ThePanda

So it is the 5th, as I sit here in a sunlit hotel room, still at Park City, sitting here on the table, typing as I see my roommate still asleep. I already attended one of the lectures, and half slept through a description of mitosis, and it finally helps that I remember most of what happened through that entire thing. For those who are interested, and there can’t be many out there, no, I finally did not attend the parade or the fireworks display, the parade because it looked far too crowded, and the fireworks because they were at night, were fireworks, and didn’t inspire me to go. I did watch some part of Law and Order instead, so I guess it works out :). It is funny, 9 days , well 8 days of lectures/stuff (nearly half a day has passed for today, next Wednesday is a half day), give or take a few and I’d be done with this, and I am actually not annoyed by that knowledge, don’t get me wrong, frequenting some of the trails over the past few days, creating my own “adventures” (getting lost on a trail for instance), seeing some of the off road places this place has, has led me to appreciate some of the beauty of this place, and it’s really quite fun exploring it, but this is no Providence, I probably spend more of my “downtime” in the computer lab than anywhere else, if only because that’s one of the nicer places to sit and use the wireless connectivity, and my keyboards beginning to irritate me, darn place sans Apple stores I know of (oh wait that was Delhi at one time :P), it’d be good to eventually get this thing set right.

It is the second week of stuff here, and while I know we get more notes for the only undergrad course I have been attending. the grad courses still seem to be proceeding uniformly, perhaps something which is to be expected seeing as at least one of them comes to an end tomorrow, I wonder who will take over for that, I hope it’s not another foray into cardiac rhythms, I am sure ending unusual/bad cardiac rhythms is a good thing, and I am sure the mathematic modeling helps, but I don’t want to see another chick “embryo’s” heart and hear about how the electrodes were arranged inside it, like ugh, too much biology, need fresh unadulterated math or CS. Oh well, I know now why I don’t take courses with the AM department, though I am told some of their courses are cool, might take Topics in Chaos, which JKD was taking earlier this year, it seemed umm interesting, and ya, I kind of already own the book :P.

Have to admit a day rolled over here, else a lot of this would not make sense. I went to this really cool, and cheap (which seems rare for Park City) mexican place yesterday, or more precisely someone took me there and that was fun, I finally know why people tend to like some of Mexican food, it really is that good :). Day rolls over, I had a mildly better start to the day today, reaching Breakfast at a time such that I could actually get a good seat, with people, not alone, and could go online later. Ever so often during lunch they people here try “social engineering”, or basically to give us assigned seats so we can “get to know” other people attending this thing. The last two times we had any such attempts at social engineering, the way group dynamics worked were that we had big conversations, I zone out, and am subsequently lucky to remember even the names of most people, umm wait I must admit, I don’t remember too many names from today. However I did meet someone from the Research Program today who was interested in talking to me, while the school teacher program people discussed things amongst themselves. That was fun, and I found at least one thing which sounded coolish in math biology. And I played soccer at night, yup I did play soccer, it was fun (apart from ball on face at one time), and ya, it really was worse than playing soccer at lower altitudes, so I guess I am not automatically acclimatized to high altitudes :P. I meant to write more, but I slept, and hence didn’t.

Note to world: Stop blowing yourself up, it’s really not fun to check on news every morning and find news of things blowing up instead of fun things. Oh and to mirror something mentioned on Plastic, what’s with sucky/little news coverage outside of the obvious online, like so far the only good news stories I have seen on today’s London stuff has been from the BBC (duh), which also spends a lot of time putting out announcements for people in London.

They have new stuff starting up today, including a series of lectures on something close to neuroscience I am told, that might be a whole lot more fun than things have been so far, hence am looking forward to that, hence am going to go away for now.

OK so the neuroscience lectures are interesting, and it is kind of funky, and I knew some of what he was talking about (OK, there were parts which I knew nothing about, but which still looked pretty), and umm ya. And I am sitting at a thing about Math in Africa, parts of which are sort of funny, but sound generally like a lot of the things you don’t attend at school :).

OK, so I am going to stop this, so I can shutdown the computer, and eventually go for eating stuff.

Ze Panda

So I am typing this as I sit in a tent with a few graduate students, a few undergraduates, and other such people, hmm I am still at Park City, and some of my “social” (sic) oil spills seem to have been reduced, though not fully managed, it is sort of fun I guess. I did hear some bad news from people at Brown yesterday, is sort of sad, and I hope not too much of additional bad news filters through. Filtering has been the weird word of this summer I guess, it all began with TLD talking about filters, me wondering what they were, me learning what they were, reading papers on them, and then the more umm unspecified uses of information filtration, I guess at the end of this entire summer I will begin making more use of the darn word, or probably end up hating it, wait I can’t hate it, I am after all using it for research amongst other thing.

Hmm, Park City, well I had a half day break on Wednesday, and I went exploring, and that was interesting, most of this place seems darn expensive, seems to be very different from what people’s general impressions of Utah were (duh, it is kind of liberal, and umm someone mentioned this is where people come to break the rules), and umm ya seems expensive :D. Other than that, this I guess is serving as, as much of a lesson about what I do not want to do, as anything else. Like it’s not about the people or anything, it’s just that most of what I have seen seems to be numerically relevant, but not really that elegant, and is mostly applied math, and I am somewhat out of place here, being interested in neither applied math nor biology, and umm knowing just enough of both that I don’t like attending the undergrad lectures, but not enough that the grad lectures are trivial. But then again the grad lectures not being trivial is good and enjoyable, it’s sort of nice, you get to work on stuff, so it is sort of stimulating, I wish I had the ability to both do the one undergrad course that excites me and one of the grad projects, but I guess for both my and the other people’s sake it’s good that I am not working on one of those :). As usual trees are pretty, graph theory is fun, and I am thinking CS, and math of the kind which involves pretty pictures/drawings, funny.

My keyboard’s again semi-broken, though it’s a lot worse than it was back in PVD, and the bookstore is not down the road, thus leading me to wait until I get back to Delhi to get this repaired, replaced, whatevered. I am kind of sort of looking forth to having the ability to sleep a helluva lot in the near future, something this summer really hasn’t afforded much of, and by a helluva lot I mean just enough so I don’t feel sleepy when I am awake, and by that I don’t know what I mean. Like I don’t know, I am getting sort of inclined on starting on coffee or something, seeing as my usual source of caffeine (Diet Coke, don’t drink Mountain Dew for strange reasons) is not free, and other things which keep me awake (strong mint slips), seem to require me walking down to a store, and I don’t want to do that.

I have recently been counting the number of flights I have taken so far, something of a record I used to maintain not so long ago when I took my first flight, and I am sort of realizing that I have sort of taken more flights in the past year, than in most of all of the past combined, which is to be expected but is sort of nice :). Flying would be pretty cool if they had bigger seats in economy class, or if I had the points to upgrade myself to business class, hmm Ok the former would be more practical, oh well, whatever.

The weekend is approaching, well OK technically the weekend is upon us, and I have no idea about what I am going to do for the next three days, it is the 4th of July weekend, and I guess I could look around on Monday, but that still leaves tomorrow and day-after, well not entirely, I could split time between further exploring the wonders of Park City, and going online, working on stuff for the vision things, and learning about umm something. Hmm I sorta wish I had brought more books from PVD, rather than hoping that there’d be a good bookstore in Park City, because so far the only bookstore type thing i have come across didn’t have anything really exciting, and I guess this is is a really good time to catch up on that reading I have not done, besides I will be needing some-sort of readable thingamajigs for the flight over. Oh, by the way, if anyone’s looking for weird fun books to read over the summer, I suggest trying to acquire a copy of Berlin Tales by Christopher Isherwood, the book’s great, and is what kept me entertained through my long flight here.

OK so I have spent sometime over the past few days complaining to various people who I know from other parts of my life (mostly Brown), about how I do not like PDEs, about how they are evil (well not really, lest JKD read any of this and get annoyed), and other such things. OK well to be fair, they aren’t all that bad, but I guess seeing as pretty much all we do is write big complex PDEs, decide they are probably too hard to solve, decide that a computer/a numerical solver could solve said stuff, and decide that if needed we could always do it, like seriously the functions, the pretty things, they seem to not appear that often. I did sit through this lecture about things called Arnold’s tongues earlier today, and they seemed to be a pretty construction, especially when colored, and I plan on figuring out some more about this. On another note, while I know I didn’t really attend any of the Putnam problem sessions like I should have at Brown, I loved the idea of pizza and problems which Harvey Mudd seems to use to get people to solve Putnam like problems, and I guess we should have something similar, but not at the cost of the Kabob and Curry lunches they give us every week, like as many of the lunches as I have attended back at Brown, have seemed to be really cool.

This is rather whimsical, but earlier today someone who is SCE’s brother’s friend asked me about why I had Office on my computer and his exact words were something to the effect of Office is evil, and how dare you use it. OK let’s see, I do believe Microsoft does some evil things every now and then, however Office is one of the nicest application suites out there, and while I have a copy of both iWork and NeoOfficeJ, on my computer, run at TeX installation, and have over a period of time shifted over to doing most of my math work on TeX, I still need something to write the occasional paper and other such things in, and I am sorry to say neither iWork nor NeoOfficeJ (which is a port of OpenOffice for Macs) seems to be quite so good with handling stuff yet, and I will hence continue to use Office, if only because it is one of the most well designed pieces of software for its purpose. I am sorry if that seems hypocritical, but I find it simpler to use Office than either of the other things, and hence I use it, I am sure if I tried, I could make the shift to Pages and KeyNote, but what is to stop someone from making disparaging remarks about those?

By the way if all of the above bored you, Slashdot reports there was a huge fish caught in Thailand today, that might seem more interesting.

Ze Panda