Conflicted
Posted by charles in Uncategorized on March 13, 2010
A few quick updates: All of us have been extremely busy over the past month, and this cut into our free/sleeping/blogging time. Also, Duncan and I stopped recording our sleep times for various reasons, so no complete dataset will be posted at the end of the semester (I know, disappointing, right?).
In the spirit of Tom’s introspective posts, this one is a little more serious than the fun bullshit that I usually write about.
At the beginning of the semester, my roommates and I made a resolution to work out at least once a week. Quincy basement has a gym, so we really didn’t have an excuse not to go. I’ve always loved weightlifting; there’s something special about the state of pleasure you get after working your body to exhaustion. I also savor the soreness that follows for a few days after a good workout (I’m probably a bit masochistic). Maybe it’s just the change of chemical balances in the brain, but my outlook on life is always better after weightlifting. I feel optimistic.
On a Sunday night a few weeks ago, I experienced a rare feeling of satisfaction with my life. I had spent the entire morning and afternoon learning. I wasn’t simply studying like I sometimes do by flipping through the pages just enough to complete an assignment; I was actually trying to engage myself with the acquisition of new knowledge. I do not attempt the latter nearly as often as I should. After a productive day of absorbing new ideas, my roommates and I went to the gym. As I was walking back to my room afterwards, I discovered what makes me feel content: progress and improvement of myself, both physically and mentally.
You’re probably wondering what that horrendously broad description means. Doesn’t everyone feel good after they get better at things? Well, yes, but not exactly in the same way. I am more focused on the process of improvement than on the end results. For me, an ideal life might be one where I could pursue an intellectual activity as a career, such as playing chess professionally, and also have time for sports as a serious hobby (or combine the two for chess boxing).
I wouldn’t have to be the best at anything; I would be happy as long as I could constantly strive to improve my abilities and achieve the maximum amount that my potential allows. Of course, this particular lifestyle is off-limits to me, but my general point is that I like the idea of making myself better at a skill that I enjoy. I don’t think I would mind going to college for a little while longer if it meant I could learn more things and also make myself more physically fit. I find it so strange that I only have two more years of structured classes left.
I’ve been wondering how to reconcile the differences between my ideal life and the potential paths that I will take in the future. If I enjoy making myself smarter and stronger, then why not just become a professor who lifts weights? Alas, academia is definitely not the right choice for me. I’m not going to lie; my materialism alters my career incentives. I want to be wealthy, but not excessively. I want to live in a big house and drive a nice car. I want to be worry-free when it comes to expenses. I want to be able to take a break and travel the world at any time. I want to be my own boss and not report to a superior from 9 to 5. I want the freedom that is associated with being out of the rat race. None of these are guaranteed if I choose a finance job, but the probability of achieving them is much lower if I choose an career in academia over one in finance.
If I desire both money and knowledge, how do I balance the two?
My hope is that a career in finance will open enough doors for me that I can eventually leave it to pursue a more satisfying goal, e.g. starting my own company. A friend of mine once joked, “you know it’s bad when you’re already planning an exit strategy.”
He’s probably right, but I hope it’ll be worth it.
Note: I added the chess boxing video because I was afraid of people being turned away by too much text.
Resolutions
Posted by tom in college life on February 14, 2010
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.
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
strip conway’s game of life
Posted by tom in Uncategorized on January 31, 2010
I am internet-hit whoring. Apologies, dear readers, for this deep betrayal.
http://xkcd.com/696/
Edit: Well, this is a silly post. I’m gonna test out some TeX.
Final rotation-related post
Posted by duncan in Uncategorized on January 25, 2010
Disclaimer: I wrote this entry over a month ago, and only just got to it.
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.
Severe internet withdrawal
Posted by charles in computers, the Internet on January 13, 2010
Ah, the great firewall of China. It’s been over two weeks since I’ve had access to facebook, YouTube (I have no idea what kind of video Tom embedded in the post below), blogspot, fmylife, Harvardfml, and select Wikipedia articles (including the one on the great firewall of china).
I’m almost having trouble wasting time on the internet; luckily, failblog and the Onion are still accessible. My Google searches are also limited although I was able to access images of the Tiananmen square incident while I was in Beijing.
Interestingly, Google is considering abandoning its Chinese operations.
More interestingly, why isn’t the most morally decadent site on the internet, 4chan, blocked?
Gotta go, angry voices are knocking at my door.
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.
Best Dataset Ever
Posted by charles in college life on December 20, 2009
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):
| Charles | Danny | Duncan | Tom | |
| Mean | 7.53 | 7.08 | 6.93 | 7.19 |
| Median | 7.47 | 7.17 | 7.25 | 7.94 |
| Standard Deviation | 0.900 | 1.99 | 1.84 | 2.37 |
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.
| Charles | Danny | Duncan | Tom | |
| Charles | 1 | |||
| Danny | 0.0758 | 1 | ||
| Duncan | 0.0135 | 0.2899 | 1 | |
| Tom | 0.1032 | 0.1035 | 0.4019 | 1 |
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:
Confirmation
Posted by duncan in Uncategorized on December 15, 2009
It turns out that Charles was right. Here is an e-mail that was sent to someone in the Harvard Society of Physics Students:
———- 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
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/