Yesterday I was baking three separate cakes and worrying about how to coordinate three separate recipes and whether I shouldn't have taken requests and just made everybody go with chocolate or something.

Flipping through Joy of Cooking, I noticed a recipe called "Hurry-Up Cake". Fast and easy plain cake, with a number of recipes right after it that were just things like "Hurry-Up Chocolate Cake: Make Hurry-Up Cake except add cocoa powder". Modularity! Awesome! It was wonderful, and allowed me to prepare three separate cakes on a tight schedule with a minimum of effort. (They were chocolate, spice, and "gingerbread" aka "just throw in some ginger powder and some cinnamon". The chocolate was a little lackluster, but the other two were wonderful if I do say so myself.)

When I was done, masterdnas did some epic cake art. I was amazed by the outcomes -- they looked genuinely great, not just "great for someone who's not used to working with frosting". Pics forthcoming.

Yay birthdays!

Just got my 20.320 exam grade back. I guess I can scratch "fail an exam" off the list of things to do before I graduate. Argh.

Time for lots of reviewing and studying. If I don't pass this class, I have to either take a 5th year or change majors. (I did fine on the first exam, so I'm sort of in limbo at this point.)

I chose my class schedule for this term specifically in order to get to the point where I wouldn't be scoring high in everything. To find my limits. Well, I've found them, and I'm disappointed they're so low (although this goes along with the recent terrible time management skills).

OK, found my damn limits. Time to extend them.

The trouble with stories is that it's too easy to lose yourself, and forget that what worked in the story would never work in Real Life, for reasons that cannot be removed by authorial fiat.

Yes, this world has its beauties, but there's no getting around the fact that much of it is unutterably mundane. Think too hard about stories and you turn into Don Quixote, who forgets that knights need to do stuff like, y'know, eat, because it's never mentioned in the books.

"If every man could weave a dream to keep him from despair"... no one would ever get anything done. Even the stories would stop existing after a while -- someone has to make them, after all.

It does no good to dream idly about fantasies. I am not in Middle-Earth, or Numenor, or the wilds of 19th-century Appalachia, or even in regular old current-day Canada. I am in a house in Brookline and I have a van to vacuum and a lab report to write.

And now I'm tired. I'm only a little bit sleep deprived and only a little bit physically tired, but I'm just... drained in some way, not sure whether 'emotionally' or 'spiritually' is the better word here. I guess staying in the fighting mentality for a long time can do that to you.

(Taking a test that I'm relatively ill prepared for will also do that just fine.)

I have enough energy to occasionally be excited about something, or even laugh or bounce. It's a funny thing, though. My typical mood today has been low, but stably so, not rapidly spiraling into DOOOOOOM. That's an improvement, I suppose. Still gotta work on that whole "waaaaaaaaaaay too emotionally volatile" thing.

must decrease emotional vapor pressure

I wish emotions had fewer positive feedback loops and bistabilities.

Every time I have a significant melancholy episode I come out the other end going "OK, this time for real, I'll [be more productive, visit Student Support Services (S^3), visit Mental Health, implement a usable to-do list system, whatever]." And I get started, and never follow through.

I'm tired of it. Last night was supposed to be fabulous and went really, really sour, entirely through my fault.

One of these days I'll decide I want to get better...

I went back to S^3 today and picked up that packet of schedule sheets that my dean left at the front desk for me after our first meeting... what, two weeks ago? or something obscene like that. I'm going to fucking make the effort this time -- and also remember that, hey, if I do poorly in 7.06 or fail it or something, it isn't the end of the world. Granted, some classes would be worse to drop/fail than others, just in terms of graduating on time / being able to take the electives I want, but none is irredeemable.

I could say "I'm tired of fighting", but I've been dragging my feet and occasionally throwing the odd punch. Half-fighting. It's time to actually do some damn fighting and not stop until someone gets knocked out.

When it appears that someone has failed to do their job properly, and I'm trying to figure out why, I would like to be in the habit of considering the following possible causes in this order:

1. Misunderstanding on my part. I missed the email where they said they did it, or that it was no longer necessary for some good reason.


2. Miscommunication on their part. They did it and forgot to notify everyone, or they weren't clear.


3. Hosage. They haven't done it yet because they were busy.


4. Forgetfulness. It just dropped off their mind temporarily.


5. Ignorance. They weren't told they were supposed to do it.


6. Incompetence. They tried and failed, or privately decided it was unnecessary for some stupid reason.


7. Malevolence. They are actively trying to harm the group.


8. Conspiracy. It is as bad as you think, and they are out to get you.

I'm specifically trying to adopt this because, lately, I've been jumping to assume total incompetence or outright malevolence in far too many instances when there were perfectly innocuous explanations for something. In my view, this is part and parcel of humility.

When I brought this up on zephyr, toomanydeaths mentioned that people might feel annoyed or patronized if you're constantly saying "did you just forget to do this?" and they didn't even know they were supposed to do it. This list by itself is not sufficient for being tactful. It's worth noting that you can send someone a quick message asking if they did something, without stating an assumption of any particular failure mode (no matter what you actually think). This heuristic is more about what you think of someone, and the emotional tone of your interactions with them, than it is about what you actually say to them or how you get them to do their job.

Also worth noting that this is a heuristic, not a rule, and if you know a lot about someone's apparent-failure modes, then you should use that knowledge (insight credit to skuffle).

My pledge class carried off a party last night which was by all accounts pretty excellent. I had quite a lot of fun making food and helping make decorations. For example, Cocytus = bowl of lemonade with lots of ice in, a devil ducky floating in the center, and crushed raspberries floating in, symbolizing the damned souls of traitors; Phlegethon = `river' of salsa.

I learned a neat trick for faux-aging regular old printer paper:
1. Tear off an irregular strip around the very edge
2. Singe the edge with a lighter
3. Paint the paper with dark-colored tea

Courtesy of Karen, ET's cook, who was an art major (!!). They came out beautiful.

Oddly enough, I didn't enjoy the party itself that much, partly because I had to continue worrying about food, partly because it was crowded enough that it was difficult to move around the house, and partly just due to "oh my god so many people". But looking at everyone's costumes was really neat. My lab partner and her boyfriend came dressed as Dr. Horrible and Penny, which was excellent; another couple were dressed as Simon and Kaylee. The various pledge classes, in accordance with tradition, dressed up in various amusing and punful themes ("NP-Complete Problems", a traveling salesman and a woman with 3 SAT tests taped to her; "Dominion Cards", a spy, bureaucrat, woodcutter, and copper. Tee hee.)

The theme was "Circles of Hell", based on Dante's Inferno, and my pledge class dressed up as the various circles of hell along with Virgil and an Angel (no one wanted to do Dante). People had a hard time guessing, even with the giant "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" sign, because the Circles of Dante's hell don't match up with the Seven Deadly sins, and are a little weird: Wrath and Sloth are one circle but Fraud and Treachery are separate.

Eru, make me an instrument of your harmony.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled,
as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in teaching that we learn,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

(It's not finished.)

"And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself."
"Who is my neighbor?"
"Totoro." And Jesus went and watched anime with his disciples and the Pharisees.

ETA: oh, it's not me, credit to geofft

Today when we got home, fuurei picked up a package from the mail closet, which was addressed to "Theta, Epsilon". Huh.

It said "PHOTOS DO NOT BEND". She said it looked like it contained the prints of our 'school photos', but that those usually come in a different/larger package, and take longer, and anyway the return address didn't match the company that we use for our composite photo. Huh.

While the shipping address was ET , the billing address was to a Tim [Lastname] whose name no one recognized at first -- "maybe it's a really old alum". ealex292 expressed hope that the photo company hadn't accidentally conflated Saint Paul Street (Brookline, MA) and Saint Paul (MN). Huh.

We opened it. Inside was a single photo, sandwiched between a bit of cardboard and a bit of foam, so we couldn't see it. We pulled it out. It was a photo of a duck. The entire room burst into laughter. It seemed like the most amazing coincidence ever.

While everyone else was standing around going WTF, a choir of angels appeared and reminded me that Tim [Lastname] was probably timprov, who visited me at the house a while ago and is a photographer. THE FUNDAMENTAL ORDEREDNESS OF THE UNIVERSE WAS REVEALED.

When I have time, I'll frame it and put it up in Phone Hall. It's a lovely photograph of what I think is a Mandarin duck -- unusual in that it's a head-on shot, not in profile.

there are so many different signal transduction pathways
there are so many experimental techniques with slight differences in the implementation that address totally different aspects of whatever you're studying... and are mostly also really, really indirect (welcome to biology)

yeah, I have a test tomorrow
I'm just happy drop date is after it

It's been a while since I came up with a Radical New Plan to Improve My Life; I'm about due for another spate of self-hacking :) Yes, it is again very organized and detailed, probably overly so, but this is how I get myself excited about making plans. "Is it a sign of immaturity that I'm really excited about implementing this system as a Python script?"

Part the First: keep my daily to-do list in the little notebook that I always carry around with me and never use.

This is deliberately oversimplified, unlike the last Radical New Plan. The point of to-do lists is to improve my productivity, and I'm not being productive if I'm wasting time implementing an overly featureful system (or, more likely, ignoring it altogether out of laziness).


Part the Second: frequently take data on my mood and things I think are correlated with it, such as what I'm currently stressing about and how long since I ate.

Short version: rate mood 1-5, optional rant/rave
(so that I don't have an excuse not to do it if I feel lazy)

Long version: (all parts optional)

Time since food
Time since Alex
Sleepiness 1-5
Primary stress source (test, homework, etc)
Location
Current activity (working, socializing, wasting time on the internet, etc)
Inbox (# unread emails ~= # un-taken-care-of emails)
Alone?
Excitement 1-5
Self-hatred 1-5
Contentment 1-5
Volatility 1-5
Overall mood rating 1-5
Rant/Rave

The intent here is to have actual data, not just suppositions, on which to base my attempts at self-hacking and mood improvement. I don't expect this system to be perfect, or to magically improve my time management and free me from depression without me actually having to put in effort.

A corollary goal is to stop screaming and angsting on my Zephyr class, where people will feel bad and either be alienated immediately or try to help and then be alienated when I push them away. Instead of this, I want to get in the habit of monitoring my state, and dumping my useless angsting to someplace where people won't see it and try to help (but I still get the cathartic benefit of writing it in the first place). Etc. We'll see how it works out.

I learned to solder today. I burned myself, not badly. When I'm not sleep-deprived on Mondays (or Tuesdays on which Monday classes are held because of Columbus Day), this circuits class is my favorite thing ever.

Our assignment for next week was to make a circuit that would turn a light on or off depending on the temperature sensed by a thermistor. chessbot, who works really fast, got it to work before class ended. And it was SHINY.

Now I want to make some kind of temperature indicator for a homebrew incubator. Of course, I could do this with a thermometer and a piece of tape, but OOH CIRCUITS, and also you can't make a temperature *regulator* out of a thermometer.

circuits circuits wheeeeeeeeeee

Whenever I have to do a long writing assignment for my music theory class, I'm always tempted to say "screw it" and write a Python program to do the voice leading for me.

Hell, I've been sort of tempted to do this ever since first term freshman year when we were doing species counterpoint, which is a lot closer to problem-solving than it is to art. Solving a species counterpoint by depth-first search would be easy. In the type of writing we're doing now, I think there are a couple weird cases that violate the strictest rules of voice leading and would have to be handled carefully...

...I wonder what sort of algorithm would do best at this. Man, I should take a Real CS class one of these days -- algorithms or AI or something. Someone out there must have written a smart program that can do voice leading well.

Things I did today (partial list):

• Completed a whole crapload of harmony review exercises for my music class


• Cleaned bathrooms


• Made chocolate-ducks-on-sticks


• Added stuff to the Medlinks website that I've long wished it had

Woo, productivity. Sanity and chocolate are also good.

I don't think I ever got around to posting this when it happened in July, but, I pledged Epsilon Theta. It somehow felt both unreal and inevitable; since I was already living in the house as a summer boarder, nothing concrete changed. I'd been thinking about pledging for quite some time, but never expected to be invited to pledge in the middle of the summer. And then, one day, gwaihiril brought me up to her room and handed me a decorated rubber duck...

At the time, they didn't do the group-hug mini-ritual because people were away for the summer. But last night, at a meeting, we were told about what happens when someone decides to pledge... "And on that note, Alioth, come here"... and everyone was smiling and chanting stuff and then there was a big hug peoplepile and dfarhi said, "Welcome home."

It'll probably take a while for the house to really feel like home -- but it's getting there awfully fast. There's still a lingering feeling of outsiderhood, and that'll probably take a really long time to disperse, even after I decide that the house does actually feel like home.

I have to wonder what I've missed by never living more than a year in the same place since I came to MIT. "At other colleges this is normal"

Unsurprisingly, you can hear the sound of Niagara Falls from a long way away. (I wonder what their noise spectrum looks like?) So, I sent the following poem fragment to pteromys, who introduced me to Poe's "The Bells":

Hear the roaring of the falls,
Giant falls!
What kinetic energy their rumbling recalls!

He responded:

How they sparkle, sparkle, sparkle,
In the dazzling light of day--
Whose refraction and reversal,
With a colorful dispersal,
Paints a rainbow in the spray.
What a flow, flow, flow,
Crashing violently below,
Drawn along by gravitation, which inexorably calls
To the falls, falls, falls, falls,
Falls, falls, falls--
Through the tumbling and the rumbling of the falls!

It's so brilliant! *poemsquee*

...incidentally, you should all read the original poem. Read it out loud, with vigor. You can hear the time signature change.

I'm not religious, and not seeking to adopt new beliefs about the divine anytime soon... but there's something very comforting about reading Proverbs.

It doesn't hurt that the first few chapters at least (which is as far as I've gotten) are all about how awesome it is to acquire knowledge and wisdom and understanding.

It also doesn't hurt that I'm a big fan of the sort of language used in the KJV (and Shakespeare et al).

There's also a lilt, a rhythm, to the sort of phrase-level repetition-and-variation in the Bible. (I'm told this is a feature of things that are passed down orally, where redundancy is desirable for many reasons).

But... I feel like there's something more to it, something that I can't pin down. I've been attracted to some aspects of religion before, and I'm not sure what exactly I'm looking for or where I can find it without actually converting to an existing religion that specifies beliefs about the divine that I don't subscribe to.

The Boyden lab (my last abortive UROP) had a community. It was large. There were something like 15-20 people in it (or at least, that many people came to lab meetings on a regular basis). People knew each other and made jokes over the pizza. There was a lab mailing list and it was kind of high-traffic. On the other hand, the environment was very tense, almost harsh. Half the emails to the lab list were "someone left the $thing open again, this is bad for the $thing, if I find out it was you I will kill you, and if you do it again you will lose access to $room_where_all_the_science_is_done." Sometimes these were legitimately bad things, like when someone left the CO2 cylinders unchained (they can blow massive holes in walls). But still, it struck me as very tense and overly neurotic and anal about everything. Boyden didn't radiate tension himself, but he emitted excitatory radiation that turned into tension when it reflected off everyone else. There were no cartoons on the walls.

Tom Knight's lab is very different. I don't feel much of a sense of camaraderie with anyone... mostly because it's pretty small, and also because TK's lab proper is only a small subset of the people in the TK lab space. >1/3 the people there are really affiliated with Gingko BioWorks and >1/3 are Registry employees (both Ginkgo and the Registry I think are spinoffs of TK's lab). I actually think there's only four or so students who are properly part of TK's lab. And I haven't even met all of them. There's no weekly lab meeting and no labwide mailing list that I know of. I attempted to compile a list of everyone, so we could all go get pizza together or something, and I couldn't do it.

I wish TK's lab was tighter-knit and didn't just have, basically, everyone doing their own thing very quietly without reference to anyone else. Perhaps I think this is worse than it is, because the people whose benches are near mine are introverted. Certainly the people whose desks are near mine are more gregarious than average (but their benches are elsewhere so I don't see them doing actual wet work). I also think the cohort of grad students who all just graduated are probably pretty close, a lot closer than I can be as someone who's spent less than three months in the lab.

But really, better a loose-to-nonexistent community than a tension-ridden harsh one. It also helps that there's plenty of actual physical space in TK's lab. In the Boyden lab you ended up afraid of moving because you would bump into something. One time I accidentally opened the tap on a carboy of buffer by pulling it with my backpack strap. That was embarrassing.