2/24/16

1. It’s been a couple days! Here’s a rough-grained update.
1. Monday I had my math midterm. Pretty insane, but I think I did well.
2. Lunchbox with LIGO leader was awesome. SPS lounge was packed. Our 4 pizzas were gone within seconds.
3. Horrible circuits lab actually went well this time. Ok, we did spend about 45 minutes trying to figure out what the $$^(*&# was wrong with a circuit whose ground lead just wasn’t attached correctly on the breadboard. (Honestly, my partner makes a lot of these little, incredible time consuming mistakes.)
4. Did linux hw for a while, then went climbing for an hour.
5. Did Circuits hw with Brandon, Winnie, Eric late. Brandon and I broke down this really complex circuit and were up until 2am, but it was very satisfying to understand the thing in its entirety.
6. On Tuesday:
7. I took a nap in the afternoon! That was great. Also did a bit of work on CS lab.
8. SPS Career Panel! Frank actually put together a really great panel. First Olmstead dumped a bunch of data on us, then we questioned the panelists. One HS physics teacher was having a great time, he argued that physics teaching is much better than teaching in the other sciences in a couple of regards (first principles, more general questions from students, I generally agree). Also interesting--lots of physics PhD’s (over half!) go into industry and get paid quite a lot.
9. Super long, massed Glee rehearsal with USingers, Women’s Choir, and the Orchestra. My voice was shot :D
10. Took pizza up to the floor tradition, conversed with Ashleigh and Maddie for a while. Heard a lot of Maddie’s background, growing up in a military family and living in a military base in Japan; plus Sarah started arguing about Japanese culture, which was socially awkward but interesting.
11. Again went climbing for like an hour. Very fun, and I’m definitely improving.
12. Went to Odegaard and tutored for ACED for an hour. Turned out I was tutoring this dude from Lavin, Bo, which probably disappoints Justin since he isn’t getting the marketing reach outside Lavin that he wants. But it was fun. Pretty basic (by now!) integral calculus.
13. When I came back, Xin was in a state of moderate panic; he feared failing his math 324 quiz on Green’s Thm the following morning. So we spent about an hour going over Green’s Thm and the sample problems. I got to draw in a diversity of math (from Dr. Webber’s hand-drawn parametrized curves to 335 familiarity with Green’s Thm) so that was fun. Xin said he was impressed with my IQ, which is odd b/c I’ve been studying this stuff hardcore for a while now.
14. Today, Wednesday:
15. Neural was really cool. Prof. Rao basically recapped, with chosen examples, all the emerging uses for brain-computer interface tech that we’d been looking at over the quarter. I think this stuff is going to be really big (Dad, maybe you should take a look at the slide deck, not posted yet, so remind me to send it to you in a few days)
16. Then remade the SPS lunchbox flyer template in Google Slides--much nicer than the arcane thing that the guy before me made in Word. Still needs a few tweaks.
17. By the time I’d finished the template and made Monday’s lunchbox with it, it was time for swing!
18. Swing lesson was great. Just super friendly people, and I was getting the moves. I feel like salsa was frequented by more aggressive extroverts/individualists, which was harder for me to deal with in a difficult learning environment. And we’re moving slower in swing :D
19. Grabbed dinner (ran into Tristan from math and his buddy/girlfriend? Zara at the 8 and ate with them for a bit), then went to Rick’s.
20. I feel like I really connected with the other volunteers this time around. A small win for me on the “networking” scoresheet. Plus an affirmation to contradict my waning faith in humanity--these people turned out to be substantially more interesting than I had thought.
1. Tobias, who I had written off as a Jamie’s Group dude, turned out to have this crazy existentialist/nihilist philosophy bent. Something happened to me in conversation which happened a few quarters ago with Paul from Glee and more recently from Jannel--I realize that somebody is expecting an in-depth, interesting response from me, and everything changes--my demeanor, my style, and especially my vocab. I start whipping out words I haven’t used for months. I’m still not sure what to make of Tobias--he has a sort of ill-formed Galt-ness about him.
2. And Vivian, who seemed a straight-up sorority girl, turned out to be an aspiring CS major, who works (I want this job, and apparently they’re hiring) teaching intro coding to elementary students. $25/hr! We also got into a debate about the validity of the game-theory argument for why all animal species with two sexes have equal sex ratios in their populations.
3. After coming back from Rick’s, I met with Brandon and we planned out physics classes for next year. I’m astonished every time I try to pencil it out that my crazy schedule, double-major/minor, actually works!
4. Sent emails, etcetera, wrote this log. I’m actually going to bed now. I should stop with this 2am business, but if I get productive around 1am…
5. Cheers! Life high five,
6. Spencer