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. I was considering tactfully blowing it off by saying I was busy at every time he offered, but I did manage to catch shuttles at perfect moments (I went from the Barker Center to Memorial Hall in four minutes; I didn’t know I could do that without running).  If you have never met or listened to Dave speak, you as a person are missing out, regardless if you like astronomy or not.  He is without a doubt the best lecturer I have had so far at Harvard, definitely the best teacher (the distinction being he actually cared if we understood the lectures), and really an all around great guy.  He always spots me at band gigs and strikes up a conversation about anything and everything, and despite being incredibly knowledgeable and lucid, he is (or seems to be) genuinely interested in what people have to say to him, about what they think.

At our meeting, he started out not just getting to business, but asking me about what classes I was taking, and when he heard I was taking five classes, and had taken five classes in the spring semester, he immediately encouraged me to drop the fifth class.  His reasoning was that by taking five classes, I would still get passing grades (because it’s Harvard, you know?) but I would absolutely learn less because I would have less time.  So then it hit me that I shouldn’t be in the Chinese Popular Culture class, and I should have realized it much earlier since Tom had been telling me for the past two to three weeks that I should drop it as well.  Also, he asked me about my extracurriculars, the band, the glee club, how my math class was last year, lots of things that a head tutor wouldn’t normally care about, but a great person would, like him.  So that’s that for that.

That was a bit of a digression from whatever I was talking about before, but I’ve decided that I’m absolutely going to at least get a secondary field in astrophysics, since I only need one more class to achieve that, and if everything works out well, I’ll try to do a joint physics-astro concentration.  I’ve gotten pretty excited about this, so today I even went and filled out my course of study, and I just need three more courses my senior year.  Of course, the cores can easily be permuted.  It was also a little bit of a wake-up call, insofar as it showed that I really don’t have that much time until I graduate before I become a really cool person that grad schools think will make really awesome discoveries and publish sweet papers.

This blog seemed a little Duncan-centric, so I’m going to try and pull it back a bit.*  Aha, a bit of observation about door-holding etiquette.  I suppose I didn’t think about this so much in high school, because I didn’t go out too much, and there weren’t that many doors that I needed to go through in my high school, but here, there are all sorts of buildings that require opening doors, so I’ve had many opportunities to think about this one.  So imagine (or recall) that you’re opening a door for you, yourself, to walk through, and in the corner of your eye, you see someone who’s about 20 feet away, give or take a few.  Now we have a bit of a dilemma.  We could just go in and let the person who was walking behind you open the door himself (I’m using him instead of them because it’s singular, and hopefully understood that it could be a male or female.  Excuse the grammar tangent), which is quite reasonable, UNLESS you’ve misjudged the distance, and the person behind you gets to the door just as it shuts when you let it close.  This doesn’t exactly make you an asshole, but in the situation the person behind you may be mildly annoyed, and think you’re a little rude.  So what’s the big deal?  It’s not a big deal, really, but if it’s your first interaction with the person, it could noticeably change their perception of you if you do meet them in another circumstance.  And since it’s Harvard, this could be the future POTUS!  You wouldn’t want the President to think you’re an asshole, would you?  (Yes, improbable, but they could be important, it’s just an example.)  So if you’re not in the mood to make people think badly of you and you’ve overthought this like I have, then you wait and hold the door open.

But herein lies another issue; what if they’re far enough away that if they continued your pace, it would be about 5-10 seconds before they arrived at the door?  Big deal, you say.  I say, you’re right, sarcasm duly noted.  But I have also been on the receiving end of this many times as well, and seeing the person holding the door open for me, I feel obligated to not make them wait the extra 5 seconds, since they’re obviously taking valuable time out of their busy schedule to be polite, so I speed up my pace significantly, maybe even break into a light jog so that the door is open for a shorter amount of time.  But what has happened now?  Their act of politeness has indirectly caused me to break from a leisurely stride into a light jog.  Why not just continue at the regular pace?  Because, once again, you look kind of like a dick, as if you’re not really appreciating this enormous favor someone has done, thus sacrificing their precious seconds for an ungrateful recipient.  Same “problem” as before.  I’ve discovered then, that you can actually control people, to a small extent, by holding doors open for them when they’re too far for a door-hold to be convenient; in most cases, they will speed up so that they can accept your offer of generosity.  So now this running problem bothers me as well, so sometimes I don’t bother holding doors open because I know people will be put into a mild state of discomfort by my act of generosity, but then I risk not helping someone that would have actually appreciated the offer without being uncomfortable.  I’ll grant that this is all frivolous nonsense, but I think about it when I’m walking, so there it is.

Sometimes I try to hold revolving doors open.  It usually doesn’t end well.

*This is a good time to remind the readers that I’m not really sure why I have a blog that anyone would look at, because it’ll just be me talking about what I think, and while that could be cool, I think their time would be better spent by reading Randall Munroe or Thus Spake Zarathustra, but that’s just me.  Basically, anything I write is what I happen to be thinking about, which is inordinately vague.