Winning the bet dollar

About a year ago, I was playing a word video game on facebook, which involved shooting electronic birds and then obtaining a letter.  It was like hangman, except you weren’t allowed to run out of bullets.  At one point, I decided that the game was too taxing on my fragile brain to attempt it by myself, so enlisted the help of the rest of the Blandfill.  At one point, there was a word that had me completely stumped; Tom assured me that it was in fact a word that is so ridiculous that I wiped it from my memory.  I said to Tom, “I will bet you a dollar that you are wrong.”  It turns out that he was right, and despite it just being a dollar, I felt obligated to make good on my bet, so he received the dollar.

Now, a year later, I received the dollar for being the first to perform a mildly creepy task for Charles (I won’t repeat it here or anywhere, in case you’re wondering.  And no, it was not sexual).  As the owner of the dollar, it was necessary for me to make another bet so that someone else could receive it.  This time, I offered the dollar to the first one of us who posted a new blog.  It’s been 3 days since anyone’s posted, so I’m going to think of a new bet.

I used to think I didn’t need mail goggles.

Last night, at around 4:36 A.M., after drinking more than I’d care to remember, I got back, and decided what I needed more than anything else was a copy of Windows 7.  Tom told me the best thing to do was to e-mail sysadmin@cs50.net and ask whoever was on the other line to send me a username and password.  Here is how I went about doing that.

This is my favorite manifestation of this meme

Charles found this on the interwebs, bless his heart.

I guess they’re making a computer on a spaceship…

Tonight marks the first time that I’ve finished a problem set well before the deadline (read: more than 12 hours) and having not crammed it all into one sitting.  Not to be a nerd, but I actually enjoyed solving the problems.  This makes me feel like I would really enjoy my schoolwork if I executed it sensibly, which I never do.  Maybe I will start this semester.

I spoke with Professor Dave Charbonneau on Tuesday, between a section and a dinner with the HSS to talk about why I should or shouldn’t concentrate in astrophysics. (more…)

The pursuit of career

Hmm, I’ll write a blog to warm up for my essay.

So, life is interesting and complicated. One of the things people sometimes do in life is enter careers that involve doing jobs. A question arises: What kind of career would I like to do?

I like science a lot. I think that, at a philosophical level, improving the level of mankind’s understanding of the natural world in which we all find ourselves is one of the greatest pursuits there is — here we are, some mammals sitting around wearing clothes sometimes, and we spend years figuring out what the heck everything is and how it got there. Almost as amazing as the fact that anything got there in the first place. (I think Stephen Hawking is a well-known proponent of essentially this idea.) And my favorite branch of the sciences is the science that deals with most of the universe: physics (and astronomy). Understanding the whole universe seems like an extremely ambitious goal, but people have made such big achievements already in figuring out what exactly is out there, beyond the Earth. Space is cool! And the mathematical relations (i.e. laws of physics) that most “stuff” on and near Earth follows seem to hold true throughout the visible universe, as far as we can tell. For me, the idea of being a part of this process of figuring out how the universe works is both extremely appealing and intellectually engaging. This is why I’d like to be a scientist.

Learning how to understand the awesome stuff that we see in the universe is really satisfying

But, hmm, sometimes becoming a scientist is hard, and maybe in real life it’s not as cool or satisfying as it’s cracked up to be. When I come to it, maybe the actual experience of being a scientist is tedious, unrewarding, and takes too much grant-applying & dealing with bureaucracy, and not enough exploring & appreciating the wonders of the universe. If I were to choose a career that I enjoyed, even if it didn’t have the philosophical benefits of being a ‘man of science’, what would I do with my life? (more…)