So last night, Nik, Max, and I were studying for the philosophy midterm, and we got to talking about the Monty Hall problem. It goes like this: you've got three doors, behind one of which is a fun prize, and behind the other two are nothing. You guess one of the doors, in an attempt to obtain the awesome reward, but before you get to see if you were right or not, some punk named Monty opens a different door, and shows you that there is nothing behind it. You then have the opportunity to change your selection. What do you pick?
Well, we figured, being shown that another door has nothing behind it doesn't change what your original choice was, so it doesn't make a difference as to which door you pick now. Either of the remaining two doors will be equally likely to have the prize behind it, right?
Wow, that was a good weekend. I'm sore, and twisted my toe on the wrestling mats, but learned a lot. It was fun to be exposed to so many new techniques: all-direction step-in-thrust, a rotating takedown from side strike, and an opposite-hand variant of the fourth-kyu 180-degree pivot shuffle cross-step-under initiation. There was even koryu buki study, and some calligraphy practice! The demonstration itself went well too, although we didn't get to go through all six techniques.
I was happily surprised to see David-sensei and a bunch of other friends from the Portland club at the Genyokan. I miss those guys out here, so getting to work with them for three days was a nice reunion. Looking forward to getting back for summer, and having class with all of them again.
Two hours after going to sleep, I awoke to a shrill alarm with a start, kicking off the bed and into the air. Three things went through my head in the second or so before I touched down.
- Hmmm, that's not my alarm. It's much too high-pitched, and isn't intermittent.
- Gosh, there's a lot of smoke in here.
- Hey, is that the ground?
The weekend was pretty darn awesome. Sophie and her housemates invited Nik, Max, Rachel, Anna, and I to dinner, where they'd made tons of delicious Jewish food. There was salad, fresh-baked bread, delicious kugel, and a massive roast with carrots and other veggies... it was *soooo* tasty! After weeks of Sodexho, getting to have a real meal with good company made my day. Max and I washed the dishes, and after we hung out on the couches, studying and watching Grey's Anatomy.
The two tests from Monday's classes went okay--I was definitely more confused by the EM material than Partials. Of course, the Partials test didn't actually ask us to solve any PDEs, and that's the part of the course I totally don't understand yet, so I got off easy. Seeing the unusual connections between function spaces and Linear Algebra is mind-bending at times.
I haven't taken many classes lately with research papers. It's all been problem sets, notes, finals... not much in the way of going out and finding stuff on my own. Because of this, it was not until yesterday that I experienced the awe-inspiring mass of documentation that is the U.S. Government Archive, on the first floor of the libe: rows and rows of compressed movable shelving, stuffed full of treatises on every imaginable topic.
They're filed according to some byzantine scheme, with at least six separate fields for each identifier. The notation uses capitalization, slashes, dashes, dots, colons, and even superscripts to index each document, and after perusing shelves of this stuff, I can't ascertain what those numbers mean. On this shelf, a decrepit tome "War" rests sedately on the shelf; thicker than it is tall, it describes the military capacities of the United States decades ago. Here's a report on global warming written in 2005: a thin paper booklet held together by staples, and right next to it: five volumes, over three thousand pages, detailing the threat of Communism to the American public.
A couple of funny things happened to me today. Over break I got a series of e-mails with tips for taking the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a scenario-based assessment of critical thinking skills. The names for each tip started with the letters B and S: "Be Specific", "Be Skeptical", etc.* However, the e-mail for tip number four was:
TIP #4: READ DIRECTIONS ($5.00 extra to anyone who can come up with a version of this tip's name that starts with an “S”) Check that you’ve done what you’ve been asked to do. If you’re being asked to play a role, think about who you are suppose to be writing for. Don’t assume that your audience knows what you’re writing about.
To sum up the last term:
I took three classes: Ordinary Differential Equations, Japanese 205, and Classical/Computational Mechanics, affectionately (though with a thin edge of nervousness) referred to by many physics majors as "Classy" and "Compy". These last two ate me alive: the average weekly problem set was 18 hours in length, although one went up to 25 hours. I spent a lot of mornings (9:00 P.M. -- 3:00 A.M.) in Olin, the physics building, staring at Mathematica and struggling through Lagrangians. "You know, the windmill is really pretty at sunrise," my friend Max told me. "You can see it through the windows of the Olin hallway."
I sometimes wonder about how much postprocessing is, for lack of a better word, "honest", in creating a photograph. When working with an image composed of a bit vector, which is only interpretable through the use of complex hardware, I feel free to modify the image as much as desired; unlike working with a traditional negative, in which the image has a concrete physical form, one sequence of bits is, in some sense, as good as any other. This lack of permanency, of a link to the exposure itself, is in some ways liberating, but can also feel dishearteningly trivial.
For most images, I perform mild color (usually, just levels) correction, rotation, and cropping only. I feel that these modifications are not only traditionally acceptable, having analogous processes in the darkroom, but do not change the photograph in a way that misrepresents having been there. That is, I suppose, the most important aspect of photography for me: relaying the experience of seeing something in the world to someone else. Drift too far from that experience, and the photograph communicates a dream, not reality.
Classes haven't killed me yet!
It's eighth week, and time for overdrive. Two take-home finals (one expected to take two weeks!), an ODE lab, an 80 hour final project for Computational Mechanics analyzing the dynamics of our tinkertoy siege engines, and all the regular Japanese and ODE coursework on top of that. Of course, this can only mean one thing: it's time to take harder classes.
So stuff here has been busy as heck the last few weeks. Classes are beating me up: Classical Mechanics, Ordinary Differential Equations, and Japanese 205 this term. Aikido hasn't been going at all recently, which is sad. First week I caught whatever cold was going around, then this Monday I knocked my shoulder out of commission on one of the 4th kyu sacrifice throws. It's slowly coming back, but I'm still not up to rolls, or really much of anything with that arm. Realistically speaking, I'm probably not going to test this mid-term: I've just missed too many classes.
This week was full of out-of-town visitors: Des and Bitsy came out here for the weekend, which was full of Aikido, reading, and photography. Bitsy helped me out with the alumni interview for Physics, which was more informative than I had initially expected.
Ruby on Rails is much, much, slower than I would like. It takes around .25 seconds to render the index page: about 10 times longer than Ragnar. I've alleviated the problem somewhat by switching to a Mongrel cluster with Apache's mod-balancer, but performance is still slow. I can't add any more foreign key constraints--pretty much every feasible relationship is locked down. I guess it's just down to ActiveRecord tuning, and figuring out how to make ERB run with any semblance of speed. Possibly memcached, too...
Anyway, sorry for the inexplicable downtime. Things are still moving around quite a bit.
Working with the D70 is an interesting experience. It's a very different feeling from the 4500, partly due to the camera itself, and also to the RAW workflow. The photographs I've taken with the new camera are more complex, expansive, and subtle. The clear, bold colors that I'm used to with the 4500 don't feel right for the images that I've taken time to work with, even though the levels distribution is even.
I've been working with F-Spot, UFRaw, and the Gimp for my image workflow, which has proven effective, if unfamiliar. It's difficult to predict how a given set of parameters will transform the RAW data, and I expect it will be some time before I become adept at the process. Getting color right is hard.