5.12 Organic Chemistry I
6.01 Intro to EE/CS I
7.03 Genetics
9.01 Intro Neuroscience
20.110J Thermodynamics of Biomolecular Systems
21W.765 Interactive & Non-linear Narrative

According to the units, that's about 1.3 times as much class as I'm taking right now. I'm not sure whether to go for all six, or to leave the nonlinear narrative class for later. But this is just my pre-registration -- it's almost certain to change, especially because I still have to meet with my advisor (and before that, I have to be assigned an advisor!) to go over all the myriad Institvte requirements I have no doubt forgotten.

Whatever happens, I'll be pretty loaded next term because of 5.12 and 6.01, which are time-consuming (and which I was really supposed to take this term...). I should get a reality check -- is it a good idea to take 72 units with 5.12 and 6.01 among them -- even though I know that 6 classes is not per se unreasonable.

Also, grr the fact that 6.034 (Artificial Intelligence) conflicts with 7.03. I'm rather tempted to switch next term to 6.034, especially because next term is the last term that I know for sure that Raffi is around, and I'd like to be taking 6.034 at a time when he's here.

I have a promise I make to good friends: "My ears, my shoulder, and my arms are always open to you." This is something I take very seriously.

Recently I got to thinking about this kind of threshold. I've heard of a couple different ones. E.g. "I consider as good friends the people who I would tell anything, without dissembling, unless for reasons of someone else's privacy". That's a higher threshold than my "always open", but naturally what's meant by "good friend" will vary accordingly.

(I wonder whether it's significant that "always open" is centered around empathizing and comforting, and "tell anything" is centered around trust and openness? Certainly both are valuable, but it's interesting to look at which ones people codify.)

One wonders, though, where it's appropriate to put such thresholds. It overlaps rather interestingly with the question of where to put LJ privacy filters (although they probably won't coincide because the goal is rather different -- friendslove is different from "trusting people enough to tell them X").

It also kind of makes me sad that the bar for friendship on, say, Facebook is set so low. I have Facebook friends I've never met or spoken a word to (on the internet or in real life). Hell, I'm Facebook friends with a number of fictional characters and at least one cat, and I know them better than I know a good number of my human Facebook friends. The threshold of Facebook friendhood seems so arbitrary and low (although, to be fair, here again the goal differs -- Facebook is mostly for keeping in touch with people who aren't immediately available).

You have got to be kidding me.

This article, Government Declares Some Grad Students Are ‘Security Threats’, appeared in today's issue of The Tech (MIT's student newspaper). A number of international students working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute are being denied easy access to the ports they sail from because the government considers them, for no reason at all, "security threats".

To get in and out of the ports, you need this RFID card, the "Transportation Worker Identification Credential". Without the TWIC, it's very difficult (though not impossible) to get in and out. Difficult-but-not-impossible is a totally unreasonable restriction to impose on these researchers. It's hard enough not having key-card access to the building that contains the lab you're interning in -- *raises hand* -- and even though it's reasonable to expect a bit more difficulty when you're doing fieldwork, it's not Antarctica these students are requesting easy access to, it's a port. And, I might add, these students are only asking for the same access that their labmates and PIs already enjoy.

As the Dept. of Homeland Security wrote to one student (others received similar letters), “I have personally reviewed the Initial Determination of Threat Assessment, your reply, accompanying information, and all other information and materials available to the TSA. Based upon this review, I have determined that you pose a security threat and you do not meet the eligibility requirements to hold a Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC).” This is what we say to students who come here to carry out government-funded research? We give them grant money and then call them "security threats"?

Two of the students being denied access are from Britain and Germany. Britain and Germany. I thought we were supposed to be all buddy-buddy with these countries? If this is what students from friggin' Britain and Germany have to deal with, how much worst must it be for students from, say, Syria?

My friend Raffi, who's from Canada, mentioned how the Office of International Students is always warning them about how "if you do this you'll get deported. If you do that you'll get deported." Apparently the definition of "security threat" bears this out: you're a security threat if you threaten national or transportation security, if you pose a threat of terrorism, if you have "lacking mental capacity"... or if you simply have the wrong kind of visa.

I'm ashamed to live in a country that funds scientists and then treats them this way.

[Crossposted to Dendritic Arbor]

... it is rather lovely to be visited by someone while you're tool-and-die-ing, someone who doesn't need to be up as late as you are, but is anyway. (Not at 3:20am -- sleep is too holy for that -- but earlier, around midnight.)

I got myself a wiki, per sneswhiz recommending the scripts.mit.edu service (which is awesome). Right now I'm using it to write a psych paper -- far easier than writing in TextEdit or NeoOffice. Something about wiki markup language just helps me organize my thoughts, I guess.

The wiki is slowly morphing into a combination of idea repository, shirabe-list, reference, and Pensieve.

Shiraberu is a Japanese verb meaning something like "to check out, to look up, to investigate". I'm not sure if I've got the sense of it exactly right, but that's what it means in my head, and it's rather difficult to translate exactly. I have long lists of things I intend to shirabe -- interesting links I get pointed to, books I should read, random questions I think of during class that I can't find the answer to on Wikipedia, that sort of thing. I end up with "shirabe-lists" all over random scraps of paper, and because they're so disorganized, they languish, un-shirabe'd. Hopefully the wiki will change that.

I also get random ideas for experiments or projects to do, and it's nice to not forget them, and to be able to add to them incrementally.

Probably the most useful thing about the wiki will be the reference pages. I'm already keeping a couple, just for computer usage things -- e.g. Mac keyboard shortcuts that are useful but I can never remember, tidbits about how MIT's computing environment works, that sort of stuff. It's easier to do this than to use public help pages, for two reasons. One, I'm writing them, so they're absolutely tailored to what I don't know and what I need to do. Two, I know where they all are -- they're on my wiki! -- I don't need to go searching through the dozen Mac help forums or the several MIT computer help pages, each with their own interfaces and specialties and idiosyncrasies.

I also find myself putting up a lot of trivial facts and random thoughts -- e.g. I'm making a page for each class I take that lists the prof, the TA, and the semester I took it, plus some thoughts about the way the class was run, its content, what sucked about it, what was awesome, etc. This isn't really important information that I will need to investigate or refer to, but it's kind of satisfying to write those thoughts out, and helps make them coherent instead of all nonlinear and vague. Plus, who knows when I'll need to remember the name of the guy who taught me differential equations?

And before you ask... no, it's private, but that doesn't mean I won't occasionally take content from there and post it here.

I recently got this in an email.

(Adapted from the book by Michael J. Gelb)
The "Seven Da Vincian Principles":

1. "Curiosita: "An insatiably curious approach to Life and an unrelenting Quest for Continuous Learning."


2. "Dimostrazione" : "A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes."


3. "Sensazione": "The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience."


4. "Sfumato" (literally, "going up in smoke"): "A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty."


5. "Arte/Scienza": The development of the balance between science and art, logic, and imagination. 'Whole-Brain' thinking."


6. "Corporalita": The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise."


7. "Connessione": "The recognition of and appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. 'Systems thinking."

...Hmm. I heartily applaud each of them separately and think the world could use much more of all of them, but I'd be wary of calling these the seven principles. In particular, it's missing a key part of the scientific method.
Maybe add 0. "Humilita": the recognition that (human) comprehension is limited both in theory and in practice, and that all knowledge contains an element of uncertainty (or indeterminacy). Something snappy like that... if I had more time I'd think harder about how to encapsulate the rather vague sentiment I'm thinking of here (akin to some kind of mixture of scientific method and hard agnosticism).

Earlier this evening I went to the floor meeting on the hall I'm going to live on next year, and we picked rooms.

And, the room I'm going to live in next year has got the Door of Moria painted on the door.

...Has got the frickin' Door of Moria painted on the door!

(And the people are fabulous too, of course -- we spent a very enjoyable half hour after the meeting ended. I just thought the Door of Moria thing was indicative.)

New userpic. The star Alioth is Epsilon Ursae Majoris, type A-nought peculiar.

(...When I made it the new default, I didn't expect it to change retroactively...but now all my old posts have this new pic by them. I hope it isn't too jarring.)

I've been doing a lot of work lately on the team wiki pages for my bioengineering design project, and, well, I really like wikis. And now I find myself wanting one of my own, to dump thoughts onto in an organized way.

Is there a wiki hoster out there with the following features:
* free (with or without ads)
* privacy / access control
* uses MediaWiki, or at least the same markup language as Wikipedia

Most of the wiki farms I've looked at are not very good at telling you what features they have -- it's mostly "Hey, wikis are awesome for the following reasons!". They also don't tend to let you view sample pages, grr. Also also, very often they have free signup but make you pay if you want to keep your wiki private.

Someone is running some kind of "wellness week" this week, the most visible component of which is a giant box of apples at each dorm's front desk each morning -- one per resident.

Naturally, given the sheer quantity of apples involved, they had to go for lousy apples. Yesterday it was red deliciouses that, I swear, tasted like aspartame. (Apart from the usual wet-sawdust texture.) Today it was some very sour granny smiths.

Luckily, the latter were redeemable. I cut one up and put it in vanilla yogurt with walnuts and brown sugar, which was *excellent*. Om nom nom nom.

Also, I seem to have made a great discovery. I usually don't like fruit salads that much, but it never struck me to make a fruit salad out of only fruits I like, and that don't have incontinence issues (i.e. apples instead of bananas or over-juicy canned peaches, which tend to mush and leak all over everything).

Mmm, repurposing and salvage.

All my spider plants seem to have established themselves well. I can see roots on all the ones that I planted in clear plastic cups, except one, which was a really small baby when I got it, the only baby that hadn't already started making roots. It's kind of hard for me to gauge growth, but they mostly seem to have gotten a bit bigger as well. The little one doesn't seem to have grown at all, but it hasn't died either, so all I can conclude is it's still working on the whole growing-a-root-system thing.

The pumpkin seed sprouted and got to its first set of real leaves, but then mysteriously wilted and died. Don't know what was wrong with it -- I kept it well watered. The same thing happened to one of my sunflower seeds, but the other sunflower is still going strong. Though admittedly its morphology is rather strange -- it's really long and really skinny, and would be lying flat on the ground if I hadn't staked it up with a chopstick. But now it's about twice as long as the chopstick is tall, and so the top half just sort of flops. I'm debating whether to get a taller stick or let it be and see what interesting shape it develops into.

One of the bamboo twins seems to be having a problem. Two of its leaves have half-died, but the wilt hasn't spread, and its other two leaves are fine, as is its sibling plant. Keeping it well watered too. The mini succulent thing from the beginning of term seems to have gotten slightly bigger, although it's hard to tell. It's looking a bit longer in the tooth than it did before, but doesn't seem to have grown any new leaves.

Sarah's kalanchoes are doing fine as well. The new shoots they put out in January are getting bigger, though I doubt they'll flower again.

Recent soup:
chicken broth
water
zarusoba tsuyu (grr, premixed -- it's impossible to find dashi (key ingredient) by itself)
udon noodles
"mushroom flavor" seasoning that came with the udon noodles
bok choy
soybeans
fish balls

Throw it all together and boil. Om nom nom nom.

...Wow, I'd forgotten. That smell really takes me back. I guess dashi really is "the quintessential Japanese flavor". I haven't been able to find it by itself. Only tsuyu, a sauce that has dashi as a primary ingredient, but tsuyu makes an acceptable substitute. Half chicken broth half water with a hearty splash of tsuyu makes a decent Japanese-oid broth. (Tsuyu's expensive, or I'd use more of it.)

The fish balls are interesting. The texture is kind of like sponge, but softer and with smaller holes, and less chewy. They taste really nice too. Not quite as good microwaved as freshly cooked, but then again, no meat ever is. (Plus, they don't go bad after two weeks in my fridge. I wouldn't trust non-processed meat to stay good.)

It came through! I get to live in East Campus next year! Woot woot!

So I will be spending a good chunk of this weekend visiting the various halls, figuring out which ones I like. Tetazoo is great, and I know the most people there, but I might prefer to live someplace a little quieter, among other things.

I fell asleep at around 11pm -- last night? tonight? -- and woke up at about 2:30 because I had fallen asleep accidentally, in a rather uncomfortable position. This gives me a good chunk of small hours to do work, but it's not a strategy for heavy use, because I could so easily have slept through until 8am. I also don't know what this will make me feel like today/tomorrow.

The today/tomorrow, last night / tonight thing is even more confusing now than it is when all-nighters are pulled. Does the sleep count as a nap, or as sleep? Is it still yesterday, or is it tomorrow already? I don't even know. All I know is this is the most awake I've ever felt when doing diffEQs at 5am.

EDIT: Ooh, it's been a while since I saw a sunrise.

Been a while since I used this tag, no? I haven't been not cooking, nor has my cooking got substantially less adventurous. No, I think what happened is I started acquiring actual cooking utensils and such, and started doing more dishes from home, and suddenly cooking became ordinary. Well, no more.

The first time I tried fried rice, it was a simple thing. Cut-up sausages, frozen mixed peas/corn/etc, rice, soy sauce, oyster sauce, stir-fry, done. Very fast and very easy.

The second time, I made the mistake of (a) having WAAAY too much rice and (b) getting the wrong kind of mixed vegetables. This time I got canned, and the mix included potatoes and carrots of the relatively mushy kind. It ended up a rather blandly nasty-tasting sludge. Yuck.

So a couple days ago, I got the idea to repurpose it into a tomato soup/stew/thing. Went out and got a thing of tomato soup (the good kind this time, not the cheap-shit canned kind that tastes metallic). Implemented the idea just now, and oh boy was it a good idea, if I do say so myself. Again very fast and very easy: chicken broth, tomato soup, salt & pepper, FRIED RICE OF ULTIMATE EPIC FAIL, stir, boil for a bit, done.

...NOM NOM NOM NOM. This is actually really good. Reminds me a bit of minestrone, only without the shell pasta and with loads and loads of rice (so it's more like a thick-ish stew). Plus, dipping toasted cinnamon swirl bread in = win.

Hooray for salvageability and repurposing and experiments that work the second time, and gaining some kind of rudimentary cooking intuition, and actual good-tasting food that's actually cheap.

They just don't do that much for me. Profoundly enh. In their stead, give me early music or the subgenre of modern music that imitates aspects of early music, any day.

Case in point: Brahms. We're doing his piece Nänie in choir right now. Couple years ago, Menlo choruses did a few from the Liebeslieder Waltzes. I know approximately what Brahms sounds like. In my opinion, he sounds melodramatic and overwrought, even emo. Gaudy. Gilt wood carved into elaborate swirls and florets, instead of a simple and organic shape with the wood softly polished to let its grain shine through.

I think it goes deeper than that, even. There's one, maybe two moments in the whole Nänie that touch me. Whereas, in the Vaughan Williams Mass in G Minor or the Duruflé Requiem Mass, there's at least one exquisite, excruciating, bleeding, passionate, trembling, dying moment of ecstasy... per movement. (Seven and eight movements, respectively, not counting the solo Pie Jesu in the Duruflé, which I don't know.) Where does the difference come in?

And that's to say nothing of the Five Mystical Songs, the other Vaughan Williams we're doing at the moment. People seem to really not like that one, and I can sort of see where they're coming from, but to me the first four parts of it are pure squeeing magic. Maybe the poetry is a little weird in places, but I find applicability in it, and the music, oh the music, oh the music. I can't listen to Brahms after that. Admittedly, comparing to the 5MS is not really fair because I know them backwards and forwards and inside out and upside down and have loved them for years, whereas I haven't had all that much time to acquire the taste of the Brahms yet. But give me some credit, I'm pretty sure by now that that taste is not going to get acquired very well at all.

It is possible to be Romantic without being melodramatic / overwrought / emo. Although, to be fair, I'm not sure what (or how big) the distinction is between the Romantic movement we learned about in junior English class, and the Romantic period in classical music.

Whatever it is, I don't get (or react strongly to) the Romantic music I've been exposed to, and this makes it hard for me to understand how other people love it so hard.

(Afterthought: maybe this is another reason I had a hard time enjoying piano lessons?)

I always fall asleep in 18.03 lecture. Maybe because it's at 1pm and I've usually just eaten, maybe because the room is warm and the seats are comfortable. It didn't used to be quite this bad, but now term has progressed and I'm losing more sleep.

Caffeine is also a wonderful thing... but I have really low tolerance, and I prize that. I avoid caffeine as much as possible, and usually try to imbibe it only in `emergencies'. Today in 18.03, I was having an absolutely ridiculous time keeping myself awake, so I took a few sips of Coke, and almost instantly everything was much easier. Because of the sheer speed of the effect, I'm thinking it was mostly expectations / placebo effect, not so much the caffeine as such -- although that may be kicking in now, 45 min later.

So: caffeine works on me. Really well. But I don't want this to go away. I want to be able to keep myself up in an actual emergency without having to burst my stomach or spend fifteen dollars on the concentrated energy drink du jour. Plus, it'd be nice to graduate and be able to brag to people about surviving here with my caffeine tolerance intact, as well as the ability to pull a productive all-nighter on half a soda or less.

Proposed solution: get my body to do it for me. Condition myself to be able to produce my own stimulants. I'm thinking of training myself by eating a cinnamon hard candy and then imbibing a small amount of caffeine and running up and down the hallway or doing jumping jacks or something. The taste of cinnamon is pretty stimulative already. I think this could work. (Ideally, the cinnamon wouldn't be necessary -- I'd just have a trigger word or something -- but I bet this will be a whole lot easier.)

Better than shaking myself constantly throughout lecture so it looks like I've taken too much caffeine, anyway.

Inspired by jbsegal's post on Wii Curling, and the discovery that there exists Wii Surgery:

I want there to be Wii Conducting. Choral, orchestral, various small groups, whatever.

Seriously, I think this could be great if done right. More appreciation for the art of conducting and for classical music (though the selection of music ought to be broader than just classical -- maybe they could get permission to include bits from movie soundtracks?). The biggest problem I can foresee is that good conducting uses both hands, sometimes asymmetrically, but a game that requires two Wiimotes per person is bad.

I declared Course 9 (Brain & Cognitive Sciences).

Mostly because you're not allowed to declare course 20 (biological engineering), it being a new program -- you have to apply for it during sophomore year. Right now I'm planning on doing course 20 with large side helpings of 9 and 6 (CS), though depending on interest I may double-major after all. Especially because they are probably going to make the requirements for double-majoring a little less insane.

The 9 and 20 combination is because I'm being very strongly seduced by the awesomeness of bioengineering and synthbio, but I would really like to work on neurons (or glia) doing computations, among other possibilities. Definitely something lower-level than most stuff with the word "cognitive" in it, though. Not that that isn't extremely interesting and worthy of study, but... the lab bench calls to me in a way that words like "concepts" and "cognition" somehow don't.

By the way, it is to my advantage to declare a major instead of going undesignated, because this way I get an advisor in a department instead of remaining with my freshman advisor. There really aren't any consequences for declaring something with intent to change later, with enough planning ahead.

In other news, I may have finally become a real contributing member of my 20.20 project team. This is an excellent thing. While it is very stimulating to have to work hard to keep up with three upperclassmen, that doesn't work so well when in a bad mood -- then it's just frustrating as all hell. And it's not like this project won't be plenty challenging anyway.

It really bothers me that Facebook is so much in the habit of introducing new features -- and making them default-on, or even mandatory -- without pre-announcing them to users first. Why on earth do they think there's a fair number of protest groups for every single new thing they introduce? (And why do they ignore the groups who are in favor of new features that would be fairly easy to implement?)

And it's not just Facebook that does this. MIT administration has shown itself to be unfortunately fond of doing this too. Twice in a row now they've decided (behind closed doors) to convert a graduate dorm to undergrad, and the first anyone heard of it was some kind of public announcement. No discussion with current or prospective residents, no willingness to negotiate when they got called on it, no nothing. (And on top of that, they're ripping out the damn kitchens. Administration retardedness combined with housing retardedness combined with dining retardedness! Arghhh!)