The last of my semester grades trickled in today, and I can finally say that all of my obligations to spring semester classes have now been fulfilled.  I also have the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing that I’ve managed a 5.0 (of 5.0) semester GPA at MIT.  Whether this is actually repeatable or not remains to be seen.

My down comforter at home is leaking, and so every morning I wake up covered in feathers.  I feel like I’m slowly turning into a duck.

I’m leaving bright and early (5am, yuck) on Saturday morning for Seattle, WA, an event that I am exceptionally excited for, dangling preposition be damned.  My employer is graciously providing subsidized housing for us interns, which also means that (hopefully) there will be a gaggle of enthusiastic nerds to socialize with once I move in to my new living arrangements.  Anyone ever been to Seattle?  I don’t really know anything about the city, but I’ve heard from others that it’s “green and pretty” and “has good coffee.”  I like coffee.

Beyond those things, I’ve mostly been gaining weight and catching up on sleep at home with my family.  When I get bored of that, I dabble a little bit with the new MIT DanceTroupe website that I’m slowly building with the Django web framework.  It will be a thing of beauty when it’s complete, I promise.

I have my last final exam of sophomore year in 15 minutes, so obviously the logical thing to do is to write a quick blog post.

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…

People often complain to me that I don’t update this blog enough.  Considering I haven’t posted anything since last November, this is most likely a fair complaint.  After some long, extended soul searching, and an emotional montage with lots of grainy black-and-white closeups of my face looking “deep”, I’ve decided to just try and write more.  The average quality of my posts might go down, but allow me to simply try to alleviate this dry spell.  My insatiable obsession with perfection shall restrain me no more!

I should deliberately make a mistake to help the process.  Maybe some typo, or unforgivable grammatical sin that would have, in high school, cost me an entire letter grade on an essay.

Its as easy as this.

Would anyone believe if I told them that writing that sentence almost caused me physical pain?  It was worth it though: the bondage of grammatical perfection, relevant content, and post length shall haunt me no more!

For a long time, whenever asked about my religious views, I generally told people I was non-religious. I didn’t want to label myself an atheist, agnostic, rationalist, or anything else, because labels like those always carry so much baggage with them. “You’re an atheist? You probably think all religious people are dumb then,” I can certainly imagine some people thinking. That’s not the idea I want to give anyone. The way I see it, the last thing we need at this point is another group of people who don’t tolerate anyone else.

Fact is, I find a lot of goodness in the world’s religions. I was educated in Catholic private schools for four years of my life, and while I might not have emerged a devout Catholic, I certainly feel like I’ve emerged better for the experience. I might not believe in the beauty and wisdom of an omniscient God, but I do believe in the beauty and wisdom of people, together with all of their flaws and foibles. The Bible, if nothing else, is a great work of literature, full of poignant imagery, comforting verses, and even some sex and violence, if that’s your kind of thing. I’ve had friends tell me things about Hinduism that I’ve kept with me as some of the best advice I’ve ever been given.

I find it saddening to discard all of that, the collective wisdom of billions of people, for the sake of a label.

For now, if anyone were to corner me and force me to label myself, I’d probably say Humanist. I say this only because I stumbled upon the Wikipedia article, and saw the IHEU Minimum Statement on Humanism:

Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.

It made a lot of sense to me, so I felt sort of obligated to call myself a Humanist from then on.  The feeling was a lot like reading the description of a Facebook group, agreeing with it completely, and then feeling obligated to join the group.  I still hesitate to label myself, since labels are for squares and people who don’t stick it to The Man, but if forced to by threat of physical injury, I will now say Humanist.

This month was Burton-Conner’s Annual Apple Bake: a culinary competition between floors that can only really be described as Iron Chef Apple, but with college students. This year, our floor (Conner 2) submitted 43 entries and won $420 in prize money. This is perhaps slightly more interesting when considering that there were 76 total entries, and $500 in prize money to be won. We are a bit enthusiastic about Apple Bake, you see.

I wound up winning first place in entrées for my Apple Bacon Cheddar Omelets, which I finished at the absolute last minute and without recipe. I’m not really a fan of cooking from recipes. The way I see it, when you start cooking, you should probably have an idea of what you want the final product to wind up looking and tasting like. From there, you draw on your skills and ingredients (and fancy kitchen gadgetry) to get there. And so, with 10 minutes remaining before the submission deadline, I pulled out my chopped onions and apples, my smoked cheddar and gouda, and my delicious bacon, and started throwing things into a hot skillet. A few dashes of sea salt and a sprig of parsley later, they were done.

When you learn differential equations, you never learn how to solve just one particular equation. You learn methods, pattern recognition, what to do when you have a square hold and a round peg, and how to draw hundreds of little arrows with remarkable efficiency. Cooking should really be the same way, except maybe direction fields don’t make omelets taste any better at all. I’ve got a bunch of ingredients floating around, and the solution I’m looking for is the tastiest one. Hopefully it’s a stable solution, but not always (soufflé anyone?). If the problem is at all interesting though, it’s probably one you haven’t seen before. Improve, adapt, overcome. Make the best damn omelet the world has ever seen, despite the fact that you ran out of eggs and maybe you don’t have a skillet either. Just because a few recipes happen to call for eggs and a skillet doesn’t mean every omelet needs them. Throw some tofu and cheese on a piece of tinfoil placed over your stovetop.  Blam, instant omelete-esque.  Mmmm…aluminum.

So learn yourself some Laplace transforms, and maybe you’ll cook a bit better.

The fire alarm went off a few days ago, and the firemen didn’t manage to turn off the flashing lights for quite some time. We were allowed to go back into the dorm after a few minutes, but the lights kept flashing. And all of the alarms were emitting a low, crackling noise. Like a wire had been severed somewhere. Not many people had returned yet, since we had just all been let back into the building. As I walked down the almost deserted hallways of my dorm, I thought to myself, “Wow, this would be a pretty good beginning to a zombie movie.”

As a side note, it seems like all of my blog posts are set in “a few days ago.” This is really just code-speak for “some time in the past which is not so far gone that I have forgotten to write about it.”

Imagine if our humble floor in Burton-Conner were the only remaining bastion of humanity, with the rest of campus, nay, the rest of the world overrun by hordes of flesh-craving zombies. Slow-moving, dimwitted zombies, of course, but zombies nonetheless. This being a movie, of course, means that the residents of Conner 2 would all fall into clearly predefined zombie movie stereotypes:

Leader

Someone would clearly have to be the battle-hardened leader of our ragtag band of zombie killers. This person seems a bit cold at first, and might even argue fiercely with the other characters, but ultimately this all stems from a deep desire to fend for the group’s best interests. If this person does end up dying, it is always near the end of the movie at an emotional low.

Big Brother

In any group of friends, there tends to emerge a big brother figure. The Big Brother is, in many ways, similar to the Leader in that he/she feels personally responsible for everyone else in the group. Instead of appearing cold and distant, though, the Big Brother is immediately likable and generally funny. Unfortunately, the Big Brother will almost always die saving one or more of the others in his group, inevitably due to a mistake on their part.

Smart Ass

The Smart Ass functions as the comic relief of the zombie movie, and may or may not actually kill zombies himself (this character is also almost always male, for whatever reason). He has seemingly limitless supply of one-liners and smarmy comebacks, and never hesitates to throw in a healthy dose of sarcasm at inopportune moments either. The Smart Ass is inevitably killed off in an amusing and somehow not tragic death as the movie progresses, since he also gets exponentially more annoying (and less funny) as time goes on.

Eye Candy

An unfortunate reality of most zombie movies is a small host of clueless teenagers, generally of the aesthetically pleasing variety, whose only purpose is to provide for pretty things to look at and a number of special effects laden deaths with satisfying little character development.

Love Interest

An even more unfortunate exception to the Eye Candy character, this person (almost always female, not necessarily true for plain Eye Candy) functions as a girlfriend of sorts for one of the main male characters in the movie.  Because of this, the Love Interest is practically immune to death, as long as the male character remains alive.

Traitor

Whenever someone gets bitten by a zombie in any zombie movie, they will always hide the wound and infection from the rest of the group until it’s too late.  Barring that, someone will end up betraying the group to some evil external group (faceless corporation, Nazis, etc.).  Karma usually operates here, and dictates that the Traitor die a messy and crowd-pleasing death as a result.

After my 6.034 (Artificial Intelligence) class let out a bit early today, I had to make a trip over to the bathroom. Now, in the building (Stata Center) where I have that class, that bathroom (and indeed, the entire building) is very particularly designed, and the stalls in the bathroom are very particularly arranged. It just so happens that the stall that I went to was occupied by another person. I started thinking: what exactly are the considerations that a guy makes when he’s picking out a bathroom stall? Do these conditions change when choosing a urinal? These questions, inevitably, led to myriad other equally nonsensical formulations and conjectures about how people go about walking and sitting the way they do.

As with any imperfect solution to a complex problem, our path finding algorithms occasionally fail us. On my way to 7.012 (Biology) lecture, I noticed a person stop dead on his tracks, and after a brief pause, let out a long, frustrated “ffffffffff-”, the beginnings of a drawn out expletive seemingly expressed through the deflation of his hopes of getting to class on time. Often, the problem isn’t finding an optimal (or any) path to a destination, but finding an optimal seating position in a class, or the least awkward urinal in the bathroom. Surely, I can’t sit too close to the front, and risk looking overly enthusiastic about learning, nor can I sit too far back and look like a deadbeat who’s only there to catch up on the sleep he missed because he was playing Super Smash Bros. And surely, sitting immediately adjacent to someone I don’t know is right out, unless, of course, that someone is an attractive individual whom I might want to introduce myself to. If I arrive late to class, I certainly cannot walk all the way across the room to sit; I take the nearest available seat instead.

It’s an interesting question for me, sitting here between classes and watching people pass by: finding destinations, empty seats, power outlets for their exhausted laptop batteries, the best tastiness/(time*cost) ratio for a late breakfast, the most amusing company for an evening’s debauchery.

When you boil everything down, people, in all of their irrationalities and idiosyncrasies, do actually operate based on real motivations and principles. I make no guarantees as to the quality or consistency of said motivations and principles, but behavior is generated by something. Even “random” behavior in people isn’t truly random. Tell a room full of people to arrange themselves randomly, and they wind up spacing themselves out, instead of truly randomly. +10 points to the first person who points out that reference. Note: points cannot be redeemed for cash, food, favors, or just about anything except self-empowerment.

Or maybe I’m just thinking too hard.

I’ve recently been involved in a relatively non-trivial undertaking known as Tech Theater. For those of you not hip to the jive, Tech Theater is a small production that is put on for the incoming freshmen during their Orientation that’s written and performed by current MIT students. Its purpose is to inform them about all the ways they can avoid drinking themselves to death, and all sorts of fun and family-friendly things of that nature. Somewhere between the free dinner at one meeting, and discussions about the implications of cricket death, we all decided that the introductory video for our little play should be shot and edited in the style of the Friends intro. We’re actually going to frolic in the moat. Frolic. In the moat. On camera. Overall, I’m pretty thoroughly amused by the whole venture, and also pretty excited about getting a chance to act completely ridiculous in front of most of the new freshman class. I need to start things off on the right foot, don’t I?

It’s both comforting and somewhat disconcerting (you resolve that contradiction, I’m lazy) that summer is almost over. It’s been a pretty unusual summer for me, as far as summers go; it’s been my first summer away from home, and also the first time that I’ve worked full-time for any real length of time. I’m going to miss having up to 40 hours a week to devote to improving Timegrid, but I think it will be refreshing to move on to spending my time on other things (like classes, and stuff). There’s also the idea of people that I know (!) and like (!!) actually living on the floor, which is exciting. Perhaps even more exciting is the idea of people I don’t know moving into Burton-Conner, i.e. the freshmen, that I can corrupt enlighten.

I had the opportunity to see the Transformers movie today with a few friends, and while I’m not going to review the movie here (it was awesome, ’nuff said), it inspired a few thoughts that I thought I’d post about. Basically, if this post bores, offends, or otherwise intrudes on your quality of living, you can blame Michael Bay and his ridiculously cool movie.

Do you ever watch a movie where the characters, who are otherwise just regular shmucks trying to make it through another day, get tangled up into a conflict larger than most people see in a lifetime? Frodo never asked to leave the Shire. He seemed pretty happy right where he was, but he ventures out; he risks his life for something bigger than himself. People in movies like that go through trials and torments that are only tolerable to witness because we have a the protection of reality, a thin screen dividing Frodo and his ring from our safe, air-conditioned seats and overpriced popcorn. Those giant robots that tore through buildings like so much tissue paper are placed safely in the realm of impossibility. Even movies where the element of fantasy takes a backseat to the element of realism are thus tamed.

Good movies erase that boundary, if only for an hour or two.  We can all easily sit back and point out all the reasons why giant autonomous robots from Cybertron could never crash land on our planet.  It’s more fun to lower your defenses for a while though, suspend your disbelief, and for just a little while, live vicariously through the characters on the screen trying desperately to save their world from extinction.  It’s a strange and exhausting sensation for me, to feel all of these big, noble emotions.  Maybe we all want to taste, even for a second, what it feels like to have something more to worry about than whether we’re going to finish our next project on time.

When I walk out of a movie like The Lord of the Rings or Transformers, I always feel exhausted.  More than that though, I always have trouble going back to my life, unenhanced by special effects and unplagued by absolute evils, and not feeling a little insignificant.  How can I possibly have any real problems compared to those characters?  I don’t have any worlds to save, evil rings to destroy, or Persians to defeat in glorious, slow-motion combat.  All I have are my comparatively inane worries that I’m not getting enough sleep, that I need to make myself dinner tonight.  Ironically enough, my life is the one that winds up feeling contrived and artificial.

The feeling never lasts too long though.  I guess I just go back to my regular life and get used to it.

Today marks a momentous occasion in the history of this little blog: the first post ever with embedded Flickr photos! You’ll have to try your best to contain your excitement; we wouldn’t want any ecstatic screaming at this hour of the night now, would we?

Browsing Facebook one lazy evening, I came across a Marketplace listing for a used Fender American Stratocaster for $450. I wasn’t actively looking for a new guitar, but this was potentially a tremendous deal, and if I were to buy another guitar, it would have been a Stratocaster anyways. My interest piqued, I e-mailed the poster and opened the appropriate lines of communication. After meeting him and playing the guitar in person, I wrote a check, and came away the proud owner of a beautiful guitar. Curiously enough, I can’t seem to quite pinpoint the exact model of the guitar, since the serial number is missing. I suspect that it has either worn away, or the neck was replaced at some point. Anyways, here are the specifications:

• White Fender Stratocaster
• 3 Rio Grande pickups
• Vintage tremolo, temporarily stopped for more sustain
• 21 frets
• One-piece maple soft-V contour neck

And the promised pictures:

If anyone needs me, I’ll be channeling Stevie Ray Vaughan and wailing away in my room (which, incidentally, I moved into about a week and a half ago).  I’d post pictures of it, but that would oversaturate this post with pixels, and they’d start dripping all over the place and everything would just get messy.