All of these things are what I would consider either side-effects of leadership, or properties of good leaders.

I think we could all agree that the act of making someone a leader is a specific and definite action. Think back on every election or inauguration that you’ve ever seen. There is a moment where some previously unimportant person is through some magical means made the leader of some group. What really happens at that moment? You can’t instantly force someone to be persuasive. You can’t force someone’s goals to align with the group’s. You can’t force the rest of the world to acknowledge a positive contribution. So what wizardry, at that very moment, suddenly makes them a leader?

The zen of leadership is that being the leader of a group means that you are accountable for the group’s actions.

You are the person that people blame when something goes wrong, or when something doesn’t happen. You can delegate tasks to subordinates, of course, but ultimately if they fail then it is your own failure as well. The flip side to this is that, in the purest sense, a leader isn’t directly tasked with actually doing anything.

I would argue that the ideal leader of an ideal group does nothing at all.

So when the President of the United States is inaugurated, or when a small group of students all subconsciously elect the one poor schmuck among them to be “the responsible one,” there is no magical process that instantly makes that person the confident, persuasive visionary that we often associate with a position of leadership. What really happens is that we have chosen the person to blame when things go wrong, hopefully because we trust them to make it right when they do. Nobody wants wars to break out, or projects to run behind schedule, or budgets to run over, but because these things are so inevitable, we need some correcting force to make sure that those problems aren’t the end of us all.

Leadership is about being the one to blame when things go wrong. It is about making up the difference between that perfect ideal of completely competent people acting completely selflessly, and the reality of imperfect people all pulling at their own individual goals and interests.

One of the points I made during the first class was that programming is more about a conversation with other people rather than a conversation with a machine.

When one first starts learning to program, it really does feel like you are somehow talking to a computer. You type some words in a text file, save it, and when you run it, your silicon companion will either helpfully respond with the correct answer or squawk at you irritably and tell you to try again. For small programs that never grow beyond one-off scripts and toy projects, this is about the highest level of discourse that really ever gets reached.

As your projects grow in both the amount of work that needs to be done and in the time it takes to complete them, it becomes increasingly important to write your code not just as instructions to a computer, but as documentation to anyone else working on that code. You are just as much, if not more, telling the computer what to do as you are telling the next person to read the code what you mean to do. Sometimes, the next person to read the code might even be yourself in the future, well after you have forgotten the thought process behind the original code.

I’ve found that thinking of programming this way has inevitably led me to write clearer, better code and clearer, better comments. I imagine a colleague sitting next to me and then I pretend that I’m not allowed to communicate in any way other than the contents of the text file that I am editing. If the code is obvious, then my intentions are clear. When I do something that looks funny, or pause to think about a decision (perhaps some trade-off or compromise), I imagine the furrowed brow and confused expression on my friend’s face. These are then quickly remedied with an illuminating comment or bit of documentation.

Writing clear, understandable code isn’t a once-over kind of process after the fact, and it doesn’t have to be difficult either. I’ve found that by keeping my imaginary friend in the back of my head while I do my work, the output is inevitably better for myself and for others. Or maybe this is all just an excuse to justify having an imaginary friend.

And so, what wisdom can I impart, you ask?

Trader Joe’s Frozen Tamales. They are very tasty, and very convenient on a late night after all other dining options have closed. Always keep a few reasonably healthy, tasty, and filling food options in your freezer. “Break glass in case of emergency” if you will, although I’m sure your kitchen-mates will be displeased if you choose to smash your fridge open in the event of a hunger pang.

A few other things:

• Dress up every now and then, even if you feel terrible. A lot of times, if you feel tired or upset, dressing to look the part will only make things worse. As much as your outside reflects your inside, sometimes the inside can follow the outside too.
• Get off campus at least once in a while; it is healthy and will make you less crazy and more happy.
• No matter how many friends you think you have, there are usually about 10 times that many people on campus that you will never get to know, but would make wonderful friends with you if you ever met them. Moral of the story is to always meet new people, especially outside of your regular social circles.
• Everyone and everything will clamor for your time: clubs, classes, friends, enemies, girlfriends, boyfriends, hobbies, jobs, and a million other things. Learn to say no. Consciously taking time for yourself, even if it’s just 5 minutes in a day to listen to some music, catch up with an old friend, or even just dancing/singing in your room alone to a silly song, is invaluable to your mental health and happiness. “Me” time is a precious commodity.
• Sleep.

Oh, and greek yogurt. Buy it and eat it, especially the honey-flavored kind. Mmm.

We had a concert this past Sunday for our 21M.303 (Writing in Tonal Forms I) class, where the fantastic QX String Quartet performed our humble compositions for us. The project was to write a minuet & trio for string quartet in idiomatic 18th century style, a goal I think all of us in the class achieved quite well. My minuet & trio pushed a bit against a few rules, a few dissonances sounded more 19th century than 18th century, but overall I (and I hope my professor as well) was pleased with the final result. A classmate and I recorded the concert, and recordings will find themselves on the Internet sometime in the near future.

Thanksgiving is coming up. Does anyone else notice that it’s basically a week late this year? I thought it was always the third Thursday of the month. Apparently somebody decided that it would be the fourth Thursday of November for 2008. I had a friend who actually booked her flight home incorrectly because of that faulty assumption. Is there some committee somewhere that’s in charge of deciding these things? Are there some people somewhere who sit around and vote on when Thanksgiving will be? The National Committee on Holidays and Funtimes, I would call it. I wonder if they have lobbyists. Could I lobby for a new holiday? Do companies lobby for holidays? Coca-Cola Day? Christmas, brought to you by Samsung?

I couldn’t think of a simple circuit that would implement the desired behavior.  Clearly, neither putting the switches in series nor putting them in parallel would work.

The strange thing is, after observing the behavior of the switches for a while (much to the bewilderment of my suitemates), I realized that the state of the light was a simple XOR of the positions of the switches.  My bathroom has an XOR gate built in to it.  I wonder what would happen if I somehow “wired” together enough bathrooms.  Could I make arbitrary combinational logic circuits?  I’d need one other type of gate…

• In lieu of a laundry hamper, a towel wrapped around your clothes functions quite perfectly.
• Looking well-dressed is as easy as getting well-fitting, nice basics (good jeans, some t-shirts, some dress shirts) and recombining them endlessly.  This need not (and should not) be expensive.
• When dancing hip-hop, I find it helpful to focus on two things: where you go, and how you get there.
• Teaching someone to give good massages is the gift that keeps on giving.
• Backstreet Boys.
• Happy hour sushi is made of rainbows and unicorns.
• When at a loss for content, make a list.

The worst part about writing a random list post is that I’ve never really figured out a good way to end it.  Oh well.

So, without further ado, I present the Tang-Nicholson System for Procrastination Classification.

Types of procrastination are given two attributes: class and level. Procrastination class can take on one of the following three values:

Class 1

Procrastination from a productive task by either not doing anything at all, or doing something purely recreational, e.g. playing video games, reading a book, or spending time with friends.

Class 2

Procrastination from a productive task by performing other productive tasks that are lower in priority, e.g. doing the dishes, running errands, or doing assignments due at a later date.

Class 3

Procrastination from a productive task by focusing and obsessing over details related to the task, e.g. learning LaTeX in order to typeset an essay, copying problem sets to make them neater, or obsessively refactoring code instead of finishing features.

Procrastination level is a positive integer that, in relative terms, describes how far removed from the actual productive task an activity is. Since procrastination can be composed with itself, this metric measures the level of nesting. For example, if one’s original task was writing an essay, imagine the following procrastination composition: write essay, learn LaTeX to write essay, configure Emacs for editing LaTeX, submit patch for bug in Emacs. The final step, submitting a patch for a bug in Emacs, is a class 3, level 3 form of procrastination. In fact, all of these steps are class 3, with level ranging from level 1 for learning LaTeX to level 3 for the last step.

And there you have it: a simple, concise way to precisely define how you are wasting your time.

Quick, what level of procrastination was I at when I first thought of this system instead of doing my psets?

In my tragic shampoo-less state, I didn’t know what to do.  Go without shampoo?  Could I substitute body wash for shampoo?  What if my hair dries out from the soap?  That would have been tragic.  I’m fairly certain that all my friends would have left me if I used anything less than amazing shampoo on my hair.

Mason, we all talked, and we’ve decided that your hair is simply not moisturized enough for us to associate with you.

The horror.

A sudden realization.  A spark of insight that grew from some dark, unexplored corner of my mind.  What could it be?  Dig deeper, Mason, follow your instincts.  Yes!  I’ve got it!  The apartment came with complimentary conditioning shampoo!  Now where did I put it?  This drawer here, yes!  Luxuriously clean hair can once again be mine!

It wasn’t much, but it tided me over until I made the trek over to the local mall and restocked on my preferred shampoo.  I can have friends again.

Somehow though, I managed to inspire myself to put on some house music and start dancing.  I love house music, and I’m trying to learn to house (dance style), but it’s rather difficult to not look like an idiot unless you’re pretty good already.  Luckily, my roommate was out, so looking like an idiot was not an issue.  I don’t have dance classes for the next three weeks, so I figured that it’s probably a good thing to dance on my own to keep in shape and keep my skills nice and skillful.  For the next two hours, I switched up the music a bit (old school funk, nothing like it) and managed to practice popping, locking, and some breaking, and felt infinitely better than how I felt before I started dancing.

The joy of motion, the ecstasy of rhythm, there’s nothing like it.

So next time you’re feeling down, throw on some awesome music and just let yourself go.

A quick shower afterwards, and I feel content and happy.

Executive summary:

• I’m working as a software engineering intern this summer.
• Heaps are cool.
• Django is cool.
• Sleeping enough actually does help you learn better.

Actual post to come soon, I promise…