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.

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.