Archive for category science
Games
Posted by danny in college life, computers, science, the Internet, video games on April 3, 2010
So today I went to the Google Games, an event at the Google Cambridge office involving a bunch of geeky competitive events.
Highlights:
- There was a music-identification round (part of a larger trivia round), during which they rickrolled us and played awesome music like the Firefly theme, Korobeiniki, Do You Wanna Date My Avatar, and Dragostea Din Tei. Unfortunately, I was unable to correctly name Korobeiniki, as I have long held the misconception that it is called Kalinka. (I’ve been disabused of the notion before, but still couldn’t remember the right name.)
- There was a puzzle round; I spent the last half hour or so working through about 70 cases of one puzzle, looking for the one that satisfied certain conditions. At the one-minute-remaining mark, I had three cases left. I managed to eliminate one more of them, and then sent in the other two as answers, feeling sure that I had missed the answer. Instead, one of them was correct! I was both happy and sad.
- I was really excited to play Wii Sports Resort (there were supposed to be rounds in rowing, basketball, skydiving, and swordplay), and I was the only one on the team who’d played before, so we kind of figured I’d do them all. Then they said each person should only do one event, so we decided to be good competitors (they almost definitely wouldn’t've noticed had I done them all), and two other people did the first two events (I wanted to do swordplay). Then time ran short and the last two rounds were canceled. I was and remain severely disappointed.
- We were the highest-ranking Harvard team (the first five spots went to MIT). Success!
- Foosball. Playing with new people was fun. There was a left-handed table there (you shoot left instead of right); interesting, but it was also a really bad table.
interview
Posted by danny in Uncategorized, college life, computers, science, the Internet on February 3, 2010
I had a phone interview with D.E. Shaw today (I’m applying for a summer internship there). I was kind of afraid I’d get asked about what I wanted to get out of it and where I wanted to be in ten years, which I would’ve had an awkward time answering (that is, arguably, a bad thing in its own right, but never mind). It turned out to be basically fact-based, so that was okay. I talked about the work I did with an astronomy professor last term; the interviewer had me talk about how we processed the data, then asked me some questions about the statistics of it. I remembered the process pretty well, though I guess I wasn’t very clear and had to retry some of it. I remembered the Poisson distribution, but he asked about the conditions for one to be approximated by a normal distribution, which I didn’t really remember. I said it’s acceptable when the expected number of events is at least 20, which turns out to be about right.
After that he asked how to do quickselect, which I answered fairly well, and how to partition an array in place, which was okay, though I didn’t say it very smoothly. Then he asked a pretty simple probability question, which I sort of figured out how to do pretty quickly in kind of a neat way, but it was different from what he was expecting and I didn’t explain it very well, so that kind of fell down. I got the expected method with some prompting, but I really should’ve made it more clear that I actually knew what I was doing. I think he did somewhat recognize what I was saying, at least. Still, I think that was quite a trip-up.
“I will stomp on things to focus my mental energies, or ‘menergies’.”
– T-Rex
A silly post. Happy ‘teens, Blandfill!
Posted by tom in computers, science, the Internet, video games, videos on January 9, 2010
I’m making a silly post! This is so I can make a more thoughtful post later without having any backlogged sillyness to interfere.
I’ve been playing Diablo 2! I finally beat Duriel. I’m a necromancer and I summon skeletons. That game is hard and sometimes repetitive so I’m gonna lay off for a while.
There was a robotics kickoff! I didn’t sleep last night! Instead I played Diablo 2 with Nico. Nico has returned to school, to the best of my knowledge. So, today I am pulling an all-day-er. I made up this term; it describes when you have been up all night for some reason and, if you were a rational person, you’d go to sleep as soon as you were done with whatever was keeping you up all night. But I decided I want to stay up so that my sleep clock (totes not a biology person, someone explain why it exists) isn’t all screwed up, and I’m trying to make it all the way to normal-people’s-bedtime so I can be set all right and stuff. It’s about 9:20 PM as I’m writing this sentence so I think I’ve been mostly successful! Also hugely sleep deprived, which is why this post is a collection of words that lack logic or intelligence behind them.
Adrian sent this out over that one email list: http://www.dontevenreply.com/
I countered with http://www.asofterworld.com/oqarchive.php and http://www.27bslash6.com/
Here’s a silly video to break up the pace:
I have been playing the xkcd game for like two whole hours without ending. (The xkcd game is something we made up, I think, where you click “random” until you get a repeated comic.) Usually it doesn’t take more than 20 minutes, but I’ve been going really slow and leisurely, analyzing the details of each drawing, trying to make sure I don’t miss any of the jokes. (Like backslash escape sequences, for example — something I wouldn’t catch in a handcuffs reference even if I was vaguely familiar with the idea when comic 234 came out). I think my patience to do it so slowly is very related to my sleep-dep-ness; reading xkcd endlessly is trance-like.
I am reasonably sure that I haven’t been just forgetting which ones I’ve seen since I began playing, since my browser cache would load previously seen images instantly but all the comics I come across load noticeably slower than instantly.
I imagine this blog post is pretty boring. I’m streaming all over my consciousness right now.
This comic is funny.
To come, two posts (which I might combine into one) on less playful topics: A) New year’s resolution (1240×1480? ^_^), B) What happens to me when I am at home.
CS50 Projects!
Posted by blandfill in college life, computers, science, the Internet on December 13, 2009
Hey everyone, as you may or may not have known, the CS50 fair was this past Tuesday, and three of us participated (Danny’s too good for CS50, although we did try to get him to TF the course).
Note: The cloud is being reset on January 1, 2010, so the links will no longer work soon.
Charles’ Project:
An automated trading system analyzer written in Python3 (eventually going to be moved to its own domain). http://cloud.cs50.net/~li15/fp/
Duncan’s Project:
A course selection tool that randomly selects appropriate Core classes. http://cloud.cs50.net/~dwatts/final
Tom’s Project:
An interactive speech recognition program named “Hal Py-Thousand.” Source Code: http://www.blandfill.com/tomstuff/CS50.rar
Danny:
Look at the post below for one of Danny’s many projects. http://www.blandfill.com/2009/12/13/gchat/
GChat
Posted by danny in Music, Uncategorized, college life, computers, hacks, science, the Internet, video games, videos on December 13, 2009
Someone in the room mentioned that we should create a GChat bot that would let us all talk together without the hassle of creating a chat room each time. Having used xmpppy before, I went and did it.
The result:
(Charles changed my GNOME theme to pink some weeks ago.)
Tom then wanted me to write a post about how I did it, so here it is. Without going into a description of the library itself, it works as follows: when it gets a message from one of us, it prepends the appropriate initial and sends the message to the rest of us.
I guess I can go a little more into the details of the library (especially because the documentation is pretty annoying). (There still isn’t really that much to say.) You run some commands in the library to create a connection and log in, then register a function with the connection object to handle incoming messages. I suppose I can add more description if anyone wants. Code.
So that I can get all the tags:
http://acme.com/jef/singing_science/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0ib4GxLPw
xkcd is so much better than I could have imagined
Posted by duncan in Uncategorized, science on December 11, 2009
After doing a lab about galactic rotation curves, the following xkcd comic has gained more meaning for me;
Escalators
If this isn’t explicit enough for you, please compare it to the following;
Shock and awe.
Long overdue
Posted by duncan in Music, college life, computers, science, the Internet, videos on November 25, 2009
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Stars
Posted by danny in Music, Uncategorized, college life, computers, science, the Internet, videos on November 19, 2009
This one’s for Rachel. Thanks for taking care of our wet music.
As Tom mentioned below, we went, along with a bunch of other people, to see the stars. (Nominally the meteors, but there weren’t very many of them.) I’ve got a little tripod, so I took some long-exposure (15 seconds, so not really that long) shots of the sky.
Cassiopeia over the horizon.
Orion.
This is the PLEIADES.
And now for something completely different.
This is awesome. Someone should do this for a CS50 final project.
‘trospection
Posted by tom in Uncategorized, college life, computers, science on November 18, 2009
Tonight I went out of town with Danny (and around 30 other folks who I didn’t know) to check out the meteor shower. There weren’t many meteors but the sky was real, real nice and I enjoyed trying to figure out the constellations and chatting about space with Danny. It was a really worthwhile experience – sometimes I miss the Milky Way and the vast expanses of land that accompany not-the-city.
Now, I have a CS exam tomorrow, but I went on this five-hour excursion anyways. As it stands, I haven’t done any studying besides attend a review session (and overhear Duncan listening to videotaped lectures online), and Charles tells me that this exam looks a lot harder than the last one. I’ll do my best, but I wouldn’t be surprised if all I get is 65 +- 15 percent.
People here really care about academics – or at least grades. There’s strong peer pressure to get good grades in things, even if you aren’t learning that much. I definitely think it’s a good idea to be an organized person who can study well and manage time well and be disciplined, and I also believe that there’s a lot to be gained, at a personal level, through really understanding lots of interesting and new things. But are grades themselves important? There’s certainly a correlation between getting high marks and getting lots of understanding, but I will always value the latter far more than the former.
So, understanding. Wisdom, perhaps. I have very little. But I think I’m yearning for it. Wisdom enough to know what to do with my life. And it’s nights like tonight that make me pause, gain some perspective, and think.
Switching concentrations
Posted by charles in college life, computers, science on November 14, 2009
Four days ago, I made the decision to switch to computer science. I was actually very close to declaring econ; I was talking with an adviser to get my plan of study signed when he told me that I would have to add two more classes to replace skipping Ec 10. This event was the catalyst that set off my decision to consider CS as a viable choice. The decision to switch had been churning around in the back of my head for a few weeks, but I pushed aside those thoughts with the logic that I was already far enough on the econ track that switching would be detrimental to scheduling and to my future.
I want to go into finance after college, so I originally chose econ because Harvard doesn’t offer a business or finance degree, and I thought that econ was related to those fields. As it turns out, the relationship is tangential at best. (I also thought that skipping Ec 10 would give me a comparative advantage, but I have never been more wrong…)
I was already having trouble selecting econ courses to fill up my schedule because, surprisingly, classes like “Moral Perspectives on Economic Growth” and” The Historical Origins of Middle Eastern Development” don’t interest me at all. The thought of adding two more made me cringe.
With CS, all of the classes that I have to take seem very interesting, and with an econ secondary I only have to take the classes that I want to take, namely Capital Markets and Corporate Finance. One of my stat electives will also count toward the CS requirements, so everything just works out better.
My adviser told me that if anything, a CS degree can only help with getting a finance job; it can’t hurt my chances. He also told me a story of a friend of his. The guy graduated with a CS degree, worked for a startup firm that got bought out by Microsoft, made a decent sum of money, went to Stanford B-school, and is now working for McKinsey. (Actually, is it sad that this sounds like an ideal life to me? I’ll have to address this issue someday)
All of this being said, I’m still leaving the option open to switch back to econ in case things really don’t work out.
On an unrelated note, the weight room in our dorm is surprisingly stocked with equipment, and it’s really close and convenient. I don’t know why I didn’t go earlier.