Mid-July. I am halfway done with my college career. After reading through a few of my old Xanga posts, I’ve concluded that I might be more knowledgeable than I was in high school, but in the end, I’m still a kid.

Quick recap of what has happened in the past four months since I last posted:

1. End of school year/finals. Housing worked out well for us. We all have singles next year plus a common room. Finals could have been better.

2. Family vacation in Hawaii. We drove through Hilo, so Tom and I were in the same city for a brief moment.

3. Internship in Shanghai.

I’ve been in Shanghai since June 11th, and I’m staying until August 25th. This is the longest period of time that I’ve lived by myself, but I feel good. My schedule is fairly consistent (for better or worse): get up, go to work, lunch break, get off work, exercise or go out to eat with friends, go home and surf the internet. One aspect of Chinese culture that I wish the US would adopt is the extremely long lunch breaks; I have a 2 hour break everyday that I use to eat, facebook and nap.
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I’m writing this partially because Tom has been bugging me about writing (it has been a while since I’ve published), and because I want to postpone my post about Owl City, mainly because I think it would decrease our subscriptions by 100%.

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!

Hello, dear Blandfill readers. This is a slightly more serious post, I suppose, so you’re in for a treat!
I’d like to talk a little bit about “resolutions” that I think I’d like to adopt in my life. These are sort of like New Year’s resolutions, but different in two ways. First off, I think that 01 January of every year is a little too arbitrary to be meaningful, and it seems like overall it’s a pretty atrocious way to attempt self-changes (at least statistically speaking: Wikipedia says “Recent research shows that while 52% of participants in a resolution study were confident of success with their goals, only 12% actually achieved their goals.”);  and secondly, it’s common for New Year’s resolutions to be pretty specific: “Work out more”, “lose weight”, “get better grades”, “spend more time with family”,  ”get more sleep”, et cetera, and I’m not super interested in small specific changes.

So, Tom, what the heck are you talking about?

I’ve more or less alluded to this in previous blog posts (such as, in chronological order, pursuit, advance, funny, ‘trospection) but college has really helped me confront myself and my beliefs and such – not so much politically or religiously, but personally and emotionally. Living at home with my family was a sort of painful box for me; not because of anyone in particular’s fault, but because of my overall situation; and though I numbed to the pain and managed to “be good at stuff” to whatever extent university admissions folks think is important, it’s only since I’ve come here, living without my family, with my roommates, in a new community, that I’ve been able at all to address bigger questions.

I’ve been thinking about ways I’d like to change myself, become better, perform self-improvement — whatever the hell you feel like calling it — and the following “pieces of thought” (they happen to be cartoons) struck a chord in my mind.

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This is an end-of-semester thing that we’ve been looking forward to.  Back in mid-October, I thought it would be fun to record our sleep and wakeup times.  We started on October 14th, and here are the results from calculating hours slept.  I think we have a lot less than the average number of all-nighters for college students.

You can download the dataset (csv format) here.

Note: the hours slept are calculated for the night before, e.g. Sunday values correspond to hours slept Saturday night through Sunday morning.

Summary (hours):

As you can see, Danny, Duncan, and Tom have left-skewed distributions (the mean is less than the median) whereas I’m right-skewed.  I have the highest mean sleep time and the lowest standard deviation.  Tom has the highest standard deviation, and Duncan has the lowest mean sleep time.  Graph:

Days of the week:

We were also curious about our sleep patterns during the week.  Tom was usually very well rested on Tuesdays.  Graph:

Correlation Matrix:

Unsurprisingly, I am not very correlated with the others.  Duncan and Tom have the highest correlation.

My hours:

My variance increased over the semester.  Graph:

Danny:

Thanksgiving break meant a lot of sleep for Danny.  Graph:

Duncan:

I bet you can tell when Duncan had an astronomy lab write-up.  Graph:

Tom:

The wild roller coaster ride that is Tom’s sleep schedule.  Graph:

All of us:

First things first: I gave blood today (Wednesday) for the first time! Duncan was doing it and my schedule was the same as his so I figured I may as well. It was kinda cool, in an ow-my-arm-hurts-in-a-weird-sore-way-will-this-needle-come-out-soon-please way. I’ll post a picture within the next couple dozen hours. (It won’t be gross.)

Second things second: I am reflecting upon the creative process. By this, I mean: I am attempting to write an essay. This is the third essay for my English class. It is due tomorrow (to a good approximation, at least – there are some complicated details). I’ve been thinking of things to write about, and referencing the text of the novel I’d like to write my topic on, for several days, and I even emailed my TF with a bunch of the ideas I’d collected. So, armed with a whole bunch of jotted-down observations, the page numbers referencing my favorite quotes, and a very vague idea of what my thesis might sort of be, I sat down four hours ago ready to write my essay.

This was a bad idea.

I know this because I did essentially the same thing for my first essay. I never really finished it, because I wasn’t able to write anything. I didn’t have a solid idea of exactly what I was going to do when I jumped into writing it, and as a result I sat staring at the mostly-blank text document for literal hours. The smallest temptations become irresistible distractions when you’re a little sleepy (or perhaps just caffeine-jittery) and don’t know really what you’re writing about. But when you’ve set out to write your essay and then go to sleep and then turn the essay in as soon as you wake up, it seems like the only good idea is to just write – there’s no time to stop and go back and outline your thoughts in detail! So you press on, but those distractions just get bigger.

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