As you may be aware, India is full of trash; when you’re finished unwrapping something you simply throw it out the window or discard it in the nearest gutter. It looks like there are two equilibria here: one where everyone litters and one where only a few people do. The amount of litter here is astonishing and it’s taken me a month to get used to just dropping things whenever I’m finished with them (don’t get me started on “Be the change:” this problem’s bigger than me and I use trash bins when they’re around.
Most of the trash here is simply burned, after it’s been picked through by dogs and cows (have only seen a few people digging through the trash here; there aren’t any giant piles of trash). Shop owners keep the areas in front of their shops clean, but the same can’t be said of houses; there are some really nice houses behind Vidya Bhawan that have ugly, dirty streets.
There are clear public benefits to responsible disposal of trash; property values rise, the air’s less polluted (and less smelly). Furthermore if I’m disposing trash on your property and you’re picking it up and putting it back on mine we’re both wasting time. But most people in the West pay for garbage disposal, not the other way around.
When did we move to this equilibrium? I’m pretty sure social approval, and maybe littering laws, are the driver behind the no-litter equilibrium; what’s to stop someone from just dumping their trash in the middle of the night? The only successful ad campaign I can think of in this area is the “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign, which was hugely successful in cutting down on highway littering. The amount of littering I do depends on how much littering I think you’re doing as well as the convenience of disposing of it. It’s possible that rising incomes won’t solve this problem, as it’s a collective action issue. Homeowners associations and malls might be able to solve it, and shop owners can keep their shops clean but I doubt there will be much change otherwise.
Five types of shitty question askers
Kevin Burke | 3/10/10
Tyler Cowen blogged about this today, so I better publish this piece, which I wrote two months ago, when I was really fed up with bad question askers after the ITAB trip, but it never made its way onto the Forum. Here it is, verbatim.
Five Types of Question Askers to Avoid
Kevin Burke
Pot, meet kettle:
The person who just wants the speaker to confirm something that they already believe. You can tell this type because they ask leading yes or no questions. “Do you believe that global warming is going to destroy our way of living?”
The person who just wants to show off how much they know to everyone else. You can tell this type because they start off their question talking about something they did last year, or by mentioning some news story or obscure point. When there are only two people left in the room who are paying attention to the answer, this question asker has done their job. “I did a research project on abortions in China last year, and I just wanted to know what you think is going to happen when the policy in Sichuan province changes next year,” or “I traveled to your native country last year, and had the chance to meet rural politician X, what do you think him?”
The question rambler. In the face of silence, many people become nervous and feel the need to continue speaking. They ask a perfectly good question, then try to justify the question and discuss what they think, then discuss what they think the speaker will say, with a few “um”s sprinkled in for good measure, until she’s been speaking for a minute or more and the speaker is confused.
The activist who launches into a three minute long diatribe, which the speaker won’t touch because it would force her to accept the activist’s false premise. These come in two flavors: the disjointed activist who has spent his fair share of time wearing a sandwich board and standing on the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft, and the kind who are generally in tune with “Barack Obama is a Muslim who is working with the Islamic high command. In three days he’s going to suspend the government and turn everything over to the Saudi’s. How do you plan to respond?”
The person who asks a factual question that has an easy answer on Wikipedia, or in the syllabus. Usually, this question asker steps forward when everyone’s packing up their things and the teacher asks, “Are there any more questions?”
Fortunately, there are good remedies for these types of dumb questions. The first one is to raise the price of asking a question. Because you’re using everyone’s time by asking one, asking a question generates a negative externality, so charging $1 per question is not unreasonable. If $1 is steep, pool together money with people at your table. Since you’re using their time by asking the question, if they don’t want to contribute money to hear the answer that’s probably a good sign that your question’s not very good. We can also remove the ability of people to signal when they ask questions by having everyone who wants to ask a question write it down and then pass their question two to three seats to the left. Alternatively, we can present all questions to the speaker, and ask the speaker to answer the ones he or she feels like answering. Furthermore, if you’re ever up in front of an audience and someone asks a bad question, be polite, but curt.
How to choose where to eat in an unfamiliar city
Kevin Burke | 3/10/10
When I’m in a foreign city I use these proxies to find a place to eat:
No outside advertising in English: +1 point. Generally, ads in English mean a place is catering to tourists, and thus likely to try and steer me to the non-spicy items, etc.
More than half full with locals: +3 points. This is great as well because then I can just look around and order whatever everyone else is having.
More than half full with tourists: -2 points. I know I talk a lot about signaling, but this is really more for spice, quality and price reasons, not “I want to be different than the crowd” reasons.
The restaurant serves only one item: +3 points. If you serve only one item it has to be at least decent, or you’ll go out of business. Furthermore this removes any ambiguity over what to order, and increases the speed with which you’re served.
The restaurant’s located on the main tourist drag: -3 points: If the rents are high, it’ll have to serve everyone, and cater to the lowest common denominator.
The restaurant’s in a guidebook: +1 point, although this one’s harder to evaluate; I’m not sure what criteria they’re using, and their recommendations might be good within each price range. The guidebooks are more likely to recommend places along the main tourist walk.
Unfortunately, saying “Just bring me something good, and spicy” doesn’t work too well. When I was in Nainital, I went to two different places a night; it’s too cheap not to. I’m looking for suggestions.
How to get tons of reading done
Kevin Burke | 3/9/10
I’m about to finish my fifth book in 5 weeks (What Works in Development? edited by Bill Easterly and Jessica Cohen), in addition to reading a higher number of academic papers and the same number of RSS feeds that I usually read. There are a few good reasons for this:
1) Amazon Kindle app for iPhone: I read on the largest possible font, so there are only two or three sentences on the page at a time. The relevant unit of accomplishment is flipping this (small) page, so I can read a little or a lot and still feel like I’m getting reading done. Furthermore, with this small screen I don’t skip text and backtrack nearly as much as I do when I’m reading paper. Reading on a digital screen makes me less sleepy. There also aren’t any distractions, like my phone is when I’m reading a paper book.
Another nice thing about the Kindle is links within the book. I read more footnotes because you can skip easily to the footnotes and back to the main text by touching the screen. This is something that’s even easier to do on the iPhone than on the Kindle.
On a side note, I’ve purchased books for the first time in almost two years; it’s impossible to get paper copies of the books I’d like to read while I’m here.
2) No Internet at home: I’ve had tons of experience dealing with this one; queue up a whole bunch of tabs, print out PDFs of each page and save them to a flash drive. In addition to saving time surfing (no actual reading time,just deciding whether or not to read things later), I finish a higher percentage of my reading and I’m not as distracted because there’s no information coming in, like new RSS feeds or email/text messages. Any links I open from stories I’ve just read get saved with a “Unable to load page” page in Chrome; the next time I get on a wireless connection these open automatically. Same goes with emails, which I compose and then sit in my outbox for days at a time.
3) More free time. Everyone says that liberal arts schools ‘teach you how to think’ but also stress the irrelevance of the course material. Classes are a distraction; most of the reading is stuff that isn’t too helpful.
In short, I’m enjoying higher productivity now but all three of these are going to disappear once I get home; I won’t read on my phone when I can get free books from the library, I struggle to shut off the Internet voluntarily and next semester I’ll have thesis and job applications in addition to coursework. I’m not optimistic about maintaining this high level of productivity.
I read a bunch of really cool stuff this weekend. The highlights:
This Salon interview is old, but the gist is that a professor realized that as young, innocent children most victims of sexual abuse don?t feel that traumatized while the abuse is happening. In contrast to an event like a rape, where the victim immediately feels terror, pain and shame, and does not consent to the event the feeling most often expressed by child sex abuse victims (at the time of the abuse) is confusion (the upset and anxiety comes when they grow older). So when sexual abuse is described by the media and popular culture as a traumatic event, sexual abuse victims believe that what happened to them doesn?t fit the bill, and don?t tell the relevant authorities. The author also believes that repressed memories are a myth; around the world, people remember traumatic events vividly. Because these events are not really traumatic, people forget about them and then recall them when asked later, which is natural, and has nothing to do with repression. Note that the author is not condoning or excusing sexual abuse; merely observing that for many children, the event is not traumatic or painful (at the time), merely confusing, and because their experience doesn?t match up with the description of sexual abuse in the media they don?t come forward, even though the crime is horrific.
Colin Marshall shares thoughts on interviewing after having done 100 of them. In essence, his advice is to go with the flow of the conversation, don?t prepare questions (but do your research) and ask questions about things about which you are genuinely interested in reading the answer. I keep meaning to start interviewing people; I should start right now but I doubt I will.
Here?s a good review of Center City, the new gigantic development in the center of the Strip in Vegas. I agree that it lacks personality, and two bits in particular reminded me of my own experience there (excepting the suicide bit):
?I start to feel claustrophobic and duck out of the event. For a certain type of person, Vegas is a non-stop party. For me, it induces a kind of persistent low-grade anxiety. There?s something dystopic about the place generally, and CityCenter is starting to feel like the world of Blade Runner come to life. I head back to my room, shut the black-out curtains and lie in bed. More people commit suicide in Las Vegas than in any other city in the United States.?
[?]
?Realistically, this place is as much an artifice as anything on the Strip, a re-imagining of a 19th-century saloon, complete with polished bar, antique typography, Edison bulbs. Why, then, does it feel so much more honest? Because its aesthetic is filtered through a contemporary sensibility? Because it seems a natural part of a vibrant neighborhood? Is this all bullshit I invent to make myself feel more comfortable? Could the real problem with Las Vegas ? my real problem with Las Vegas ? be that its commercial imperatives are simply too transparent??
Here’s an illustrated post describing 10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone. I don?t enjoy talking on the phone; on days like my birthday when lots of people call I get stressed out. It must show because people say I sound very funny when I talk on the phone.
Many Republican governors made a big show out of repealing the stimulus but as Jonathan Chait points out, Republican states generally get more federal money in than they give to the federal government in tax revenue than Democratic states. He also profiles Mitch Daniels, whose Indiana country bumpkin-ism is phony, as a former pharmaceutical company CEO, but who has generally governed Indiana from the middle, expanding health care and increasing taxes. My preferred Republican candidate is still Jon Huntsman, but he won?t be back on the national stage until around 2014, probably.
Voluntourism: Overseas volunteer trips often hurt more than they help
Kevin Burke | 2/28/10
Daniela Papi has a great post on the many problems with ?voluntourism,? or traveling to a foreign country to do volunteer work. She points out that most volunteers don?t know much about the local culture, you don?t speak the language and don?t have relevant skills, and this makes it very difficult to find work that?s useful. Given these constraints, it?s entirely possible that the work you?re doing overseas (for example, painting or building houses) is displacing local labor, and that the money you?re spending can be put to much better use.
?I really did travel with a tour company that decided to allow us to paint the school that was on their bike route. We painted it poorly, I must say, as we rushed to complete it in one day (and most of us felt too tired to put in a big effort). We probably spent $200 on paint (25% of which we dropped on the floor). The project was in rural Thailand, and $200 could have probably bought a lot of educational resources, hired a few teachers for a month, or done a list of other things which would have added more educational value than our patchy blue paint job. If they insisted on painting, if they had instead funded $3000 towards a locally identified educational need (for example, a weekly life-skills training course), plus bought $200 worth of paint, at least then our combined efforts would have been more than just the blue paint on the floor.?
Voluntourism creates an unhealthy culture:
?As Saundra has told us over and over again and as I have learned through seeing the negative effects of an unbridled tourism culture of giving things away ?to the poor people?, giving things to people is never going to solve their problems. Instead, it can destroy local markets, create community jealousies, and create a culture of dependency.?
Tour companies don?t monitor projects effectively:
?A tour company in India allowed tourists to hand out goats to families on their tours. In the middle of the tour, a person from a nearby village came and told the director that the man who had been put in charge of choosing which poor families should get the goats had been charging the families for the goats for years. The tour company had been making their English speaking tour guide rich, were not helping ?the poorest of the poor? that they claimed to be, and had furthered corruption and mistrust in the village.?
?There are many orphanages in Cambodia which take volunteers to teach English. Some come for a few weeks, others for a few days. When they leave, the classes have no teacher, there is no curriculum to ensure that the students aren?t learning ?Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes? every day, and the school is not better able to solve its own problems in the future because of the volunteer?s visit. If skilled teachers had spent time teaching English teachers English, they would have improved the system at least slightly, but sadly, everyone just wants to pet the cute kids.?
Last but not least, the tours ?foster moral imperialism? among volunteers:
This one is the biggest problem I think, but the least talked about. We assume, because we come from wealthier places with better education systems, that we can come into any new place without knowing much about the culture or the people, and we can fix things. We can?t! THEY, the people who live there and know the place well, can. Our job in the development world can and should be to support them in doing so. So, we can?t assume we can come do it for them and ?save the babies? by visiting an orphanage for a few hours on our trip to India. And we sure shouldn?t think that our time is oh so valuable that we should fundraise money to pay for OUR flights to go paint a school poorly. My job, in running a tour operation, is to educate travelers on at least these two points: improvements take time, and the people we are visiting have just as much?if not more?to teach us as we have to teach them.
The bottom line is that ?voluntourists? are more interested in showing that they care than in actually helping make a difference. This is one reason why I could never be a college admissions officer; I would reject outright any student that wrote about this sort of work in glowing terms (and I know many do).
I was pretty careful in vetting organizations at the beginning of the trip, and I know that the organization I?m working for does things the right way. I don?t have any illusions about the value of the work I?m doing. I tend to think of the main point of my trip as spending time traveling, learning about a different culture and trying to learn several specific skills.
It became clear very quickly that I don?t know much about the culture, and I definitely don?t know enough Hindi to get by. I do have some useful skills; I?ve been spending more than my fair share of time doing things for the NGO that I am good at, in particular redesigning their website to attract more money in donations (the revenue from which, when complete, will far exceed the cost of the plane flight), and writing grant proposals in English.
Traveling to a foreign country is an excellent experience and I recommend it, if you or your parents have the means. The longer you can stay the better, but even if you can only go for one week, don?t pay for one of these trips though. Aim for one of the smaller cities, then a month before you leave, buy a phrasebook and practice. Once you get there, rent a bike/car and get out into the countryside, eat the local food and try your best to make conversation.
Save the planet, increase workforce satisfaction, increase productivity by hiring better managers
Kevin Burke | 2/26/10
Two economists just completed a huge worldwide survey on management practices. A team of MBA’s went to firms and interviewed them on their management practices, generating scores in three different categories (Incentives, Monitoring, and Targets) and then using the data to draw a whole bunch of conclusions about management. Everything in here is correlation (it’s not certain which way the causation runs) but when you generate enough correlations, it gives you an idea of the importance of good management, in a Bayesian sense.
GDP and good management practices are highly correlated (R^2 of 0.81). That is, countries with high GDP are also likely to have firms with good management practices. Greece scores even worse than India and Brazil on firm management. Portugal is just slightly ahead of India and Brazil. Their low scores can be attributed in part to government intervention in the labor market.
Improved reallocation accounts for a large percentage of the difference. That is, the market identifies more efficient firms and allows them to grow more rapidly in countries like the USA. Competition is highly important for this process, and also to weed out inefficient firms. It’s more important to look at the bottom of the distribution than the top to determine which countries have the best management; countries that allow inefficient firms to hang around score poorly.
Higher management scores are correlated with better performance at the firm level. A one standard-deviation increase in management correlates with a 38 percent increase in sales per employee.
Larger firms have better management. On the surface this may refute the Peter Principle, but it tends to suggest that smaller firms with better management out-grow other small firms with bad management. Over time, if a firm stays the same size perhaps management falls.
At the firm level, better management is associated with improved health care outcomes, employee satisfaction, and energy efficiency. Note to shareholder activists: Promote better management!
Labor market regulation hinders incentives management. At least half of incentives management is the ability to remove/improve low-performing workers, pay for performance and change the workstaff’s hours.
In terms of classes of ownership, private equity companies have the best management, followed by dispersed shareholder ownership. Government has the worst management, followed closely by family firms with a in-family CEO, firms still owned by the founders, and firms owned by private individuals. I was surprised to see that firms owned by the founder (in 100-5000 person companies) perform so poorly. The authors suggest that necessary management skills for a start-up don’t transfer well to necessary skills for a 100-5000 person firm.
Management practices diffuse slowly over time. Managers are not well informed about how good their own management practices are and which areas need improvement (ha! Maybe there’s a role for consultants after all.
All in all these suggest that one of the best things we can do for development is try to transfer good management practices to developing nations, either in the form of FDI or through education. There was a great speaker at the Ath last year whose firm provided business guidance to small companies in Mexico and helped them grow.
Another experiment by the same group took a random group of textile firms in India and provided them with free management consulting. Not only did performance grow in the firms provided the consulting, but they also said the reason that they didn’t implement the changes sooner was because they were not aware of good management practices.
Data collection is an underrated skill – this analysis was only possible because these guys arranged surveys of thousands of firms in 40 different countries. The impressiveness is in the dataset, not in the analysis; same goes for Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s This Time is Different, which I’m currently reading. It’s usually lumped in with science or statistics but it’s something people should know how to do (and analyze)
Two articles today show how difficult it is to maintain good incentives in poor countries. The first was from Madagascar, one of a handful of countries in Africa which was exempt from U.S. tariffs under a special program, the AGOA program. The textile industry in Madagascar was thriving, employing over 100,000 workers and also employing hundreds of firms that supplied the raw inputs to the textile shops. The AGOA ran out at the end of 2009, forcing thousands in Madagascar and the surrounding countries to find other work. The results have not been pretty; there have been riots in the streets, and increased stress on profits in other professions, like street sales.
Ostensibly, Congress ended Madagascar’s inclusion in the program because of a military coup in March. But there isn’t really much evidence that imposing sanctions on the workers has had or will have any effect on the authoritarian leadership. Indeed these sanctions tend to hit the working classes much more than they hit the people in charge. Growth and good governance go hand in hand, but it doesn’t make sense to kill a country’s growth because the government changed.
Robert Strauss, head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Madagascar, told IRIN that a quarter of the jobs in the formal economy were dependent on AGOA, and the reintroduction of US import duties of up to 34 percent had made keeping factories open unprofitable.
The rapid decline of the textile industry was also having a knock-on effect in other countries in the region, including Mauritius, Swaziland, Lesotho and South Africa, where many of the materials used in Madagascar’s textile factories, such as zips, were produced, Strauss said.
[...]
Fabien Rakotonirina, a textile factory machinist who lost his job in December 2010, told IRIN: “Here on the street there is not enough profit. In the factory I earned 10,000 ariary ($4.65) a day, now I earn 6,000 ($2.80).”
The second story is from India, whose farmers this year will produce less rice per hectare than Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The Indian government has long subsidized the use of different types of fertilizer in agricultural production, which has by and large stimulated crop yields and reduced India’s need to import food. As government revenues wax and wane, subsidies have gone up and down – but the urea (a type of fertilizer) manufacturers are politically powerful and have prevented the urea subsidy from being touched. Because urea is so much cheaper than other fertilizers and nutrients, farmers are spreading way more urea on their crops than is recommended (32-to-1 ratios of nitrogen to potassium, which should be about 4-to-1) and the soil quality is deteriorating. As a result India may soon have to increase its dependence on importing food.
India has been providing farmers with heavily subsidized fertilizer for more than three decades. The overuse of one type?urea?is so degrading the soil that yields on some crops are falling and import levels are rising. So are food prices, which jumped 19% last year…Farmers spread the rice-size urea granules by hand or from tractors. They pay so little for it that in some areas they use many times the amount recommended by scientists, throwing off the chemistry of the soil, according to multiple studies by Indian agricultural experts…The government has subsidized other fertilizers besides urea. In budget crunches, subsidies on those fertilizers have been reduced or cut, but urea’s subsidy has survived. That’s because urea manufacturers form a powerful lobby, and farmers are most heavily reliant on this fertilizer, making it a political hot potato to raise the price.
These are both examples that demonstrate the fragility of good incentives and growth, and the power of special interests and far away people to destroy it. Throwing money or sanctions at these problems is not very helpful, but encouraging trade and denying special interests are. Politics always has winners and losers; the winners here are textile manufacturers in America and other countries, and urea manufacturers, and the losers are producers in Madagascar, taxpayers in the US (who bear the cost of the subsidy as well as the market price of the food) and farmers in India.
Good writing in The Count of Monte Cristo
Kevin Burke | 2/25/10
I’m almost finished rereading The Count of Monte Cristo, one of my favorite books. It involves a prison escape, buried treasure, delicious revenge and a reversal of status. One thing I’ve noticed now is how egotistical the Count is: taking pleasure in others’ misfortune, being convinced of his complete superiority over everyone else, believing that he is a messenger of God, sent to deliver justice for a crime committed twenty-five years hence. However the other characters are so evil that he’s totally justified.
I wanted to share some good quotes from the book. Abbe Faria, a priest locked up in prison for 15 years, is asked by Dantes, “What would you not have accomplished if you were free?” and replies,
“Possibly nothing at al; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated into a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced-from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination.”
Here’s another one, about the career-driven M. de Villefort and society:
Ordinarily M. de Villefort made and returned very few visits. His wife visited for him, and this was the received thing in the world, where the weighty and multifarious occupations of the magistrate were accepted as an excuse for what was really only calculated pride, a manifestation of professed superiority – in fact, the application of the axiom, “Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you,” an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the Greeks, “Know thyself,” a knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous science of knowing others
Kumbulgarh is a giant fort, in the middle of nowhere, on top of a plateau, with huge walls and a series of gates and walls leading up to a castle on a hill on the plateau. Given the fortifications and technology at the time I guessed it would have taken around twenty invaders for every defender to storm the thing. Which begs the question, why would any invading army bother capturing the fort? Just surround the whole plateau and steal all the food and messengers coming in, and you?ve effectively captured all of the land. For a fort to be effective, everyone must have had their huts/houses inside, but there wasn?t that much room on the top of the plateau, to support an army or otherwise. Sure, giant fortifications can keep people out but they can also make it really tough to maneuver.
There?s a passage in one of the Michael Crichton books that talks about the eerie silence in the Middle Ages, when there are no buzzing airplanes, cars or electronics emitting ambient noise. Crichton?s wrong on this point, because there are always animals around, and stuff like the wind that rustles trees, but it gets noticeably quiet when you are out in rural areas.
There were clearly different levels to the fort, with the palace at the top, so back in the day, you could tell someone?s status really easily by what level of the hill they lived on. People probably went their whole lives without getting to the top of the fort. Now you can get to the top of the fort for 5 rupees.
Tourist traps and historical sites can only make so much money charging admission, licensing guides and selling merchandise. I think tourist sites can go further nowadays in selling an experience to visitors, and especially selling exclusivity, to people that demand those sorts of things. Only a Westerner would say this, but I couldn?t help looking around and thinking about how cool it would be to have a giant paintball tournament or other battle-type event at the fort. Take the Tough Mudder competition for example ? a 24 hour competition designed to test endurance and strength, and push people to their limits. Tough Mudder sells a story about toughness to people; complete this and you will have higher confidence and something to boast to your friends about. Why hasn?t someone thought to do the same at some of our coolest historic sites (at least the less reputable ones)? No question you could earn more revenue with a 1000-person, 5-day-and-night paintball tournament (biodegradable, washable paint, of course). All it would take is a blatant disregard for the reverence due to history. Historic sites only sell an experience so much; they could do a lot more if they were willing to be a little more entrepreneurial (and less respectful). Maybe I underestimate the tourism options available for the ultra-rich.
We hired a cab driver for the day (good decision) but he stopped at a restaurant that was, on reflection, a complete tourist trap. Not only was the food overpriced, but as a restaurant that caters to tourists, the food was geared to the lowest common denominator, e.g. a tourist who hates spicy food. Why people who can?t eat spicy food come to India is a mystery, but the lesson remains; any place that caters to (foreign) tourists is going to have bad food (and a big menu). While we ate the cab driver disappeared in the back, to eat lunch, no doubt. He probably ate way better than we did for about a twentieth of the price. Note to self: In the future, pack lunch.
Ranakpur
Ranakpur was a series of three awesome Jain temples, in the middle of the jungle. The temples were very beautiful, peaceful, and cool, decorated in marble on the inside and out. The temples were supported by many pillars (again, awesome for paintball); any one of the pillars by itself could have been an extremely valuable work of art, together they were overwhelming, and almost made you underestimate the amount of work that must have gone into any particular one.
It?s interesting to see how the ideal human form changes from religion to religion and culture to culture. In Buddhism the ideal is a smiling, fat Buddha; in Catholicism, a lean, suffering Jesus Christ; in Islam there are no pictures of faces. The Jain idols had very wide faces. Maybe this is just a relic of the sculpting style back in the day.
The temple is very much still active and there were many ascetics sitting crosslegged, praying and walking around the temple. There were many visitors just watching the Jains. I think it would be difficult to pray, or reach any sort of positive mental state, with so many people watching.
Every religion allows people to tell the difference between believers and non-believers. Believers seek out clothing, rituals, audible prayers and other visible actions that distinguish themselves from non-believers. In this case the Jains were wearing white almost-togas. It would be pretty awful to believe in something and not let others know that you believed it.
Photos when I get a more reliable internet connection…
In light of a recent hour long solo trip I made to walmart, I want to introduce to you an exciting recession-friendly game. The name of the game is The Walmart Dollar Party. One of the greatest things about this game is that you can play this game anytime:
- By yourself With a friend Against a friend With many friends With teams of friends
All you need is:
A walmart $10 plus tax:
The goal of the game is to find twenty things in Walmart that you want, need, or are amused by. The rule is that every item has to be $1 or less before tax. The items se can be anything from snacks and foods to toys and tools. I recommend picking out a <$1 snack that you can munch on throughout the game. This game also gives you a chance to see the prices of all sorts of items, which is very helpful information if you are trying to spend less money. During my aforementioned trip, I bought 35 items for $43.10 (including one $10.50 bed sheet). Read more...
How I named Yeiyo Apparel
| 4/12/09
I have admired Esther Lauter ever since I read a Harvard Business Case about her. I have since then been amazed at how she cleverly transformed her name to be more brandable, to Estée Lauder. Mush classier, and now is a household name as a high end make up brand. After a few unsuccessful attempts in making a similar change to my name, I switched the syllables in my name, took out my least favorite letter from my name, and replaced with my favorite letter from my name: YEIYO. It looks cool, sounds cool, and most importantly, resembles my name. On top of that, it sounds similar to a familiar word used in pop culture. This is sure to catch people?s attention, in a similar way to fcuk, the French Connection UK, a fashion retail chain. Read more...
School is fun??
| 2/27/09
My college experience has been phenomenal. I?ve learned so much in and out of classes and had fun doing everything, almost. This year, the last semester of my senior year, I?m enjoying every part of every class this semester. Some GEs were less than exciting and meaningful to me that I would ignore them all along, it wasn?t hard to put in some minimal work and get by. But even my more exciting classes, usually covered topics I wasn?t interested in. I hate wasting time, and I wasn?t going to do it memorizing facts I would soon forget.
This semester, however, I find myself wanting to squeeze the most out of every class I?m in. This could be in part senioritis, where I?m suddenly finding a need to be more ?professional?. But, I?m confident the reason for this sudden change is that all of my classes are case based.
In Advanced Corporate Finance, we are assigned notes on a certain valuation method paired with a HBS case. The classes are completely discussion based; debating the correct valuation method of projects, we sound like young executives.
In Industrial Organizations, we read unique industry and firm study cases paired with a relative topic regarding industrial research (Microsoft and antitrust laws, broilers and industry cycles, GM and the automobile industry, etc.).
Business Law is a tuned down version of a law school class. We read chapters in a law book and the cases attached, go to class and discuss. Every class, I learn the law regulating business conduct that I am sure will come in handy to know later on in life.
Leadership is a combination of a self-help course and a college education on leadership theory. Perfect for everybody. The course consists of reading and discussing HBS cases on different leaders, learning about various styles and techniques in leadership, and practical assignments such as persuasive and inspirational speech and self assessment papers.
I?m excited to learn what I?ve learned in school out in the real world.
Freshmen: Kegs are awesome! If I buy a keg, I could be awesome too! And as long as I keep talking about the keg I once bought, maybe I?ll stay awesome...
Sophomore: We?re awesome because we drink kegs all the time. Like, all the time. I?m awesome because I always have keg shells in my room.
Junior: Keg? What keg? Oh, that keg. Nice.
Senior: Fuck kegs. I?m buying a 30 rack for myself. People can figure out their own booze. Wait, a sophomore got a keg? Nice, fuck the booze run, let?s go there. Read more...
The Changing Nature of CMC
| 1/7/09
Claremont McKenna College (CMC) is a young school which has recently joined the ranks of great liberal arts colleges. CMC?s growth in popularity and rankings can be attributed to the success of it?s alumni. The alumni?s success can be attributed to the unique culture of CMC which is largely in part due to the high leadership level of its average student, the large percentage of students living on campus, and the freedom the school allows the students to have. The high leadership level of its average student can be attributed to the focus of the admission committee to bring in students that have shown excellence in extracurricular activities during high school such as by being the captain of sports teams or a leading role in student governments. The large percentage, over 98%, of students living on campus has created a culture of constant interaction with a larger variety of peers, allowing students to constantly observe and learn from a variation of leadership styles and techniques. Lastly, the minimal supervision has created an extremely social culture, that could only be shaped by the students and not the administration or faculty; an important characteristic of the culture is that the students at CMC can drink, do drink, and know how to drink. However, the ability for school to continue to execute only minimal supervision is under scrutiny.
Minimal supervision in the student government system, allow the student body to control funding to various student groups. Student groups are not conformed to whether or not school administration believes it is necessary for the school, but are free to exist with the support of the student body. Minimal supervision regarding student activities give students a feeling of control and being trusted. This leads to happier students who interact more positively with others, and more assertive students who step up to fill the leadership roles that the school allows. Most importantly, minimal supervision has also created a culture where alcohol is very prevalent. It is important to note, however, that the focus of the admission committee on leadership has brought in students that are more likely to drink; many people have observed in high school that leadership positions are often held by people in or around ?the popular group? who have more experience socializing with peers in social settings involving alcohol. Through years of heavily drinking in an extremely social atmosphere and by observing mistakes made by peers and themselves, CMC students graduate more than prepared to socialize in a very common setting in the real world: around drinks. Studies have shown that in professional careers, there are premiums for being a drinker. Male nondrinkers earn 12.8 percent less than drinkers, female nondrinkers earn 25.5 percent less than drinkers, and the highest premia went to professionals who have approximately 75 drinks/month, or about 20 drinks a week. Along with the various positive attributes of CMC graduates, which include academic and social leadership, the experience in a setting involving alcohol has been of great use. Even the current president of CMC is known to be a very fun drinker, and it is doubtful that this has not positively affected her well known ability to attract funding from alumni who have been successful, which I suggest has been in part due to their ability to drink.
However, the drinking culture that has been observed at CMC cannot be maintained by a college indefinitely. The success of CMC?s alumni has led to increased publicity and higher rankings of the school. This by itself limits the ability for a culture of drinkers, often looked down upon by society, to continue. As the schools administration and executives meet with a larger variety of potential investors and partners, the schools drinking culture will be questioned more often. Additionally, the schools increased rankings have been attracting a new population of prospective students, namely those who take academics more seriously. In no way am I suggesting that past students did not take academics seriously, but that, compared to the average applicants in the past, the average student who applies to CMC now has been more focused on academics in high school in proportion to their leadership roles in social settings. The admission committee, with a larger pool of applicants, now can admit students of seemingly similar leadership experience but with higher academic performance. This cannot be faulted; no matter how focused on extracurricular activities the admission process may be, it would be impractical for a school of this academic level to not take into account the academic integrity of their applicants. This has been the reason for two major problems observed by the schools administration.
First, alcohol related incidents have risen sharply. As is the case for business men, college students are more likely to make mistakes regarding alcohol without experience. The difference is however, that a mistake in a business setting is sloppiness, while a mistake in a college setting often results in alcohol poisonings or alcohol related injuries. It should be of no surprise that the students of the recent incoming class, who have shown much higher academic performance in high school, have on average much less drinking experience. The lack of experience in these students, when placed in a setting where alcohol is prevalent, has been the major reason for increasing alcohol related incidents.
Secondly, the school admission has, according to rumors, found that the most common reason for accepted students to choose another school is the prevalence of alcohol on CMC?s campus. This is not surprising since the current prospective students of CMC have less experience drinking, making them more likely to avoid alcohol. Additionally, they are accepted to more schools, resulting in them drawing conclusions from the ?buzz? they read online about CMC and it?s alcohol policy, as opposed to visiting the school and actually experiencing the social atmosphere created by the freedom of drinkers and nondrinkers to unite in social settings.
Without an increasing amount of supervision by the administration of the school, the school has already seen significant change in its culture. Drinking is less prevalent, where students are less likely to drink heavily on nights before morning classes. This suggests that the schools culture will change accordingly to the publicity and rankings it gains, and that the administrative personnel of the school need not to worry about continuation of the recent negative affects alcohol has had on our school.
The alumni, who were lucky enough to experience the unique culture that CMC used to provide, must understand this change, not be upset by it, and not let it halt them from making contributions to the school that help made them who they are now. They should, however, embrace the idea of having this younger generation of CMC students increase the worth and usefulness of their diplomas. The younger generation of CMC students, although they may have the tolerance of a thirteen year old girl, should learn and understand the benefits of a now disappearing alcohol dominated culture of CMC that has brought the school to where it is now. Read more...
Shots: The Video
| 1/7/09
I don?t know who these people are, but they seem pretty cool.
Try swiping your mouse over the right image in this blog post. It?s a MobileMe gallery that I automatically update from my iPhone as I take pictures on the go. Or just visit my MobileMe galleries and be impressed.
In order to easily upload the pictures I take on my iPhone onto my blog, I?m going to use my MobileMe gallery from my MobileMe account. Although setting these things up may be a hassle, once set up, make your life much easier. If you want to learn how to do it yourself, go to apple.com and watch the tutorial videos. They are very easy and take you step by step.
iWeb: First and foremost, I am currently using iWeb to create this website. iWeb is an apple application that is pre-installed into mac computers. It let?s you easily choose from templates and create a customized website, blog, or photo album. This site is an example of a site created using iWeb. The most convenient aspect of iWeb may be that it has a publish button on the bottom left of the window that allows for you to directly publish changes you make to your site, photo galleries, or recent blog entries. MobileMe: The beauty of having a mac is that many mac programs are built to work with each other very well. The iWeb publish button can easily be set with to http://www.me.com/yourusername if you have a MobileMe account. In addition to that, if you have your own domain name you?d like to use, your MobileMe account will host it for you. This site is an example of that. iPhone: Even if you have an iPhone, you may have never noticed that when you click the bottom left button while flipping through your photos, one of the options in the menu is ?Send to MobileMe?. This allows you to publish photos directly to your MobileMe gallery, which is available for public viewing at http://www.me.com/yourusername. You can also privacy settings for specific albums and such. Back to iWeb: I come back to explain how iWeb and the MobileMe gallery are connected. iWeb will set templates for you, such as in this blog that always have an area prepared for a picture. Right clicking this picture allows you to either pick one picture or one album from your album to place there. If you place an entire album, visitors can scroll through the album simply by swiping the mouse over the image. Exciting. Read more...
Organizing My Life 1: Clean My Room
| 1/6/09
My goal for this winter break, aside from doing well on the GMAT I?ve recently decided to take, is to organize my life as much as possible. I plan on starting with the most basic tasks such as cleaning and organizing my belongings at home. An effective use of the space at my parent?s house will most likely become increasingly important as I move out of school and into what will most likely be a small apartment lacking storage space.
After cleaning my room, I will move onto more exciting parts of my life using everything apple has to offer: macbook, mobile me, iphone, iweb, iphoto, and more.
8AM Wake up. 830AM Departure from home. 900AM Arrival to Bellevue Athletic Club (BAC). 9AM-10AM Exercise at BAC. 10AM-1030AM Steam room and shower. 1030AM About ready to start my morning at my personal desk in one of the many BAC lounges. In my right hand, a 16 oz Latte from the BAC snack bar. In my left hand, today?s Wall Street Journal, available complementary at the connected hotel lobby. My new macbook in front of me has fast wireless capability courtesy of the BAC. The desk pictured above is the desk I am currently sitting at to write this.
Unfortunately, it?s January 3rd, exactly about halfway through winter break, and I don?t have much to do. Read more...
Where in the World is...
| 1/3/09
Yohei Nakajima, going to be next year?
My last three summers, I spend the majority of the time in the greater Los Angeles area. Close to school, jobs were easier to find, and so were people I knew. Throughout college, I?ve always assumed that I would stay in Los Angeles after I graduate. However, as the clock ticks, I realize that my options are endless. I still feel as thought Los Angeles will be my first choice, purely because of the number of people that reside in Los Angeles that I would like to get in touch with. But I see myself leaving LA as soon as I have had a chance to network for a year or two and to solidify some long term friendships. I know many people in New York and San Francisco, two cities I have always wanted to live in. I emphasize ?to live in?, because I strongly believe that living in a city is not comparable to simply visiting. I can back this up from my own experience: having traveled back to Japan yearly for my entire life, it was not until I moved there mid-high school that I realized how different Japan is from the United States. Although I realize the difference between Tokyo and Seattle is far more significant than that of two cities within a country, I still stand by my statement that only by living in a city can one truly get to know the culture and people. For this reason, I am announcing my desire to live in the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York for at least 6 months each in the next 5 years of my life. In order of preference, if time were to allow it, I would like to reside in Seattle as well as Miami and Chicago.
For better or for worse, this focus on the location, or variety of cultural experience, has made my search for a job and/or grad school seem less meaningful. Read more...
I've been staring at a picture of Santorini that I have on my wall for the past hour because I can't sleep. The stone white walls against the deep, clear blue water. If I close my eyes and try hard enough, I can still feel myself riding our donkey's up the steps to reach Oia. The warm sun against my back and the smell of clean air and water. I can remember walking through the little alley ways filled with boutiques and cafes. I remember sitting at Cafe Kastro, and wishing that that day would never end. That I wouldn't have to go home at some point. I felt so safe and so serene, like nothing else was relevant. It's times like these, when I have a quiet moment to think, whether it's right before bed or right when I wake up and I can't quite distinguish dream from reality yet, that I miss Greece the most. It's not even the island life or the adventures or the traveling. It's the little things. I miss walking into my apartment and seeing the warm afternoon sun shining in from the balcony onto my bed or just chatting with my roommates as we lay in our beds. I even miss sitting on my balcony desperately trying to steal internet while the elementary school kids from across to street try to play juvenile tricks on me. I can still remember all these things vividly, from walking into Arcadia and seeing Petros, Maria, Jenny, Joanna, and Jan to everyone's apartment and the distinct smell each place has. I feel like these memories are more vivid now than they were when I first came back. I feel a pang of sadness and a knot tightens in my stomach every time I remember. Maybe it's because I've had time to digest and reflect. But I'm afraid that one day I'll forget. I feel like I'm desperately trying to grasp onto something that I know is slipping away, no matter how hard I try. Greek words that used to roll right off my tongue are now lost somewhere in my unconsciousness. I feel like there's a void that's been in me since I left Greece and I still don't quite know how to completely fill it. Read more...
Seriously. Life can’t be this good, and I feel like I’m overdue for some seriously bad news. I’m in the middle of my internship at NATO (the Claremont Colleges’ connection to NATO is one of the reasons I chose CMC), and I love it. All of my studies have been devoted to foreign relations and diplomacy. I’ve read my fair share of communiques. And now I get to be a fly on the wall as these documents get drafted. I come home (always leaving the office late, always after a long commute), and I’m simultaneously exhausted and totally pumped to keep going. (Which is why I’m having this huge internal debate about whether or not the foreign service is right for me, but that’s for another post.)
I love Brussels. The city is so charming and there’s always something going on. And since these festivals (museum openings, parades, food fests, designer exhibitions) are open to everyone and locals go too, I don’t feel like a tourist but like someone who actually lives in Belgium. AND my French is improving! And the people who stop me on the street to ask me out are polite and typically ask me to dinner rather than their apartment. In any case, I wasn’t so sure I could live in France but I could see myself in Brussels.
I booked my dream trip to Thailand. I’ve seriously wanted this trip since middle school, and suddenly a funding source opened up, and airfare went down (thank goodness for a drop in oil prices…), and it became possible. I’m going with my boyfriend, and things are still good for us despite all the time we spend apart while I’m off trotting through Europe. This makes me happy. So now we get to do a jungle trek together! Elephant rides! Hanging out on beaches with clear water and white sand! Cheap cheap cheap massages! Eek!
I got the job of RA and couldn’t be with a better group of people. I’m about to head to Mexico for the first time, and I get some quality time with one of my best friends for the first time in years. I am about to get my wisdom teeth pulled, maybe that’s my bad news. I just hope it’s not something terrible like a year from now complaining that no one hires me, no grad school accepts me, and I have no source of income.
Seriously. Life can’t be this good, and I feel like I’m overdue for some seriously bad news. I’m in the middle of my internship at NATO (the Claremont Colleges’ connection to NATO is one of the reasons I chose CMC), and I love it. All of my studies have been devoted to foreign relations and [.. Read more...
Home after an amazing 4 months [sbao11]
CMC Abroad Recent Posts | 6/7/09
It was weird coming home, I didn't realize how much I had missed it until I pulled up into my drive way, went into my house and laid down on my bed in my own room. To be honest, I had been dreading going home for the past 3 weeks because coming home would mean leaving Greece and the life and all the friends I had made in the past 4 months. I realized just how short 16 weeks were and how close we had all become amidst being in a foreign country, traveling, living together and growing together. Some of the friends I made this past semester are some of the closest people I know now. It was just so heartbreaking seeing all of that come to an end. Being back at home now, it almost feels as if Greece never happened. We're not all living in apartments a few blocks away from eachother. I don't just walk over when I'm bored or go to the fruit market on Tuesdays and Fridays. No more traveling on the weekends or going out to Psyrri. No more bakerys or gyro stands. Leaving Greece and saying bye to everyone was one of the hardest things I've had to do I think. Looking back now, I have no idea what I was so scared about about going abroad. It opened my eyes to so many things and gave me an experience I wouldn't trade for anything.
I've been back at home for about 3 weeks now, and it's still hard to think about Greece and the memories because it makes me smile and yet sad because it's over. On the plane ride back, thinking about everyone and knowing that we wouldn't all be together again, or at least for a very long time made me nauseous and just want to disappear. Even now, I wish we could all just be back in Greece and have a little more time together. But then I realized, that I shouldn't be moping or sulking. What I experienced was amazing and once in a life time. If i hadn't gone abroad I never would have met these wonderful people and wouldn't have had the adventures I went on. One of the hardest things that I had to deal with was growing apart with my friends. It's as if one second we were in our own little world, and the next we're back in reality and in our homes spread out across the country. But I know that regardless of where we are or how much time passes, we'll always share those 4 months of experiences that no amount of distance or time can erase. That's what makes me smile. Barcelona, Spring Break, the islands, I'll never forget Greece. Making sangria on Sangria Friday's, and cooking family din before going out for a night of fun in Psyrri and going home at an ungodly hour as the sun was rising. It's always going to be a part of me and I'll always miss it on some level. What we had was special because never again will we be able to experience what we had at that time. Who knows what's still in store for me in the future. This is just the beginning of a lifetime of adventures. I'll take these experiences with me and grow from them. Read more...
Playingâ
CMC Abroad Recent Posts | 5/28/09
My host father explained to me (in English) that their oldest son plays hooky every day, but important exams are coming up in a couple weeks so he’s going to be very busy… may even need to stop playing hooky. I figured going to class the couple weeks before exams would indeed be beneficial but wasn’t entirely sure why skipping so much class to begin with didn’t faze Monsieur Parisel.
About thirty minutes later, when the conversation had switched to French, it became evident that Vincent plays HOCKEY.
I must say, the constant switching between English and French (and the fact that I’m living in Flanders, who speaks FLEMISH tyvm… which I can’t read) is incredibly disconcerting.
My host father explained to me (in English) that their oldest son plays hooky every day, but important exams are coming up in a couple weeks so he’s going to be very busy… may even need to stop playing hooky. I figured going to class the couple weeks before exams would indeed be beneficial [.. Read more...
Have I mentioned airplane travel makes me super irritable? [kwalker10]
CMC Abroad Recent Posts | 5/28/09
Flight: Very beginning: Surrounded by over-perfumed old ladies (isn’t airplane etiquette to forgo the perfume??) and screaming babies. Early middle: Watched Marley and Me. Why I decided to do that on a plane, when I know fully well that I bawled through the last few chapters of the book, is beyond me. Middle: I watched Twilight and am upset that I’ll never get those two hours of my life back. Late Middle: Tried really hard to sleep. Epic fail… End: Flight from Frankfurt to Brussels, unwashed tourists on both sides. Still not enough sleep. I’m really unpleased but have no one to bitch at. (We’ll see how much my boyfriend loves me after we fly to Thailand and back…)
BUT I’m here. And despite all the promises that Brussels would be hot and humid, it’s cold, wet, and rainy. I hope this goes away… I may not have packed well. I have a light jacket for nights, but that’s it. AND no warm pajamas, which I didn’t think I’d need. AND only one pair of flats because I forgot to pack two. AND I packed my baggy jeans instead of my skinny jeans (that are the same wash). I’ll survive. I just may need to go shopping. Believe it or not, I do try not to do so in Europe. Is it bad to call home and ask for a care package on your first full day there?
To end a good note, I have a really good feeling about my host family. My host mother squealed and hugged me when she saw me. I’m quite relieved. And now, I’m off to explore my new neighborhood!
Flight: Very beginning: Surrounded by over-perfumed old ladies (isn’t airplane etiquette to forgo the perfume??) and screaming babies. Early middle: Watched Marley and Me. Why I decided to do that on a plane, when I know fully well that I bawled through the last few chapters of the book, is beyond me. Middle: I watched [.. Read more...
Back to Europe! [kwalker10]
CMC Abroad Recent Posts | 5/22/09
As Wes continues to tell me, I never really wrapped up my semester in Germany, did I? The last few weeks were a flurry of school projects, Weihnachtmarkts (Christmas Markets), and realizing how much I loved Freiburg and would miss it when I’m gone.
Now that that wrap-up is done, onto the really good news: I leave for Brussels in FOUR days. Am I ready? Perhaps. Am I packed? Of course not. BUT I’m super excited to get back to the Continent.
My summer plans in brief:
Intern full-time at the US Mission to NATO (June 2- July 24). Wear suits and jackets every day in heat and humidity… who does’t love that? (In all seriousness though, this is an amazing opportunity and I’m beyond grateful for it.)
Head to Paris for Euromeet to have CMC pay for expensive meals, network with CMC alumni, and visit one of my very best friends (who tells me this is the first week of the Parisian soldes, or sales, and that it’s also fashion week for hommes. Apparently I’m sneaking into a runway show or two?) (June 26-28)
Visit Aymi, a good friend from my Germany semester, in Berlin (July 24-27)
Return to a former home-sweet-home: yay, Freiburg!! (July 28-29)
Day trip around Belgium, taking advantage of an SNCB deal where 10 one-way tickets cost 73EUR total and are good anywhere in the country. I’m thinking of going to Brugges, Antwerp, kayaking in the Ardennes, and Ghent. The nice thing about being in a country as small as Belgium is that I can get just about anywhere I want to go within an hour (and most far less than that.)
I’m telling myself I’ll do research for my thesis, make connections for a Fulbright application to study multiculturalism in Estonia since EU accession, and work on grad school and fellowship applications. We’ll see how that goes.
Explore Brussels. The three girls I know from Claremont won’t arrive until July, but Brussels, as the de facto EU capital, is full of expats and there are a lot of opportunities to meet each other. Hopefully I won’t gorge myself on Belgian waffles or chocolates in doing so.
As Wes continues to tell me, I never really wrapped up my semester in Germany, did I? The last few weeks were a flurry of school projects, Weihnachtmarkts (Christmas Markets), and realizing how much I loved Freiburg and would miss it when I’m gone.
Now that that wrap-up is done, onto the really good news: I [.. Read more...
mopeds: the french manâ
CMC Abroad Recent Posts | 5/10/09
it’s funny how many of my friends will get dreamy-eyed when you talk about french boys on electric scooters. “ever since i saw that mary-kate and ashley go to paris movie”, they muse, “i’ve always wanted to see paris from the back of some super handsome french boy’s moped.” and it’s not just my friends. hundreds of american girls are swept up by french accents, the city of lights, and romantic encounters involving a vespa.
well, girls, the secret’s out. french boys now understand this weakness and are trying to exploit it as best as they can. i was with friends on one of our all-night clubbing adventures at a “hip-hop club” that, in all actuality, sounds just like any other american club without the hip-hop specialization. at the end of the night, my two girls and i were waiting in the club’s entrance for the metros to start running at 5:30am. a tiny band of boys walked by us… and back… and back again… and back. one of them attempted to make small talk with us which we shut down, then left… and returned AGAIN, this time with the other ones in tow. two of them started trying to chat up my non-interested friends, and the third sat next to me and immediately revved up his french seduction game.
a sidenote about french men: they accost women on the street and say throatily, “bonjour mademoiselllllllllllle” in their sexiest manner- which, if they’re older and creepy and you’re just trying to get to the library, comes off horribly unappealing and scary. french boys and men will tell you that you’re ravishing, that you’re the most beautiful woman they’ve seen in their life. or they’ll say really awful, gross things to you in a cajoling, dirty manner. hopefully not much of the latter. they sometimes follow you through the metro, “accidentally” fall against you on the bus… the audacity and serious creepiness of some french guys is astounding to me. french girls and women, in return, are excellent at ignoring these men completely and never giving random men on the street so much as a glance or the time of day. i have guy friends studying here that complain about how cold and heartless french girls are, but i must admit that i’d do exactly the same to them, if i didn’t know them.
anyways, this boy (whose name i couldn’t quite comprehend from his slur-mumbled response) told me that i was the most beautiful girl blablablahbla. i laughed and said, “man, you’re really french. nice pick-up line”. he got offended and told me that he wasn’t like those other french guys. he wasn’t dangerous! so, i asked him for some evidence that he wasn’t a sweet-talking stereotype, and here were his reasons (mind you, he wasn’t exactly in his most rational state of mind):
he had a good family. they were very close. sometimes, he helps with chores in the house. he went to la sorbonne and studied econ. he was very interested in econ philosophy. he has a gold card. he has nice hands. his mom bakes great pies. he enjoys great pies. his friends are nice (and handsome, eh? here, he nudged me and winked). he works for a well-known financial institution. ah, and then his eyes lit up. here, he said, is why i’m not dangerous (and therefore why i should fall in love with him). “i have,” he says, dramatically, “a little red vespa”.
any other girl, and they would have done the whole swoon thing that he expected. i just laughed. vespas do not impress me. i disliked those mary-kate and ashley movies. and i will NOT be charmed by this man who obviously has done his research on american girls. anyways, i had a great time listening to his hilarious logic, and decided to give him my number and just not respond. to shorten an extremely complicated story, i ended up accidentally agreeing to a date with him and then having a surprisingly intellectual, wonderful time during the date. then at the end of dinner and ice cream on the little island in the middle of the seine, he drove me home on the back of his little red vespa. and, much to my chagrin, i really enjoyed it.
it’s funny how many of my friends will get dreamy-eyed when you talk about french boys on electric scooters. “ever since i saw that mary-kate and ashley go to paris movie”, they muse, “i’ve always wanted to see paris from the back of some super handsome french boy’s moped.” and it’s not just my friends. [.. Read more...
Spring Break and other thoughts [sbao11]
CMC Abroad Recent Posts | 4/22/09
Spring Break was a WHIRLWIND. It was completely just unreal and beautiful and amazing. We spent 9 days on 3 different islands and soaked up a lot of sun.
MILOS We went there first for 4 days and this place was just gorgeous. I didn't have any expectations for Milos because it was small and not as popular as some of the other Cyclades. All the hotels were white with blue shutters and we had our own little suite with a balcony. They SAID their hotel was 90m from the port and the water...they lied. We later find out that all of our hotels lied haha ESPECIALLY the one in santorini. So we rented a little car and drove around the island exploring different beaches and caves. The island was tiny and you could go from coast to coast in 15 minutes. The water was incredible! It was so clear and blue and you could go swimming because the water was pretty calm and you could still see your toes eve when you were waist deep in the water. We went to this one beach and the water was literally turquoise. I feel so lucky to have been to these places. The weather was great, the sand was fine, and there was no one else on the beach except us 4. The last night Jess and I went to Plaka and climbed to the church on the highest hilltop to watch the sunset. It was soo windy but so beautiful. The view was breathtaking.
Paros Paros was a bit of a disappointment. I mean, we didn't do much because the weather wasn't too good the first da we were there. We took a bus through the island and ended up in Golden Beach. One of the beachside restaurants reoepened for the first day for the season and their patio area was right on the sand and we relaxed in the evening sun eating a Greek Salad with some Giant Beans.
Santorini Santorini was beautiful. Of course. Our ferry there got delayed so we didn't get in until late Friday afternoon. First impression: wow there are alot of cliffs and windy roads you have to drive to get to the top of that cliff. We made it to our hotel, which was on Perissa beach (the opposite side of the island from where the port was). Right outside our hotel was the black sand of the beach with little umbrella huts. We signed up for a boat tour for the next day. I also had the best dinner that night! We made friends with the restaurant owners (a couple by the name of Liza and Kosta). We practiced our Greek with them and they were all very impressed haha. Liza is actually an American who met Kosta and they dated and did the long distance relationship over the phone while she learned Greek over audio cassettes. Eventually she moved to Grece I guess and they opened up their restaurant NTOMATINI. We had the best zucchini rissoles (fried zucchini deliciousness) and pasta.
The next day we got up to take our boat tour. We rode a traditional sailboat to the volcano and we hiked up that. It was pretty cool seeing as how this volcano sand half of the island when it erupted thousands of years ago. This is also the place that the lost city of Atlantis is said to be. We spend about an hour on the volcano, got back on the boat and went to the hot springs by the volcano! They were NOT hot. The boat couldn't get too close to the hot springs because there were too many rocks in the shallow water by the shore so we had to jump off the boat and swim to the springs. It was a COLD jump and the water wasn't too warm (who knows why) but it's supposed to get pretty hot in the summer. The water was orange from all the sulfur from the volcano. The swim back to the boat was pretty bad because the water felt so cold in contrast to the warm water from the springs. We climbed back aboard and sailed to Fira, this old little town with traditional houses. We climbed up a huge cliff of just switchback roads and enjoyed a light lunch at a cafe built right at the edge of the cliff overlooking the water. On our way day me Jess and Bella almost got trampled to death by donkeys. They have donkeys that you can ride up and they were coming back down and their owners couldn't control them and we could hear them running down the path getting faster and closer so we ran down that path in about 5 minutes. The same path that took us about 20 minutes to climb up. After Fira we sailed to Oia to watch the sunset. This time we took donkeys up and dear god I thought I was going to die. After I got on my donkey, he just decided to take off and not wait for the others. It was so scary at first because I thought I was going to fall off as he made his way up the stairs of the cliff. The only image in my head was of Lena falling off her donkey in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I could feel tears forming in my eyes from sheer terror. He was walking so close to the edge too I thought he was suicidal. Then bella's donkey walked along side me and my donkey was a little guy and bella's was bigger and mine just kept trying to race with bella's up the hill. It was scary at first but pretty cool. the beginning was harder because it was a lot steeper so the donkeys had to work harder. I feel really bad for them because they get treated so badly and I would hate to have to carry people up and down the same cliff everyday for the rest of my life. We found a nice little restaurant that overlooked the water to ready ourselves for the sunset. Oia was simply breathtaking. It's everything I ever imagined it to be. The stark white houses contrasted against the blue shudders and domes and blue blue water. I thought I was dreaming. The sunset was gorgeous. The orange and pink that the sun reflected into the sky and off the white houses. It is something I will never forget.
We made it home Sunday night after 7 hours on a ferry. And now I'm sitting back at school typing this. There are only 3 weeks left in this program and it felt like just yesterday that I was panicking about coming here and leaving home for so long. I've grown to love Athens and Greece and just the Greek culture, but I think when the time comes I will be ready to come home to the good ole US of A. It's hard because I want to go home to see my parents and friends but I don't want to leave Athens because I don't know when I will come back again and even if I do it won't be the same. I feel like another chapter in my life is closing. I've had the great chance to meet a group of wonderful people that are now some really close friends, that I otherwise probably would not have met. I'm ready to go home, but I am definitely going to enjoy and make the most of my last 3 weeks here. Appreciate the city and stay in Athens for the weekend and not travel anywhere. Read more...
NATO Week [kpedersen11]
CMC Abroad Recent Posts | 4/5/09
For all those who do not know, this weekend was the NATO summit in Strasbourg, France. This was particularly interesting because Strasbourg is only about an hour away from Freiburg, so there was a considerable amount of activity in and around Freiburg. The week began with a very large peace rally that took place in downtown Freiburg. I, along with many other IES people, decided to go down and investigate (hoping against hope that we would see people getting tear-gassed and all that good stuff). The crowd was full of communists, hippies of all sorts, general anti-war people, and a few curious participants who were caught up in the crowd and ended up marching around Freiburg (like me). The chants of “Anti-Capitalismo” “Solidarity” and other various anti-NATO slogans aimed at riling up the crowd. Overall it was a fairly solid peace rally, but not as exciting as I was hoping. I did get to see what a peaceful German protest looks like though and it actually is peaceful.
The next portion of my week involved a vist to a center in Freiburg dedicated to the eradication of small arms exportation. Present at the center was an ex-military guy from America, who had been a guard at Guantanamo Bay and is now a pacifist. He gave a long talk about the evils of military and how it is all a big conspiracy by the rich white people to keep the rest of America down. He actually made a couple interesting points, but the majority was so naive and pathetic that I actually began to get angry. I consider myself a pretty liberal guy, but I am also a realist. It would be awesome if there was a chance to eliminate the military but there is no way it is going to happen. The elimination of our military would not solve anything, and in all likelihood would actually drop the world deeper in to chaos. One of our people actually had to get up and leave, and I began criticizing many of the points that he was making. Primarily because they actually had no back up plan. It was: lets get rid of the military. Well what next? “Um.. we don’t know, we are not experts in that sort of stuff.” !!!!!!!!!!!! I became quite angry at that point. We actually had quite a civilized debate until our Egyptian colleague, Dena, decided that she was going to start ripping on the United States and refering to all of us as naive and unwilling to accept the faults of our country. When you cannot have an argument without getting out of control and outrageously emotional, I will not take the time to try to have a discussion with you. All I can do in that situation is yell back, and to be honest, I do not enjoy pointless screaming matches. It was a fairly interesting experience, but it really made me angry with the idiocy of pacifists.
The coup-de-grace of this whole week was my opportunity to go to the Atlantic Youth Summit in Strasbourg, which allowed me to participate in a forum between 300 students and a good portion of the movers and shakers of NATO. It was an absolutely amazing experience. I had the opportunity to listen to the Secretary General of NATO speak and in fact was sitting within a foot of him before he spoke. I tell you it is an absolutely amazing experience to listen to a man who refers to NATO policy in the first person. He is a brilliant man, and also appears to be a fantastic person as well. I was really impressed with his speech and his overall intelligence. I also heard: the Director of Military Operations, the director of policy for the secretary general, Bernard-Henri Levy a French Philosopher, one of the chief correspondents for the Financial Times, and many many others. The whole discussion revolved around the future of NATO and whether is and would remain justified in its operations. Granted alot of it was propaganda, but it really was interesting. Even more exciting than that is that I was able to go see President Obama speak in his first major public speech in Europe. His whole speech revolved around the concept of a new “Era of Responsibility” in economics, foreign relations, nuclear proliferation, climate, and energy. I was impressed with his speech, but the most amazing part was his ability in answering questions. The man is incredible. He can take a stupid question, make it sound important and interesting, make that person feel important and interesting for asking it, and take it in the direction that he knows everyone wants to hear. It is actually a fairly overwhelming experience.
This whole week was quite an experience, one that very few people get to have, and one that makes me increasingly grateful for the opportunity to study over here. In all honesty this was a once in a life time experience that I will remember for the rest of my life.
For all those who do not know, this weekend was the NATO summit in Strasbourg, France. This was particularly interesting because Strasbourg is only about an hour away from Freiburg, so there was a considerable amount of activity in and around Freiburg. The week began with a very large peace rally that took place in [.. Read more...
Ben Casnocha (CMC '11)
All Entrepreneurship is Social
Ben Casnocha: The Blog | 3/11/10
There is a tremendous amount of fuzzy thinking around terms like "social entrepreneurship," "social business," and "socially responsible business." When people ask me what I think about social entrepreneurship, I first say I'm not sure what social entrepreneurship means. I'm not sure what makes it deserving of its own term. Then I say I think for-profit entrepreneurship does huge amounts of social good so I'm going to stay focused on that.
Carl Schramm recently wrote an excellent short piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review called All Entrepreneurship is Social. Nut graf:
...regular entrepreneurs create
thousands of jobs, improve the quality of goods and services
available to consumers, and ultimately raise standards of living. Indeed,
the intertwined histories of business and health in the United
States suggests that all entrepreneurship is social entrepreneurship.
He goes to succinctly expand upon this point. He notes:
Entrepreneurs typically generate a surplus benefit above and beyond
the profits they reap, finds the...economist
William Nordhaus. Nordhaus has calculated that entrepreneurs
capture only about 2 percent of this surplus, with the
remainder passed on to society in the form of jobs, wages, and value.
As Nobel
Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, said: "Income is the best medicine.?
The Torturous Inner Life of the Man Who Seems to Have it All
Ben Casnocha: The Blog | 3/9/10
How many people whose lives we admire actually maintain a torturous inner life? How many ideal men and women -- and I don't mean perfect, I mean ideal, which is to say perfectly flawed -- actually are consumed by insecurity or anxiety or guilt?
In American Pastoral, the character Swede is perceived as an ideal man in every respect. But his outer life is
accompanied by an inner life, a gruesome inner life of tyrannical obsessions, stifled inclinations, superstitious expectations, horrible imaginings, fantasy conversations, unanswerable questions. Sleeplessness and self-castigation night after night. Enormous loneliness. Unflagging remorse... And in the everyday world, nothing to be done but respectably carry on the huge pretense of living as himself, with all the shame of masquerading as the ideal man.
Was this Tiger Woods' inner life the past few years? Could it be the private mind of a close friend who's duping you with his charade? Has a journalist done her job if she does not know what keeps her subject up late at night, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling?
By the way, fiction addresses these type of issues the best. Unrelated: Philip Roth is a fucking genius.
###
Wise and poetic advice for the exceptional from the same text:
As with any exaggerated trait that sets you apart and makes you exceptional -- and enviable, and hateable -- to accept your beauty, to accept its effect on others, to play with it, to make the best of it, you're well-advised to develop a sense of humor.
Otherwise, I'm told people will just hate you. This is not the only reason to try to develop a sense of humor...
The Impact of the New Tech: Use, Then Judge
Ben Casnocha: The Blog | 3/8/10
Alain de Botton recently blogged about "one of the challenges of our time": re-learning how to concentrate. To sit quietly and think without distraction. I agree, except I'm not sure if we've ever known how to do so.
Technology broadly defined is usually seen as both culprit and savior. For example, we get nothing done when compulsively checking our BlackBerries, so we must take Adderall to focus. The issues related to how technology affects the way we think are complicated. But apparently this doesn't deter smart people from making uninformed, simplistic judgement calls.
Steve Coll is a veteran journalist who writes for the New Yorker. (Here's my 1,700 word review of his book on the CIA and Afghanistan.) Like any curious person, Coll is reflecting on how the internet has changed his profession. Just recently he went on Twitter for the first time. Here's his report:
I had never been on the Twitter site until I read his recent posts...Last night, fearing what I would learn, I went on the site and scoped out my Twitter fingerprints. There were dozens of recent tweets emanating from South Asia linking to an interview I had given to the Times of India about Indo-Pakistani relations. There were a handful of nice tweets from random people reading one of my books. It all seemed fine. It also seemed like a space that did not require my direct participation anytime soon.
Despite this five second superficial investigation, Coll goes on to riff on whether "technological systems have moral characteristics" and the "qualities of excellence in a great tweet." New rule: stop listening when someone refers to it as "the Twitter site."
Michael Lewis, God bless him and his brilliant journalism, alas does the same here:
I don’t tweet, I don’t Twitter, I couldn’t even tell you how to read or where to find a Twitter message. I don’t actually see the point of limiting communication to a haiku. I find the whole effusion of communications technology bewildering. All you have to do is overhear a certain number of cell phone conversations to see that the vast majority of what people say and write to each other is totally pointless.
In other words: I don't want to try it, I don't know nothin' about it, but I sure as hell will judge it. I find this willful ignorance unforgivable -- just spend a week using the free technology and see how it goes? Then decide how you feel.
I discussed the issue of information diets, bits vs. books, and whether the web is harming our ability to concentrate in this piece for The American. It is long and therefore itself poses a concentration challenge! But I do hope you read it if you haven't already. I believe it represents one of the most thorough analyses of these issues yet written.
###
The Atlantic is doing a series on the information diets of notable journalists. Felix Salmon is the only one who uses an RSS reader. Susan Orlean uses Twitter to get news headlines which I personally find inefficient. Everyone subscribes to tons of print magazines.
The anonymity then of death tolls, my lack of proximity, and the
fact that I wasn't sending or receiving "Are you OK?" e-mails made it
easy to think in broad, analytical strokes. But now I'm thinking about
people, places, and details. I'm trying to track down friends I haven't
heard from, and I'm afraid of what I might find out. I have images of
driving on roads and bridges that are now destroyed. When I saw footage
of looters ravaging supermarkets during other disasters, I blindly
condemned them; I thought, how could this be all right? Now I'm deeply
conflicted watching interviews with old Chilean women emerging from
broken supermarkets, dodging tear gas, and shrieking into the camera,
"I don't have water, I don't have food?what do you expect me to do?"
The lessons I'm learning are not necessarily intellectual or academic;
they are about empathy.
A few days after the quake, I
ate dinner at my favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant, just down the
street from my apartment. For the first time, my usual waiter initiated
a conversation with me. He asked how I was doing and how I was feeling
in light of all that had happened. Normally he doesn't bother trying to
decipher the broken Spanish of a gringo. But the bond of our shared
experience?for the moment, anyway?transcended language barriers. We all
know the clichés: common challenges unite uncommon people; humanity
knows no borders, etc., etc. But those maxims really do come to life
when life itself is at its most tenuous.
2. Jacob Weisberg takes Obama to task for his vague "it's not the size of government that matters, but whether it works" mantra. Size matters.
3. Robert Samuelson wonders when Millennials will wake up and smell the coffee about the dismal economic situation they are inheriting. Will there be a generational revolt against the Baby Boomers who left us holding the bill? I'm thinking of Buckley's Boomsday.
4. The cover piece is about why bad teachers need to be fired from schools. Aka: Teachers unions are as selfish and reckless as ever. Kind of old news by now....
The Power of the Phrase "It Turns Out..."
Ben Casnocha: The Blog | 3/6/10
"Incidentally, am I alone
in finding the expression 'it turns out' to be incredibly useful? It
allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections
between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble
of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It's great.
It?s hugely better than its predecessors 'I read somewhere that...' or
the craven 'they say that...' because it suggests not only that
whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually
based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it's research in
which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual
authority anywhere in sight."
That's from this interesting Hacker News thread about the rhetorical power of "it turns out."
The post that sparked it is here, and the author discovers that Paul Graham is a particularly avid user of the phrase. The concluding logic:
Readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from
belief X to belief Y if the writer himself (a) seems taken aback by it
and (b) acts as if they had no say in the matter?as though the situation simply unfolded
that way. Which is precisely what the phrase ?it turns out?
accomplishes, and why it?s so useful in circumstances where you don?t
have any substantive path from X to Y.
Colleges Work to Maintain an Information Deficit About Their Effectiveness
Ben Casnocha: The Blog | 3/4/10
To graduate from college students do not have to demonstrate anything whatsoever beyond passing grades. Students do not, for example, take a standardized test administered to students from multiple universities, so their performance cannot be measured against a common benchmark. As Philip Greenspun points out, "There is literally no way that a university can be embarrassed by its graduates' poor overall performance."
Without accountability, colleges don't have an incentive to actually succeed at teaching students basic critical thinking skills. And so a majority of college graduates enter society without them. According to Kevin Carey, in the journal Democracy: "A 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research found that only 31 percent of adults with bachelor’s degrees are proficient in 'prose literacy' -- being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for example. More than a quarter have math skills so feeble that they can’t calculate the cost of ordering supplies from a catalogue." Remember, this is 31% of the 25% of Americans who even have bachelor's degrees.
Unfortunately, it's exceedingly difficult to figure out which colleges are helping students and which aren't. Right now there is no "objective, publicly available information about how well colleges teach and how much college students learn. Nobody knows which colleges really do the best job of taking the students they enroll and helping them learn over the course of four years."
It's not for lack of data. Colleges are now collecting rich data sets about how students learn, how much time they spend studying, how engaged they are in class, and how well they know certain concepts. There are dozens of studies conducted by outside organizations and government regulators about student learning and professor teaching -- and yes they probe for things like critical thinking and creativity.
The reason there's no access to the data is because colleges do not want it to be public.
One of the most powerful special interests lobbies that nobody’s ever heard of...is the American Council on Education (ACE), the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), and a host of other alphabet-soup organizations conspire to maintain higher education secrecy at all costs.
For example:
in 2006, Mark Schneider, the commissioner of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, proposed adding some new questions to the annual survey all colleges are required to fill out in exchange for federal funds. Colleges would be asked if they participated in surveys and tests like NSSE and the CLA. [Tests which measure teacher effectiveness and overall student learning.] If the college answered "yes," and had already chosen to make the data public, it would be asked to provide a link to the appropriate Web address. It would not be required to participate in any test or survey not of its choosing, or disclose any new information. It would just have to tell people where to find the information it had already, voluntarily, disclosed. One Dupont Circle rose up in anger and the proposal was summarily squashed.
Why are colleges so eager to keep private the data? The obvious reason is because the data are embarrassing and everyone would prefer to be held less accountable. The more interesting reason is that the older colleges with better reputations dominate the lobbying effort and they benefit disproportionally from the "existing, information-starved reputation market."
See, the lack of data about which colleges are doing a good job -- whose graduates are succeeding, whose are not -- means that the customer (high school seniors) suffer from an information deficit. As Carey explains, this turns college into a "reputational good": "You’re paying up-front for professors you’ve never met and degree programs you probably haven’t even chosen yet. Instead, you rely on what other people think of the college. Of course, some students simply have to go the college that’s nearest to them or least expensive. But if you have the luxury of choosing, in all likelihood, you choose based on reputation."
If there were clear data about which colleges were doing a good job and which were not, colleges could distinguish themselves based on how well students actually learned. This would give newer entrants into the higher ed market a better shot at competing. At present, even if they're doing a good job teaching students, newer colleges must wait for reputation to catch up to reality. This can take generations. Wouldn't it be better if there was a detailed database online showing every possible metric?
Bottom Line: The sorry truth is that "colleges remain indifferent to how well they help students learn, graduate, and succeed in the workplace." And "like the church...they see themselves as occupying an exalted place in human society, for which they are owed deference and gratitude." We should demand that all data around the effectiveness of colleges at teaching students be made public and easily searchable so that consumers of higher education can make more informed choices.
The craziest sentences uttered at the Vancouver Olympics came from Norwegian silver medalist Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset describing his performance in the men's 4x10 cross-country relay:
"My name is Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset. I skied the second lap and I
fucked up today. I think I have seen too much porn in the last 14 days.
I have the room next to Petter Northhug and every day there is noise in
there. So I think that is the reason I fucked up. By the way, Tiger
Woods is a really good man."
Folks, we will return to regular programming here soon, and I want to talk at some point about the Chile situation more broadly, but let me quickly address some issues as the day-to-day developments unfold:
1. I want to stress the vast differences in conditions that exist right now within the country. If you walked down Av. Providencia in Santiago you would be hard-pressed to see that anything had happened. There's utter normalcy. To be sure, some sidewalks are portioned off with caution tape, some buildings have visible damage, and my local supermarket is essentially empty. But on the whole I view Santiago as more or less back to normal. I am totally safe and have access to food, water, internet, power, etc.
2. What are you seeing on TV are images of Concepción, the largest city near the epicenter. It's about 350 miles south of Santiago. The situation in Concepción is deteriorating. Citizens have taken up arms to protect themselves and their stores from looters. My understanding is that most people still do not have access to water, food, power, etc. The Army is running the city, certain constitutional guarantees have been suspended, and as of yesterday there was an 8 PM to 12 noon curfew in place. Yesterday I was in a cafe eating a churrasco and all of us sitting there were watching footage from Concepción and thinking, "Is that a different country?"
3. In the view of several commentators here the government deployed military assets too late. Tanks began rolling into Concepción late Sunday night, nearly 48 hours after the first quake. By the time troops had arrived, chaos had already gripped the city. The government also stupidly advised citizens near the coast to return home after the quake; fortunately the people knew better as a tsunami came shortly thereafter and caused more damage. There have been other complaints about government's ineptitude. This will be clearer in time.
4. The damage and loss of life will not rival the situation in Haiti. Not even close. I have had some awkward conversations with people who are uncertain about how they should think about Chile vis-a-vis Haiti. Haiti is worse and needs more help. That said, most of us don't volunteer or give to charity based on greatest need -- we do so for selfish reasons. I have spent no time personally trying to help Haiti. I have donated no money. I have, by contrast, both invested a lot of time in the Chile situation and donated money to relief efforts. I have obvious emotional interests in Chile.
5. Chile does need help. It is now asking for international aid and receiving it. It's up to each person to decide if and how they want to help. If you want to donate money specifically to Chile relief, I recommend this reputable organization. If you speak Spanish I would also recommend Un Techo Para Chile.
6. The best news coverage is in Spanish. Try La Tercera.
Experiencing the 8.8 Earthquake in Chile
Ben Casnocha: The Blog | 2/28/10
This is a blow-by-blow dispatch of my Saturday. In subsequent posts I will offer a more analytical take on everything. Photos are from this incredible set of images on Boston.com of devastation in Chile.
At 1:45 AM on Saturday, February 27th, I slunk into bed. It had been a loud night. My neighbors had hosted a raucous birthday party which called for several renditions of Feliz Cumpleaños and various dance songs. Despite the noise, I actually enjoyed the festive atmosphere. Before turning out the light I read Isabel Allende's latest book, My Invented Country, a memoir about her growing up in Chile and eventually re-settling in California. She discusses the similarities of the two places. I read until 2:20 AM and then turned off the light and fell fast asleep with my windows open and the summer Santiago air breezing over me.
At 3:34 AM I awoke to my entire apartment shaking violently. My bed creaked and I heard a vase of flowers in my kitchen fall over. I did not mentally process or consciously think of anything, not even "earthquake," but I had an instinct to walk over to my desk and grab my laptop. [I'm not what it says that my first thought was to protect my laptop, but there you go.] Propped up on a stand I feared it would fall over the desk and break, and indeed it was going to do so shortly had I not grabbed it. I stood clutching my laptop. A sliding French style door that separates my living room / desk area from bedroom moved and hit me, so I backed up and leaned against the wall for support. The shaking continued for a bit more time and then stopped and everything was silent and dark. The power had gone out in my building so all white noise and power lights: gone. I heard no screams or sounds or anything. Just total black silence.
I put my laptop on the floor and got back into bed. The utter silence and stillness made it easy to fall asleep, and I suspect I was snoring away by 4 AM. Not long after, I awoke to shaking. This time it felt even more intense though technically reports show it was *only* a 6.3 size quake. My bed really rocked and seconds later I heard sirens outside. My power was still out. This is when I started getting scared.
After the second major aftershock ended, there was a joyous albeit brief stretch of stillness, and I heard my neighbor say, Gracias por Dios, Gracias por Dios. Then it started again. My bed gently rolled back and forth seemingly without stop, like I was in a boat on an ocean. I convinced myself my mind was playing tricks on me. Seriously. I pulled the sheets over me and tried to go back to sleep. But the sirens were non-stop.
I gave up on sleep and waited for my power to come back on. By 8 AM my power was on but internet down. I watched the local news reports about the earthquake. CNN was broadcasting exclusively Chile quake coverage. I realized this was going to be an international news story and that I needed to communicate my status to friends and family.
At 9 AM I walked out of my building in Providencia with my laptop searching for a free wi-fi signal. There was rubble and broken glass on every street but I did not see any major building damage. In an alleyway behind my street I found a free "dlink" network with a weak but working signal. My inbox showed a dozen "Are you OK?" notes -- I would receive about 200 of those emails throughout the course of the day. I fired off some "Yes I'm fine" emails and then posted my first tweet of the day: "Friends, thanks
for all your notes. I am safe in Santiago. It was a terrifying night. I
am happy to be alive. More updates later."
Throughout the day I used Twitter to post updates. There are few English language people in Chile posting updates, including official journalists. The BBC has always been understaffed in Latin America. The New York Times' coverage was and continues to be astonishingly bad (they're still filing from Rio de Janeiro). LA Times is filing from Bogota. As a result, my tweets got picked up by lots of media outlets who asked if I could comment on the on-the-ground situation. I did interviews with the AP, BBC, and a live video interview with CNN in the afternoon. My main goal in the interviews was to dilute some of the usual media hysteria over natural disasters: most of the country has power, I said, most of the telecom is working, there is no looting, etc.
In the late afternoon, I walked around my neighborhood a bit more. The sky was a gray haze from a supposed chemical fire that had started downtown. Nevertheless, I was amazed at the tranquility of Santiago. Public buses full of people passed by. Cars drove calmly. People chatting on the streets. I ate dinner at my favorite local restaurant and it was full of people. Much of the rubble and glass I had seen earlier had already been picked up. The scene was such a contrast from the images on TV. I know what I saw was a million times better than what the scene is like more north in Santiago, or especially in Concepción and along the coast. Still it's a reminder that it's hard to generalize about a situation in an entire country, let alone in one city.
I went to bed at 9 PM having not slept since 4 AM. I wondered whether my bed would start to shake. It didn't. All was calm. I fell into a dreamless sleep.
I was woken at around 8:25 AM Sunday morning to another vigorous aftershock. According to one count, the 67th aftershock since the first nearly 24 hours earlier.
Culture Matters to Entrepreneurship
Ben Casnocha: The Blog | 2/25/10
Culture Matters
All through childhood and adolescence you are a sponge absorbing cultural stimuli. From local billboard advertisements, to school curriculum stylized to your country; from conversations with your parents about the ways of the world to the thousands of local customs that dictate proper behavior in restaurants, queues, airports, homes, and driving on the road.
Culture matters. That's the title of a compelling set of essays on whether some cultures are better at creating freedom, prosperity, and justice. It is politically incorrect to chalk up massive societal failures in places like Africa to culture -- besides, the situation is always more complex than a single factor -- but it seems safe to assert that the culture you come up in affects how you think.
our beliefs are severely distorted by our culture and training... We all know that we would have been inclined toward different beliefs had we been raised in different cultures or disciplines. We see consistent differences between folks trained in West vs. East, science vs. humanities, economics vs. sociology, and in different schools of thought of most any discipline.
By the time you're 18 years-old, I believe a certain vision about how the world works glows in your head. You carry many assumptions. It's possible to change these assumptions in adulthood -- easier now thanks to the knows-no-physical-boundaries internet -- but it is still hard, and most people would rather not expend the energy to develop a set of values about the world that are independent from their milieu defaults.
Governments Trying to Promote Entrepreneurship
Now pivot to this: virtually every county's government is trying to promote entrepreneurship, create a mini-Silicon Valley, "become an IT island," become a hub for innovation, etc. It makes sense: the data are clear that entrepreneurship is the engine of economic growth.
How should a government do it? As Amar Bhide says in From Poverty to Prosperity, the most important thing is for the basic government functions to work: property rights, provision of roads, water, electricity, etc.
The most common next step is for government to make starting a business as easy as possible, minimize tax and regulatory burdens on business, offer tax incentives, etc. These are all good things and are well within a government's purview.
Chile has done both these things. By taking care of basic government functions, no small task, it has become a better place to be an entrepreneur than most other developing countries. You need only look at its dysfunctional, corrupt neighbor of Argentina to understand that when a government can't take care of its own basic functions, nothing else matters. And by offering various tax breaks and incentives and helping VCs get new early-stage funds off the ground, Chile's government carrots have made many entrepreneurs I know take a careful look.
Chile is 100x better place than Argentina to be an entrepreneur. But it's still far away from rivaling the U.S. as an environment for entrepreneurs. Because here's what it lacks more than anything: entrepreneurial culture. And no government program or law can change this overnight.
Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture
Here's a seemingly trivial example but I think it's telling: In Chile as in many parts of Europe and Latin America (and maybe elsewhere), kids usually live with their parents until into their late 20's or until they are married. Think about the attitude that probably accompanies this custom: greater dependence and deference to the central authority figure you've had in your life. More significantly, in Chile as in almost everywhere except young America, they have a long history, and with history comes psychological burdens. Being conquered and then re-conquering. Living through a military dictator. This stuff seems to affect everything from a person's propensity to trust strangers to their willingness to challenge the status quo. It's harder to invent the future if you're still debating and processing the past.
In Northern Cyprus government officials told me about the various incentives they were going to roll out to attract entrepreneurs and how they were going to have conferences to encourage young people to think about a career in IT. And I'm sitting there sipping my tea thinking, "How the fuck are you going to get people to want to be entrepreneurs when half your citizens work for the government and get off work at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and the other half feel like they deserve more handouts from Turkey?" It's not an incentive problem; it's a mindset problem.
I get emails from Koreans who have read the Korean translation of my book and they tell me that they want to start a company but if they do their family will think they are a failure.
This is the story in so many parts of the world. (China, as always, is complicated -- they certainly today have a culture of hustling. Beyond that I can't say.)
Why I'm Bullish on the U.S.
The single best reason to be long on the future of the U.S. is it has a culture of entrepreneurship. It was born this way. Contra Umair Haque -- who thinks "it was the American way of life that ate America. And America's real bankruptcy is a bankruptcy of the soul" -- in fact it's the American way of life and the American soul that are one of the redeeming and enduring attributes of the country's DNA in this time of uncertainty. The free wheeling spirit, the self-reliance, the fearlessness, the celebration of youth, the permanent fresh start: these things remain, independent of the meltdown of our governance system.
Can You Change Culture?
Culture is really hard to change. It takes generations of time. There are a million levers you could possibly push and it takes way longer than a politician's term to see any effects. People have pride in their habits.
So what do you do? I think you try everything, and you also try this: import people from countries who have the cultural attitudes you're looking to cultivate in your country. Use them as implants. I know the Japanese do this with American consultants: they ship in "crazy Americans" to sit in on business meetings and blow up the enormously inefficient customs that still dominate Japanese business. For example, get right to the point instead of flattering the seniority of all the senior people in the room. Integrate the implants with the youth and hope that the power of example will cause more people to think different.
The Perils of Cooking Regularly
The Skye Is Falling! | 10/4/09
As I mentioned earlier, I'm on the 8-meal plan. At the beginning of the semester, I was "making" my own breakfasts and lunches, and eating dinners at the Hoch. This wound up working not quite so well. Breakfast was not the problem---I just need to eat a non-zero quantity of food, which is usually a bagel or a bowl of cereal. The problem was lunch. I would make myself a sandwich, or a veggie dog. While these were delicious and nutritious choices, I would wind up being hungry again halfway through the afternoon, when on most days I have class until 5:30 or so. Now, I'm eating lunch at the Hoch, and making my own dinners. Again, I'm using the term "making" fairly loosely. I usually have some kind of pasta + some kind of sauce + some kind of frozen vegetable, or some kind of instant meal from the grocery store. The funny thing is, even with instant food, this is still cheaper than eating at the Hoch. Each meal at the Hoch costs about $10, if you divide the number of meals in your meal plan by the amount of food you eat. A box of cereal, a half-gallon of milk, a few pounds of pasta, some veggies, and some boxed food come out to about $30 a week. My food-cooking system is therefore lazy, but economically sound. Read more...
Starting School
The Skye Is Falling! | 9/24/09
And the school year begins again!
My schedule this semester is fairly abnormal. I'm taking two core classes that I've never taken before (since I dropped E&M my sophomore year, I never took it as far as the registrar is concerned), two off-campus humanities classes, one off-campus CS class, and two on-campus "classes" that meet once a week and are worth 1/3 the credits of a normal class. So even though I'm in my 5th semester, I'm not in a full-credit in-major course on campus. On the plus side, this semester increases the number of campuses I've taken a real class at by 3: my logic and computing class is at Pomona, my music theory class is at Scripps, and my history/gender studies class is at Pitzer. If you count PE classes, then by the end of this semester I will have taken a class at every single one of the 5C's.
Other things I am doing this semester: --I'm the GameSHMC treasurer! That means I'm in charge of buying club video games, club board games, and food for club events. --I'm running ITR Games, which vaguely resemble tag. We play them in the rather maze-like basement of the academic buildings. When I told the deans that we were holding the first ITR Games a few weeks ago, they asked us to make sure the doors were shut when we were done. In general, the administration here trusts students to not break things, and to tell people when the do. Which means we get to run around in the basement on Friday night. --I'm grading CS70, the data structures class that I took last semester. It's a pretty big time commitment (about 8 hours a week) but it's a lot of fun. I get to tutor underclassmen! Huzzah! --I'm also still a CS staffer. One of the jobs of CS Staffers is to name computers when they come in, so that we can keep track of machines when "the third one from the left side of the counter" becomes "the computer we put upstairs." When we got a bunch of new computers the week before school started, I named them all after flowers.
Also, I am living in Sontag, on the 8-meal plan. This means I have dinner at the Hoch and I make my own lunches and breakfasts. Which I am about to do now. Read more...
Summer At Mudd
The Skye Is Falling! | 8/17/09
I've been at Mudd most of the summer, working as a staffer for the CS department. (Yes, that's what I did for part of last semester. And I'll keep doing it in the fall.) My big project for this summer was writing inventory tracking software that could talk to a Bluetooth barcode scanner, so that the CS department can keep track of its stuff with minimal effort on the part of humans. I spent about 2 weeks writing the initial software and another 2 weeks working out the bugs, and last week, we declared it initially finished. This is my first really big software project, and I'm really excited that it actually works in the way we intend it to. That's something that's surprisingly hard to do, so this is a big accomplishment for me.
Over the summer, I've been living in Sontag, the dorm I'll be living next year. I had a single for most of the summer, which was about the size of a very large table. On the plus side, I had a suite lounge with a couch and a TV, and I had a kitchen---vitally important when you're off the meal plan, as you are all summer. A few days ago, I moved into my fall room, and another person moved into my summer room. I had a little more than 24 hours to move all of my stuff, and I agreed to take care of a few things (like a set of Guitar Hero drums) for some friends, so my suite is mostly full of boxes at this point. After last Friday, when the last summer resident moved out, I've had the suite all to myself. Since I'd been living with 3 other people for the rest of the summer, this feels pretty weird. To counteract the weirdness, I've been cooking with a friend of mine who has an apartment about a quarter-mile away from Mudd. So far, we've made lasagna, macaroni and cheese, eggplant parmesan, enchiladas, and curry. Our food has been pretty tasty so far, and also creates enough leftovers that we can eat it for two or three nights.
School starts in two weeks, and when it does, my brother will be living in Case as a freshman. I'm really excited for him! Read more...
What Do You Learn In CS70?
The Skye Is Falling! | 5/4/09
My parents keep asking me what exactly it is that I learn about in CS70. This question was hard to answer until class last Wednesday. We had an in-class review session where we wrote down topics we'd learned about on sticky notes, and then stuck them on the blackboard and arranged them into categories. (Clicking on a picture will take you to a larger image.)
For next week's post, I will answer questions. If you have a question you want me to answer, leave a comment here, or send me an e-mail ( sberghel [at] hmc [dot] edu). I will then answer the question on this blog! If you want me to send you a reply and not put your question here, that's OK too.
I will also talk about jobs next week. Stay tuned.
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In case you were wondering what a week at Mudd is like, here's mine. I'm taking 16 credits worth of classes (essentially 5 + 1/3 classes), and I have two jobs.
Monday: I have 3 classes--a core math class (which changes every half-semester), a biology lecture, and a CS class on programming, data structures, and code style (referred to at Mudd as "CS70", or simply "70"). I have a dinner meeting for one of my jobs, and then I finish the larger of the two Algorithms assignments, which is due Tuesday. I also meet with my partner for CS70 and do some work. (All work in CS70 must be done in pairs. While this limits the time that I can do my homework for that class, it also means that we can help each other figure out what we're doing wrong. Since the class homework mostly revolves around writing and fixing complicated code, pair programming actually makes the class easier.)
Tuesday: I have two classes---my algorithms class, and a macroeconomics class. Until recently, I also had a class that met in the late afternoon on Tuesdays only. (That's the 1/3 of a class referred to earlier---there's not a lot of homework, and the class meets once a week for 2/3 of the semester.) I meet with my CS70 partner again, and do more work. I also get started on the smaller of the two weekly Algorithms assignments.
Wednesday: In addition to my Monday classes, I have another dinner meeting---this time for the class that I'm grading. If my partner and I aren't done with CS70 yet, we work until 11:59 (since homeworks for this class are due at midnight) or until we're finished, whatever comes first. I then finish my Algorithms homework (due Thursday), and start on my math homework if I have time.
Thursday: Thursday is when my week starts lightening up. I only have two classes, and I have no homework due Fridays. I usually work on my math homework and run errands in the afternoon. At night, I hang out, goof off, or (usually) both. Since some of my friends are seniors who don't have morning classes on Friday, the biggest challenge is to get to bed at an appropriate time for a morning class.
Friday: I have a math class in the morning, and a staff meeting at noon. My CS70 partner and I start work on the next assignment before dinner. After dinner is free time, which I usually spend hanging out with my friends.
Saturday: Afternoons are for math and algorithms homework. Nights are for doing many things that are not homework, including going to the grocery store. (Vons, the local grocery store chain, closes at midnight.)
Sunday: Like most Mudders, I spend Sundays doing work--in this case, math and Algs, since both are large assignments due at the beginning of the week. Read more...
The Skye Is Falling! | 4/7/09
The post scheduler appears not to have published my post from last week. That's odd. I'll see if I can recover it after classes today. Read more...
The Skye Is Falling! | 3/27/09
I've heard admissions decisions are out! As always, people with questions about Mudd can either leave them on my blog or e-mail sberghel [at] hmc [dot] edu.
Note: I plan on updating at midnight Friday night (technically 0:00 Saturday morning) from here on. This means I can write my blog post either Thursday or Friday night, when I don't have homework to do, and then have Google publish it at midnight. If I decide to write other posts, they would probably go up at midnight on Sunday or Tuesday nights, depending on when I write them.
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I have a summer job! I'm doing staff work for the Computer Science department. Basically, it will be my job to make sure that the computers work, and to fix them if they don't work. There's usually a big "project" that the staff does over the summer, but I'm not sure what that will be yet. If I had to guess, I'd say we would be writing a new inventory tracking system.
I'll know by next week where I'm living in the fall. I have a roommate for next semester, and we want to have a kitchen if at all possible. We're hoping to get an efficiency in Atwood, which is a double with a stove top, a kitchen sink, and a refrigerator and freezer. We're picking a room halfway through when rising juniors (current sophomores) pick a room, though, so we might not get one.
Spring break has just happened, and work hasn't really picked up much since then. The one exception is my Data Structures/Programming class, which has most of its difficult assignments in the middle of the semester. We'd been working on this assignment for 8 hours already, but still couldn't get our code to run until half an hour before it was due. People who have taken the class before tell me that the hardest assignment is next, and then the rest are relatively easy. This should work out nicely, since work in other classes tends to pick up a few weeks before finals are due.
Later tonight, I'm going to the April Fool's ITR games. ITR games, by tradition, are passed down by word of mouth, so the most I'm going to say about them is that they're like a very, very complicated version of tag. The April Fool's games are even sillier than usual.
I might update in the middle of the week with a post about jobs and Mudd, and how the two work together. Read more...
New Semester
The Skye Is Falling! | 1/26/09
I guess it's time to start blogging again, now that the semester has begun in earnest.
The trip to England for my Dickens-Hardy class was really fun. We spent our first week in London. My roommate for the trip and I went to the British Museum, Hyde Park, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, and a lot of other places during our free time. The class did a lot of walking tours in London that were Charles Dickens-themed: we got to see the different places that Dickens lived and worked, as well as the places he wrote about. We also spent time wandering around London---we had unlimited-ride tube passes, so even if we got really far away from the hotel, we could get back without walking too far.
We then spent a week in Dorset learning more about Thomas Hardy. We saw the cottage where he grew up, the house in which he lived later in his life, and quite a lot of the landscape that he wrote about. We also got rained on quite a bit, which was part of the fun.
It's very strange being back in California. It's light out for much longer than it was in England, it's always above freezing, temperatures are in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius, it's not raining nearly as much, and I can't spend an hour walking in any direction and then catch a once-every-3-minutes tube to get back home.
This semester is looking to be substantially less brutal than last semester. My hardest two classes this time around are probably CS70 (a data structures / programming design course) and Algorithms. Algorithms is very fun so far---the professor is quite clearly excited about the course material, and his enthusiasm is contagious. My Economics class is looking like it won't be too hard. The Core Math course I'm in right now is enjoyable---it's another class taught by an enthusiastic professor. (I'll be changing courses at the half-semester mark to a new Core Math class with a new teacher.) I haven't been in Biology class more than once thusfar, and therefore can't really make a judgment on the course just yet.
I'm hoping this semester I'll have more free time than last semester, which I spent most of either doing homework or sleeping (but mostly doing homework). We'll see how that goes.
In closing, here is a picture of my tour group at Stonehenge.
Choosing a Major, or, What Can Indecision Do For You?
The Skye Is Falling! | 11/21/08
A few weeks ago was the deadline for 3rd-semester declaration of majors. (Mudd has two deadlines -- you have to declare by sometime in the spring of your sophomore year, but if you want an advisor in your major when you're choosing your 4th-semester courses, you need to turn in your form around the end of October.)
A lot of the people here know what major they want to be by the time they get here. (This doesn't necessarily mean they know what major they're going to be, though. For example, when I came to Mudd, I knew I wanted to be an engineering major. One year later, I had realized engineering wasn't for me, and I declared for CS a few weeks ago.) Not everyone does. (If you want an anecdotal non-representative sample, of my friends here at Mudd who are in my grade, about 1/3 declared for the major they thought they wanted when they were new frosh, 1/3 are deciding between their original choice and another major, and 1/3 are considering a double or joint major with their original choice and another major.) So while a lot of sophomores have stuck with the major they preferred as frosh, a lot more are asking upperclassmen how to keep their options open.
This is both easier and harder than it sounds---it's not particularly difficult if you're trying to decide between, say, CS and Math. Those two majors have a lot of overlap, and you can even have a joint CS-Math major if you enjoy the intersection of the two. However, if you're trying to decide between Chemistry and Engineering, it gets more difficult. The two majors share no classes, and it's strongly suggested that you start preparing for each major early (by 2nd semester in the case of Engineering, or 3rd semester in the case of Chem). This isn't to say it's not doable, but it will be difficult.
There are also people who come to Mudd and then decide on a non-science major. Again, this isn't too tricky to do. I have a friend who recently decided to be a Literature major with a math minor. (At Mudd, you're either a science major with a humanities "concentration"---which is like a minor---or you're a humanities major with a science minor.) The most difficult part, according to her, is meeting with a professor from another campus to discuss your major. Because of the way Mudd is set up, a humanities major is an off-campus major---so my friend is a literature major via Pomona now.
On the other hand, I have a friend (who's a junior) who was a physics major and a math major, and decided to be a CS major sometime around the beginning of this semester. He'd already taken CS60 (the intro-level, non-core CS class), so he didn't need to "catch up." (With its chain of prereqs, you have to start taking CS60 in your 4th semester to finish the CS major without overloading/pain.) So, long story short, you don't have to know what major you are until your 4th or 5th semester, so long as the classes you're taking will "work" for all the majors you want to be. Read more...
Culinary Adventures
The Skye Is Falling! | 11/19/08
The food at the Hoch isn't bad, but the menu's on a weekly rotation. What usually happens is that the pre-frosh think "Wow, this food is pretty good!" By the eighth or ninth week of first semester, you realize that, while the food is good, you sure have eaten this a lot. By sophomore year, you find that even when you're on vacation, you wake up Tuesday and expect to have tacos for lunch.
To help combat this, some of my friends and I make our own food every Friday night. Our "recipes" usually look something like this:
What Is This Stuff? It Tastes Pretty Good Soup (Serves you and 10 of your closest friends) Ingredients: whatever vegetables at the grocery store looked good a couple cans of beans, for protein, I guess some soup that none of your friends are allergic to
1) Mix all ingredients in large soup pot. Begin cooking. 2) Realize you need spices. Add the ones that smell good. 3) Remember that you bought parsley. Add parsley to soup. 4) Realize that soup is not thick enough. Find rice. Add rice to soup until you think you've added the right amount. 5) Wait until rice is cooked. 6) Serve. Avoid all questions as to what recipe you used.
We're also masters at making "this is kind of like applesauce but I forgot the potato masher" and "weirdest pancakes ever" (like normal pancakes, but fluff the eggs and use yogurt instead of milk). I've also discovered the magic of microwaveable macaroni and cheese with bell peppers that you cooked in your friend's electric wok. And the longer I stay at Mudd, the more creative I'm becoming about my food choices. Ritz crackers with cream cheese! Cheerios with strawberry jelly! I wonder what will happen if I add this to the spaghetti sauce! (I have, in fact, eaten all of these things. Cheerios with strawberry jelly is a better food than one might think.)
On another food-related note, I'm staying at Mudd for Thanksgiving. Enough Easties do this that we have our own Thanksgiving meal, for which we cook a metric ton of turkey, vegetables, and pies, and take over most of the kitchens on campus to do so. I'm making spiced carrots and a lemonade pie. Read more...
Good Golly Miss Wally (HMC '09)
last day
good golly, miss wally | 12/17/08
today is my last day at mudd. i am not done with all of my classes yet, but i will just have to submit my exam and project from home. i am still awake right now, packing up the past 4.5 years of my life. i've accumulated quite a few items, so packing is taking me longer than hoped. i can't believe this is it... Read more...
false ending.
good golly, miss wally | 11/30/08
the past week has been crazy fun. on tuesday, after my only class of the day, i went to the airport to pick up my childhood friend to go to the coldplay concert, which was amazing, amazing, amazing! i cried when they played "fix you", but that song has so many ties with me that i pretty much cry even when i don't hear it live. after the concert, i decided to stay up the whole night to start packing away my room. four years is a long time to accumulate a lot of junk. i skipped my classes on wednesday so that i could be home in time for my brother's birthday. (having wednesday classes before thanksgiving is a terrible idea for a school that has so many out-of-states students.) i started cooking that night and cooked all day thursday, and the result was a pretty spectacular menu. my uncle said during dinner that it's a waste for me to go to a math and science school when i should have been at a culinary institute. haha. i actually really want to go to one later, not to start a cooking career but to spruce up my dinner parties a bit. :)
i really love being home when the whole family's there. since my brother is in the military and i'm away at college, it's nearly impossible to get all of us in one place. i had a lot of fun doing absolutely nothing with my family, and i just miss that feeling of no time constraints and no worries. today is my last day to see my brother for a long time because he's going back to iraq when i finish college. i wish i could stay at home longer, but that dreaded voice keeps reminding me that i have eighteen days left here. eighteen! geez, time flies by so fast!
i know those eighteen days won't feel like anything, but before i can be home free, i still have a lot of things to finish. i have to make some edits on my thesis, build two webpages, write a treatment for a documentary, take two finals, and piece together an hour-long documentary that i've been working on the past few months with a couple of people at pomona college. the last bit scares me the most, since all we have completed at this point is five minutes tops. it was a promising piece--the girl secured a place in the calarts film festival in january for it--but i'm scared we won't be able to complete it in time. the project changed a lot during its course, so that's why we didn't finish more. and i have too much school work now to work on it.
it felt like school was over, until i arrived at my suite door. there's still so many non-school-related things i want to do at mudd and in claremont before i leave, but i've been shooing people away because i have to keep focused. i can't stay here any longer even if i wanted to (because my backpacking trip starts in january), and i really can't screw up now. but at this moment, i am, because i'm writing this post instead of reading and researching and writing. :/ Read more...
tunnel vision
good golly, miss wally | 11/23/08
i was talking with someone tonight about one of my professors (a family member of harvey mudd) who isn't too happy with harvey mudd college's affiliation with the defense industry. the guy told me that there was no problem with that, and that's what engineers do: they make bombs, and bombs kill people.
harvey mudd college is great because of its mission statement, drafted in 1956 by president platt and still observed to this day:
"harvey mudd college seeks to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities and the social sciences so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society."
but comments like the ones made by that guy make me really disappointed that maybe the meaning of the mission statement got lost over the years. a lot of students come here for just math and science, yes, but the beauty of hmc is that you can take humanities classes so that you can really learn the connection between what you're doing in your technical classes and the world.
i just hope that by the time these students finish their college career, they will be able to see more from different perspectives and really question each and everyone of their actions. Read more...
when i'm not at mudd...
good golly, miss wally | 11/14/08
...i still stay up till ungodly hours of the night. tonight, er, this morning, i discovered two wonderful cleaning products: CLR and the magic eraser. i've seen commercials for both, but i've never tried them out until tonight, and wow, they really work as they are advertised! my bathroom is spotless with very little effort, unlike the intense scrubbing days of before! it's only 5:30am cst right now, and i am on a roll! i think i might head on over to the kitchen. mom can't exactly get up and clean the house, so i think it'll be a nice surprise for her. :) i'll hit the books again tomorrow...
oh, and i realized that this blog has diverged a lot from its original purpose. but then again, i have no idea who's reading this blog. if you have questions about mudd, you can still hit me up. i think i'm only keeping this until i graduate, which is in a month (fingers crossed at this point, though, because i've missed quite a bit of work in the past week or so). :) Read more...
everything always gets better.
good golly, miss wally | 11/11/08
i am really at ease right now. no longer do i have to be on alert to make sure that my mother is breathing or that she's not in unbearable pain. i went almost a whole week with hardly any sleep, so i've been pretty much a zombie. my mom was released from the hospital this morning, and she is the toughest woman i know. even though i could tell she was in a lot of pain, she wanted to get herself up without much help. it'll take her a long time to heal completely, but the worst is over. we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
i'm flying back to claremont on the 15th, and i am starting to be a bit scared about the coursework that's waiting for me when i get back. my professors have been super nice and supportive, but i can't run from work forever. i have one more month, but i am still not very far in my thesis. i just quit two jobs so that i will have enough time to get everything completed. i know that i will probably not be 100% invested in my work when i get back, but with more time, i can finish everything and get my undergrad degree! Read more...
just ahn-cray-deeb-bluhr (incredible)!
good golly, miss wally | 11/4/08
tonight's presidential race was so very exciting!! by 10pm EST, i was already jumping for joy. the final announcement as the west coast states came in took me by surprise, though. i didn't realize that the final verdict was going to come in so soon, and i was in the middle of cooking my dinner as i heard the announcement on my computer speakers. i had to drop everything and turn off the stove so i can witness the finale. i'm so glad to have been part of such a historic race. obama gave a great speech, but mccain was very sportsmanlike in his speech, too. mccain actually earned a lot of respect from me tonight on how well he took the news.
remember, we still have to be mindful of the people around us. everyone is entitled to their own views, so don't go bashing now. one person in power isn't going to change the world. we are the change, so we have to be the change we want to see in the world. and we have to work together and respect one another. :)
i really wish i were able to watch the race in a large gathering, like in downtown LA or something. i celebrated with my suitemates, but it's still not the same as being there with a bunch of people and really basking in the moment. i had a talk with michael ho right after and he pointed out that i will never get to witness such an incredible race as this as a college student ever again.
there was a bit of family problem that i had to deal with tonight, so it was hard for me to be excited about the race and then feel really sad about what happened to my mom. the dream that i wrote about a week and a half ago almost came true today, and it scared the crap out of me. she was involved in a bad car accident this morning, but she is fine right now. she's still in the hospital, but the nurse said that she was doing well after her surgery. i'm flying out in about 7 hours so i can spend her birthday with her and see how she's doing. :( that's the hardest thing about going to school so far away from home; i can't be there during the moments my family needs me most. Read more...
under pressure!
good golly, miss wally | 11/2/08
i think i've overcommitted myself once again. i keep forgetting how much time classwork takes, and i agree to do everything that's thrown my way. i should be working on my thesis today since my critique is tomorrow afternoon, but i agreed to go film for some panel discussion group at scripps college. i guess it's not so bad that i am actually getting paid pretty well for my time.
ever since i started the countdown of how many days i have left in claremont/college (45) and listed everything that needs to be done before then, i get super overwhelmed. i'd like to just take things one day at a time, but at this point, the clock is tick-tick-ticking. i am leaving before my final exams are even due, so i'd worked out with some of my professors to move the exams around, which means all of my other deadlines get pushed up, too. i'd like to stay an extra few days, but airplane tickets are ridiculous during the christmas season. my plane ticket doubles if i fly on the 18th rather than the 17th. yikes!
wow, it's already november! time flies by soooooo fast!
have you ever woken up drenched in a pool of tears?
good golly, miss wally | 10/24/08
that just happened to me this morning, and it was scaryyyyyy. i should have gotten up and stayed up, because in that extra 45 minutes of sleep, i experienced the most traumatic nightmare.
anyhow, in the dream, my parents and i went on vacation, and it was our last day there (the place looked remarkably like wellington city but i don't think i dreamt i was in new zealand). anyway, my parents went off to borrow car from a friend/family member (?) and my job was to walk with them to the side of a street and wait with the luggage until they come back with the car. i waited and waited, and no one came back for me. it started raining, and some of my friends showed up and took me home with them. the entire time, i kept questioning where i was going and where my parents were, and i was very convinced that they had ditched me. as i walked away, i kept looking back at the luggage sitting on the side of the road.
and then my dad showed up, and he didn't say where he's been or what he was doing, and i kept asking him where my mom was. and he was just as confused of her whereabouts. he said that he wasn't responsible for picking up the car because mom was supposed to pick him up then pick me up. we returned to my old house (i dream about this house every time i dream about something scary), and in the midst of all this, a neighbour was beating the crap out of her kid on the front lawn. i got pissed and went over and beat the crap out of her. then i walked into the house and out onto the back porch with 911 on the line. there was a bus of kids who weren't kids (?) and a creepy guy (who looked like the master in the 3 ninjas) in our driveway. the guy came up to us and told us that's there's no hope and that we should move on.
i called 911 again and told them what this guy was telling us, that there was a huge plane that crashed on the side of a hill, crushing all the cars below it. the guy on the other line confirmed that there was such an accident, and the hill was near the street where i was waiting. suddenly, i started crying in my dream because the creepy guy told me that my mom was probably driving there during that time and that she was probably crushed to death. i didn't believe him, but he told me to ask my neighbours because three of their family members didn't make it back driving near that hill.
and then i woke up crying out for my mom. i don't know if anyone heard me, but i was super scared when i woke up. i guess lately, i've just been missing home a lot, so it makes sense that i would dream about my parents. :( maybe this is an unconscious reflection on how scared i am to have to grow up pretty soon, that i can't just rely on my parents, especially my mom, to take care of me like they did when i was six or sixteen?
the word 'break' should be redefined.
good golly, miss wally | 10/19/08
it's the second day of fall break, and i'm at my computer, trying to write midterm papers. the prompts were only given a few days ago, so it's not like i was procrastinating. but the sucky thing is, i'm actually not really getting a break during fall break. i went down to san diego for my friend's birthday yesterday, but i had to come back this evening because of all this work. booo. and who makes things due smack dab in the middle of break? i will probably not get much sleep tonight. :( Read more...
ticketmaster is evil.
good golly, miss wally | 10/11/08
the way ticketmaster works is this: they release tickets in batches and make people think that those are the only tickets left. they create sites like ticketsnow.com where you pay a hugely inflated price for tickets that should have been sold for a "normal price" on ticketmaster. they rack the convenience fees so high that sometimes it's almost double the "price" they set for the tickets. and their search engine really doesn't search for "best tickets available".
so all you can do is gamble, hoping that if you release the tickets you currently have on hand that you will get better seats somewhere else. and it's too bad that a lot of venues only work with ticketmaster now, and it's too bad that they've become the monopoly that they are.
i've been searching online and on the phone with a tm agent all morning, and both kept telling me that the only tickets left were obstructed side stage seating on the upper terrace. i nearly gave up, but...i'm going to see coldplay in anaheim on nov. 25th! my seats are still not so fantab for the price that i paid ($100 per tickets, yikes!) but they're not obstructed! i've been really wanting to see them, and i was so sure i wasn't going to get the chance to. they were in LA over the summer, but i was in texas. and then they're playing in dallas when i'm back in claremont this semester. so when i heard a couple of days ago that coldplay was coming back to the LA area, i just had to jump on the opportunity.
yay, i'm really happy. i still haven't figured out who the second ticket's going to, but i couldn't wait around for my friends from texas to confirm, so i bought two tickets just in case. my suitemate said she'll go if i can't find anyone else. :)
There is so much to talk about and no time with which to talk about it right now. Here, in fact, is a list. I'll talk briefly about some things in this post, and may expound on some in later posts; leave a comment if you want to hear more about anything in particular.
Friday was the Barnstormers' trip out to Edwards Air Force Base.
Saturday Proctor Elaine set up a trip for a bunch of us to go to some hot springs.
Sunday I went to USC for the Intercollegiate Swing Dance Challenge my sister organized.
Clinic:
Code Freeze was on Tuesday
Final report rough draft is due Friday
Next Presentation is on next Tuesday
Graduation is in less than a month.
First, the Edwards trip. I have a difficult time expressing how cool last Friday was. We got to fly the F-16 simulator, then at the end of the day we got to walk around the F-16 flightline and see the real F-16s up close and personal. Our guide, Nate Cook (HMC class of '95), told us what each new thing on the F-16 was and then took us into the hangar and showed us some dummy bombs that they have for testing. He talked to us about the difference between dumb bombs, which are purely ballistic, and smart bombs, which guide themselves in to their target. We got to see the Global Hawks in their hangar. One of them was fueled and it's impressive how much droop the weight of the fuel causes in the wings.
The trip to the hot springs was quite lovely; the springs themselves are at the end of a mile-and-a-half hike. I was getting nervous hiking all that way through weather somewhere in the 90s, but the springs are right on the bank of a creek that was flowing with frigid water, and we actually had to cross the creek to get to the hot water. That was a nice, refreshing end to the hike before we went to relax in the springs. I now have a lovely peeling sunburn across my upper back. It has a hand-print on the back of my left shoulder, where I could reach.
My sister called me to find out if anyone from Claremont was coming to her Swing Challenge at USC (she's the president of their swing club and has been working on making this happen for several months). I asked some of the dancers here and then told her that no, the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company (CCBDC) had not heard. She asked if they were the right people. After all, this was a swing competition. At Claremont, I assured her, "Ballroom" means "Dancing with Partners" instead of "Waltz, etc." (those five are more properly the "Standard Dances").
It ended up that most of the company members had practice that night, but one girl and I were able to make it, so the two of us represented Claremont in the Jack and Jill challenge. A Jack and Jill is a swing competition in which each person dances with another, chosen mostly at random (leads and follows dance with a partner of the opposite type). I didn't get through the first round (11 leads, and all of them way outclassed me) but I had a great time anyway. Our other Claremont rep took 5th place, though!
For now, that's it. I'll talk more about clinic when I don't have to be doing it quite as much.
Tools: Now with 100% more Photographs!
The Mudd-y Swamp | 4/10/09
Okay, so it's just two, but hey, that's infinitely better than none. I've even got some mathematicians here to prove it. I have leftover pieces of stock for my screwdriver, so I can give you a before and after picture of that, although I don't have any intermediate pictures: The cylinder on the far left is the acrylic stock for the handle. To prepare it, you need to face the ends (scrape off the rough edges made by sawing it off from the rest of the stock) and drill the central hole for the blade to go into. Both those steps are done using the lathe (drilling on the lathe will always feel odd to me, since it's the part that is spinning, not the drill bit). Next you use the lathe to carve out the cone. The milling machine then bores out the six flutes along the length of the handle, and it's back to the lathe to file the dome on the end into shape.
Finally the entire thing is polished -- first you sand it with coarse-grit sandpaper, then with two or three finer grades of sandpaper until you finish off by rubbing it down with toothpaste using a sock. If you do it right and put some elbow grease into it you'll get nearly a mirror finish to the plastic which is quite remarkable to see: scratches from machining the handle make the surface of the acrylic very cloudy and it looks like it will never again be as clear as the stock you were given.
The blade is placed into a holder that keeps it at the proper angle for machining the tip, the mill is used to take off the material from one side of the blade and then you flip the whole thing over in the jig to machine the other side. The other end is then faced to length on the mill and a tiny hole is drilled right in the very center of the blade near one end. A matching hole is drilled in the handle and the blade slides in and is held in place with a small pin. Before assembling the screwdriver, the blade is heat treated to increase its hardness and toughness and then polished in a sandblaster.
The hammer, shown disassembled with each piece next to a piece of stock where available, is a much more demanding tool, owing mostly to its increased complexity. This is a machinist's hammer, not a claw hammer, and it has two faces: a soft face made out of nylon for easily-damaged pieces and a hard-face for driving nails and other more traditional hammer tasks. The first piece I made was the hard face. The hard face is made of AISI 4340 carbon steel and machined entirely on the lathe. After machining it is heat treated just like the screwdriver blade. The 4340 steel is quite hard to begin with and is much more difficult to machine than any of the other materials we use in this class.
After working with the hard face, machining the nylon for the soft face felt like butter. There wasn't much to do for this beyond facing it and reducing the diameter. The only noteworthy part was tapping the hole drilled in the back side so that we can easily thread a set screw into it to hold it on to the hammer head.
The hammer head required quite a bit of machining, both on the lathe and the mill. It's made of AISI 1015 steel, though, and is much easier to work with than the hard face. First it must be faced and the smaller diameters must be reduced on the lathe. Then a hole must be drilled and tapped and a "spotface" (very small washer-like indentation against the face of the piece) produced for the nylon soft face to attach to. The other side is drilled out, then reamed to a very tight specification so that the hard face can press-fit into it and hold without slipping out. That hole has a countersink bored into it to make room for the chamfer on the hard face between the two diameters. The head is transferred to the mill where the flats are cut on the sides and the slot for the handle is bored.
Finally, the handle is worked from a piece of wood and the entire thing is assembled. To hold the handle in the head a slot is cut in the top of the handle and a wedge driven between the two pieces of the slot. The spec-sheet says that the wedge is made out of "Red Devil #4" which has defied my preliminary attempts to define.
Moral of the story: take a machine shop class. It's fun, and amazingly useful even if you never step inside a shop again.
April crunchtimes brings May graduations?
The Mudd-y Swamp | 4/4/09
One of my professors just called April the worst month of the year. I had never thought of it that way, but in a way it is, and has been since I was maybe 10 or so. The second half of spring semester always comes upon us suddenly: it's staggering (and more than slightly terrifying, truth be told) to think that I only have 6 weeks of school left: 4 weeks of classes, projects week (finals week, too, for seniors), and an empty week (finals week for the rest of the school).
The downside of this, of course, is the 4 weeks I have to get EVERYTHING done. That includes my Computer Vision independent study, Clinic, Clinic presentation, Clinic poster, Clinic report, Photography, Philosophy of Mind, and tools.
Tools is my current favorite. I'm making my hammer now, and I just finished all the work that I need to do on the metal lathe. A quick search of my archives tells me that I haven't actually talked about tools yet, which is strange since I really enjoy it and I'm taking it for pure enjoyment. Tools, or E-8, is one of the first engineering classes that prospective engineering students take at Mudd. It's the introductory shop course, called "Tools" because that's what you build. You use the sheet-metal shop to craft a tool tray, bending, cutting and welding sheet metal into shape. You use the metal shop to build a flat head screwdriver, and most of a machinist's hammer (something like this, with one face made of nylon and the other of hardened steel). You use the wood shop to build the hammer handle.
I have not yet made my tool tray, but I've finished my screwdriver and much of my hammer. The screwdriver handle is made from acrylic using the lathe and the mill, and the blade is made on the mill. The hammer is the most complex piece. The hammer head (a short piece of 1in steel bar stock) is machined on the lathe and mill to fit the handle and both faces. The handle is made with the band-saw and wood lathe followed by a LOT of sanding. The hard face is machined from carbon steel on the lathe, followed by some filing, and then heat treated to bring it up to full hardness. It's polished by sand-blasting and fits into the head by press-fitting. The soft face is made from nylon (the nicest material I've worked with on the lathe) and attaches to the head with a screw. I'll post pictures of my pieces when I get off my butt and take some pictures (possibly tomorrow).
The shop proctors tried to chastise me when I told them (on, say, Wednesday night) that I hadn't started my hammer yet (due Friday of the following week). I corrected them. I am not a sophomore engineering student with no time. I'm a senior computer science student taking this class for fun. I can be in the shop every morning for 3 hours if I feel like it, and if I don't feel like it, I can drop the class (HMC's drop date is insanely late in the semester) or turn in half a hammer. It's a good way to approach the class.
In other news, I photoshopped up my senior page for the yearbook yesterday. Each senior gets a full page in the yearbook to decorate as desired, so I sifted through my (meagre) photo collection and placed the pictures on a canvas in Photoshop. The pictures include me eating a Chinese-Donut-Burger, my barnstormers co-president, my girlfriend, my roommate (first three years; we have singles now), a prank some friends and I pulled, a prank some friends pulled on me, a few Halloween costumes (I'm the Rorschach near the top), me getting my head shaved for a friend who had cancer sophomore year (he's doing fine and back at school), the boxers a friend decided to hang on her wall after finding them in her laundry, the Mudd Amateur Rocketry Club at ROCStock a few years ago, Iris Critchell with her Cessna 172, and Rotsnake. And lots of gratuitous Photoshop effects.
I discovered Photoshop brush packs. Thus I have a coffee stain, ink stain, and crinkled-paper effects. The torn edges, actually, are incredibly simple to do in newer versions of Photoshop: turn on layer-effects and add a drop shadow, inner glow and outer glow to the layer. That gives the very slight drop-shadow to create some depth in the image and a thin white border to each picture. Take the eraser tool and grab a ragged brush, then erase the corners/edges of the photo. The white border now looks like torn paper where you've erased the image. I used this to create pinholes, torn corners where pushpins may have been ripped out, and half-ripped photographs. Putting the whole thing on a wooden surface gave it a bit more context, and I couldn't resist the coffee stain. The tape strikes me as a bit cheesy, but not too much and I had just learned how to make the tape.
As for post-graduation plans, I'm not sure yet where I'll be working; I have an offer from DreamHost, and I'm waiting on a few more. I'll probably take the summer off, though, and start in the fall. Over the summer I think I might take some classes at The Crucible in Oakland and visit old friends.
The last few days have been full of excitement for me, all on the job hunt front. First, I talked with the recruiter from AeroVironment. She said that they really liked my background, but they were essentially waiting to hire someone to be my boss before they made a decision on me. That was heartening, since it's been three weeks since I interviewed with them and I hadn't heard anything.
Next, Google flew me out the Googleplex on Thursday and put me up at a very nice hotel for a series of interviews on Friday. I had a lot of fun there, got a short tour of the campus and really enjoyed the people who interviewed me. Those interviews went better than any I've done before because...
I got a job offer on Thursday afternoon from DreamHost! They'll pay well, give good benefits, and they're really laid back. Since their downtown office is a block and a half away from a metro stop, which in turn is 3 metro stops away from Union Station where the trains come in, I can take public transit (real public transit, not buses which are a wholly unacceptable mode of transportation) in to work from almost anywhere in LA, I think. That makes this offer, in addition to a very good offer in its own right, an ideal safety net: if my girlfriend gets a job in one of those "anywhere's" that I can get to work from I have a job that I can take as well even if I don't get any other offers.
Of course, Edwards Air Force Base (remember the whole "Middle of Nowhere" thing?) is one of those not-almost-anywhere's from which I probably won't be able to get to DreamHost in any acceptable length of time. But AeroVironment in Simi Valley is even closer to Edwards than Pasadena (the nearest place I thought I might be able to get a job) and now I have a bargaining chip. I would be completely amazed if I got an offer from Google (they're in the middle of layoffs, so they can't be hiring many "Nooglers"). But hey, all I need to do now is graduate, and what can I say? I'm Feeling Lucky.
Clubs, Projects, and Jobs
The Mudd-y Swamp | 3/24/09
Barnstormers First up, the Barnstormers have a new website. They actually don't know it yet because Claire and I have been building it at a temporary location on a domain that I own while I sort out getting a domain of our own. It uses the WordPress blogging software and I hope will be immensely more maintainable (and thus more useful) than the website Claire and I inherited from days gone by. The blogging I intend to use as news posts and updates. I'm not sure if I want the news to be the front page (as it is at the time of this post) or if I want the front page to be an introduction to the club and who we are.
Additionally, we are going to Edwards Air Force Base to get a tour of the Flight Test Center there. Edwards is where everything eventually winds up for testing before the Air Force will accept it and we have an alumnus who works there testing F-16 armament systems. Sign ups for HMC students to go on the Edwards trip are going on right now and we'll be heading out there on the 17th of April.
Theremin, Thoremin, Th[eo]remin-Bot I believe I've mentioned that there is a student-run electronics lab club at HMC now. Not only does said club exist, but it now has funding. And to raise interest, our intrepid leaders, Nate and Raffi, have decided that the club will buy kits for students to fun projects and then hold a projects day at the dining hall to show them off!
I took one look at Nate's e-mail and decided that this was my excuse to build a theremin, since I didn't get around to it last summer. After poking around the Internet for a while I had found a few theremin kits that appeared to come mostly preassembled (no fun for an e-lab project) and this. Art's Theremin Page gives instructions, schematics and component lists for building several theremins including one using vacuum tubes to get a 5 octave range.
I told Nate that I wanted to build one and that if someone else built a tesla coil we could pair them into a Thoremin. I steal the name shamelessly from one of the suggested names for the following:
The other suggested name was Zeusaphone. This tesla coil is actually producing the music; sound is just vibration of our ear drums at some frequency in the audible range. By firing the tesla coil, say 440 times per second, we can create a musical note. By feeding its controller the waveform of a piece of music, the tesla coil can be made to act as an enormous speaker that happens to shoot lightening bolts. Similarly, below you can see the result of someone using a (much smaller) tesla coil as an amp for his guitar:
One of the other students in the electronics lab, upon hearing that I intend to build a theremin, decided that he wanted to build a theremin-playing robot for a class next year.
Job Hunt I have been applying for jobs this semester. So far I have interviewed at DreamHost and AeroVironment and I'm waiting to hear back from them. Google is flying me to Mountain View this Thursday for an interview on Friday, which I am really unbelievably stoked about. I've also dropped my resume to a few other places, but these three are the three I'm most far along with. (For those who remember, I'm also looking at Edwards AFB. I'll be talking more with Nate when we visit in April. Incidentally, AeroVironment is located in Simi Valley, shown in the lower-left corner of that map.)
I now need to admit my geekiness (you can prevent laughing at this sentence if you ignore everything above this point in the post, and all my past posts, by the way). I finally found a resume class for LaTeX that was close enough to what I wanted that I took the effort to modify it and port my resume away from Microsoft Word. The Word file I had was fairly finnickey and would not hold all its formatting if I tried to use ANY other programs to open it; Open Office (which I generally dislike), Abiword, and Google Docs all ran it on to a second page and so I always needed to be using a Windows computer (or a mac with MS Office) when I edited/printed my resume.
Now, I have a subversion repositoryonline that holds the most up-to-date copies of my resume and cover letter. Feel free, of course, to take the .tex files and the resume.cls file to TeX up your own resume. If you're interested, you can find a rather nice IDE for using LaTeX on Windows here. Linux tends to come with LaTeX installed, and I think Mac OS X does as well. Of particular note in this subversion repository (you did find it under the "online" link above, right?) is the makefile. With help from professor Geoff Kuenning of the CS department I built a makefile that will typeset and display my resume and cover letter as well as add new files to the repository automatically and publish my resume to the web using a really neat tar-ssh-tar piping trick.
That makefile is exciting to me, but I accept that many of my readers will find it less than enthralling, so if you want me to talk about it more just let me know and I'll be happy to talk more.
Good luck to all of you who have applied -- admissions letters are in the mail now! If you didn't get in to Mudd, take heart; that you even applied is a good indicator that you'll get into another top school. If you did get in, congratulations! Let me know if there is anything you want to hear about. I also host "prefrosh" or prospective students, so if you want to come by for another visit let me know and I'll make the arrangements to host you when you show up. Finally, if you're not yet a senior then thanks for reading and good luck next year; you should also let me know what you're interested in hearing about. (And if you're not a prospective student but a prospective parent, one of my parents or one of my friends, then just enjoy reading).
Fail One last thing before I sign out -- in addition to fouling up the account creation with DreamHost for the Barnstormers, I also clobbered my external hard drive last night. It takes power from my monitor, because that's the only reachable powered USB port I have. I usually turn my monitor off when I leave my room, but this poses a problem when I have a large backup running to my external drive. The drive is formatted with the fat32 filesystem (eew, I know) and so that crash caused some fairly massive corruption.
Interestingly, my data was all fine (except for the stuff copying over at the time) but my OS suddenly decided that the filesystem was read-only if I tried to delete the corrupt files. I ended up fixing it by telling gparted to check and repair the filesystem twice.
So camping went...not as planned. After driving up to Santa Cruz, we stayed at Marty's uncle's house for the night. We got in at 01:00 and got up when the (very loud) espresso machine dictated. Once awake we discovered that some of the trails we planned to hike were closed and we couldn't get some of the permits that we needed on the weekend (it was Saturday). Poor planning on the part of the person who planned the trip. Oh well.
We had a backup plan. Sort of. We made one up on the spot, so that's kind of the same thing. We decided to make a day-hike of what would have been the last day of our trip and then go the rest of the way home to the north bay -- all three of us live within an hour's drive north of San Francisco -- and then go to the Boy Scout camp in San Rafael to camp for a couple of days.
We started our day-hike and had to ford a stream. Our oxen didn't die, fortunately, but Marty didn't have AMAZING HARDCORE WATERPROOF HUNTING BOOTS like Liz and I and so he hiked the rest of the 10 miles in wet socks. He had 5 blisters afterwards and decided to bail on additional camping. We took him home, spent the next day working out details of getting permission to camp on the Boy Scouts' land (a mini-adventure of its own) and then went out to spend one night camping.
Along the way we came across something that I had forgotten was up there: an old B-17 engine. One of the last B-17's manufactured crashed there on its way to Hamilton Air Force Base and one enormous radial engine is all that remains. I decided that my portfolio theme for my photography class would be HMC students doing non-academic things that they really enjoy, so I took some pictures of Liz with the engine and our packs, tying in to both her love of aerospace and of backpacking. When I finish shooting this roll we'll see how they turned out.
The moral of this story is something that I didn't realize until I'd been at college for a while: things don't always have to go as planned and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. I often get an idea of how something is going to work out in my head and then get stressed, consciously or unconsciously, when real life gets a hold on my plan, even if my "plan" is just my unofficial, unconscious view of what I expected to happen. It's amazingly freeing to step back and realize that it doesn't matter...we can have a fun time by completely ignoring the plan and doing something totally different.
Be Prepared is the title of this post, and the motto of the Boy Scouts, but being prepared can take on many forms...often it means having a well thought-out plan, but it could just as well mean be prepared to throw out your plans and do something different. If you're prepared, it'll work out fine. I was just told by someone that you need a well-formulated plan so that you have something to deviate from when you get into the field.
Although that was a good stopping point right there, I thought I'd bring this back to Mudd. I mentioned above that my photography theme is pictures of Mudders doing things that get them really fired up. I decided on this because I'm graduating in May and wanted to explore what it was that made me love this place for the last four years. I remembered back to freshman year when I was amazed to find the breadth of personality here at this tiny, technical (officially liberal arts) school. We have all kinds of people who enjoy all kinds of activities:
Jacques and Tavi, my freshman year, taught a class on Maori fire-spinning, called "Poi" which I really enjoyed. Jason was so good at unicycling that he can ride his unicycle up and down stairs and "idle" in one place talking with you. Brett drives to the mountains and tries to convince people to go mountain biking with him. He also sculpts. Scott flew RC planes and turned down at least two good job offers to go get a PhD in some form of aeronautical engineering. Marty plays Go. Alex was offered the role of Simba in the Disneyland Parade, although he turned it down because he would have had to take a year off of Mudd. Matthew auditioned for the Dapper Dans: Disneyland's barbershop quartet. A surprising number of Mudders are on the ballroom dance team. Liz bakes cookies for the dorm and sews magnificent costumes because she feels like it. Camillo dropped out because he decided his passion was in the martial arts and last I heard he was teaching German Longsword lessons and learning parkour.
We have all sorts here, and it really makes it an amazing place.
Okay, so that title is misleading. I'm actually leaving an a Mercedes-Benz older than I am with a diesel engine and a currently temperamental starter motor...so surprisingly close to a jet plane, in reality. My girlfriend, a clinic teammate and I are all going backpacking in the Santa Cruz mountains starting tomorrow. Spring Break starts tomorrow, so it's pretty good timing. Not like we had it rigged to turn out that way or anything....
Packing was kind of a rush job tonight and I'm going to have to have some discussions with myself and my trailmates tomorrow morning about the distribution of group gear and what really needs to be brought. I'm bringing my SLR camera and tripod, which, admittedly, are luxury items and quite heavy, but I also am saddled with more communal gear than I realized initially, since much of the contents of my pack is fairly static and mostly communal. Let me explain that:
I was a boy scout. I am an Eagle Scout (for those not in the know, you can only be a boy scout until you're 18 in most cases, but if you make it to Eagle then you're always considered an eagle scout in the present tense). This means that I take a lot of stuff with me when I go camping that I never use and never want to use. This includes first-aid kit stuff -- bandages, alcohol pads, and tape -- and more general things like extra rope, straps, plastic bags etc. I leave a great deal of this in my back and often forget about it. I'll have to check with the rest of my group to see if anyone else has first-aid gear or any of this other stuff so I can see what can be left behind as overly redundant.
I say overly redundant because gear does break, and you can't be stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no way to fix it and no replacement. We're bring two stoves, for example. The only meal we actually need to cook is dinner on the first night, but most other meals would be unpleasant to eat cold. We're also bringing 2 water purification pumps which is a bit redundant in my eyes, since I have a bottle of Polar-Pure. Polar-Pure is an iodine water purification that uses a small bottle with iodine crystals to saturate a small amount of water that can then be poured into much larger water containers to purify the water inside them. It tastes better than most iodine systems, but still not as nice as a pump, so my teammates will probably opt for both pumps. I still won't leave the iodine at home, though.
As an interesting aside, the sale of Polar-Pure was heavily restricted in California for a time (and may still be) because it is the only water purification that I know of that uses pure iodine crystals, and people were using the crystals to synthesize meth. Talk about a disruptive few spoiling it for the rest of us. Anyway, I really need to be asleep an hour ago so I can get up to finish last-minute work before spring break.
Look for an update when I get back from my trip, though!
Wow...I'm really slacking on this. Anyway, a few weeks ago, as mentioned by Trevin (whose blog you should read, if you don't already), was the Career Fair. I feel like it was smaller than usual, although the spring career fair is always small, so it could just be perception (I haven't gotten around to going to the office of career services yet and asking). However, there was a company there called DreamHost. They are a web hosting company founded in '97 by four Mudders. They've managed to keep quite a bit of the informal, friendly feeling of Mudd in their company, which is completely amazing...check out their "don't be a jackass" policy (at Mudd we are told during orientation that you'll generally be okay if you try not to be a jackass...it makes everything a lot more chill than it might otherwise be).
In addition to being pretty chill, they're remarkably helpful. They have a status blog to inform you when things go down and a twitter account that will tweet status changes. Beyond that, they have the best administrative backend I've ever seen. They really make it a snap to do most things. The two coolest things that I've come across so far are the one-click installs and SSH access. The second, SSH access, is nice because it lets you have control over your own files in a way that is comfortable to most of the CS majors here at Mudd -- we use the Unix shell for much of our work, so we get quite comfortable using it. Most places only give you FTP access.
The one-click installs are truely cool, though. DreamHost has gotten together a number of popular packages (WordPress, Drupal, ZenPhoto, etc.) and created an incredibly simple installer. You just click on the package you want, it walks you through everything you need to create, and then deploys the package where you asked it to. It also has a button labeled "update" that will update your packages to the most recent release just as easily. Truly, it is crazy.
Anyway, I need to think up a really awesome domain name, and then I'll probably start blogging over there once I graduate.
I'll try to have more updates for you this semester....
Prezi: The Coolest Thing Since...Dinosaurs, I Guess. Or Rocket Ships. Those are cool too.
The Mudd-y Swamp | 2/3/09
One of my clinic teammates is really excited about making good presentations. This is great, because he's imparted that excitement onto our team. Probably everyone reading this has heard advice like "don't read off your slides" and "Don't write paragraphs for each bullet point", but I'm willing to bet that relatively few of you have ever tried to make a presentation that completely gets away from the PowerPoint paradigm. PowerPoint, an ancient relic of a past age that's too cumbersome to know that it's dead, encourages slides that look like this: +--------+ | Title | |*bullet | |*bullet | +--------+ or perhaps this: +----------+ | Title | |*bul |pic|| |*bul |___|| +----------+
*edit: HTML's reluctance to insert multiple spaces into a web page made this asciiart somewhat unpleasant to draw...Non-breaking spaces fixed it.
This makes for a very dull presentation, even with an enthusiastic speaker. This is, certainly, a valid style of presentation, but relatively few topics actually benefit from it, and very few presenters know how to make it work to their advantage. It became mainstream because it was just about the limit of what PowerPoint (and computers, really) could do back in the old days. PowerPoint, being a part of the most prolific productivity software suite ever, reached the masses, and an entire generation of students was brought up learning how to use it and carrying that knowledge into the business world.
Unfortunately, they mostly learned how to use the very basic features. PowerPoint has grown beyond its original limitations, but people have stayed behind and still mostly use the basic templates depicted above.
Enter Keynote. I am a PC user -- I run Windows XP on my Tablet PC and Ubuntu Linux on my (distressingly old) desktop. That said, Apple's Keynote software left me speechless the first time I used it. Nearly as intuitive as the iPod, I sat down and knew how to do nearly anything the instant I first tried. It made building a presentation fun, like the classier breed of really horrible Flash games you find online and can't stop playing.
The two presentations that my clinic team has done were built using Keynote, and both were probably among the best presentations that have been given for clinic projects (in my completely informed and unbiased opinion). Instead of bullet points, we had little circles representing our users that scooted around the screen, and lines that appeared between them, and several other gimmicky animations that really made the presentation far more interesting that a static screen full of bullet points.
3 days ago Marty came into my room and said "I just IM'd you a link...check this out." The link was http://prezi.com, and the "this" to check out was one of the samples at the bottom of the home page. Go there. View the three samples. You'll be amazed.
This is cooler than dinosaurs, cooler than space ships, cooler than those awful flash games, and even cooler than sliced bread (although there is some debate about the dinosaurs). This program, called Prezi by taking the Hungarian dimunitive form of the English word "presentation", tries to escape slides altogether. It is a seriously cool piece of software that really has the potential to change the way people give presentations.
Three of my clinic teammates have signed up to be Beta testers, so with any luck our final presentation will be given using Prezi. For those of you interested in it, you can check out the Prezi blog at http://blog.prezi.com and you can follow several of the founders on Twitter.
And so I emerge victorious from the black depths!
The Mudd-y Swamp | 1/29/09
Welcome back. Sorry it's taken me this long to update, but I am indeed back at Mudd and the semester has gotten underway. Today's title refers to my first time in a darkroom since senior year of high school. I'm taking intermediate B&W photography this semester and the darkroom here is somewhat different than what we had in high school. It's also in the sub-basement of the physics building. Next to rooms with really big lasers.
In other news, I decided not to continue with Russian this semester, so in addition to photography I'm taking Philosophy of Mind on CMC, Clinic, Tools, and independent study with Professor Dodds. It's a light semester with only 12 units (I can't get on the Dean's List for this semester because of this, for instance), but I think I'll be very happy with my decisions.
In addition to all the academic classes I'm taking I also am taking 2 ballroom dance classes on Pomona. Pomona has a dance department whose students study modern dance, ballet, and other expressive dance forms. Mudders can take those classes for Humanities credits (that department is where I did my humanities concentration in Movement Studies, actually), but the ballroom dance classes are perhaps more accurately called "lessons" and are taken for PE credit (0 credits at Mudd, but you're required to take at least 3 pe classes before you graduate. I think I'm up to 10 now, 2 of which I helped teach...). The head of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company, Paul Roach, is a recent Pomona College alumnus and teaches the ballroom classes. He's a very funny guy and has a unique style of teaching dance to large groups that I find to be very similar to the style employed by my martial arts instructor before I left for college. This semester I'm taking Silver (intermediate level) International Standard Dance and Silver Social Dance.
Standard is Paul's personal favorite dancing, and it is much more commonly danced in competition than socially (except, perhaps, for weddings you rarely see it in social situations) so that class is very exacting. That class drives us very hard for technique. The 5 Standard dances are Waltz, Tango, Foxtrot, Quickstep and Viennese Waltz. This semester we are starting with Waltz and then moving on to Tango. Last year Liz and I took the Bronze (beginning) International Standard Dance class in which we spent most of our time on Quickstep, but also learned some Waltz and ended with Viennese Waltz. I've never danced Standard Tango and I'm really looking forward to that.
The social dance class is one of the most fun things I've ever done in my life. Bronze Social was alright, but the goal there was mostly to teach an enormous group of people the basic steps to a number of common dances (Cha-cha, Salsa, Triple-Step Swing, Polka and Lindy) and to try to get people out of their shells and make them more comfortable in social situations (while Mudd is the most technical school of the 5-C's, the others are no slouches and the difference between college students and high school students is, in some cases, only spelling, so social interaction can be a foreign concept to many people.
Silver Social, on the other hand, is an amazing class. Paul deliberately told us not to form lines like most of the dance classes and the result is a very organic and fairly chaotic group of fairly good dancers who are learning how to be themselves while dancing and look good while having fun on the dance floor. It is more fun than I can do justice to and I suspect will be a very, very good source of stress relief later on in the semester.
Dancing is fun, and I'm really glad I started taking these classes while I was at college.
Building Soccer in the US
Just Tryin To Feed My Children | 6/24/09
Note: By an act of some devine being, the US National Team advanced in the Confederations Cup. Bust out your buggle horn as the US tries for more suprises this morning at 11:00 AM (PST) against world-number-one Spain.
Soccer is known as the world?s sport. It is easily the most popular pastime from Western Europe to Africa to South America and parts of Asia. And even though it?s the fastest growing sport among young Americans, the sport does not enjoy a competitive share of commercial success in the States. This is unfortunate because soccer is a great sport, rich in both tradition and athletic grace.
Part of has to do with the fact that the sport?s infrastructure and league organization is not nearly where it needs to be in order to compete with established institutions like the NFL or MLB. Moreover, the fact that games basically run for 90 minutes straight without any stoppages of play means that the opportunity for advertising and promotion falls far short of what is possible in sports like basketball or baseball. Because of all of this, there is simply not enough money to go around that would attract the top talent necessary to create real buzz around the sport.
But these targets all take time and are really part of the end-game. To make soccer more commercially viable, the sport just needs to increase its domestic presence. Getting more eyes on the sport should make people more amenable to it.
ESPN is doing its part, having just purchased the rights to televise a large number of La Liga games from GolTV next season. The deal is structured such that ESPN will air 114 matches on ESPN 360, 95 on ESPN Deportes and 20 on ESPN2. This is great news for existing soccer fans and for potential ones as well.
La Liga, Spain?s top soccer league, doesn?t have the cache of England?s Champions League but it is still a great league for the WWL to feature. Whereas strength and bullishness is more prized in the English version, there tends to be more creativity and artistry in Spanish soccer. Fans tend to find this style of play to be more exciting. There?s also the language affinity that the Spanish league will bring to potential viewer in the US. Finally, the addition of superstars Kaka and Christiano Ronaldo to the Spanish league adds fodder to the belief that ESPN?s move could help cultivate a fan base.
My hope is that this move will increase soccer?s fan base amongst Americans and thus be a boon to the future of professional soccer in the States. Really, I think the impediment to a full-fledged league is the lack of fans. Get the fans (ie the demand) in place and then we can focus on other issues, such as getting world class player talent and matching league calendars with those in Europe.
Slammin' Sammy Update
Just Tryin To Feed My Children | 6/23/09
Turns out there?s more pathetic news on the Sammy Sosa steroid front. Evidence has come to light suggesting that Sosa requested that the sleeves on his jerseys be tapered to show his increased size. Go back and take a look at some photos of Sosa from 2002-2004 and look for the elastic bands that were sowed into the sleeves. So not only was Sosa likely juicing, he wanted to show it off! He rubbed it in the faces of Chi-city dwellers and ball fans alike.
This type of custom tailoring is not altogether original. Jimmy Fox had his jersey sleeves cut short and so too did Ted Kluszewski of the Big Red Machine. Even Tiger Woods had the left sleeve of his polo shirts shortened to free up his swing. The difference with Sosa is that these other guys altered their attire so as to free up their bodies to perform. Big Klu cut off his sleeves because he couldn?t swing properly: "They [coaches] got pretty upset, but it was either that or change my swing ? and I wasn't about to change my swing.? Football runningbacks and receivers have elastic on their jerseys but that?s done to make it harder for wanna-be tacklers to grab hold of something.
Sosa?s move, on the other hand, was outright vainglorious. His alterations weren?t done to make it easier to swing. Rather, he made them tighter so as to show off his growth. It was done with aesthetics in mind, not performance. I?d laugh if it weren?t so blatantly stupid.
Pricing Model Responds to Demands of Crowd
Just Tryin To Feed My Children | 6/18/09
The current economic conditions have put a damper on attendance at games and matches throughout all sports. Baseball, especially, has had a tougher time than most getting fans into seats, with ticket sales down at least 5 percent. But the San Francisco Giants organization is fighting this trend with a slick pricing strategy that is used primarily in the sale of airline tickets and hotel rooms.
Feeling that the League?s mandate to use StubHub as the primary ticket dispensary was hurting sales, the Giants began experimenting with a dynamic pricing model. For each home game, the Giants offer about 2,000 seats whose prices shift based on demand. Unlike other teams who peg prices at the beginning of the season which rarely change, the Giants? model weighs factors such as weather, opponent profile and past ticket sales in setting prices. So a Saturday game against the Dodgers where Tim Lincecum pitches will cost more than a Tuesday day game against the Nationals.
The model has been successful. The Giants say they are sell about 20 percent more tickets in the dynamic pricing zone?which is located in the upper deck and three bleacher sections?than they did a year ago. The team is also averaging about 375 more fans over the same period as last year, although attendance is below last year?s full-season average.
From the fan?s perspective, there are positives and drawbacks. The benefit is that a fan can come by a cheaper than face-value ticket if he doesn?t mind seeing a non-blockbuster match-up. But the system could hurt season ticket holders in the future if one is able to buy a seat via the new model at a price lower than what was paid by the season ticket holder. Season ticket holders buy their seats at set prices at the beginning of the season. In the future, will season ticket holders get refunds if dynamic pricing sets prices lower than face value? The organization should be wary of how dynamic pricing could effect loyal customers who purchase vast quantities of seats each year.
Other teams are watching the Giants? experience closely. Indeed, the organization is a vanguard in applying this model to ticket sales. If successful, it?s likely that other baseball teams, and teams across all sports, will adopt dynamic pricing in their ticket sale operations.
Surprised? Hardly
Just Tryin To Feed My Children | 6/17/09
Were you surprised when you tried to beat Joey Chestnut?s hot-dog eating record and failed? Were you surprised when Obama won the election? Were you surprised that the hot girl left you when you spat game like Tarzan? No? Then why the hell is anyone surprised that Sammy Sosa was juicing?
I?m sorry, but I?m fed up with all the steroid talk. Everyone is peddling eulogies, saying how this is such a shame, how it degrades Sosa?s legacy and how it undermines the game. People talk about how inspired they were by the summer of 1998 and how Sosa and McGuire provided a respite from the otherwise pedantic lives of their fans. Now that the truth is out, they don?t know if they can live anymore. Jeeeeeeeeeeeeesus. What sycophantic talk!
I could go on and on about how I think almost every single word that?s been spoken about steroids are misguided tropes filled with moral relativism completely lacking any modicum of context and perspective. If I did, however, I would give myself an aneurism. Wellllll, let?s tempt fate.
What?s so frustrating is that the debate among baseball enthusiasts rings, most unfortunately, like debates among politicians. All parties point fingers at others, each thinking that it is magically able to occupy the moral high-ground all by itself. Players blame the league, the league blames the players and the fans blame both.
It?s part and parcel with Democrats blaming Republicans for being overly ambitious in their war planning, the GOP shirking any responsibility because Democrats were being unpatriotic and the people blaming both because DC politicians can?t do anything. It?s like, Hellooooooo! Both parties voted for the war, and most all Americans wanted to kick some Middle Eastern tail. Everyone is to blame!
It?s relatively similar in baseball, especially with regards to the widespread applicability of blame. Except in baseball, it?s something like this: Pitching dominated baseball during the 1960s and 1970s. The league messed around with mound height, ball density, bat technology etc, all with the hope of balancing out defense and offense in the game. With the popularity of baseball struggling to compete with the ascendancy of the NFL, the need to liven up baseball was pressing. Home runs came in to solve this problem. ?Chicks dig the long ball? is what we?re told, but so do Johnny, Billy and everyone else playing Little League baseball across the country. So players knew that power and home runs were what was going to get them that lucrative salary. Good lord, what are players supposed to think when Adam Dunn gets millions for his .225 average, 200 Ks and 40 HRs but David Eckstein (model baseball player) gets chickenshit? So home runs began flying all over the place and fans were happy and therefore Bud Selig and the league were happy.
So who cares if they took steroids? No one was complaining when Sosa and McGuire were belting home runs. It?s just so typical for people to get moral in hindsight. What, was no one suspicious? Did people not want to be? Were red flags not raised when the normally affable Sosa had near apoplexy after Rick Reilly challenged his arrogance by informing him that there was a testing facility 10 minutes down the road and that if he really wanted to quell the rumors why not go piss in a cup? Then, when the guy stops hitting dongs, he gets caught with a corked bat. Hmmm, what year was that? Oh, 2003? The year he tested positive for steroids? This is just way too obvious.
People need to accept the fact that steroids were, and still are, a part of baseball. In fact, they?re probably more prevalent in sports than many people think. How else has the average O-lineman in football gained 75 pounds, increased his bench-pressing ability, yet still manages to run a 4.8 40-yd dash? That wasn?t happening 20 years ago. Wow, just wait until 60-minutes breaks this one.
The steroid era does not need to have a big tainting effect on the game?s legacy. If you set aside your predilections, the last 15 years of baseball have been some of its most entertaining. No one discounts the achievements of Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson for having pitched in the Dead Ball Era. We?re going through the same thing now. Get your panties out of a twist, and enjoy the fact that the game is more offensively minded.
But hey, don?t get me wrong. I love a good pitchers duel. But the last time I saw one, every goddamn tech-start up, entrepreneur wanna-be, venture capitalist never-will-be was too wrapped up in their Crackberry to soak in and appreciate the subtle intricacies of the game of baseball. Instead, it was only when Barry Bonds was pelting balls into the Bay that these college-nerd drop outs took their thumbs off their QWERTY keyboards to stand up and cheer. The game has changed because the fans have changed. Baseball is no longer the slow, cerebral, thinking man?s game that made it popular at the turn of the century. Fans don?t want to see a perfectly executed relay, much less a well-timed pickoff move. They want to see balls flying out of the park as if they were North Korean missiles.
From The Crowd
Just Tryin To Feed My Children | 6/15/09
Any true, hardcore sports fan appreciates good trash talking. When done right it enhances the experience for friends and hopefully it jeers the player in the crosshairs.
Last fall, while sitting in the right field bleachers as a Washington Nationals game, we called out Elijah Dukes for his sub-par play and propensity to miss the baseball with his bat. We pissed him off, he flipped us off and then proceeded to can a routine fly-ball. Dude deserved it, he?s a punk. But we didn?t curse, didn?t cross any lines and kept it, well, R-rated yes, but at least not NC-17.
Where am I going with this?
While good trash talk can be all fun and games, sometimes fans take it over the line. Like the Rams fan at the Niner game last year who I saw toss his Bud at a Niner fan but pretty much missed due to his inebriation and spilled it, instead, on a little girl. Punches ensued, security arrived, and though it?s darkly entertaining, it?s unnecessary.
A new service being peddled around sports stadiums is the ability to text security in order to alert them to unruly fans who may be taking things a bit too far. So when you finally get tired of the drunk bum behind you who?s been spitting on you as he tries to curse the ref, you can solve the problem discreetly, without confrontation.
The service is offered in 29 of 32 NFL stadiums, and dozens of MLB, NHL, and NBA venues. This past week, I received an email from the SF Giants informing me that they are going to begin offering the service themselves. It?s called the ?Text-to-Security? program and is being billed as a fan enhancing tactic.
And on its face, it is. If someone is being a true dick, they should be tossed. No one likes the guy uninformed, ignorant jackass that?s too stupid, drunk and unathletic to realize that a third-to-first pick-off move is not a balk. So when he spews out his bullshit you can get the jerk removed.
Nevertheless, in a sense, it smacks of tattling and narcing. Fans shouldn?t have to protect themselves in the first place, nor should they be put in the position of having to rat on fans, no matter how stupid they?re acting. The onus shouldn?t be on the fan to police the stands. That?s what the ushers are for! They?re the ones who should be making sure that fans don?t get out of line. Still, it?s a good thing that stadiums and management are recognizing that while energy should exist at events, games and matches don?t have to have the same atmosphere as a British pub after their soccer team was beaten by the German nationals.
A brief news update in the politics of sports?
Just Tryin To Feed My Children | 4/1/09
One of sports? great anomalies is lack of uniformity in the application of antitrust legislation. Baseball is the only sport?and business for that matter?exempt from Congress?s blanket of trust-busting. Other sports do not enjoy such protection.
This time it?s college football that?s been caught on lawmakers? radars. Senator Orin Hatch (R.-UT) is plotting a potential antitrust investigation into the NCAA?s Bowl Championship Series. He is planning hearings, too. Alleging that the current system ?leaves nearly half of all teams?at a competitive disadvantage,? the investigation would look into strength of schedule disparities and other factors that go into the controversial computer ranking system.
Perhaps he?s grandstanding. More likely, he's for real--after all, every fan of college football hates the system and greatly prefers a playoff model. Or maybe he?s just still bitter about the fact that his states undefeated record wasn?t good enough for a spot in the ?ship. Read more...
The Slide of Paul Revere
Just Tryin To Feed My Children | 3/4/09
The Slide of Paul Revere
[Grantland Rice]
Listen, fanatics, and you shall hear Of the midnight slide of Paul Revere; How he scored from first on an outfield drive By a dashing spring and a headlong dive? ?Twas the greatest play pulled off that year.
Now the home of poets and potted beans, Of Emersonian way and means In baseball epic has oft been sung Since the days of Criger and old Cy Young; But not even fleet, deer-footed Bay Could have pulled off any such fancy play As the slide of P. Revere, which won The famous battle of Lexington.
The Yanks and the British were booked that trip In a scrap for the New World championship; But the British landed a bit too late, So the game didn?t open till half past eight, And Paul Revere was dreaming away When the umpire issued his call for play.
On, on they fought, ?neath the Boston moon, As the British figured, ?Not yet, but soon;? For the odds were against the Yanks that night, With Paul Revere blocked away from the fight And the grandstand gathering groaned in woe, While a sad wail bubbled from Rooter?s Row.
But wait! Hist! Hearken! And likewise hark! What means that galloping near the park? What means that cry of a man dead sore? ?Am I too late? Say what?s the score?? And echo answered both far and near, As the rooters shouted: ?There?s Paul Revere!?
O how sweetly that moon did shine When P. Revere took the coaching line! He woke up the grandstand from its trance And made the bleachers get up and dance; He joshed the British with robust shout Until they booted the ball about. He whooped and he clamored all over the lot, Till the score was tied in a Gordian knot.
Now, in this part of the ?Dope Recooked? Are the facts which history overlooked? How Paul Revere came to bat that night And suddenly ended the long-drawn fight; How he singled to center and then straightaway Dashed on to second like Harry Bay; Kept traveling, with the spped of a bird, Till he whizzed like a meteor, rounding third. ?Hold back, you lobster!? but all in vain The coaches shouted in tones of pain; For Paul kept on with a swinging stride, And he hit the ground when they hollered: ?Slide!?
Spectacular players may come and go In the hurry of Time?s swift ebb and flow; But never again will there be one Like the first American ?hit and run.? And as long as the old game lasts you?ll hear Of the midnight slide of P. Revere.
_________________________________________
We read this poem for my Politics and Law of Sports class. Written around the turn of the twenitieth century, Rice?s poem joined an array of other popular culture movements that looked to affix close bonds between baseball and American iconography. All such works were part of an effort to elevate baseball through patriotism which was a boon to establishing baseball as America?s national pastime. Read more...
What Is the Greatest Sound In Sports?
Just Tryin To Feed My Children | 2/4/09
I debate this in my mind constantly. I know, I know, really geeky right? But seriously, let me know what you think. Here's my top 5:
1. The rattling of a golf ball in the hole after you've sunk a 20-footer. 2. The pop of a 90 MPH fastball as it smack the raw-hide of a catcher's glove. 3. The crunch that emanates from the collective crash between a middle-linebacker and a wide-receiver as he streaks across the middle. 4. The swoosh of a basketball as it falls through the mesh net. (Does a chain-link net sound better?) 5. The roar of 43 NASCAR stock cars as they start their engines at the beginning of a race.
Do you agree? Think I'm way off? Am I missing others? Let me know what sounds in sports are akin to the strings in Beethoven?s Fifth. Read more...
Electronic Arts' Market Strategies
Just Tryin To Feed My Children | 2/4/09
So the economy is still hurting and companies across the board are looking for the best strategies possible to ensure stability and viability. To be sure, the sports industry has not dodged the economic bullet. But one company provides a lesson for how to navigate these testy times.
Electronic Arts, a titan in the sports videogame market, recently reported a third quarter net loss of $641 million, or $2 per share. This compares to a $33 million loss for the same quarter a year earlier. Citing poor holiday sales, the maker of Madden, FIFA Soccer and Tiger Woods Golf has released considerably more conservative forecast projections.
But despite these poor numbers, EA shares rose 6.1% in after-hours trading the other day. How could the share price rise in the face of such crummy numbers? For starters, the company has been transparent and forthright regarding their losses. So investors were not shocked by the poor numbers?they expected them.
So this accounts for why the stock did not tank upon the earnings? release. But why then did the share value actually increase? It turns out that EA has been proactive and vocal about its plans to regroup and recharge. EA has made the decision to tighten its belt by focusing on their most successful products and extracting maximum value from their best brands. Thus the decision has been made to delay work on niche products such as ?The Sims 3? and to transfer focus to their more popular games such as the Madden franchise. Furthermore, EA plans on cutting 1,100 jobs and closing twelve facilities.
So investors were calmed and even encouraged by EA?s comprehensive and robust war plan to get the company back to posting strong profits. Indeed, the gaming company forecasts per share earnings to fall between a five-cent loss and a 40 cent profit. When compared to this years earnings drop off of $3.29 for this fiscal year, that?s quite an improvement. EA?s plan to pare back on niche products and to focus on aggressive marketing for their best products position?s them nicely to weather the storm. Read more...
Baseball as a Civil Religion
Just Tryin To Feed My Children | 1/25/09
The important distinction is that baseball is a civil religion and not a "religion". Thus it is not an ecumenical religion like Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Buddhism. In ?Civil Religion in America,? Robert Bellah posits the idea that ?most Americans share common religious characteristics expressed through civil religious beliefs, symbols, and rituals that provide a religious dimension to the entirety of American life.?[i] Civil religions have neither gods nor sacred texts but they do have institutions which aid and abet their effects. They possess religious overtones as they live deep in peoples? souls and elicit a visceral emotional connection.
They present qualities that its follower?s value and create a spirited community. In the same way that religions have institutions, so too does baseball. If institutionalized religion has cathedrals and synagogues, then baseball has stadiums. Walking through the tunnels of a stadium is like walking through the crypt of a church. Stepping out of a tunnel and facing the open field is then analogous to entering the sanctuary. Even baseball jargon is religious in tone and form. In the stands you here cries of ?you gotta believe!? and strategies that require ?sacrifice.? When the game is close fans are encouraged to have ?faith? in such ?life and death? scenarios. Larry Merchant, a sports analyst for HBO, once said that the World Series was treated by fans ?as though it were a solemn high mass.?[ii]
The emotions felt by athletes and fans work to inspire religious feelings as well. When Robert Novak goes to watch his beloved Dodgers he notices several ways in which baseball creates and inspires a civil religion:
By the asceticism and dedication of preparation; by a sense of respect for the mysteries of one?s own body and soul, and for powers not in one?s own control; by a sense of awe for the place and time of competition; by a sense of fate; by a felt sense of comradeship and destiny; by a sense of participation in the rhythms and tide of nature itself.[iii]
All of these emotions and effects are present in baseball but could easily be found in religion. The companionship of crowds yields congregational sentiments. The sense of fate breeds respect for what will come and helps us cope with events when things go sour. The rituals of baseball?do not step on the foul line, take exactly two practice swings, lick your fingers before every pitch?are not unlike the rituals found in religion.
A famous sports saying goes ?Winning isn?t everything, it?s the only thing.? What follows from this is that in losing there is a sense or element of death. To lose is to die. But this is symbolic just as baptism and communion in church are symbolic. In each ritual the participant dies, symbolically, and then is reborn, symbolically. The same is true in baseball. A player loses a game or strikes out three time and dies, symbolically. But the next day he is born again with a chance at redemption. As long as the churchgoer or player cedes himself to the symbolism and does not just walk through the motions, the effects of the rituals can be impacting.
Some are cynical and find it aggrandizing to elevate sports to a semi-religious status. They are more humanistic and fail to see?or refuse to see?how a stadium could bear resemblance to a church. But then again, what religion does not have its skeptics, its nonbelievers? ?Any religion worthy of the name thrives on irreverence, skepticism and anticlericalism. A religion without skeptics is like a bosom never noticed.?[iv] Indeed, Novak welcomes their challenges as their dispositions validate baseball?s religious nature.
Baseball is also religious in that its followers share common histories and pass shared experiences and memories down through generations. Robert Elias? A Fit for a Fractured Society, quotes Stephen Riess who said ?the national pastime?supplied some of the symbols, myths and legends society needed to bind its members together.?[v] Shared beliefs create communal bonds and also inspire reverence for the subject. A young child listening to his father?s experience seeing Jackie Robinson play or Barry Bonds slug home runs can have a very impressionable effect. That these memories can be passed down through generations shows the sport?s transcendentally religious nature. Sharing memories and stories ensures that the civil religion persists and stays vibrant.
Unlike much of the world, we lack the thousands of years of evolving society that has placed art, and music and opera at the summit of societal importance. We have musical talents but nothing on the order of Beethoven or Mozart. America has some great literature but most rankings put Shakespeare, Milton and others at the top. The reason is that Europe has had thousands of years of societal struggle?we have had just over 250. Alas, sports are our civilizing agents.[vi] They better us by bringing us together and they inform our hearts and souls through the values that they teach. Baseball is America?s universal art form and our civil religion.
It is very easy to gloss over sports. So ubiquitous in our society, they often fade into the background as scores scroll across the bottom of television screens. We are inundated with sports to the point that they may even seem to have a dulling effect. But to rest there would be a serious injustice. As the French author Jacques Barzun once wrote, ?Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.?[vii] What began as a simple game played on the Elysian Fields in New Jersey has blossomed into so much more.
[i] Robert Bellah, ?Civil Religion in America,? Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Winter 1967, Vol. 96, No. 1, 5. [ii] Larry Merchant, quoted in Will, 24. [iii] Novak, 18. [iv] Novak, 23. [v] Stephen Reis, quoted in Robert Elias, A Fit for a Fractured Society: Baseball and the American Dream,(Armonk, New York: Sharpe, M.e., Inc., 2001), 10. [vi] Novak, 27. [vii] Jacques Barzun, God's Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love Spiced with a Few Harsh Words, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1954) 159. Read more...
The Fantastic Adventures of MC Ho (HMC '10)
Rough Week
The Fantastic Adventures of MC Ho | 9/25/08
The past week has been ridiculous. so many things going on, so much homework to do, and not enough sleep. Here's a break down of what I did...
E80 Research: Friday 1:00-5:00 pm Run to 21 Choices: Friday 5:00-5:30pm API-SPAM retreat: Friday 5:30 pm-Saturday 4 pm Knocked out: Saturday 4pm - Saturday 6:30 pm (missed a Newspaper I was supposed to be in charge of -_-) Food + trying to wake up: Saturday 6:30 - Saturday 8:30 pm More E80 Stuff: Saturday 8:30 - 10:30 pm Micro-P's lab: Saturday 10:30 pm - Sunday 2:30 am Sleep: Sunday 2:30 am - 9:30 am Electronics HW: Sunday 10:30 am - 11:00 pm Hum reading/falling asleep: Sunday 11:00pm - 3:00 am Sleep: Monday 3:00 am - 9:00 am Electronics Office Hours: 10:00 am - 11:00 am Class: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm Lunch Meeting: 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm Class: 1:15 pm - 5:30 pm Dinner/finish up hum reading: 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm ~~~~~ OMG I'M ONLY ON MONDAY~~~~~ Class: 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm Frustrated with Micro-P's lab: 10pm - 3:30 am Sleep: Tuesday 3:30 am - 8:30 am Class: 9:30 - 11:00 am Fixing/finishing Micro-P's lab: 11:00 am - 3:45 pm
I'm too lazy to type up the rest but you get the point. I think the next few days will be better though. Read more...
It's 6:00 on a Saturday morning
The Fantastic Adventures of MC Ho | 4/19/08
I'm tired and don't want to be awake at all but we're about to get on busses to go launch rockets. Exciting! Read more...
Pictures!
The Fantastic Adventures of MC Ho | 4/12/08
Yes! Now you can enjoy my blog with minimal reading!
It was two of my friends' birthdays so a group of us went out to eat at a Mongolian BBQ place for dinner on a Saturday:
Hah! Look at Rishad's face:
Last Wednesday, it was Prof. Schaffer's birthday. He's one of my fav. professors so my friend Jessica and I had to do something for him (hehehe):
We also made him wear a sash ahhaahahahah. I was eating lunch with him that day:
In my continuum mechanics class, Professor Bassman was up to her usual antics and passed around cups filled with corn starch and water for people to play with. It's an example of a dilatant, non-newtonian fluid (its viscosity is really big with a high shear strain rate, low with a low shear strain rate). Scott Butters had a little too much fun: Read more...
Harvey Mudd is...really hard
The Fantastic Adventures of MC Ho | 4/11/08
Preface: These are my personal experiences. How the HMC workload affects someone is very much dependent on that person's habits. Factors like time management, how good you are at a particular subject, whether or not you're willing to ask for help, and more all play a role. It IS possible to get plenty of sleep and not get that stressed out about things here (but it's pretty rare). Also, I realize that complaining about academic work is silly compared to all the other worrisome things out in the world, but this is really what people talk about at mudd.
So, unfortunately, Harvey Mudd isn't all fun and games. This is a college that expects a lot out of you and you're going to have to work hard. Though it's probably not a completely adequate description of the pains and struggles of HMC, here's a brief overview of some obstacles I've faced here:
-I've gotten tired of work. No, not just tired... I've gotten to the point where I would beg for all the work to stop. There are times when I would have non-stop work for weeks in a row (this doesn't last all year, but it happens every once in a while). Even though I'm interested in math, science, and engineering, there's a point where I just want to leave all that and do anything non-academic. At Mudd, it's not uncommon for academics to consume you. I think it's probably built into the nature of our school.
-I've been completely defeated by assignments. This is something I've really never had to deal with in high school. Also, it was largely non-issue freshman year. However, starting sophomore year, I've had some assignments which have really gotten to me and "broken" me. What does this mean? Well, basically, it usually means having homework assignments with only about 6ish problems...but lasting me 6+ hours. It means doing a problem, finding a mistake, redoing the problem, finding another mistake, redoing it again, etc. ... and then moving on to the next problem and repeating the process (also, it means writing code that doesn't work, but also doesn't give errors, and then sitting around trying to figure out where you went wrong)
-I get disappointed with my grades sometimes. Maybe you already have a feeling of this already but here's the deal: most of the people who come here are at the top of their graduating classes and are used to getting A's with little to no effort. At Mudd, you really have to work HARD to get good grades. And a "good grade" is not necessarily an A, it might be a B. Also, it's pretty common to study hard for tests and get unsatisfying grades on them :(
-Because of an overload on work, I've lost (lots of) sleep. Sleep deprivation occurs often enough at Mudd that students abbreviate it as "sleep dep". It really sucks. The worst that I've ever had to go through was going without more than an hour of sleep at once for about 3 days... during finals week. I was falling asleep during my last midterm. Yeah... that was bad. Maybe I'll talk about it more later.
-Stress and sleep dep plays a strong negative role on your emotions. When I'm stressed out and worried about the massive amount of work that I have to do, it's much easier for me to get angry and annoyed at other people. I become less social and sometimes depressed. Not a great feeling.
So why do I put up with it? Well, even though the work can sometimes take a beating on me, I still really like the things I'm studying. Though not ALL of the material is interesting and some of it is just plain boring to me, I really do have very strong interests in engineering, math, and science. Some of the stuff I'm learning is really really cool and the "aha!" moments of engineering, math, and science are awesome. It's a weird mix of pleasure and pain haha.
In deciding whether or not Mudd is right for you, a big piece of advice I'd give to you is to evaluate yourself and think about how passionate you are with respect to the technical fields (of math, science, and engineering). I think, with little or no interest in the technical fields, you will probably not make it here. With a decent amount of passion, you can make it but it won't be a pleasant experience at all. With a strong passion, you'll make it through and you'll be as happy as you can be at a place like this. Read more...
My Schedule
The Fantastic Adventures of MC Ho | 4/5/08
This semester my schedule is awesome:
(I don't even have to meet for E8 yayyyy)
Homework due dates: - Monday - E85 Labs - Wednesday - E85 and E83 Homework - Friday - Art 100 (Intro to Digital Photography) Homework
This probably doesn't seem like much but it's quite a bit. E85 Labs and E85, E83 Homework Assignments can take about 5 hours each. Also, I need to have E80 group meetings to prepare for our labs.
Last semester it suckeedddd cause I had a lot of core classes:
Work and Play
The Fantastic Adventures of MC Ho | 4/5/08
My bad for not updating in like... forever. Here are some videos for y'all to enjoy:
Here's my E80 lab group (minus one of the team members) working on one of our labs. I'll describe E80 in more detail in my next post but here's the basic jist of what we're doing:
The rocket that's in the video has thermistors in it, these are resistors which vary with different temperatures. Basically, you connect a voltage source to the thermistors and use these to get values of temperature with this thing called an RDAS (Rocket Data Acquisition System). The problem is that the RDAS outputs raw data, which is not the same thing as degrees Fahrenheit. That's why we need to calibrate the thermistors by gathering data from both the RDAS and high accuracy digital thermometers, which is what's happening in the video:
Also, I recently went to go see Justice @ The Mayan Theater in LA. It was sooooo amazing and crazy and intense. I was about three people away from the front. Here's some video of them mixing D.A.N.C.E.:
I've been busy...
The Fantastic Adventures of MC Ho | 3/9/08
I have some plans for bigger posts soon but I've been running around and doing stuff non-stop so I haven't had too much time to sit down and blog. Right now I'm studying for my E85 (Digital Design and Computer Architecutre) midterm, which is tomorrow. Maybe if I take a study break I'll put something of substance up.
also: I got over my cold really quickly ^.^ yay for airborne (or a cheaper CVS copy) Read more...
if(sick): cry
The Fantastic Adventures of MC Ho | 2/27/08
So I think I'm getting sick which is no good. A bug has been going around the school and lots of people have been getting sick. This is a big fear among students especially because the pace of your workload at HMC doesn't give you much time to be in bed all the time (hah, I have to do a post about sleep deprivation sometime soon).
I hope I get lucky and get better soon. I have some midterms coming up blehhhhh.
Another little tidbit: There are many email lists for the college which have different subscribers. There are, of course, lists for the entire student body, lists for graduating classes, lists for clubs, and lists for students enrolled in different courses. However, there are also two email lists per dorm. One is for more serious emails about dorm-related affairs. The other is a "dorm chat" list where all sorts of completely unserious emails get sent out. They're filled with anything from strange and gross youtube videos to incoherent banter. There's also a list called "community-l" (all the lists end in "-l"), which is a place where students can have serious discussions/debates about issues that they're interested in. Topics range from the role of diversity at Mudd to the strengths and weaknesses of the Room Draw system. There's currently some discussion on how free speech impacts the Claremont Colleges and what constitutes a "biased-related incident." Read more...
Ummmm
The Fantastic Adventures of MC Ho | 2/24/08
So I guess I fail at that whole "post everyday" thing haha.
Here's a little tidbit about dorm life: Once a week, the various HMC dorms (North, South, East, West, Atwood, Case, Linde, and Sontag) have a dorm barbecue (different dorms can have it on different days). For the barbecue, the dorms get grills, charcoal, lighter fluid, patties, buns, quesadillas, etc. for the dorm residents to make burgers and other food with.
West (the dorm that I live in), has their dorm bbq every Sunday. It's a good way to hang out with other people in the dorm and you get some good, not-dining-hall food (I've made some delicious burgers at dorm barbecue).
If you don't know how to flip a burger, you'll soon find out how. Read more...
My blogging schedule and one of many posts about HMC's workload
The Fantastic Adventures of MC Ho | 2/21/08
So my new plan for this blog is to try to post something about 6 times a week, with one of those posts being longer and elaborating on a particular topic. The other posts will be short and sweet. My intent is to meet my goal of catching things that "slip through the cracks," as I've stated before.
Woooo! We'll start with a short one:
So I'm working on my Math 63 (Linear Algebra II) homework right now. I'm a little stuck which has been frustrating, especially because I usually find my LinAl homework to be challenging but very doable. It kind of got to me a few hours ago, when I was getting a little angry about it. I had dinner at the dining hall with cool people though so that lifted my spirits.
Transitioning to Harvey Mudd can be weird because you will inevitably have trouble with technical courses. When I was in high school, I really looked forward to all my math and science classes because I liked them AND because the homework was really easy for me. At Harvey Mudd, it's not rare to find that the technical stuff is really the hardest stuff you'll face on any given night of homework. At times, it will create an extremely defeating feeling (Being the best at something -> Being the worst at something = T_T). In high school, I think I built up a sense of security and comfort through the math and science classes I was good at. Well, Harvey Mudd definitely tore those barriers down and showed me what it was like to be bad at math, science, and engineering classes. Bleh.
Don't worry though, there are many resources out there to help you when this happens. Academic Excellence tutors (special upperclassmen who help with core curriculum classes), regular tutors, your peers, and accessible profs (professors). You'll be fine ;)
... that was a longer post than I expected haha. Read more...
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