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.