On Procrastination...

I think I know why people procrastinate. It's all about hope. When you procrastinate, you put a task off for a later time or date, when you can hope that it will be done. Procrastinating is just a fancy way of forgetting your troubles for a while. Why are we so prone to procrastination? Because we like to hope. Because when you have hope, everything sort of feels all right.
Blogs are an excellent source of procrastination.
Procrastination can be a good indication of your distractability.
It requires tremendous willpower to stop procrastinating.
Usually when you procrastinate, it's because you really don't want to do something. The question is, is it a good idea to actually do what you don't want to do?
I'll leave it at that.

Chatting

Chatting is a waste of time. I don't know why I get sucked into it so often. So is talking on the phone. It disrupts physics, math, english, computer science, research, juggling--everything. What a waste.

Random.

The swim trunks don't belong on your head, silly.

Mickey mouse cannot climb cliffs, and people are not perfect.

Blue duckies belong on neptune, Uranus is a planet.

Ski pass my ass.

The cell phone is a waste of time unless used thoughtfully.

Emotion is the crux of human relations. So many actions are based off of it.

A grade is a number that means more to some than food, sleep or well-being. A number is more important than well being.

Lava lamps, like emo, like swing, like uggs, are a fad.

Do a freudian analysis of that.

What I learned today, and yesterday

Funny words:
schizoid (disorder)- a personality disorder characterized by a lack of a desire for social relationships.
sexagesimal- fractions employed by Babylonians around 1320 A.D., based on dividing units into 60 parts. This is how the minute and hour were eventually divided into 60 parts.

Interesting Principles:
The gradient of a scalar field maps the direction of greatest increase of the scalar field as a vector field.
The divergence of a field is, in physics terms, the rate of change of the amount of "stuff" per unit volume per unit time. SO, the volume integral of the divergence is the rate of change of mass going through a particular volume per unit time. It is related to flux by Gauss's theorem, which states that the total flux over a closed surface is equal to the total divergence of the flux over the volume the surface encloses.

These are actually really hard to understand, and it took me FOREVER to get them, which kind of makes me frustrated because now I have only a day to understand all of the electromagnetism which feynman presents (like 5 chapters, each of which take an hour = impossible).

Fun Facts:
Ice cream made with liquid nitrogen cooling is tasty apparently.
If you run an AC current through a pickle, it glows.
There are 5 different tastes we have: sweet, sour, bitter, satly, and umami. Umami is a flavor commonly used in the East, and is the taste of MSG. Tomatoes and parmesean cheese also have umami, however. I characterize it as a "meaty" flavor.

Cool Quote:
"When it comes to procrastinating, I do it right away!" Dunno who said that...but it's clever.

The UW Campus at night...

The University of Washington campus at night is truly a wonderful place. It's really nice being able to wander such a vast campus which just 5 hours ago was teeming with live, and is now almost completely empty. Highlights include Greek Row (the houses there are HUGE, and it's fun to peek in to see what those frat guys and sorority girls are doing). The Computer Science building, and the Physics building.
My favorite place was by far the physics building. You can only get inside if you have a special key, and once there, it's like you own the place. There are comfy couches, computers galore, and all the soda you could possibly drink there. Not to mention all the books and empty hallways you can wander.
Basically, everyone needs to walk around their campus at night. Or, if they don't live in a university, everyone needs to go out one night and just wander. You'd be amazed at what you'll discover.

Why do we have 20 Dollar Bills?

It just occured to me...why do we have 20 dollar bills? I mean, I understand 1, and 5, and 10, but then why 20? And why is the next bill a 50? These numbers are all multiples of 5, in this order: 0, 1, 2, 4, 10...Perhaps the treasury knew that they wanted 10 and 50 dollar bills, and wanted something in between. But that would be a 30 dollar bill. Or, if they wanted a bill between 0 and 50, they'd need a 25 dollar bill. However, a 25 dollar bill would be difficult to give change from, since 25 is harder to subtract from than 20. But in that case, then why do people create such obscurely priced merchandise?

My pizza cost $2.40.

Curiosity: I was on the phone so long yesterday that my hand was cramped up in the phone-holding position (hand up to ear).

The Harvard Grad Student

So.
There's a Harvard Grad student downstairs. She's working on her PhD in math, and already has her postdocs lined up for 3 years. All at Harvard. She comes off as very quiet, and very intelligent. She's working on some sort of very complicated Algebra.

We had dinner, and I was surprised at how passive and ordinary she seemed. I mean, you'd think people from Harvard are like this elite class of super-humans or something. I mean, they're at Harvard! But no, they're just ordinary people. Smart, yes. But in other respects, pretty darn ordinary.

I was amazed at how little she had to say about Harvard other than her math students were unenthusiastic about math. You'd think that Harvard would be a school of privledged elites who love all subjects. Not so. The school is just as diverse as the UW. Okay, maybe the UW is quite a bit more diverse. But the two are both intelligence and interest spectrums. Both have their outliers, and that bell-shaped middle.

And as always, half of the class is always below average.

Still, I'd like to go to Harvard, or an equally renowned school simply because then I'd be surrounded by really smart people. And I always enjoy that.

How I Juggle for 5 Hours

So, a friend asked me today how I manage to juggle for 5 hours a day. Here's my answer:

I just do. Meaning, I go and juggle, and I get so immersed in my juggling that pretty soon it's been 3 or 4 hours...occasionally even 5. Juggling isn't really a meditation, and it doesn't allow the mind to wander. But, it requires an intense focus. You have to think only about juggling when you're juggling. Otherwise you'll drop. The minute you worry about other things, like whether you will drop, for instance, you do. And it always keeps teasing you with more tricks to learn. When I get into one of my long sessions, what happens is every time I learn or practice a trick, someone shows me another one. So, I of course have to learn it. The end of a juggling session usually isn't due to a lack of tricks to learn, but rather due to my sheer exhaustion, thirst and hunger.

Perhaps the reason I can juggle for 5 hours is because although it's physically demanding, you don't get as tired as fast. Or, at least I don't notice it any more now that I've been juggling for a while. I juggled again for 3.5 hours today. 2 hours into the practice I thought maybe we'd done an hour tops. Time flies when you're juggling. It's a very different, very focused world. Juggling is quite an experience.

When you think juggling, think hiking. Think reading in a quite library. Think walking alone on the beach. Think being completely immersed in your little world--focused, and alone.

On a similar note, recent juggling progress:
5 clubs, 56 catches
4 club shoulder throws
juggled 5 balls for several minutes
Learned a bunch of other stuff you'll have to see for yourself. Check out my videos (most are not all that up to date) at
http://students.washington.edu/uwjuggle/videos.htm

The Weekend In Review

Saturday:
Computer Science Homework
Made Phad Thai
Juggled for a total of about 5 hours.
Chatted. Chatted way to long. But for a friend, it was worth it.

Sunday:
Physics Homework
Wrote many emails, including one apologizing to Sensei Junko about why I did not go to the karate tournament today.
Figured out classes for next quarter:

CSE 321 (if I can get in, if not, then Math 310: Problem Solving) : Discrete Structures
Phys 123 (H) : Honors Physics
Math 324: Multivariable calculus (it's about time!)
Phys 225: Modern physics
either Stat 390: Probability and Statistics in Engineering and Science
OR Research credit for the explosives research I'm doing now

Worked on Honors in Rome Application
Visited a family friend who'd recently broken her pelvis and hip in 3 places
Edited and updated juggling website
Juggled
Chatted. Again, for far too long.

And that's about it. This is what a light weekend is like for me.

Answer To Puzzle 1, Puzzle 2

You can view the program that prints itself online at:

http://students.washington.edu/julenka/puzzles

And now, for a new problem:

A genie walks up to you and says, "Hey you, can you help me figure out which of my magic lamps is fake? I have 12 here, and know 11 of them are genuine. The one fake lamp doesn't way the same as the other 11 lamps, but I don't know whether it's heavier or lighter. I also have this pair of scales, but they're weird. They can lean either to one side or the other, or stay even, but that's it. And they can only weigh stuff 3 times. Can you devise a method to figure out which lamp is the odd one out using just three measurements? Hurry, Survivor's on, and I only have a few minutes to spare.

What Undergraduate Reserach is Like

I’m typing this in a 6 x 8 foot cell, half of which is taken up by a noisy fume hood. I’m sitting on a small black stool (the kind with no back), with my laptop on my lap. To the left of me is that giant noisy fume hood, with tons of chemicals, heating plates, and experiments inside. In front of me is a giant tank of nitrogen the size of a 5^th grader, as well as a very complicated-looking microscope. To the right, there’s a little desk cluttered with fancy gadgets and tools. There are a few lab coats lying around, and a vacuum cleaner as well. The entire room is orange because of these smelly plastic curtains they put in the room. Every 4 minutes or so a little window pops up on my screen, indicating I’ve completed yet another data run. So, I reset my experiment, put my data in an excel chart, and start all over. This experiment manages to keep my happily half busy like this for several hours each day. So that’s what research is all about.

CS Agony

I have a ridiculously hard Computer Science midterm tommorow. We are given 50 minutes to solve 6 problems, 2 of which are straightforward computations (but require quite a bit of time, one is a page long fill-in the blanks sheet which requires meticulous analysis of code). The other 4 are harder programming problem. We have to write a program which does a certain task on the spot.
Here's an example of an array problem from the test:


Write a method longestSortedSequence that returns the length of the longest sorted sequence within a list of integers. For example, if a variable called list stores the following sequence of values:
(1,3,5,2,9,7,-3,0,42,308,17)
then the call
list.longestSortedSequence();

would return the value 4 because it is the length of the longest sorted sequence. If the list is empty, your method should return 0. Notice that for a non-empty list the method will always return a value of at least 1 because any individual element constitutes a sorted sequence.

Now, this is pretty hard on its own, but imagine having to do 4 of these with about 35 minutes left on the clock. You basically have only one try to get it right. Oh, and did I mention that an 80% is equivalent to a 2.6? Talk about pressure.

So far, I've gotten about 50% on my physics midterm. We'll see if this test score gets better as my results come back.

First Puzzle

This is a programming puzzle:

Write a program that writes itself. That is, the output of the program is whatever the code of the program looks like. So, if the code of the program looks like this:

if (this was a real language){
it would not be comprehensible;
}

Then, if it wrote itself, it woudl output:

if (this was a real language){
it would not be comprehensible;
}

I Had This Impulse...

To start a blog. For my first entry, I will lay out my terms:

This Blog's 10 Commandments:

1. No chronicling of daily life in the form, "First, I did this, then I did that..."
2. Only mention aspects of daily life if they are unique, or interesting.
3. Attempt to illustrate what life is like as a juggler, physics and computer science student, english teacher, and karate student.
4. Don't offend anyone.
5. Don't reveal overly personal information.
6. Try to give puzzles and paradoxes on every post.
7. Make rules.
8. Follow them.
9. Don't write what isn't worth writing.
10. The beauty of blogging is you have time to express what you want--so think before you type!

Okay there they are. I think I will post these on my profile somewhere so they don't get lost.