Justin Li

Just to let everyone know that I've moved my blog from ninghui48.blogspot.com to justinnhli.blogspot.com. It's just more canonical... and I believe my MSN account and this is the only thing left which uses ninghui48.

Hope everyone's doing well.

So I was playing with Google's gazillion features, and realized that Blogger is owned by Google. I dipped my toes in, and found I quite like it. So I created Justin's Blag <http://ninghui48.blogspot.com>, to really test it out. I want to post more often than before, and maybe not write such a blig post each time. I haven't found a way to sync the two sites though; if I only post at one site and note the other, I bleg for your forgiveness. Hopefully there'll be a easy solution to update both sites at once.

Justin out.

I am a reader of digg.com, a "social news" website where stories are ranked by how popular they are. Recently, two different articles have appeared on the front page:

The Porn Myth, by Naomi Wolf, New York Magazine
Meet the Pre-teen Beauty Addicts, by Diana Appleyard and Sadie Nicholas, Daily Mail

The first article is based upon a well known theory that watching pornography leads to the objectification of women. The theory claims that porn glorifies the physical aspects of women, but ignores or even degrades the mental and spiritual aspects. Watching porn excessively - embedded with these portrayals - leads to in essence a brain wash effect. By indulging in porn, the attitudes of women in porn are taken to be the attitudes of women in real life, leading men to see women as mere physical objects without intelligence or thought at all. This objectification of women turns into rape and other predatory crimes, a "substance" abuse for the offenders.

The article actually attempts to show that the theory is incorrect. I add some of my own thoughts in this summary, but the big ideas are all in the article. In reality, watching porn becomes an escape from real life. It is true that porn has saturated our society - over 60% of website visits are sexual in nature (source)) - but it is not the attitude of the actors which stick with the watcher. It is the impossible ideal of a perfect, submissive, sexual women. Finding this ideal lacking in real women, men turn exclusively to porn for stimulation. The actresses in porn thereby acts as a substitute for the interaction with women that men would otherwise have. But of course, this "interaction" is purely physical (or rather, sexual) in nature, and it leads to the desensitization of men towards any other kind of stimulation.

As the last note, the author also did interviews at Northwestern. The quoted student's response shows just how pervasive pornography and sex is in every day life.

The reaction of women? Start trying to attract men, harder and at a younger age. The second article talks about young girls who are aspiring to be fashion models. Young as in pre-teen, as in 9 years old, who spend 70 pounds (141 USD) on cosmetics and make up a week. That's 3640 pounds, or 7356 USD, a year. At this age, of course, the money comes from parents - willingly. Both the parents and the daughter claim that "all her friends are doing it", and that if she doesn't she "doesn't feel right". The girl's role models are celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, and their parents don't find anything wrong with that. In their world, it's not knowledge or literary value which drives them to read (Katie Price's a.k.a. Jordan's book), not moral values (Jennifer Lopez's multiple divorces, again among many others) or law abidance (Lindsay Lohan's drunk driving, among many others) which considers people as their role model.

Of course, it would be incorrect to blame all this on pornography. Certainly, the culture of celebrity worship, of the media's magnification of beautiful people, and of toy companies trying to sell dubious products (like the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit which was available under "Toys and Games" section for a while) all play a part. I think the deeper need, however, is to get a sense of self worth from others - to get over the sense of not measuring up college females reported in the first article.

The problem for both genders, in my opinion, is the inability to appreciate anything but the physical. There is an intrinsic mental, even spiritual reward in interacting with real human beings, which you don't get just sitting in front of your computer or watching TV. The sacrifice of these rewards for porn shows another problem with modern society: instant gratification. Of course eating ice cream all the time will be great, until one gets cavities and over weight; similarly, of course watching pornography makes one happy, but it's at the expense of friendship and of intimacy. Having never been rewarded mentally or physically, they instead choose to dwell on what they know will make them happy.

A similar argument can be made for the young beauty addicts. At that age, neither their body nor their minds have started to develop. All they are exposed to, thanks to the media, are beautiful people who they take on as role models. They too are in a sense ignorant of the other sides of life, not knowing why an equal or larger amount of time should be used to "take care of themselves" mentally. Together with the same ignorance on the male's part, this leads to the life of girls being sexualized at increasingly early ages.

Photos which don't necessarily compliment this account can be found at

http://picasaweb.google.com/ninghui48/Scotland?authkey=PNZMab3_G9E

The hiking trip in Scotland was fun. For one, this trip, like my spring break trip and PWild trips previously, has brought some new friends. Long distance hikes, the more strenuous, the more you bond with people who go with you. On this trip, even though we had not planned to walk the trail with anyone else, we nonetheless found a number of groups who we have grown closer to. But perhaps I should describe where exactly this trip of ours is taking place first.
As I've just mentioned, our hiking trip is in Scotland, for the most part following the Great Glen Way. The way follows the Caledonian Canal, which connects the Atlantic Ocean on Scotland's south west to the North Sea on the north east. The canal is 60 miles long, but as hiking trials tend to meander the entire trek is 77 miles. The Caledonian canal uses a natural fault line and the series of lakes (lochs) and rivers on it, only building locks to control water flow. The most famous of these lochs is of course Loch Ness, home of the legendary serpentine monster Nessie. Loch Ness is the largest of the lochs on the canal, spanning a full third of its length. I said that we mostly followed the Great Glen Way, because for the last 18 miles of the 77 mile journal we actually take another route, on the other side of Loch Ness. Normally people finish the hike in 6 days, starting in Fort William to the south and ending at Inverness ("inver" - mouth of; "ness" - the River Ness) to the north. For us, however, the last day's hike of 18 miles was too much. That, or we couldn't find a hotel at Inverness for that night - I never found out which was the case - added 300 pounds cost, a ferry across Loch Ness, and an extra day's length to our trip.
Now at the end of the hike, I don't think the hike was that bad at all. We could certainly have had it worse, if we say carried our own tents and sleeping back. As it were we had a carrier service that moves our luggage from one night's accommodation to the next, so that we only have to carry water and food with us for the hikes. The hikes were moderately easy with that fact, although it still would be manageable with larger backpacks. The day with the most elevation gain was only 500m, which was not the day of the longest distance. The first two, easier parts of the hike were also the more boring ones, as we simply walked along the tow path of the canal. On the third day there started to be some elevation, and we began to get better views of the lochs and rivers. For the next two days the views were still not great; we were not high enough, and the sky was constantly covered with clouds, making all the photos seem dull. The day of the best views was the one with the most ascent, and a decent 14 mile hike. We were high enough to see past the mountains on the other side of Loch Ness, resulting in a scenery combining the water with the fields beyond. The sun also sometimes poked out from beyond the clouds, lighting up the meadows to add more color to the scene. That was the fifth day of hiking; after that we took an hour long cruise across the loch, to continue our trail on the other side. This trail, as it was not the Great Glen Way, is less well maintained, and had more forages into bushes and climbing over moss covered rocks. On the sixth day although our hike was only 11 miles, it took us 7 hours to complete, because of bad instructions and also because of the rougher terrain of the track. The last day was easier, but as we moved onto the bank of the River Ness the views were less interesting. Ultimately, my favourite day is the third, when there was some elevation, but the hiking was still pleasant. It also rained at the end, which was quite fun (at the time; rain caused lots of trouble on the fifth day).
Given that the Way is the newest and rather easy long distance hiking trail in Scotland, there were a fair number of people hiking it at this time of the year. The first pair of people we met and have somewhat of a relationship with is a pair of girls, I think from Netherlands or Austria. I guess I should say "women", as they are older than me... They had large backpacks, and I think were camping their way along the trail. I personally never talked to them, but recognized their faces. The first time we "met" was the first day, on a series of canal locks called Neptune's Staircase. We had just finished watching a boat being lowered and was about to leave when they arrived. I didn't see them on the second or third day, although my mom and brother played leapfrog with them on the trail several times. Er, by that I mean they passed each other in turn, not actually played leapfrog; that would be weird. The fourth day was a short hike, just 8 miles, and as I hiked ahead of my family all three of us spent a lot of time resting at our destination. My mom saw them on the fifth day as well, and had wanted to go talk to them, but when she turned her back for a moment they had already moved on. The last time we saw them was today, when at the trail end's marker we waved to each other.
There are four people I can mention in one breath. The eight of us (four of them and my family) stayed at the same B-and-B on the third night (07-23). Two women were from Boston, and were biking the opposite direction. I talked to them at breakfast, as I was the first one ready of my family. As they were heading back towards Fort William, our starting point, that was the only time I've seen them. The other pair was also American, a couple from Michigan. I only really got to know them on the fifth day, as I caught up with them in the rain. The husband is actually a professor of mathematics at a small university, but had done his undergraduate degree in computer science, and so we struck up a conversation. I had first paid attention (and thus was able to recognize them later) to them because they were talking about Fahrenheit and Celsius conversions during breakfast, which led me to conclude they were Americans. Of course, their lack of accent to my ear also helped me distinguish that fact. It's strange, because none of my other family members have talked to them.
Speaking of computer science, another hiker comes to mind. He was British - I could tell from his accent - and he had an old Google shirt on while he hiked. We played leapfrog on the fifth day, but he was the fastest hiker I've come across on the entire trip. Both times I past him were when he was resting, once to eat an apple and the other to change into dry clothes. We first met after taking a short break after climbing a steep hill, and I knew he was fast then when I couldn't keep up with him, never mind overtake him. We only had a brief talk, while he was eating. Although we were almost the latest to start on the trail that day, we were some of the first to arrive at our destination. When I overtook him while he was changing, I also overtook another couple. At first I thought they were non-native English speakers, but I now I think they are Canadian. They were also very fast hikers, although I was slightly faster. Their hike and accommodation was also curiously booked through the same company as we did ours, and so we had the same boat ride across Loch Ness, and stayed at the same place that night. We were not as close as say me and the couple from Michigan, but bonded somewhat when we tried to figure out the instructions after the cruise.
There were two couples I (or I guess my parents) were closest to. One was a couple from Switzerland; they had saved my parents from walking down the wrong trail, then at the next section picked raspberries to eat. I only met them once, on the day of the short hike, and had a short chat with them then. My parents and my brother bumped into them much more often, as their pace was more evenly matched. The other couple was American, but have been living in Italy (Venice) for the past two years or so. I think we first past then on the third day. I had followed them for a while, as I didn't feel like overtaking them. They then took a break on a meadow overlooking the loch (Loch Oich at the time), and my entire family when past them. Later at Invermoriston the husband bought a drink for my dad, and that's when we really started talking. We shared a B-and-B the next night, and my father returned the drink. They were staying another night in Drumnadrochit, while we took the boat, and by pure coincidence we arrived at the ending marker at the same time today. So we took pictures for each other, and shook hands.
I think that covers everyone. Certainly, the people we met on the trip made it much more interesting. I think our family was also memorable to them, as I'm sure we were the only Asians on the trail. It made us really easy to recognize, and I think that's why the last gentleman bought my dad a drink. The only other Asians I saw were two Chinese young men at Fort Augustus, and I don't think they were hiking. Perhaps it is this uniqueness which made more people talk to us.

London, ay? This is my last day in London; tomorrow we're driving out to Bristol via Bath. I've been to Bath before, and have visited the Roman baths there as well as the nearby stone henge. London, of course, is also not new to me, although I have no recollection of it from seven years ago. I have a clearer memory of Bath. So, to make my visit really touristy, I visited most of the attractions.

On Wednesday, since my dad and my brother were not here yet, my mom and I decided to just wander around London and do whatever we want. We took a walk through Hyde Park first, as it was only minutes away from our hotel. We then took the Underground (the Tube) to the British Museum., where we went our separate ways. I guess I confused the British Museum with the Natural History Museum, as I was looking for dinosaur skeletons and not ancient relics. My inner nerd still made me stay two hours there though. The exhibit on money was particularly interesting. I think I like the Louvre better for the Egyptian displays though.

After British Museum, I took the Tube again to King's Cross. There wasn't any major tourist attractions around there, but I wasn't looking for one. I was only there for a photograph... of a sign reading "Platform 9 3/4". Yep, Harry Potter. Considering that Rowling didn't actually have King's Cross station in mind (she had mixed it up with some other station), it wasn't actually between platforms 9 and 10, but on the outside wall of the section housing platforms 8 to 10. I don't remember which station was the one they filmed in though, and couldn't be bothered to look it up, and so left it at that.

From King's Cross I took the Underground again to Waterloo. It's my first stop on the south side of the Thames, and I fancied a walk. It took me a few wrong turns to get to the riverside, but once I got there the view was pleasant. There were street side performers along a long stretch of the walkway. One of them dressed up like Dumbledore, and I posted that on Facebook with the caption "*HARRY POTTER SPOILER WARNING* Dumbledore's not dead..." There was also a Jack Sparrow actor, but he wasn't as good as the Dumbledore one although he had a larger audience. My meandering took me to County Hall, where there was Star Wars exhibition. It was expensive to go in, so I didn't, but took pictures of a "Jedi School" sign and models of Storm Troopers lined up outside. These I captioned "My real reason for leaving Hong Kong" and "Target practice" respectively.

Further along the riverside, I came across the Tate Modern Art Museum. I am not too big a fan of modern art, but as I was passing by, I just took a peek in. There turned out to be an interesting exhibit on urban cities, their growth, development, diversity, density, and so on. The "art" were mostly videos people made in these cities, and I only glanced at a few of them. The information about the cities was much more interesting; Hong Kong was not one of the cities being explored though.

Directly outside of Tate Modern is the Millennium Bridge, which I recognize from Jenn's photos of London. My first souvenir of the trip was bought on the bridge, two tiny kites. I suppose they would be very easy to fly. Crossing the Thames on the bridge brings me directly in front of St. Paul's Cathedral, which I had previously mistaken for the Central Criminal Court aka Old Bailey. I again went in for a peek, and was just in time for a choral performance. My timing couldn't have been better planned.

That about takes me to the end of the first day. I ended up walking for over three hours along the Thames. I took a rush hour train back to my hotel, and had Indian food for dinner.

My dad and my brother arrived early the next day. We spent most of the day looking at university campuses, the main reason for this trip to the UK. We did spent an hour in a giant Waterstones bookstore, where I looked for books on genetic programming again. They didn't have any in stock though. The only half exciting thing was a musical for the evening, Billy Elliott. It's about the son of a labour miner who gets into the royal ballet school. It wasn't too good of a musical, to be honest; I didn't like the boy's singing.

Yesterday then, I again had more free time. My family visited the Science Museum first, right next to Imperial College. The exhibits weren't that exciting - Hong Kong's Science Museum has more hands on toys - but their store was amazing. They had USB rechargeable batteries, lava lamps, and best of all a solar powered hot air balloon. It's 8 metres long, and I think it works by absorbing sunlight to heat the air inside. It actually flies, as the packaging has warnings like "do not fly above 50m altitude," "the balloon must be tethered at all times," "do not fly during thunderstorms." We were tempted to buy one and try it out, but in the end I walked away with only an LED flashlight.

Our next destination was right next door, the Natural History Museum. That place was huge. I took 90 minutes walking through only one section of the museum, as I didn't realize the other sections existed. I forgot to collect a map, you see. The sections I did walk through were mostly geological and astronomical in subject. The coolest exhibition was a collection of gemstones. I wondered how much I would get if I stole and sold the stones. I had never imagined that the museum would have such valuable items. For my last 30 minutes there, I briefly browse through the mineral gallery, and found a collection of 50 diamonds of varying colours. Again, what treasure.

Last stop of the day was the National Gallery, right off Trafalgar Square. I spent another two hours there, but was done with my main interest after the first. I enjoyed the 17th to 18th century paintings, and the small number of impressionist paintings from a slightly later period. Again, the Louvre's collection was more impressive.

To round the day off, my family went to watch another musical, Fiddler on the Roof. This one I have seen before as a movie, and really the stage show is not too different from it. The dancing is slightly better in the movie, as the stage was really too small for say the wedding scene. Tevye's acting was superb though, and sounds just like the actor from the movie.

Finally, today. I spent the morning at the Science Museum again, looking over a few halls I missed yesterday. At 1300, I went to Covent Garden and met up with Shagnik. I had emailed him before the trip, as Mark (I think) had said he was still in the UK. He has an internship right now, which is why he was staying for the summer. He will be going back to Hong Kong for a month or so in September, when I will see him again. But we found each other among the sea of people in Covent Garden, and had lunch as this Asian restaurant. It was a curious place, laid out with benches like a Hong Kong food court, but you are actually served. The food was enjoyable too. After taking our time finishing our drinks, we took a short walk around Covent Garden before sitting down at a coffee shop. A lot of our conversation was on college/university life, but later on we moved on to our preferred nerdier subjects, maths and computer science. We took a while trying to figure out if the 15 puzzle (the one where you slide an empty square around) spans the permutation space of randomly placing the 15 pieces on the board. Yeah. I think the conclusion was that it doesn't. We also wandered onto genetic algorithms a bit, and the whole "I am a God creating digital life" thing. Another topic (which led to the nerdiness) was forensics, and how our group is so tight knit. As I said to him, that I was talking to him in London is proof of that. We sat for over 4 hours in that cafe, talking until Shagnik had to go meet the friend he was staying with. We planned on meeting when he gets back to Hong Kong though, to go to the school library (of all places) and read through the yearbooks.

After saying goodbye to Shagnik, I went back to Hyde park and typed this crap up. Just one more thought: in another "life imitates xkcd" episode, I can't help but think that all my pictures were taken not so much as memories of London, but to make people enjoy seeing them online. Which is really the same idea as comic 77, "and yet all I can think is, "this will make for a great LiveJournal entry.""

For the purpose of entertaining those not in Hong Kong, and those I don't talk to too often...

I haven't really done anything since coming back to Hong Kong, not in the way I do things at college. I do have a few websites to work on, but have not really worked on them. Summer so far has been too good work.

Really, the most memorable parts of the summer have been the numerous forensics meetings we've had. It seems strange that forensics would drive people together like so. I mean, now I know three people who are 4 grades below me, who I otherwise wouldn't know. Somehow the bonding goes beyond speech and debate, but into other matters of life as well.

I don't know what I'm writing about, and that was horribly written.

On the other hand, I've only met with you guys once or twice. Where are you and how are you doing?

I wrote this after missing the last train home on Sunday night/Monday morning. I thought I would share it with all of you.

I love Hong Kong's night life, possibly more than the myriad of activities that happen during the day. I'm not talking about the bars and the seemingly always open shopping malls; I'm talking about the pier at 0300 in the morning.
After missing the last train, I decided I would just stay up instead of spending loads of money to take a taxi. Luckily for me, there was a 24-hour McDonald's near the train terminal. For the first two hours or so, I sucked on a small cup of coke while writing on napkin designing my belated father's day gift and taking notes on what happened that evening. The McDonald's had another funny property: it played both Chinese and English pop songs, probably due to it being in such an international tourist attraction. While I stayed I listened to "Both Sides Now", "Dreaming of You", and "When You Say Nothing At All", all of which brought a smile to my face. I sang along.
After two hours of sitting down, I had enough, and spent an hour outside. The first thing you notice when you walk out at 0230 is not the peace, but the activity. Not 100 meters from the restaurant entrance are about twenty people working, unloading and stacking newspapers. The area they worked in was well lit, under the roof of the pier's small shopping arcade. I would imagine these people are here every day of the week, every week of the year, in tonight's calm or in the worse monsoons.
I walked past them to the water front, with a magnificent view of the harbor and the skyscrapers on the other side. The night was still, only a soft but consistent breeze moving the waves. There weren't too many lights on, but enough to see the outlines of each individual building. Curiously, there were a few office lights on, bright enough to make out the generic filing cabinets behind the glass window. I didn't see any moving shadows, but I would assume the lights are on because someone is working. At 0300 on a Monday morning, day after father's day? What are these people doing? Will they regret it later on? Such lights peppered the building-scape, illuminating the buildings above the orange street lights.
As I turned my sights closer toward myself, I was met with another through provoking phenomena: there are people besides the workers walking the street at this hour. Most of them were in pairs and triplets, generally of the same sex. There were several couples too, of course, and the largest group I saw had five members. They were young, from early twenties to early thirties at the oldest. They weren't poor: they had jeans and handbags and cigarettes, strolling past the pier talking. Two girls I saw had an iPod. They walked in, sat down on the stairs leading to the water, and plugged in for a while. Then they got up and walked on. At least two pairs of men walked by and had a short conversation with them, one (Indian, probably workers somewhere on a break) tried to take their picture with a digital camera. These people have money, jobs, a home, and a bed. I gazed at the lights across and wanted to ask: who are you? What are you doing here, now? They can't all possibly have missed the last train home. Do they work their life, take a nap, and hang out with friends at 0300 in the morning? There's all in all maybe a hundred people around the pier. Twenty of them are working, so where did the other eighty come from? As I walked, there was a Caucasian with crew cut hair, along, trying to catch a taxi. I think he was in uniform, which fits with his hair, but I don't think he got off duty alone. These people too, I thought, are here every single night. Compared to the ten or so homeless people sleeping on shadowed benches, these people are harder to understand. Why don't they go home?
Watching these people has a cathartic effect. I wonder if they're abused, perhaps it actually is the case they don't have a home to go to. That "home' is not a place of shelter, but where the pressure continues to build after a long day of work. As it did for me, perhaps for them being in the calm of the harbour was their way of relaxing, or even their way of being closer to nature. It is the only way for them to enjoy a quiet moment with their friends.
And quiet they were, to not disturb the sleeping dead. The sleepers reminded me of the song "Streets of London". It goes, "Have you seen the old girl Who walks the streets of London, Dirt in her hair and her clothes in rags? She's no time for talking, She just keeps right on walking; Carrying her home in two carrier bags." Some of the sleepers really had two or three shopping bags by their feet, possibly containing all that they own except for the clothes they were wearing and the pillow they had laid their head on. Unlike Northwester, no cops wake them up at night. When do people find out if they're dead? A quote from the movie Collateral: "I read about this guy who gets on the [train] here, dies. Six hours he's riding the subway before anybody notices his corpse doing laps around L.A., people on and off sitting next to him. Nobody notices." What are their stories? They won't understand my English, and I don't feel comfortable asking in Chinese.
Instead, I walked back into the McDonald's, for a meal to last 90 minutes till the first train. There at least I got a glimpse why people are here. There were three people waiting for their food. They spoke French. The lady (who I later found out was the only one who knew English) bought a pair of ogre ears (courtesy of Shrek) with her meal, on impulse. She looked around parading her new toy, and I commented that she looks good. As they waited, I asked why they were here so early in the morning. It turns out they are getting a meal before work. The two guys were a "maid" (as the lady translated) and a waiter, whereas she was an accountant for the army. Their meals was packaged to-go, so we didn't talk for long, but it was fun. They asked why I was here as well before they left, and I told them about the trains.
I will probably never see these people again, but they make great company for someone stuck for a night.

A few things have happened since I last wrote.

• I got a 38% on my math midterm, the lowest grade I've gotten since... middle school?


• I code up a spam filter in 200 lines of code. Lisp is amazing.


• I wrote a 2 page paper calling Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech BS. It was turned in on Thursday, and I think I will get a pretty good grade for it too.


• I attended a chemistry show on the beach. The professor blew up hydrogen, iron, cobalt, nickel, magnesium, sodium. He made a luminescent solution. The best part thought was the thermite... Those of you interested in repeating the thermite "experiment", here's a video showing how to do it.


• I watched The Dark Side of Oz, which plays the Pink Floyd album to the Wizard of Oz. It wasn't amazingly spectacular, but Oz brought back memories...


• I went to my first birthday dinner since high school.


• I biked from Chicago down near to the Indiana State line, and took the chance to visit Indiana Dunes Natonal Lakeshore.

And for this week, I have a final on Tuesday, two finals on Wednesday, a paper I'll finish on Thursday, and another bike trip on Friday. Then Saturday morning I'm flying out for Hong Kong.

Out,

Justin

Things are slowly entering the final stretch. While a lot of people are out of school already, I still have one week of class, followed by a "reading week," and finally... well, finals (pun intended). I still have my second midterm for differential equations on tomorrow, which I will hopefully do better on.

Like everyone else who is still in school, I am somewhat swamped with work. I just had a paper due today, and am right now (supposed to be, sshhh) studying for my math midterm tomorrow. On 30th I have a lab due (Bayesian spam filter, anyone?), and 31st another paper.

I am enjoying myself though.

Can't wait to get back and have nothing to do! (Well, website, but that's something else.)

Hello.

Ryan will probably post a little after this (and now after reading he won't just to spite me). He skipped this student government thing for speech. It was pretty funny, actually. I was sitting at the same table with the college democrats, and it was only when they started talking about Ryan did I think "oh right, he was supposed to be coming for the democrats..." And I was right! So Ryan, I met Lily Becker and the president... what's his name.

I hope all of you out of classes are enjoying yourself. You'd better be.

I'm going okay in my classes. Nothing as stunning as happened since the midterms, although I do have my second math midterm in a week and some. The AI midterm that I mentioned turned out pretty well; I got 13/15 ~= 86.7%. Which is why I'm in computer science :D

Originally we were going to have a worm wrestling competition this past Tuesday, for the Outing Club, but no one showed up so we just tried the slack line and ate smores instead. On the other hand, I did go on a hiking trip yesterday. We visited the Great Woods Forest Preserves just outside Chicago for a short hike, then took got a nice guided tour of the Vold Bog just south west of there. You can even see the floating boards we walked on through the bog here.

The trip was really cool because it was actually organized by the geology department. The great thing about geology is that you have the excuse to go to random places. The greater Chicago area is full of debris from the glacier that was here during the last ice age, and the bog was one of the results of that. It was pretty interesting.

As for today, besides spending 6 hours with the student government, I met up with some of the spring break group, and had a nice dinner. Hoepfully we'll do it more often.

How are you all doing?

Despite not many people replying to my confidence question, I will tell you why I asked that. It has to do with Monica's last post as well.

It's because I did poorly on midterms I didn't study for and walked overly confident into.

Last Tuesday was my differential equations midterm. Recall that it's the class I never bought the book for, and so have never done any homework. Well, the night before I was like, "hm... study or not study? I've done well on the quizzes so far, so maybe I won't study." So I very briefly looked over what was new since the last quiz, and looked at all the main theoretical parts of the the lecture. I usually do this because I don't like to be bogged down by the numbers of a specific example, but try to keep the manipulation of symbols in my head.

It turned out that this study technique (or lack thereof) had two faults. There was a question asking about the first topic we learned (integrating factors, in case anyone is interested), and I had completely forgotten how to do it. I spent 10 minutes in a 50 minute midterm deriving the technique back out, which involves multiplying both sides of the equation by a function, and went on to solve it... only forgotten to multiply one side by the function. What a stupid mistake.

Then another question asked about an example shown in class. That was great, except I distinctly remember the professor saying "in certain cases, like this one, you can..." Great, so it doesn't fit into a large theoretical example, and I have no clue what goes after the "can..."

The result: 73%.

I was expecting 60%, since the first question I screwed up on was worth 20%, and the other 15%, and with some other errors I would have gotten 60%. What was more surprising, though, was that the average was 69%, which means I got above average. Don't know how that happened...

But I am spending the rest of today reorganizing and digitalizing my notes, and sort them by topic and not by chronology this time.

Then there was this Cognitive Science midterm this Tuesday. I walked in, and found that it was 50 multiple choice questions, graded with a scantron. It was on human estimation heuristics and logical fallacies, and I didn't know some of the formal names, but thought I did fine.

The result: 68%, this time with an average of 82%.

Well. That sucked. I think I'll be fine for this course though. At least I don't have to worry about not having a book.

How confident do you think I am?

on a scale of 1 to 10, where

1 is not confident at all ("I'll probably stub my toe walking out the door.")
10 is dangerously overconfident ("Let me try defusing a nuclear bomb.")

Please reply! I'll tell you why I'm asking in my next post.

USA Today, Wednesday April 25, 2007.

...
Like all academics, his classroom was his special domain, an almost sacred place in the hearts of all academics. It is a place protected from ignorance and intolerance - the enemies of learning. Yet, what makes such rooms special is not the interior but the occupants. The earliest "universities" did not have a conventional campus or building. A university was the collection of faculty and students who'd meet wherever they could find shelter and safety. When a famous teacher such as Plato met with his students, it was often in the open. He and his students would form a circle, and the interior of that circle became a place of learning, a protected space.
...
The image of Librescu holding back a killer from entering his class is an image that most academics will never forget. Indeed the next day, when I opened the door to my torts class at George Washington University Law School, I felt an immense sense of pride and gratitude to be a member of the teaching academy. Even before we had walls on or classrooms, generations of acadmics have protected this special place. When I walked into my first class roughly two decades ago, I can remember the overwhelming feeling that this is my classroom and what occurs here is something of my making. It is a notion that is sometimes lost on non-academics.
...
For academics, our most important creative enterprise is non-physical. It is a journal of learning that we take very term with our students, a journey that is truly reciprocal in every way. The classroom may be ours for only an hour a day, but during that time, it is entirely ours. For better or for worse, it is what we make of it and the truly great teachers, such as Librescu, can make something, while intangible, last a lifetime.
...

Here's to our teachers.

I've had two math quizzes in the past two weeks, on Tuesday. I should elaborate a bit. The last time I took any math course was March 2006, and that was vector integration. So I haven't had formal math instruction for a year. This quarter I'm taking Elementary Differential Equations, which requires quite a bit of integration, although a lot less of multiple integration. As I've said before, I stubbornly refuse to buy the book. I shouldn't have to spend 100+ USD on something that stupid. I'm not even required to take the math course.

Anyhoo, about that quiz. Since I didn't buy the book, and since the homework is all from the book, I therefore haven't done any extra problems at all. The first quiz was last Tuesday, and I got it back this Tuesday.

47/50 = 94%.

I love how I'm blasting through this course on pure genius.

On the other hand, this Saturday I was in a Rube Goldberg competition. If you don't know already (shame on you!), Rube Goldberg machines are devices which does an abnormal amount of energy transfer to do something simple. We had to use dollar store toys to design and build a device in 6 hours. We had to start with a marble drop and end with pushing a switch for an LED. Our particular design starts with the marble going down a tube, which is caught by a cup, which slides down a zip line, which pushes over a block of wood, which pulls on a swing, which removes a gate, which releases a car, which pushes another marble, which lands in cup, which unbalances a lever, which flips cards, which lands on the switch. We didn't win anything, but it was a fun day.

Lastly, I just want to tell you all that I got invited to a new "job", a senior position for teaching a series of workshops augmenting the introductory engineering sequence. I'm quite excited.

I hope all of you are well.

In order to not have to write about the same part of my life three times for three different people, I've decided I will just use LiveJournal as my blog (as it was meant to be used) and post everything to there, that is, here. Hopefully that will allow me more time for work, and other crap.

Quite a bit has happened since I last posted on Feb 16. Obviously.

Last quarter went alright. I'm surprised that I managed to raise my GPA, considering that my final project for Machine Learning didn't work at all. The two of us tried to make a neural network learn to distinguish handwritten characters, but somehow it just refused to work. My book holder project was finished nicely, however. What else did I do... cognitive science was okay; didn't do much work for it, so I guess I deserved the lower grade. My other AI class was alright as well. I should have put more effort into it, but it seems other people put even less than what I did. My last class, computer engineering, was a breeze. I barely studied at all, and I did well.

Spring break was fun. A group of friends and I drove 24 hours to southern Utah, and spent a week in Bryce Canyon and Zion national parks. We also visited Flagstaff, Arizona, after meeting some college students from there, and slept at their house for one night. There are pictures available here: http://groups.northwestern.edu/outing/gallery/2007springbreak.html

This quarter I'm taking 5 classes again (once you do 5 at a time you can't go back). Intro to AI, Differential Equations, Philosophy of Mind, Learning Representation and Reasoning, and Computer Game Design. Of these, the last one will be the most time consuming. Diffeq will probably be the class with my lowest grade, as I stubbornly refuse to buy the book (which has a cd with it and therefore terribly expensive). I'll just have to learn diffeqs online. The philosophy class will be interesting, as it's talking about Freud's psychoanalytic theory. The rest... should be a pretty normal affair.

Haven't heard from anyone lately. How is everyone doing?