UW Update Saturday 6/6/15

1.     UW Update Saturday 6/6/15

a.     Slept in. Started writing up the formal proof involved in the CSE extra credit problem. It was frustrating, but in the end I came up with the cleanest (not very clean) way to logically capture all the permutations. I don’t think there was a better abstraction that would have not been a ton of work to specify.

b.     Ate brunch at the 8. Ran into Winnie from linear; she was taking her lunch back to the dorms, so we decided to grab dinner later instead.

c.      Took my lunch outside and ran into Roges from CSE 311 sitting in the solitary patch of shade on the McMahon patio facing the lake, where a tree blocked the blinding afternoon sun. Talked of 311 and of summer plans as we ate.

d.     Returned to Haggett, finished and turned in CSE hw.

e.     Walked to the Denny courts, which were packed with students trying to get in their last game before the quarter ended. Got into a game of 5 on 5, then a bunch of 3-on-3 games. Very fun.

f.      Returned to Haggett, showered, did linear practice final. I got stuck on a few things, but overall it went pretty well.

g.     Headed to the 8, grabbed a burger and headed to that same spot on the patio with Winnie. Had a really interesting conversation starting with our backgrounds, turning to the current state of Taiwan with respect to China (Winnie is Taiwanese by ethnicity, but Canadian for the last 9 years). Then we got into philosophy and books we’d read in physics. (Winnie is a philosophy-physics double-major) She’d read the first volume of Asimov’s physics series, the same volume I remember reading with great fondness, and she highly recommended A Brief History of Time. I brought up A New Kind of Science wrt computer science in general.

h.     Returned to Haggett, tried to finish linear practice final. I got frustrated near the end with the sheer amount of hand calculations required, so I stopped, reviewed concepts, fixed all the stuff I got stuck on, so I have a few more problems left for tomorrow.

i.       Took a break and read Karenina. Took a short walk listening to This American Life.

j.       Did some CSE practice problems. Played a few games of chess with Red Mage (Alex) while simultaneously doing practice problems and listening to upbeat Waterflame songs. Very Leroy. I felt pretty pumped—the cognitive ease of having both chess and logic intuitions in flow at once is intoxicating.

k.     Wrote this log and hit the hay.

                                                      

UW Update Friday 6/5/15

1.     UW Update Friday 6/5/15

a.     Woke, physics. Everyone cheered at the end of class for Garcia, applause which he heartily deserved.

b.     Several people asked me about the lunch, which is good—looks like it’s gaining traction.

c.      Linear. Big recap day 2. Our postdoc teacher is the awesomest—as an aside, she dissed the other postdocs, claiming very plausibly that they were smart people but “said mean things about students” and had no patience for those less savvy than themselves. She’s also making us all breakfast before the final if 80% complete the feedback form, which we just did. I remember thinking of doing something almost analogous with cookies when I was dreaming about teaching calculus at WCC.

d.     This whole day I was feeling a bit drained, but I managed to write some decent emails before CSE 311.

e.     311 was neat. We talked about Turing machines and undecidability. Again, I can’t figure out whether paradoxes that arise via self-reference, in this case proving the impossibility of writing a program to show that a general program halts on a given input, get to some fundamental issue of self-reference within programs more generally, or whether by eliminating self-reference (as apparently some mathematicians did in a now-dominant branch of set theory (vs. so-called naïve set theory)) we could make halting decidable. Everyone cheered for James at the end of the lecture; in his usual iconoclastic way, he looked askance and said “I’m not sure what that was for…”.

f.      Grabbed lunch with Johan and another dude, Vivic, who, as it turns out, is transferring to Brown (the UW was too big for him). We ate outside and ended up having a long conversation and trying to solve 311 extra credit problem.

g.     It was 4:30 when I walked back to Haggett. I wrote another email, worked on the CSE hw more, then decided to shake my annoying brain-friedness by going on a run. I went through the lake-side wilderness to Laurelhurst and back. The wilderness was beautiful, and the grass smelled sweet in the warm sun. By the time I had returned and showered, I was totally energized. Did linear hw. Grabbed a calzone at the 8 and talked to Luke from physics while he ate. A good fellow, Luke was frustrated because he’d had to ask for an extension on physics hw after completing it late at night, then sleeping through the class. We talked about mechanical engineering, his intended major, and the strange fact that he’s held out on getting a Facebook account. I tried to convince him to get one for networking purposes (he’s fairly introverted, so he’s reluctant).

h.     Took my calzone to the lounge and ate with Nicholas and Sasha. A bit weird since I hadn’t talked to them for a long time, but it worked.

i.       Did CSE hw for a long time. I had almost finished when I was overwhelmed with exhaustion, wrote this log, and retired.

UW Update Thursday 6/4/15

 1.     UW Update Thursday 6/4/15

a.     Woke and headed to tutorial. Did the tutorial, then talked to the TAs a bit about what they were working on, since this was the last tutorial. Good ending.

b.     Hung out in the SPS. Wrote email to Garcia (this was planned with Max) asking if he would like to come to a after-final celebratory lunch/dinner, and if so, if he would see fit to send out a class poll to determine the time of the lunch/dinner and to advertise it. Garcia actually replied later today and not only is this happening, we’re grilling burgers at CENPA! Read physics chapter—fascinating stuff on heat engines (general machines that convert temperature differences into mechanical work), stuff that really everyone should know and should read about, if they could just get a basic understanding of entropy and the definition of temperature in terms of entropy (which is really cool btw). Got into a Facebook chat with Xin about the perennial topic of whether Xin should share his homework with Brandon. Found my graduation booklist and sent a copy plus recommendations to Red Mage, who had asked for my booklist.

c.      Went to Homo Mysterious—last class! Interesting conversation on consciousness. Barash didn’t define it very well in the book (is it subjective experience? Responsiveness to stimuli? Having a model of oneself (being self-aware)? These concepts are not interchangeable J) but when the issues were raised, Barash showed an acute understanding of these different categories. I wonder why he chose not to tease them apart. We talked about other stuff as well; in general, a fun conversation.

d.     Ate lunch with Chase. More good conversation!

e.     Went to Physicists Outside and had epic Flyers Up contest with Jacob J. PhyOut is starting to feel like a brief, adult Park Day J

f.      SPS meeting. Got my T-shirts! I’m formally an SPS Community Builder now!

g.     Went to short Glee Club meeting. Got the music (Song of Washington) for Commencement. Held officer elections. I actually ran for the guy who manages the Facebook, but lost on a tie J

h.     Returned to dorm. Did physics hw.

i.       Grabbed pizza and went to Film Club with Jamie. There was almost nobody there, in stark contrast to earlier in the year. We watched some goofy student-made films, plus the end of the Warriors NBA finals game, which was exciting.

j.       Returned to dorm. Logged in to the SPS officers email only to find they have a Slack account! Dad and I have been talking about Slack, so I was excited to use it. I invited myself to the “team” from the UWSPS account and made a profile.

k.     Did CSE hw. Took a break and read Karenina. Got frustrated and read more Karenina. After enjoying a particularly awesome chapter about the joys of mowing with a scythe, I decided to go to bed early. Brushed, wrote this log, and crashed. 

UW Update Wednesday 6/3/15

1.     UW Update Wednesday 6/3/15

a.     Howdy y’all! It’s been an exciting and packed week—hopefully I’ll get to recap it all, but as of now I gotta limit myself to today.

b.     This morning, Haggett Hall. Woke. Grabbed a breakfast sandwich at McMahon and walked to physics. Discussed calculating entropy changes for various processes.

c.      Linear. Big recap.

d.     No physics lab! Yay! Went back to Haggett and did hw.

e.     Went to CSE311. Went over different sizes of infinity and cardinality of sets. Interesting stuff—nice to have it all well-defined.

f.      Ate lunch and read Russell Okamoto’s (an old friend of my parents) blog posts. Walked to the physics complex. Ran into Max on the way and we ended up talking for over an hour, about setting up lunch at the end of physics (invite Garcia? Ask him to set up a poll?), about how to get interesting people together in general, and about math.

g.     Went to SPS lounge for Go Club. Started watching a game, then got into three consecutive games. Played pretty darn well for having been absent so long J

h.     Headed onto the Ave with the Go denizens, Rachel (whose birthday party I attended and is leaving for grad school at Stanford), Charles, Philip, Mike, Ben, and Devon. Ate at a Salvadorian place. Tasty, but small portions. Mike talked a lot about geopolitics; he seems to have a streak of Chinese nationalism, but is very knowledgeable. Rachel has to write a fairy tale erotica story for a French fairy tales class, so we talked a bit about that.

i.       Grabbed some groceries, was walking back to Haggett when I ran into Johan and Matthew. Headed down to CSE labs with them. Worked on some physics, played Johan’s tetris game, checked out Spencer’s boss illegal music downloader app, watched some nerdy CS videos on magnetic coil memory (a crazy technology that powered the Apollo computers). Worked a bit on 311 hw, then returned to Haggett. Ate some cake and read Karenina in the lounge. Grabbed my basketball and ran around for 20 minutes, then wrote this log and hit the hay.