an issue with my email forwarding (yikes!) and fix it (hopefully). Also eat honey peanut butter banana sandwich for the first time since childhood, very tasty, hang out downstairs with Lisa for a tad.
10. Get into a chat with Gaya, write this log, and hit the hay.

1/16/17: Brunch Day

1. 1/16/17: Brunch Day
1. Monday holiday!
2. Wake up at 10, bustle around. It’s brunch day! And so, I recruit Brandon to carry a load of groceries to Mercer. For my part, I bounce off the Safeway for some mo ingredients then report to the Engineers’ Flat.
3. The disco blares from the rich quality speakers along the lakefront windows, and the party is on! The kitchen is covered in crud so I read and they clean while we wait for Brandon.
4. Brandon arrives in a pair of glaring black sunglasses, hair newly blonder than the sun. With him the brunch begins. Cutting boards tile the counter as all sorts of veggies are chopped; Brandon stands impassive, bold at the frying pan as the veggies meet their destiny. I get to work on the sausage; at first too much water, but in the end all is well.
5. The scramble feeds everyone, even Trevor, starving from an extended homework binge. I have to run to the DM for eggs; while I do so, Jacob W. arrives, bringing characteristic charisma. Just as I admit him to the building, Alex and Julia show up! The Engineers’ is popping. Kasey and I churn out French toast by the plateload.
6. Eventually things quiet down. I manage to collect grocery money from people for the first time, which is a serious win.
7. I task Brandon with returning our groceries unwilted; Kasey, the bold but unassuming chef, graciously takes up the dishes. Jacob and I stroll to physics, there, presumably, to pound out homework. But Jacob and I are drawn inexorably to our favorite pastime; derivations on the blackboard.
8. Just as we finally settle in with our problem sets, I receive a mystery call. I take it to discover it is a distress signal; a high schooler has a physics exam the next morning and requires urgent tutoring! We arrange a meeting and I head to the Research Commons for 1.5hrs of tutoring. Definitely fun, goes well. Seems as though I might be hired on a regular basis.
9. Return to research commons, read up on magnetization.
10. Go out to dinner with Gayatri for our “1-month anniversary” (;P) We go to Aladdin’s and chomp gyros in the cozy carpeted section. Get to learn more about her family’s background.
11. Return to 2104, en route completing the great 3-day laundry cycle (wash one day, dry the next, claim the 3rd) by picking up my clothes from Hansee.
12. Quick Skype with Grace, fun, she’s just settling in at Marcus House.
13. Finish the laundry and write this log.
14. Happy Tuesday y’all!

1/13/17: The Final Mission

1. 1/13/17: The Final Mission
1. Wake up late cuz’ I was out late last night at Terry, had an amazing date; we went to spoken word poetry then played some intense MarioKart then relaxed with some pizza :)
2. Write email, decide to skip biophysics in favor of a machine learning seminar in CSE. It’s interesting, but the speaker (Noah Goodman of Stanford) throws so many ideas at us at once it’s hard to follow! The talk focused on the use of probabilistically-equipped programming languages as a way to precisely specify probabilistic models, and then applied the language’s general concepts to modeling certain kinds of human language interactions. One neat, not totally related insight: Generics (statements of the form X are/verb Y with no quantifiers, like “mosquitoes carry West Nile” or “Robins lay eggs) are surprisingly tricky to pin down. The simple translation X verb Y -> Almost all X verb Y fails (note the above examples). But, if you take into account mathematically the fact that most other species don’t carry West Nile and that only some animals lay eggs, you can predict that the statements above make sense, whereas similar ones like “Robins are female” don’t (even though the robins that lay eggs, are precisely the female ones).
3. Go to physics tutorial, which is actually interesting! Argue with Erin about some geometry.
4. SPS meeting; we play Exploding Kittens, I win both games :D :D New dude there, another Justin. Learn that Kyle is now courting that girl Stefana who came to the first meeting and whose name I forgot at swing lessons :P
5. Humans v. Zombies final mission! We start in Red Square with very little information.
6. Frantically my party rushes to Drumheller, to claim a bucket which we escort to Sylvan Grove. We then are beset by zombies; I fight staunchly. Finally I realize we don’t need to defend the bucket and must help our comrades claim the 3rd bucket! But as I’m marshalling the remaining humanity, I am turned.
7. After the final slaughter, alas, poor mankind! We return to Red Square and take photos.
8. I go back to 2104, do a little work. Then I run down to UVill for my Creating a Company meeting. Our team is meeting with our new adviser, John Wang, a professional consultant.
9. He has lots of great advice
1. Don’t pay your photography and graphic design partners to contribute to a joint showcase
2. You’re marketers first, designers second. Market yourself as marketers.
3. Ask for the sale at least 7 times in a meeting.
4. …
10. I take tons of notes and put them up on the group chat.
11. Then I have about 10 minutes to stop by home, scarf down some curry Xin made with Josh, before I head to Eastside!
12. Eastside is rocking. I really lose myself in the dancing. Even get to dance a tiny bit of the balboa basic.
13. Return home exhausted and crash.

1/6/17

1. 1/6/17
1. Wake up very late.
2. Email.
3. Dress, breakfast, and off to the Seahawks stadium for some interviewing!
4. Meet up with the Madrona peoples, who seem very intelligent (what minds spent on this dorky idea)
5. Two hours of interviewing, which is emotionally draining but fun, then back to campus to meet Chase.
6. Eat burgers, talk for a while, go back to 2104 for some ice cream, hit the gym. On the way over, Eleazar from physics runs into us and gives me a Nerf gun for Humans Versus Zombies.
7. In the gym, goof around with a volleyball and do some wrestling.
8. Return home, chat with Gayatri on Messenger for a while. Open her present for me, which is a beautiful watercolor of the moon she did with the set I gave her, plus a book of poetry that she herself published from her Honors poetry class last quarter.
9. Try to do some E&M homework, but my brain is just not working! The problems are not interesting, just a bunch of painful vector manipulation. I’m going to have to figure out some way to keep myself interested and do blunder checking and all that stuff.
10. Hit the hay! Best of life to y’all.

1/5/17: Day 3 (and what a fine day!)

1. 1/5/17: Day 3 (and what a fine day!)
1. Wake up a bit late, breakfast and shower.
2. Hit the Ave, grab a chapstick at Bartells and pick up my notebooks at the bookstore. While at the bookstore, I look up my biophysics text on Amazon and decide to rent the ebook; while I do that, good ol’ Carmen from CS and Honors Physics walks up. We chat for a while, seems like she’s killing herself with CS classes and the Security capstone, but having a good time.
3. Run to the EEB to sit in on the probabilistic methods grad class. The professor Pedro Domingos has to be one of the most composed and organized people I’ve ever met. He has a prodigious research background, but so does Marcel in physics, who is disorganized (not in a bad way, goofy) in lecture. This guy, you could put his lectures up on edX as is.
4. He also likes to pepper the class with questions. Not sure what I think of him but I love the clarity of the lecture and everything was organized very well. I wasn’t in the class yet, needed the prof’s approval to get to the front of the “waitlist” so I was sweating bullets until I saw my opportunity to ask an pointedly intelligent question, something along the lines of, “is it useful to treat a particular outcome of a discrete random variable as a derived boolean variable”, and then I relaxed a tad. Failed to cash in on it though, I talked to Domingos afterwards and he didn’t ask my name, couldn’t insert it non-awkwardly, so there was nothing to link my name to the email.
5. But a few hours later, I got an email saying I was in! :D :D
6. In the meantime, ate lunch, read a little Seveneves, met my CaC team, ran into Alex randomly and had a good conversation, had a short CaC class on the “bullwhip effect” whereby the time lag in a multiple-part supply chain leads to overcompensation, then hit the gym.
7. Some very solid games of hoops, a short abs workout, and I was heading to Music for Glee. Great rehearsal, I was in a swaggy mood and everything was peachy.
8. Shultzy’s afterward, got to talk to Hugh about physics research, plus had a good CSE conversation with Paul. Also got to meet Cameron Blecha’s friend (CB is my ol’ buddy from Ferndale chess who’s back with Glee this quarter).
9. Got a message from Gayatri :D Speedwalked down to Terry and 60% hung out, 40% “hung out” for about half an hour :P Had a good time, felt very unambiguous :)
10. Returned to 2104 by way of Oasis for a taro bubble tea and Safeway for some 2104 family dinner (breakfast themed!) ingredients.
11. Read E&M then QM, quick brownie break. Xin surprised me with the brownies, kept prompting me to come down for ice cream, then sprung a hot delicious pan of the things on me. They drew Selorm and Lisa and Abby too, good kitchen convention.
12. Wrote this log and hit the hay!

1/4/17: Day 2

1. 1/4/17: Day 2
1. Wake up, eat breakfast with Evan, and head down to Quantum.
2. Prof. Cobden shows us all (anonymized) the responses of the class to the end-of-quarter questionnaire for last quarter. Very honest move. He resolved to address some of the student complaints, laughed at our appreciation of his “dry british humor”. Witnessed the genesis of some dank memes, in particular, to the question, “did this class stretch your thinking”, some unnamed wiseguy wrote “mmm, stretchy”.
3. Review of angular momentum.
4. Head to SPS lounge, hang out, answer emails. Talk to Judith and Winnie for a bit. Judith’s working her way through a crazy music curriculum + CSE + physics.
5. Biophysics! I’m so pumped for this class :D Professor Marcel wrote a hilarious introductory lecture note which he partially shared with us in class, then we jumped right into a discussion of the important energy scales in living organisms (thermal fluctuations about kT = 1/40 eV, (this is the scale of energy molecules will spontaneously obtain from their environment when bombarded with other moving molecules) hydrogen bonds and ATP energy storage around 5kT, covalent bonds at 200kT).
6. Talk to Prof. Marcel about reading group. He said he’d be happy to do it next quarter if I was too busy. I think it will depend on whether I get into my CSE grad class. Re that, just got an email from Prof. Domingos saying there is a waitlist for the class and asking for qualifications :/
7. Chow a bar and run to the gym. Slow at first but get into a good game of hoops. Rebound well :D
8. Return to 2104, make myself a delicious sandwich, chat with Molly and read E&M.
9. Not much time before I wrap my secret santa present and run off to meet Gayatri in the music building. We hang out in a practice room singing (we sing some duets from High School Musical :D :D) for about an hour. Then she’s off to Paccar and I’m off to the Swing party. All the Swingers I know are there. I have a terrific time, lots of good dancing, get to dance with a few noobs. Lots of dancing with Alex, make up some new moves. Get into a hilarious conversation about nothing in particular. Fielder and I joke about labeling classes with complex numbers to avoid ranking issues, that the complex analysis classes would be labeled i for the imaginary unit and the three quarter sequence thusly described by i i, i ii, i iii.
10. Go to team food with the swingers. We eat at Little Thai. Our server is really nice older lady, she recommends me a delicious meat-heavy dish when I say I’m really hungry. Chow down. One of the best social conversations I’ve had in a while, Alex, Julia, Henry, Trevor and I laughing our heads off about silly things.
11. Return to campus. Realize I’ve left my computer in the music building and go to retrieve it.
12. Work in casa for a while. Mom calls and I doodle with my lovely new drafting pencils from Christmas and the Secret Santa exchange. Nearly get some work done on the CaC website. Grab Xin for some ice cream and cookies. Chat with Selorm for a bit. Then realize I have to do more email and do that. Now, alas, it is 1am.
13. Night readers!