I'm in a play-y mood and tried out to wear bunches. I was too lazy so I didn't try to braid my hair. After I finished adjusting, I walked to the mirror. OMG it's soooo girly. And cute. This is just not right. Maybe I could use it to surprise people :p For everyday life I'll go back to ponytail...
Several MIT students learned how to win in Black Jack, and went to hit Las Vegas for a good fortune. They did earn a lot, but then things started to get strange....
I bought this book at the airport as I head towards California and finished reading it during the 6 hour flight. Then in the hotel I swapped it with one of the books in the room. I hope it's fine.
The fact that it is NOT a fiction makes me proud of being in the same school. I totally believe that things about card counting in the book could in fact happen in the real world. The last part sounds a bit fictional, though it's not that unbelievable.
The author also makes winning sound very easy, while in fact it is not, or there won't be casinos. I personally think that the author focused too much on the money part. Throughout the book figures are flying around, in units of thousand dollars. It had its dramatic effect at first, but then I got numb. Yeah, it is a lot money. And?
Contrary to some of the responses written on the book back page, the story makes me don't want to gamble. I definitely don't want to be hurt by some random guy working for the casinos.
ps. The guy in the front of the poster looks a lot like Tegmark, a professor at MIT.
I'm right now in Pasadena, waiting for the shuttle to the airport. I spent the past two days here in Caltech running around, learning about the exciting research. The weather is pretty nice, and it seems that it is very research-oriented here. People do mention over-the-top nerdiness, but I don't yet see a reason. I'm pretty surprised to see that the students are free to do anything they want. It certainly doesn't look hard to switch groups, even after months after first decision. And the qualifying exams don't look intimidating.
Another surprise comes from the neuroscience group in physics department. It fits me just good. There isn't many students with neuroscience background in physics department, and there aren't many groups in physics doing neuroscience research. The group is studying the connections between neurons in a way I haven't encountered before. It's definitely not the conventional medical-style neuroscience.
I still wants to go to the particle physics group though. The talk by professor Newman ignites me again with the passion towards particle physics. Maybe I really should go outside the framework of heavy ion physics and look into more basic stuff. The physics in heavy ion collisions is too obscure and I couldn't appreciate it. Definitely not at this stage, when I still have much to learn. But I think I will eventually go back and study heavy ion physics, because nobody knows what could happen there.
I was pretty much exhausted last week. There were an exam where I have to remember some medicine/toxin names (as well as what the effects are, etc.). There weren't that many, but to a physics student, it was really a lot. Shortly after that, I have to write a one-and-a-half page long essay in German about some aspects of Berlin. It would be very interesting if I had more time to research on it, but it was too precipitous. We had to grab material from a program called Berliner Sehen, which is basically a collection of interview clips with Berlin residents. Most clips are hard to understand, so I have to listen for more than once to know what they are talking about. Then, maybe the clip I just heard is irrelavent to my topic. Cool, find a new one then. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Finally I put together some one page long essay. Well, I've done my best.
What makes things worse is the work for my thesis. This week I returned to the summer schedule: work in the lab until past midnight everyday. Thursday is worst. I worked until 2:30 in the morning. Luckily, I made a lot of progress, which is what I never dreamed of. For some reason the result turned out to be too good. It's almost too good to be true. I'm one more step towards graduation!!!!
A lot of people compare undergraduate education in MIT to drinking water from firing hose. I would say it's a bit of an exaggeration. It is the students who can say so and who don't like to make others think that they're working hard? I never feel hosed in undergraduate level science courses. Maybe the humanities classes because of my shitty English, but never undergraduate science classes, especially in physics, my major field. The professors did a good job keeping pace of the class, and it's pretty easy to follow without too much effort. I'm not a bookworm; I didn't spend much time on studying.
One of the main reason might be that I've learned most of the basic stuff in high school already. I grew up in an Asian country, and I don't quite understand what American students learn in high school in terms of basic science training. The first year here is like a recap of high school material to me. Of course there are problems with every education system, but if I have a child in the future, I will want my child to be more competitive.
But, well, in terms of self-confidence or communication skill, it's another story....
There are some interesting flash games recently. First of all there's this "MyMinicity" thing. It's kind of like building your own city, and the way to expand the city is to get other people to visit your city. With the growth of population, more problems (traffic jams, unemployment, etc.) will be introduced, and one has to make things better before increasing too much population. For example there will be links that will increase industry, transportation, and so on. My city is here....http://myminicity.ad-s.org/?id=FHead. Every click counts! (one IP one action per day.) After a while, it becomes harder to balance between different clicks because it is the visitors that can decide which link to click instead of yourself.
Another interesting one is the GoCrossCampus game. The main goal of the game is conquer the whole map. When joining the game, one can choose a force to join. Normally the map is your campus, so people just join their own dorms. The game is progressed by turns. One turn is about one day, and players can place troops, put commands, etc. That's all what a person should know to play. What makes things interesting is the coordination within and between forces. There could be spies who leak out battle plans for example. The weaker ones should also ally together to fight off larger forces. The game will go on until only one army is left, and would last a couple of months or so.
Both these web games require people to go there every day to check status or do things. The advertisement benefit is sure large. I have to admit that whoever made the game is clever.
I got my third German exam today. The second one was last Friday. I have no idea why the two of them are so close to each other, but it's fine since we don't have too much new vocabularies to memorize. This test is longer than the previous two, and we need to write more short essays. If all of the exam are in German, then it's not that bad. It turned out that there is one set of questions that confused me a lot: "first choose from 'werden' or 'sein' to fill in the blank, and then please translate the sentences to English." It sounds easy but it's actually pretty mind-consuming. I had to switch back and forth between German and English, and that's much harder than I thought. Of course I know what the sentences mean, but my translations become German-ish. For some Reason I capitalized all the Nouns, and I used 'ist' instead of 'is'. Luckily there are only two sentences to translate.
Illustration:
From now on I won't put too much comment on the illustrations here, and only finished illustrations will be put in this blog, as I opened another blog exclusively for illustrations (and also music compositions, but I don't have much progress on that side recently).
I went back home very late yesterday with my cell phone's battery dead. My cell phone is my primary source of knowing when, so I have no clue as of what the time really is. After I recharged the battery, I did notice that the time on the cell phone is one hour off compared to the time showing on the computer. I didn't consider the possibility of daylight saving time change though. The only thing I thought was that the backup battery in my cell phone also died, which causes the time change. The next day I woke up at exactly the same time as before without noticing that the duration of my sleep was actually shortened. Hmm. This probably means that my schedule is too irregular.
In spite of the vast amount of work for me to do, I was pulled away from the computer and went bowling. A couple weeks ago I also went to play. As a complete beginner, I didn't expect much for the outcome. It turned out that my high score on that day was 96. So I set my goal to be over 100 points this time.
After the first game, I got something like 60. Oops. I was probably too ambitious. The second game I come to 80-ish. I'm back :p The third game went okay until close to the end. It seems that I rushed too much and the ball keeps going in the wrong direction. I end up with 95 points, and the 10th block was [9 -]. If only I could hit the last bin.
Next time I will definitely be over 100.
Drawing~ I'm lazy with the background again. :p I've also made desktop wallpapers based on this: 800x600 1024x768 1600x1200. It's free to download.
I bought one when I went home last time in January, but I've been busy so I didn't really have time to play with it until yesterday. The instruction sheet says that at most 12 sounds can be played with this type of ocarina, from F3~C5 (or it can be shifted, as I don't have absolute sound). The available songs are very limited, for example there is no #C or #F. I didn't notice it when I bought it, but well, it's probably how it works.
Then I played with it for a while, trying out different songs. And I discovered that the available frequency spectrum is actually continuous! One has to cover the holes partially to get the intermediate sounds. To be honest I don't know how exactly it works even though I'm a physics major, but it seems that the frequency is dependent only on the total area that the air can come out from the ocarina. I have to think harder to check this.
Going on to today's sketch. The siting-on-tree one is kind of boring, so I started a new sketch. Now I think of it, the direction of the sword is wrong. It should be rotated 90 degrees given the hand position (if it is western fencing style). But I guess nobody cares about it :p
After discussing with my thesis advisor and admitting that the efficiency is way too low for me to do anything, I went on to try some desparate options. Then the total efficiency jumped up at least 15-fold. That means I will have more than 200 times the statistics all of a sudden. What's going on here..... Is this a dream? Now I can see my graduation coming.
Here's the progress of the new drawing. The drawing pad is really evil. Every time I take it out, a few hours of my time will be eaten.
Today, about 5 minutes after I left the neuroscience classroom I suddenly received a phone call from some guy saying that my wallet is still there in the classroom. I at first thought that it might be the TA, who happens to have access to my information. To my surprise, it was one of my classmates. Apparently they found my wallet, found out my name from the ID card, and looked up my cell phone number on facebook. Thanks guys.
To continue, this is my progress on the next drawing. She is standing on a sea bank (or some random high place) with her eyes closed, imagining that she's flying. I might add a pair of wings, depending on how good I can draw them d: . I'm moe'ed by her (Isurugi Noe from True Tears), so you'll probably see me drawing her for the next couple of days. The girl in yesterday's post is also the same person.
(For this blog entry please decode the following QR code to read the text)
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Ahaha. Surprised? Actually somebody started a blog exclusively for this QR code.
http://www.qrcodeblog.com/
This is the nerdiest thing I've seen in a while. Even more than the QR code cake. The guy apparently fell in love with this QR code and created a blog which everything is encoded in QR code. Pick a decoder and import the picture and one can read the content of the blog. It's so nerdy that I can't stop laughing. Good job. It was a nice distractor.
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ps. The text between "<<" and ">>" are encoded in the code block. Nothing more. You can try to get a program to decode it just for fun though.
