5/13/16

1. 5/13/16
1. Early morning math! Felt very proud of myself for finishing this week’s exhausting hw. Also finished an annoying Systems exercise.
2. After math, systems class, intro to networks, interesting. Then Thermal. I’ve been getting increasingly impatient with the pacing of lectures and spent most of my time reading and catching up on email :/
3. Went to quad, grabbing a cup of lemonade on the way to support the Geology club, and talked to the shmids tabling for startup showcase. Justin was there; after folding ACED, he’s right back on the game with a new startup about exploring career directions with a catalog of hands-on projects. Interesting, though I’m not sure how much of the day-to-day of an occupation can be captured by a project, abstracted away from work environment. Also, there were some neat dudes selling electric bikes after a few years of tinkering.
4. Grabbed lunch and to SPS meeting. Talked a bit with the guys, then read the paper I’m doing for math.
5. Science Cafe! Super interesting speaker, works at HP labs, makes all sorts of neat optical components to replace electrical components in integrated circuits. (Still all silicon, who knew you could leverage the high refractive index of silicon to trap light?) Some of them are pretty wild. For example, the dude (Ray Beausoleil) has a signal combiner that takes in two optical signals from two input channels, and depending on the relative phase of the signals, outputs their superposition to one of two output signals. This isn’t going to work with electrons :) He made the device by running a device that split one input signal evenly among two channels with the right phase, backwards. Very cool. Felt like I learned a lot. Will post the slides once I have them.
6. Back to Haggett, worked on CS for an hour.
7. Met Brandon and Jacob for dinner. Went to Noodle Nation, where I haven’t been. Underwhelming compared to Som Tam :D We talked about various physics things. Jacob’s an interesting shmid--his conversational style is super cheerful, with social discretion, but without quite the epistemological discretion that Brandon exercises (hard to describe what I mean by this). Jacob is a careful thinker, but he tends to be less crisp up front and count on further muddling and debate to impart clarity, while Brandon (and Issa) will signal either clarity or the complete lack of it up front.
8. Met up with some people from math in our old classroom, plus Kolya, who many of them know as a TA from an earlier math sequence, currently a Yale grad student on break. Issa was there(!) I thought I wouldn’t see him for a long time. We didn’t get to talk much--Issa’s goofy, nihilistic, (Juan Perez-like for those who knew him, guy I used to play chess with at a coffeehouse), roomie Ethan told the story of his strange academic year, how he got a 0.7 grade in a math class. I brought my birthday cake. When Emily showed up, she instantly recognized it as Pure Bliss :D
9. Ate cake and talked for a while, then Emily brought out Life of Brian (which I still hadn’t seen) and put it on the overhead projector. Lots of fun.
10. Back to Haggett, worked on CS, then wrote this log and went to bed.