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.

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

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.

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/

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

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.

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.

Big Dipper.

This is the PLEIADES.

And now for something completely different.

This is awesome. Someone should do this for a CS50 final project.

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.

What sorts of things has my thinking yielded? Well, for one, I don’t like the city! I think this means I should try to get away from it. Part of me envisions a future in which I abandon my academic life and find a job in a rural town somewhere near a forest. I could live off the land (in a loosely metaphorical sense), have a great view of the night sky, and go through life without too much stress, really experiencing things.

That’s almost crazy-talk, I know. If I just suffer through another five semesters of essays and problem sets (and perhaps some research-y things) I’ll be essentially set for a decent career, just like anyone else with a degree from here. Are those sorts of things really worthwhile, though?

I find myself questioning lots of things these days. Why. Why do I do the things I do? Why do I feel the things I feel? Part of this might stem from the fact that I’m far enough away from my home (in perhaps two different senses) that I can finally look back objectively on my formative experiences, and connect now-Tom with then-Tom. I’ve touched on some of this in a previous post, but I think I should really try to get a handle on the things I experienced growing up so that I’m more aware of who I am today. (I notice that a bit of this borders on L. Ron Hubbard rhetoric, so I’ll be careful as I proceed in this regard.)

Something else I’m questioning: my pursuit of science in general. Some of the things I’d like to address about myself, I don’t think I’ll ever learn to address by learning more physics or math or computer science. In this specific regard, I find myself eerily drawn to the humanities. Who am I? What drives me? Why do I feel I have to do some of the things I do? These are not questions that equations or algorithms will solve! But by reading the ideas that other folks have developed — and really thinking about them, in ways concrete enough to put to pen (keyboard, really) — it is here that I suspect I may find some answers, or at the very least, better ways for me to find my own answers.

So Tom, what, you want to run off and become a hippie English major, huh? Spend your whole life looking inwards, accomplishing nothing for the outside world, produce nothing but some pretty words and feelings — will that satisfy you?

There’s definitely that element inside me. But I don’t think I could ever settle for this. What was it that prompted this introspection, eh? Staring at the night sky is a really wonderful experience if the sky is dark enough. I think I’m dwelling a lot on Sagan these days ( http://xkcd.com/663/ ), and his line of reasoning compels me a lot. There’s this thing called the Universe, and in a little, tiny, insignificant corner of it, there’s a speck called Earth with a lot of people-shaped creatures running around on it. Time will come and go, and the star that the speck orbits will eventually burn out, but — in the meantime — some of these people-shaped creatures have come close to really understanding what this whole Universe thing is about. And we know of nothing else in the Universe that has achieved this.

Isn’t that worthwhile?

For now, though, it’s time for me to go to sleep, wake up, sit through a fantastic lecture about a book I haven’t read yet, and then stumble over to an examination room and hope for the best. Life, uh, sure is complicated. Maybe someday I’ll learn to deal with how complicated it is.

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.