ThePanda

As I sit here alone in my room, not having seen my roommate for the last 5 days, not having seen most of my friends, the people I spend most of my time with for the past two months with, for a few days, and while I procrastinate (hey I have been drawing little gammas, and looking at stupid language manuals all day, I am allowed to procrastinate), I think back at all that I have learnt in the past week, and think back to all that I have to give thanks for, this after all is thanksgiving in the United States (not in Canada), and no matter what religion you belong to there’s always something you’re supposed to give thanks for while in the new world. Well OK I lied about that, it’s perfectly OK to not be thankful for anything you have, it’s just that it makes a lot of sense to be thankful for something, and thanks to fourteen funny people I am actually thankful for something, and there are something I am extremely pissed about and hence not thankful for…

This week has shown me the prelude to my greatest fears, and I am scared about stuff that I may seem back home, and I am scared about people I may have to deal with, and I am scared about trying to explain the next four years to anyone, because frankly it’s hard to do, and unless people experience what happens for themselves, it’s not something I can explain. Back before I came here, I used to have the ability to not face certain things that I disliked, good or bad, it was a helpful ability, for not facing what you dislike is in general a good thing. Especially when it comes to people, there are certain sides of them you may not want to see, it’s a defense mechanism, it lets you retain a certain view of people, which is often very different from reality, but a view which allows you to communicate with them and see them as people who are perfectly OK even if you’d never want to spend time with the actual them. Sadly that ability is eroded by time, and other forces of social structures, social capital as any basic political science paper would tell you is an important aspect of any society. Building social capital can unfortunately be a very painful exercise, as also an extremely rewarding one at times…

New England is a strange place, the weather changes more often than it should, and is highly unpredictable, some people have in fact gone so far as to mention that weather reports for New England are so often wrong, that it’s better to follow a logically inverse version of them, which is to say that anytime you have reports of massive thunderstorms at 8 AM, you should plan on venturing out at 8 AM, for you’ll find perfect sunny weather and beautiful skies. As far as I can say this is true of a lot of things in New England, not only the weather, and it has weird consequences. Planning stuff out in New England is an okish idea, being prepared to change plans is an extremely good idea, for stuff doesn’t work the way it should. According to a certain article in Wired magazine, popularity is a zero-sum game, fortunately for me and I guess most other people, the result of zero-sum games is to an extent a function of whom you’re playing against. Few (I would have said if any, but I know NIM has been solved) zero-sum games have ever been completely solved, popularity and enjoyment are definitely not included in the list of solved zero-sum games.

The first time I went to Boston, I took a Greyhound with 10 very interesting people, and I was joined there by another four, the size of the group hampered my abilities to go around Boston to an extent, and I eventually planned to return alone. I have been back alone once, and I sure as hell wish at least some of the ten people join me the next time I go back, for Boston really isn’t all that interesting a place without people. This past week a bunch of people went back home to celebrate Thanksgiving, over the past few days at least some of them have talked to me, and I know most of them come back tomorrow, that is one of the things I definitely am looking forward to, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Providence is deserted, for I wouldn’t mind if all of Providence was deserted and only these people were back here. I also met exactly 4 people at MIT this past week, and these are people I haven’t seen in a few years, people I almost did not visit, and it would indeed have been sad if I didn’t visit them for they made my week so much better than it ever would have been.

Amazingly enough all of what’s mentioned above refers to the same thing, making it anymore clearer would go against the entire principle of this blog…

Ze Panda
who still believes Boston isn’t half as amazing as Providence…

PS: A lot of people have asked me about a certain widely publicized incident at my high school, well yes I do know about it, and I think people still aren’t asking the right questions about it, and aren’t looking towards changing the right things, instead changing minor inconsequential details…

OK I know I was telling people about semi-looking forward (or was it completely looking forward) to Tahnksgiving, and all that stuff, OK well I lied, umm well I didn’t completely lie, but I kindda comitted a faux-pas. All this Thanksgiving revelery is seriously screwing with my week, I just got out of a Friday, Saturday, Sunday sequence (generally known as a Weekend), and I had what felt exactly like a Friday today (mostly free, and hence mostly boring), and a few of my friends left (one had to fly back to Israel to get not-so plesant stuff done back home), and then I have a Thursday tomorrow (busy, ), and then there’s a Saturday after that (no classes, but people who’re sticking around for sometime), and then there’s a bunch of Sundays (no classes, and usually few or no people, umm OK most Sundays there are quite a few people who stick around, doing work, watching the Simpsons, understanding code whatever, but none in this renderation), and that’s a seriously screwed up week. Someone ate up all my days, and I am not happy :’(. Oh and I may be at Boston on the 25th, I know there are people who read this blog who need to know this information…
Ze Panda

Yesterday was a crazy day and it will be sad indeed if no one found out how crazy a day you can have, especially when people are given some amount of slack we were given this weekend, well not exactly but whatever. Well OK, not completely slack, since I did get work done Friday, and Saturday, most of my current math assignment is correct, and I rather like everyone else have been working through this dull Sunday morning, but seeing as hard pressed as everyone was through the past week or so, and seeing that almost everyone would be away the next weekend, and we’d have reading period and final exams coming up a few weeks thereafter, it was essential that we did something. Well umm I will slow down a bit, rewind to where I left off on Friday…

The Incredibles, yes I did watch The Incredibles, and it’s one fun movie, well it’s a Pixar production, so it’s pretty much like all the Pixar productions, good . They also had this mini-thing playing right before The Incredibles, Boundin’ and that had some really catchy lyrics, and cool animations. Ok this isn’t sounding very exciting, but I assure you it was, it’s a cool movie, and people should watch it…

Oh well now yesterday, umm yesterday started out slow, I had a fun interview (whee pointers), discovered that fmod in C can return a floating point modulus, why anyone on the face of the earth would actually need a floating point modulo operator is something which I cannot comprehend, but I guess, it’s there for a reason, so if anyone wants to use it they can (oh and it’s in the math libs, so do remember to include math.h), had a fun time explaining why I would want to be a TA, simulating a TA session, and generally discussing donuts, C, GCC, and other fun things. Fun . So anyways at the end of that, which was a mere half an hour later, I was back in my room, frantically hammering together a CS project, typing out bits and pieces of a paper, and figuring out what is the Russian Federation’s current stance on Chechnya is, and other such fun things. So at 1 or so I headed out for lunch, and there’s this guy I go for long random walks with when both of us are bored to death, since it seems to be a fun thing to do, and the other day we happened to walk from Providence to Pawtucket which is this other city in Rhode Island in some completely random weird way, and then we had to take a bus back, since it was getting kindda cold, and we didn’t want to walk back, and ever since then we had been telling people about how we’d eventually walk down to Massachusetts. Now this is one of those Saturdays when just about no one (OK there was someone who did) has enough work, and this guy and I decide to try walking to Massachusetts, and a few minutes, a MapQuest search, and some amount of prodding later, there’s like five of us who’re going to walk to Massachusetts, and while we have a general idea about where we’re heading (MapQuest helps, no we don’t own GPS units, and as far as I know none of us had compasses, or maps for that matter, and most of us believed that while asking people along the way for directions to Massachusetts would have been a fun thing to do, it wouldn’t have helped too much since people would in all probability have not liked that, oh and well we had someone from Massachusetts, so we were hoping she could home in on her home state), we are basically walking in the general direction of where Massachusetts should have been. It actually is a pretty walk, there are a few places which are slightly barren, but by and large the entire way is lined with beautiful houses, playgrounds, shops or something or the other, oh and at least one huge golf course. It took us an hour and a half or so (we had a few stops along the way, Dunking Donuts to buy water, one of the playgrounds to try out the swings, and we also did that on the way back), but we finally did reach a welcome to Massachusetts sign, well Ok first there was a welcome to “Seekonk, Estd 1812” sign, but that was soon followed by a Welcome to Massachusetts sign, and cars with Massachusetts sign, yay. Along the way there were some hilarious signs, including a sign marking the way to the Space Station on Dexter Street (avid watchers of Cartoon Network should get the reference)... The walk back was another hour and a half, and well it included a stop at Starbucks, where I ended up having a delicious Caramel Apple Cider, and that was followed by dinner at the Ratty, where we actually spent more than our fair share of time telling people about our walk to Massachusetts.

And you’d think that’d be it, since it should have proceeded to be a normal Saturday night, well it actually did go on to be a rather abnormally normal Saturday night. For one we watched Animal House, and that was good, but that’s not that unusual. And like we do every other Saturday night (well people do different things different Saturdays), we went on to play a game, except rather than choosing Taboo, Cranium, we chose to play Capture the Flag, in the hallways, which while a good idea, attracts lots of stares from people who obviously don’t understand why people are running up and down the stairwells. Besides at least one of my friends heard a lot of negative remarks about our playing Capture the Flag in the hallways, but to hell with that, playing Capture the Flag’s a lot more fun…

Ze Panda
walking to the CIT…

It is 10:14 AM on a slightly cloudy Friday morning, I have had a midterm already, and except for one silly Pol sci class later in the day, I am done. Umm well OK I still have math work and I was doing that before I took a procrastinating break, umm well OK I am procrastinating for the next few minutes so that I can get the physics midterm out of my head. It went relatively well, but umm it was in a big scary room, and I kindda wanna do math without having to think about the week gone by. Oh and I go watch The Incredibles tonight, physics defying stunts at the end of a physics midterm sounds like fun . Besides my math midterm hasn’t yet been corrected, and going to a movie about which I’ve had a math lecture (given by the Pixar guy), may be good karma, but well from what I’ve seen till now it seems to have gone off relatively well, and I should be relatively happy with my grades. This week on the other hand has left me strained and sapped of all my strength, and I am glad to have it behind me. I have been here for more than a month, and until now I’ve never really had a chance to complain about not having work, umm well OK a few chances, especially on Sunday nights, when I am usually left with no work, but this week has been weirdly reversed, it’s as if I hit a huge 20 foot wave of work and had to slowly prod my way through that, and that’s kindda weird. Most weeks, even through the work I have time to go meet people, do at least a few things which make me happy (oh well ok a few things which are enjoyable, there), talk to friends, and engage in other niceties, this week seemingly all I have done is work through one thing after another, and that saddens me, well a little. At least I don’t have any more midterms to look through this weekend, and except for an interview tomorrow (TA interview),I really don’t have too much to do, which should give me time to regain some of my lost strength, besides next week is really really really short, and then of course there’s The Incredibles…

Yesterday I finally had the Alexandrian presentation I have been worrying about, and though it didn’t go quite as well as I planned, I guess it was ok, umm well I don’t know, I wasn’t in the audience. For one 5 seconds before the presentation I knew exactly what order I wanted to go to, and since I had little index cards to help me remember minute but important pieces of information (names, dates, quotes), I thought I’d be more than prepared for it. I had the entire thing rehearsed in my mind, but once I went up there, I kind of couldn’t get into how to change directions, and I guess too large a part of my presentation focused on how Greek and Macedonian symposia resembled modern parties, and then slowly morphed into how Alexander was acting like an alcoholic post 330 BCE and how this would make sense, considering Philip, his father would act the same way, and how alcoholism and substance abuse at least in some cases is supposed to be in the genes (I don’t even know where I brought that in from, it wasn’t a part of my original train of thought), and a bunch of random facts about drinking in the ancient world, and facts about how people would be forced to think out each of their actions at these massive drinking parties Alexander held, and then I couldn’t come up with an ending, so I just kindda went thud, that’s about it, which in m opinion is the worse ending you can ever have. The questions after that were sorta interesting, and pointed to stuff I probably should research before my paper, stuff like any information about his drinking in private that may have percolated through the ages. The last question, which was asked by the professor, threw me off a bit, because it wasn’t something I could answer with any degree of certainty and I doubt anyone else could. He asked me whether in my opinion Alexander was clinically alcoholic, now in my opinion Alexander drank too much, and too often, however I do not even know how to determine whether people I know and can see are clinically alcoholic or not, let alone determine whether a 3rd centure BCE hero was clinically alcoholic or not. Like well it’s been known for sometime that Caesar suffered from epilepsy and at least one of his most famous mistakes, the one that would eventually result in his death may have been a result of his suffering an epileptic seizure, however it’s not something which you find mentioned in too many stories about Caesar. Besides you could get away with doing things to Caesar, Alexander on the other hand, at least towards the end of his life (years preceding 325 BCE or so) would kill anyone who so much a questioned his authority. Alexander, was also someone whom the church, and most of medieval Europe idolized and painted on churches and stuff, it’s hard to imagine them letting documentation about Alexander’s alcoholism or anything survive. Now if only that darn library at Constantinople/Istanbul was not burnt down, it’d be so much simpler. On the other hand I have learnt stuff in this course that I wouldn’t have imagined earlier, like before I came in, it was hard to imagine Alexander doing too much that was wrong, and there were all these nice stories about Alexander’s campaign in India, but as you read through a lot of the texts that exist or are derived from accounts written by people then, it seems as if he wasn’t exactly a beacon of ideal behavior, and one of the main reasons he could win wars, was because he had inherited what was one of the most modern armies at that point of time in the ancient world, and he had Greek support, umm well OK he forced the Greek’s to support him. Well he was a good warrior, perhaps a good administrator, but a lot of what I have read has left me feeling uneasy about him, and well the fact that I almost called him clinically drunk doesn’t help with my opinion about his abilities.

Ze Panda

Hmm so the midterm ended today, and now I am free as a bird to talk about it. Talk I however shan’t, well I shall mention that parts of it were harrowing since there was no way to figure out whether I was headed down the right path or not, parts of it were harrowing for they made Mathematica choke, and parts of it were harrowing for polar functions should not be used that way. At the end of the day however, what matters the most was that parts of it were harrowing, argh…..

Anyways a comic strip (admittedly from Piled Higher and Deeper, about what happens over the next few days as he checks the sollutions. I couldn’t have said it better….

So a weekend, a trip to the Thayer Street Gap, and 6 inches of snow later I am the proud owner of a pair of gloves, I have made a snowman, been involved in a snowball fight (not a full fledged one), and have seen someone make a snow angel (someday when I have more clean trousers, or am wearing waterproof stuff I shall make my own). I did promise a slightly less hurried entry, and I guess this is it. I cannot say I have no work, because I have tons of work sitting in front of me, I however am brain dead right now, and I guess I am going to write this entry and go to sleep so that I can wake up and get down to doing more work. I am still now allowed to talk about the midterm and I shall hence not talk about it now, though I sure as hell wish I could.

So yes about the snow, well snow’s beautiful, no doubt about it, and once you learn how to dress up for it, it’s not really all that bad, after snow however there’s ice, and some of the roads are so damn slippery right now. I had to walk down to the CIT today at 5 for a lab, and it was so slippery, and so many people were about to slide down, it was kindda scary. I am glad that I bought boots earlier, I doubt my Solomon urban wears would have lasted through this ice. It’s all going to melt away tomorrow in all probability, and then no more white stuff would line the road, sad, it was so beautiful while it lasted, so damn beautiful, and so short lived, I wish I didn’t have the midterm, and all that work this weekend (mostly the midterm, since it was a normal weekend otherwise), so that I could spend more time out in the snow through the weekend. Getting gloves was not a problem, and thanks to advice from people I stayed away from the reallllly expensive ones, and got good gloves, which didn’t cost a ton, but then they aren’t from Patagonia (they have really cool $30 and $60 gloves), aren’t meant to be used while skiing or anything like that, but they’re good gloves, they’re waterproof, perfect for picking up snow and the like, and they’re warm as hell. With my jacket, my hat, and my glove, it feels almost (though not quite) like I am indoors, and then it’s a good sensation. Drinking hot stuff while walking down a snowy path rates high on my list of cool things, arghhh, someday it shall snow again, and then I won’t have as much work, and I will stay outdoor longer, join the midnight snowball fighters at the main green, and build bigger snow men, someday soon… And we probably will have a blizzard while I am in Providence and before this (school) year is out, that’s a scary thought, since most of my friends assure me I don’t want to be in a blizzard. Hmm snow was beautiful, hopefully blizzards wouldn’t be too bad . Thanksgivings barely a week and a half away, and that’s a happy thought to hold on to for now, no more worrying about midterms and presentations after this Friday, and I might finally get to watch The Incredibles, the very idea of something like that happening makes me want to fast forward through the week…

Ice hockey, well hockey as it is called in America (for one field hockey is nothing like hockey as seen back home), is violent. Umm well not footballish violent, but the keep crashing each other into the side walls, and though college hockey rules explicitly forbid fighting, some of the shoving is done with such malice it’s unbelievable. And some of the cheerers and fans are so truly angry, it makes me wonder whether they are bitter about not getting into those places. Like we were playing Princeton this Friday, and it almost seemed as if the guy cheering the most for Brown had some sort of a personal hatred for Princeton. Now Princeton’s fortunately not Harvard, and no large groups of people went about jeering about how they sucked, but it’s still kindda sad, I would have loved to be in Princeton, but not bring there is no reason to explicitly hate it, and unlike Harvard and Yale, Princeton’s not exactly boastful or anything. I guess I am biased ‘coz I still like Princeton.

To all those people who sent me Diwali greeting (to those who are wondering about this, you probably didn’t send one, mail me or meet me sometime I’ll explain, this kindda does an OK job, though I don’t know all the details in there, and it’s kindda impersonal), thank you, I however did not celebrate diwali, due to more reasons than one. Happy Diwali nevertheless, and thank you for all your e-cards (hmm I would have said stop bombing my mailbox, but didn’t quite receive those many)...

Just as I am finally getting the hang of OCaml, I have begun to both love and hate the crazy type-checker, for one in that verbose a language, crazy type-checking causes it’s fair share of problems, and the fact that my code has to run without warnings means I have to go around raising exceptions every second line, and I can’t catch exceptions (well not explicitly prohibited but discouraged)... Beautiful coding, thanks to OCaml is now represented by a bunch of match with and pattern matching statements, regex, without regex, taken to another level (no seriously it’s beautiful, putting something like (0::c) pretty much tells you when you have a list such as [0; 1; 2; 3; 4], no cars and cdrs), and umm it’s good, compact and all but not all that beautiful. But then the last time I complained about it to Spike (my professor), he said something to the effect of trusting an aircraft running OCaml to one running C, on the other hand he also trusts an aircraft running Java code, more than he does one running C code, and that’s sort of scary, since Java code is scary, it’s random in my opinion, and though I love its concept of strongly implemented Object Orienting, honest I do, but well I don’t know it sounds kind of strange… I can’t believe I’m going to spend much of the next semester coding DP algos in Java, DP’s fun, Java however is sadly slow, oh well I came in with a bad feeling about Scheme, and I like all that Scheme offers now, even if I have spent most of this class forcefully exploring the vagaries of Scheme rather than learning anything really new. And now when faced with OCaml, I am wishing I could go back to the cozy comfort of Scheme, because parts of OCaml befuddle me, I don’t like spending precious minutes figuring out why my ‘a list -> ‘a function is in OCaml’s opinion an ‘a list list -> ‘a list function, why my perfectly defined ‘a -> float function when passed into map turns into a hideous ‘a -> ‘a function. I sure do wish I could give OCaml code for debugging questions in competitions back home, it’s so easy to confound and confuse people, God it would be fun.

Now, time to sleep….

Ze Panda
yawn!!!!

Sorry to say that I haven’t yet seen snow, plenty of sleet and ice though. It’s been raining sleet all day today, and it’s kindda fun, little speckles of ice, not really snow, but ice, and they don’t wet you, and form funny layers on your hair, and they layer up in really fun ways on windshields, it’s fun . Also drinking hot caramel apple cider and walking down Thayer Street while talking to friends and draped in a warm jacket has a certain fun element to it, and is well worth the effort, wheee…

I have a midterm in progress, and I am not allowed to talk about it (something to the effect of not telling anyone, including any MIT educated grandmothers has been mentioned in the class), and since this is the second midterm for the class I have learnt to limit interactions about it. It is fun though, and I have lotsa time to do it, and that’s usually a good thing, even though it means I have another deadline, ugh. I also give a presentation on Alexander’s Inebriation later this week, and I have fun stuff like wine has social and beneficial influences, it’s a promoter of civilization, a law giver and a lover of peace (ancient beliefs on wine, not my beliefs), and other fun miscellany, and I am not yet done preparing for my presentation, so it promises to be an entirely fun presentation. One more week, and then I’d be done with all the midterms, and will not have anything more before the exams, which is a good thing, we’d also be approaching thanksgiving, which would mean a tiny holiday. This wednesday would also be my last physics lab, ergo no more worrying about going to a really boooring lab (umm partly because I unlike everyone don’t have a partner), and more time to do stuff on Wednesday yahooo… Now all I need to do is survive this weekend…...

Correction, I did see snow, barely 5 mins ago, it’s snowing as I write this, and it’s so damn beautiful, I love snow, I love the entire idea of snow, though I am sure a few days from now I’ll be hating it, as I spend days upon days in snow. Snow is fun , well until I see snow and a thin layer of perma-frost all around me for a few months, well I still don’t have gloves, and the coming of snow implies I have to go get myself gloves tomorrow. Will do, I hope…

Oh and I went to my second ice hockey match ever, this one against Princeton, more about that once I am done with the tons of work I have to do…

Ze Panda
off to sleep…