First, I would take easier classes. I came into Harvard a little confused about my academic talents, and I believe these miscalculations still affect my daily life. The first real test I took at Harvard (at least that I cared about) was the physics placement test. The idea was to help you decide if you should take Physics 15a or Physics 16; both cover the same basic material, but 16 covered it with mathematical rigor, and was notoriously much more difficult. I took the test just because I suppose, maybe to prove to myself that I was just as smart as everyone else in my class, or maybe I had this idea that I would actually use the grade to make my decision. I remember not spending too much time on it; it was an AP Physics style test, and was graded in the same way, so I would just look at the questions and answer them. I felt great about it, so when I saw Danny get up and turn it in after about half an hour, I decided, “Why not?” and turned mine in less than ten minutes later. It was only when we got our grades back that I realized my expectations were far off; Danny had received a 5, and I got a 2. Take note, my first failing grade at Harvard. Somehow I chalked the grade up to not preparing enough and being careless, but I wouldn’t make that mistake again! Next time I would be slow and steady and not be caught off guard.

So I enroll in Physics 16, and the night before the first problem set is due, I hole myself up in Lamont library and start shedding some wood. Lo and behold, I am absolutely stumped, and I go back to my room at 4am a man with much lower self esteem than before. Never again would I try to do a problem set all by myself. I started doing the homework assignments in a large group and having people explain to me the method rather than figuring it out by myself. It turns out that in physics, that is half the point, and I may have completely missed it.

So if I had taken 15a, everything would have been perfect? Well, no, but I at least would have been exposed to a gentler learning curve that may have propelled me to doing the occasional problem set with no outside assistance. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to do that, and I think I’m only just managing to go at it alone in Physics 181.

Second, I would not have taken Math 25. The professor was awful, there was too much work, and it turns out I don’t really like pure math. Occasionally I see something in physics that is relevant to the class and am glad I took it, but those moments are far outweighed by how miserable I was while doing those problem sets freshman year (although in the spring, it could have been the fact that I was taking five classes; also a mistake, but there was no way out at that point; I needed and/or am glad that I took those classes).

And I think that’s really it in terms of regrets. I think sometimes I could have worked harder and slept less, and that will always be true. Some people might say I spent too much time in the band or in the glee club, but I know that those two experiences have made my college career bearable. Glee Club gave me so much musical direction when I thought I had finished with serious music, and I met some of my best friends in that group. Band has clearly become a bigger and bigger part of my life, and sometime in the fall I will feel a huge crunch because of it, but I wouldn’t trade that for anything; the Band gave me the first close-knit group of friends I’ve had at school (excluding the blandfill) that didn’t turn out to be a bunch of douchebags, and I would gladly trade a couple points of the GPA or a top grad school for that.

This was pretty heavy, so have a video.

Ian McKellan Narrating the Ducktales theme song

I was told the other day that a positive externality is essentially where one person does something, and the cost is only placed on the actor.  Apparently a perfect example of this is participation in sections.  The teaching fellow will ask the class a question, and there will be an awkward silence, sometimes lasting up to thirty seconds.  Eventually someone caves and hazards an answer, or the TF gives the answer and moves the section along.

But actually attempting an answer is the positive externality; if your answer is correct, then you and the class benefit, because you’re forced to explain why your answer is correct, and your peers learn from you; if your answer is incorrect, the TF gets a little concerned and takes pains to explain why your answer is not correct.  Here, everyone benefits, but you “suffer the humiliation” of giving the wrong answer.

I’ve always been a little annoyed by these unnecessary silences, and in the past month I’ve tried to answer the questions when I thought I knew the answer, or when it was a binary question I would hazard a guess, just to move along so that we could learn more.  When I was right, there was never an overwhelming sense of satisfaction.  When I was wrong, I have to say it was embarrassing and definitely was not an experience I wanted to repeat.

This is sort of related to the practice of asking questions in lectures and sections.  This is even more frustrating to me, especially when the instructor specifically asks if the students understand what just happened.  Of course people are going to be confused by something when there’s a slew of facts shoveled on them, but for some reason no one wants to be the person to ask for elucidation.

I know I’m not the only person who doesn’t understand everything, because there have been a couple of occasions where friends in my section have thanked me for asking a certain question because they learned something from it.

I think the “smart questions” are the ones that bother me more actually, e.g. “Isn’t angular momentum just a clever trick, or does it have any deeper significance?” or “Do we prefer Lagrangian mechanics to Newtonian mechanics because the former is more beautiful?”  These are the types of questions that people ask to show that they have absorbed the material so completely that they need to show the rest of the class that they’re wondering about the deeper significance of every result.  Of course the less gifted students pick up on this, and often they scramble for these types of questions so that they can prove that they aren’t part of the lowly masses of students trying to just get by.  It’s a cheap trick to gain the professor’s respect, and everyone involved knows it but ignores it.

This is getting a little bitter.  I’m going to throw something in here to lighten the mood a bit.

So I feel like the issue is that for most of my classmate’s lives, they were consistently the best at everything they did, or pretty damn close.  THEN.  We get thrown into this high-powered environment, suddenly you’re on a level playing field with everyone, and you’re just not that special anymore.  For the first time in our lives, failing is an option, and it’s terrifying.  Eventually we realize that it’s very difficult to fail here, but we are still aware that there’s always someone better than us at what we love to do.  Luckily we can hide our grades from our peers so that there isn’t a direct comparison.  I think that the only place left to really compare yourself to others is in your section, where you discuss your insecurities with your schoolwork.  But here, it’s really easy to not have any questions; why would you ask him to go over that last step if you understood it in the first place?  I believe that the practice of not answering or asking questions is a face-saving technique that most Harvard students have adopted.

Like everything else here, the question-problem is wrapped up in the ego.  People don’t want to expose their inadequacies to their peers, so they hide in silence, implying the answer is so obvious it doesn’t deserve a serious consideration (apologies to anyone who this is actually true for; I’m looking at you, Danny.)

I’m guilty of this ego thing as well (or maybe I’m the only one guilty of it…) but I’m trying very hard to overcome it.  By admitting you don’t know something, you can open yourself up to learning it.  But the way sections are treated now makes it difficult to speak up when you really don’t understand something.

I guess I should include as a disclaimer that this mostly applies to my math and physics sections here at Harvard; for all I know people actually contribute to discussions in humanities concentration courses.

That is all, goodnight!

Today, while I was with a subset of Glee Club singing for a bunch of rich doctors, Tom and Danny went to see Randall Munroe speak about things at MIT and then got to get things signed by him.  Rather than having a “sign, move, sign, move” approach to things, he actually took the time to speak to everyone a little bit.  Tom and Danny were thoughtful enough to print out a copy of the first blog in this series and bring it to him to have it signed.  Just to be certain, Tom asked him if the graphs really were unrelated, and Randall responded as follows; “There is lots of data in the world.”  (I won’t go on about this, but I really do think this is some of the most important data in the world; it shows we don’t know anything about the universe.  That’s all.)

So that’s that.  I include a picture in hopefully the most meta moment of my series of blog entries (I can’t speak for the rest of the room):

Two mildly related things.

1) Yesterday, I reviewed my physics textbook while walking 2.3 mph on a treadmill.  It worked out very well.

2) On the way back from the reception that we sang out, I ate about a meal and a half worth of hors d’oeuvres and am now about to birth a food baby.  Also, it seems the trick to pronouncing things in French is to ignore all the consonants.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Randall Munroe
Date: Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:25 PM
Subject: Re: the harvard physicists are on to you: (was: Fwd:
[sps-open] xkcd and galactic rotation curves)
To: Jacob Rus

It’s a coincidence, but I swear I’ve seen that graph before. I
remember wishing I could see the error bars and data points.

Best,
Randall

Escalators

If this isn’t explicit enough for you, please compare it to the following;

Shock and awe.

Update: For those of you who are less astrophysically inclined, this may have been a little confusing.  Also, some of us, like Charles, believe that the xkcd comic is coincidentally the exact same graph as the one for galactic rotation curves.  Quote from Charles: “I’m sure the Ballmer peak looks exactly like another graph somewhere in the world.”  That may be true about this comic as well, but I feel like the graph is too significant for this to be a coincidence (possibly because I spent about 12 hours staring at graphs like this a week ago for my astronomy class).

For the uninformed among you, the galactic rotation curve is sort of the reason why we believe in dark matter.  Basically, in almost any galactic model, we know that the enclosed mass at any radius, M_enc, relates the centripetal force and the gravitational force as

mv²/R_enc = GM_encm/R²_enc, or v =√(GM_enc/R_enc).  Depending on the form of M_enc as a function of R, we should get several different possible velocity vs. distance from galactic center curves. With the distribution that we expect, with most of the mass in the center of the galaxy making a big bulge, we’d expect that M(R) = M, constant, since that’s what a galaxy looks like.  For example;

This is an artist’s impression of the Milky Way Galaxy, and as you can see, there’s a huge bulge in the center, which contains a supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, which has the mass of about a million sun-like stars.  From what we can see, there’s tons and tons of matter at the center of the galaxy.  So we expect v(R) ~ 1/√R, but if we look at the observed graph, we see that this is not the case, we see that the velocity stays roughly the same as the distance from the center increases.  This means that there is way more mass in the galaxy than we see; what is it?  We don’t know, but it isn’t luminous, so we call it dark matter.  Essentially, the discrepancy between what we see and what we observe in this graph proves that we really don’t know what’s going on, and it’s these moments in science that push us forward, and force us to reevaluate our view of the universe; it’s graphs like these that make science exciting.

My point is basically that this graph is far too significant to accidentally pop up in a joke about escalators.  Without the galactic rotation, it’s kind of cute, but when you compare them directly, you see that the analogy between the two is perfect.  Please leave comments disputing or supporting this and Tom and I will attempt to address them.

Hello readers; I realize that it’s been almost three weeks since I’ve posted, since exciting things like meteor showers, drastic concentration changes, and creepy conversations online with strangers aren’t things that happen to me. But the rest of the Blandfill has been good to me and hasn’t heckled me for not posting, as I have done to them many times. So here’s my update.

Will Ramsey bit me today at the hockey game. It was refreshing and terrifying. Ah yes, a good segue to band-related things. As the 24 tagged pictures of me on Facebook might indicate, I received a staff position in the Harvard Band, Assistant Drillmaster. I get to refill the soda machine, help run the Christmas party (next Friday), set up the Band Banquet in the spring, and of course, chart all the shows for the football season. I think it’s gonna be an interesting year, especially since now I have to basically go to every gig, while last year I only did it out of a sense of obligation, being the only tuba and all that. Glee Club is also really good; it’s about that time of the year when they start interviewing for management, and the only position that I’m interested in is, ironically (story will come later), Technology Manager. I’m not sure if that would be a good idea though, since I’ll already be extending myself quite a bit with the band, and then there’s that whole thing where I take the classes and do the homework. In fact, that’s what I’ll talk about next.

I am a fantastic procrastinator. In my English class, there are seven assignments. My TF has been very lax about deadlines, which is usually a bad idea for someone like me; I’ve as of right now turned in two of the assignments. I haven’t done badly on them either, but the problem is that I need to be finished with every paper for the class on December 9, so I have about two weeks to read five books and write 9-11 pages of interesting stuff on them. Shouldn’t be too bad though. There’s also two physics problem sets, an astronomy problem set, an astronomy lab, and of course the CS50 final project that I haven’t started it. These, plus the other obligations I have towards the band and glee club, have made me, as of the moment I leave my dorm to go home for Thanksgiving, decide to not go on Facebook until it’s no longer the most visited website on my computer, according to Google Chrome. I’ve been needing an excuse to get away from that time vacuum for a while anyway, and procrastination isn’t worth it. In case any of you are wondering, yes, yes I will be sleeping eighteen hours a day during winter break.

I’ve made a short list of books I want to read before the end of this coming summer, and so far they’re all math/physicky. Here’s what I have right now;
Visual Complex Analysis (textbook for Applied Math 105a)
Georgi’s Wave Textbook (recommended text for Physics 15c)
Bamberg’s Mathematics for Physicists (interesting at least)
Carrol and Ostlie (the better textbook for Astronomy 16 and 17)
Griffiths E&M/Purcell (two pretty cool electricity and magnetism textbooks)
Morin’s Mechanics Textbook (from Physics 16/15a)
I realize that none of these books are anything people would call literature, but this year it occurred to me that I actually am pretty far behind on reading the things that everybody reads (not that I feel like I should enjoy something just because old white men said it was a good idea; I just think a lot of interesting things have been said about life before, and maybe I should read these interesting things). So, if there are any books you guys think I should read that would change my life or would just be fun (I’m going for science or literature, either one is fine) please let me know in a comment.

While I’m blogging about CS50 (marginally) I feel like I should inform readers that I’ve finally finished problem set 6, the spellchecker. I think this is the problem set that started to make me feel like shit in the class, and today I met with my sophomore advisor, Zak Stone, who is a grad student in the CS department here, and we debugged the code together, and finally we managed to spit out a program that works, and now my program, after a bit of tweaking, is on the Big Board for CS50, and I feel like that was a big self-esteem boost, since that class has been kicking my ass since I spent five late days trying to get that motherfucker to work. My test dictionary actually only had three words in it; shit, abatement, and poop. It was a hell of a week, and now that I’ve finally gotten something out of all that work, I feel slightly liberated, and well-equipped with tools to actually learn computer science by myself. Seriously, that problem set was hell. I started looking forward to Physics 15c problem sets so that I would actually understand how to solve a problem that was given to me.

That’s all I have to say for now, but I hope you were entertained for a little while. It felt good to actually write this out, so I hope it feels good to read it. Have a happy Thanksgiving, and hopefully I’ll see most of you soon.

This has been a pretty fun weekend.  I’m going to tell you about it.  Lucky you!  As an aside, everything I’ve done in the following had the effect of postponing the completion of my CS50 problem set that was due 26 hours ago (as of yet uncompleted).  But I digress.

This turned out to be Freshman Parents’ Weekend, which involved some fun awkward gigs for band, and a great Glee Club concert.  We went to Sanders Theater and played some fight songs.  They had a very strange panel table, and two comfy red chairs enclosed by two coffee tables with water jugs and glasses on them.  Obviously, when it come time to play Ten Thou, Ed and I sat in those chairs.  I had a good time with that.  Then there was a rehearsal from 4-6, which made getting to Sanders in tails at 6:30 a bit of an issue, but an easily resolved one (and resolved it was, by leaving the rehearsal early).

The Glee Club concert went fantastically.  It was great to be on stage in front of an almost full house, although I had forgotten how much I sweat while under those bright lights.

Everything you just read was written about a week ago, mostly because I got tired of blogging and stopped.  Then I felt guilty for not blogging in three weeks, so I’m going to finish this now.  Isn’t that fun?  Since the last time I posted, my cell phone has been acting strange.  I woke up about 6 hours after going to sleep Sunday morning and discovered that my cell phone had a funny colored bar on the left side o the screen.  I was perturbed, but not too worried; I could still use it, right?  Well.  As the day went on, I found that every other row of pixels had turned white, so I could only half see what was on the screen.  Again, not a huge deal, I could see what I was doing, but I was beginning to get a little worried.  By the time I went to sleep that night, my cell phone screen had turned completely white, and as of right now it has a lovely crack across the screen from me banging it to see if that would make it work better.  Turns out it didn’t.  Regardless, my phone still works, but now I just don’t text, and I have to hope that whoever calls me is someone I actually want to talk to.

Oh yes, the HUB 90th reunion was this past weekend, and it was fantastic; I’ll be posting the video of it as soon as it goes online.  It’s worth a watch.  Granted, there are bands that are 300+ without alumni, but something about seeing 40 years worth of crusties and undergrads scramble on a field is very impressive; it’s like Brownian motion, but with a purpose.  Pretty cool, eh?  That in itself makes this post a science post.  I’ll link to the wikipedia article on Brownian Motion as well.  Now this post can be about the Internet as well!  Fantastic!

http://www.webtender.com/handbook/games/threeman.game

I’m pretty sure they were making these rules up to screw with us.  Also, they didn’t tell us the rules ahead of time, they just yelled at us when we didn’t know them.

Anyway, on a more wholesome note, when I arrived back home on Saturday night at 10:30, the rest of the blandfill greeted me with a Razmatazz birthday cake from Finale, and we ate it while watching an episode of Firefly and the newest episode of the Office.  I think the most exciting part of the weekend was last night, when we all went out to an Ethiopian restaurant, called Adis Red Sea.  It was fantastic; Tom found it over the summer from the Unofficial Guide to Harvard (who knew it was useful?).  They didn’t really have plates, in the traditional sense; the food was placed on pieces of bread that could be used to eat the food in lieu of utensils.  It was also surprisingly filling, considering the food seemed to be all contained in bowls the same size as small cereal bowls.  I’m a bad food writer, clearly, considering that’s all I can think of writing.

Right now we’re waiting for Tom to come back so that we can eat the birthday cake my mom ordered for me while we watch the next episode of Firefly.  Life is good.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1169#comic

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.