It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon and, like usual, I’m working.
Class has been out for a few days now, and my finals aren’t until Friday the 18th. Normally, that would mean a week of doing virtually nothing. Sure, I might study the night before a final, but in general I’ve never been the studying type. It isn’t out of laziness; I honestly have never really known how to study for something. I learn in class as I go, and I’m usually pretty confident in the material. When it’s time for an exam, it’s just a matter of refreshing my memory. That might mean an hour skimming through the book at Cafe Med the night before the test, but it certainly doesn’t take up a week.
Normally, that would be the case. Till I started doing undergraduate research. Now the idea of “free time” doesn’t even make sense: if I have time which I’m not dedicating to class or work, that’s time for research. It’s not the sort of thing I can “finish” for the week. It’s an ongoing project which won’t ever really be finished; and now that I’ve got a research laptop in my living room, it intends to fill every crack in my schedule. Which means if I have a full week free from class, it’s expected that I’ll be spending a full week doing labwork. And if I’m going home for Christmas break, my research laptop and a few books my professor would like me to read, go with me. I’m not really complaining: it’s fulfilling stuff. But it can be daunting.
Finals are also a bit more daunting this semester. Well, one in particular: Quantum Mechanics. I’ve always loved Physics, and I actually think I’m better at it than any other subject, including my major. That’s why, when given the option to pick an honors area of study outside of Computer Science, I jumped at the chance to pursue Particle Physics. But this semester’s professor is a bit frustrating. Both midterms have been very specific to one or two small things he mentioned in lecture (i.e. “In lecture I drew a graph. What did it look like?”), and rewarded people who made copious cheat sheets as opposed to people (like myself) who couldn’t always attend lecture, but completely understood the material. So I have a feeling I didn’t do very well on either midterm: I say “I have a feeling” because I don’t actually have a clue. I was absent both days our midterms were returned to us and have stubbornly refused to go to the TA’s office hours ever since, so I actually have no idea where I stand in the class. To be honest, I don’t even want to see the grades. I’d rather assume the worst, and prepare for the final as if my life depended on it. My honors GPA limit certainly does.
So I’ve spent the last few days alone in my apartment, only venturing out for the occasional meal. Cabin fever and gloomy weather has thrown my sleep schedule off considerably: work till 6am, sleep till 1pm. If you’re on a budget for food, I’d actually recommend it. Unlike waking up in the morning, I have no need for lunch. I can survive on one meal around 9pm. Other than a possible donut or Cup Noodles around 3am, I’m good.
Unfortunately, my schedule also leaves me with no time to write anything substantial. Instead, here are a few photos.
Exhibit A: Rainy Weather
My balcony. That chair must be soaked by now.
View from my front door. Well...about 10 feet to the left of my front door.
House across from me. Who on earth would sit on that balcony?
Exhibit B: Cabin Fever
Desk in my room. The picture isn't intentionally dark: the other two light bulbs in the room both burnt out, and I haven't bothered replacing them.
Living room, from the hallway. "Living room" is an appropraite name, since I live on that chair.
Research station. Note the robotic wrist on the right: I picked that up from a hospital in SF a few days ago. It's probably worth more than you are.
Kitchen, which hasn't really been used in over a week.
Bookshelf and freshly erased whiteboard. I can't stress enough how much better working from home is when you own a whiteboard.
The living room bed. For when I know I'll only be getting a few hours of sleep, and don't want to commit to the real thing.
Exhibit C: The Lab
Exhibit D: Food
Pollo Gorgonzola
That’s my life. In a week, I’ll be home for Christmas break. It will be wonderful — even if I’ve already agreed to come back to Berkeley a week early and work in the lab. That will just make the other 3 weeks more special…right?
Meanwhile, I’ll settle for listening to A Charlie Brown Christmas for the fifth time this weekend. Till next time.
—–
For those of you wanting something more philosophical, I was browsing through my old Facebook notes, and found this. It’s a debate with my friend Magnus (a confirmed atheist) and me (a confirmed Christian) on the existence of a mouse in the UCSD commuter’s lounge which probably belonged to my brother, Randy. And by “philosophical” I mean “not philosophical in any way, but filled with puns which make Stephen and only Stephen laugh.” Also, it might count as heresy. But if I can’t post bad puns and heresy on my own blog, where else can I?
Side note: IPU and FSM generally stand for the Invisible Pink Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Magnus:
I have a theory, Randy. Let me explain it to you: Suppose you were attending a school called UCSD and you happened to be in a lounge, perhaps one intended for commuters, and while in that lounge you were using a computer, perhaps a laptop, and you happened to be using a mouse attached to this laptop. Supposing all this, suppose also that you lost that mouse. Is it possible that you lost some sort of hypothetical mouse in this hypothetical lounge and that I may have recovered that mouse? Maybe I should restate this: are you just looking for something that you’ve lost?
Stephen:
The odds of a hypothetical Randy, a hypothetical laptop, and a hypothetical computer all existing in the same hypothetical lounge are so obscenely small, the fact that you’d even ask him is pitifully stupid.
Magnus:
I have faith that the mouse exists and for some of us that’s enough. Not everyone needs everything to be scientifically proven to them and you’re really just taking most of the science on faith anyway.
Stephen:
Once you do that though, you could believe anything. How do you know instead of a black mouse there isn’t some Imaginary Perception Utility that looks in your brain and decides where to move the cursor? Or a Flatbread Screen Manipulator, sitting in a wastebasket in the Commuter’s Lounge, shooting invisible mold at the computer making the cursor move? You can subscribe to Sourdaoism or Rye-entology if you want, but leave science out of it.
Magnus:
The mouse has a manual and I’ve read that manual and I have faith that it is the best way to manipulate the laptop. You’re creating these ridiculous grain-faiths and claiming they are just as legitimate as my belief in the mouse, but the mouse has a long tradition and a manual that provides guidance to us in the same way that we guide the curser. And it is just like science, you have no idea if the attractive force of gravity is based on sorghum or oats, you just believe what the miller tells you.
Stephen
If I had a pumpernickel for every time one of you ryeligious honey-nut jobs used that argument, my flour would be enriched enough to retire. I could just as well have my own Wholey Wheat Scriptures teaching me how to live an enriched life, something you unleavened crackers would know nothing about. And every Yeaster I might celebrate the Raising of the Bread and ascension to Leaven. We’d have a very floury tradition, just as much as your Muroidean “truth”.
The point is, it’s a violation of Flaxseed’s Butterknife to spread unnecessary condiments on the most logical answer. Why would the mouse be black? Why does it have to be hypothetical? Why does there need to be a mouse at all? It’s simply not Logitech.
I believe in the Unmoved Cursor. It is a fundamental characteristic of our Operating System, that it tends toward the display of more complex, interesting windows as time goes on. The cursor, by Natural Double Selection, tends to open as many windows as it can.
Now is that a complete explanation? Not quite. We need to examine the code for the cursor, which existed before the cursor itself, to understand how and why it would appear at the center of the screen to begin with. From there, we can only postulate that during the period known as the Big BIOS, the cursor became an hourglass, and rotated rapidly, causing all other pixels to light up. After that, it’s very easy to see how the entire Operating System would become populated, driven by the movement of the cursor.
I admit the imperfection of my argument. You don’t. You think you can avoid the problem by falling back on some “Mouse” which exists outside the Operating System, as if any intelligent discourse can occur about it. Even if this “Mouse” existed, you’ve just further complicated things: in order to explain the appearance of a tiny bitmap out of nothing, you now have to explain the existence of a much more complex Mouse, with the ability to manipulate the whole screen!
Magnus:
And where do you propose this operating system came from? Some infinitesimal clump of dough that was left to rise and created everything? You don’t think its a little more likely that the Mouse was used to open all this software?
How can you look at the desktop with all its beauty and not realize that something intelligent must have chosen thatbackground , and that something was a mouse, not some 2-bit BIOS system based on pseudo-random numbers. You can keep trying to justify self-manipulating cursors, but when you end your screen saver you’ll see that something must have loaded this OS. Cursors don’t just move themselves and I think when you examine your registers, you know what moved it.
You admit that your own argument doesn’t compile, but when I propose the existence of the Mouse, which explains everything, you just claim I’m complicating things by introducing unnecessary variables. An ever-manipulating, guiding Mouse is the best explanation for the existence of everything on the screen.
Stephen
An ever-manipulating, guiding Mouse is just a crutch for those of you who are too lazy to learn real Computer Science. It might be an explanation, but it’s a dead-end: once you say everything was caused by this Mouse (I’ll capitalize it out of respect for you), there’s nothing else to go on. Decades ago they couldn’t explain anything about the processor — people believed there was a keyboard that gave commands, a hard drive that stores data, a monitor that displays the graphics, and even a human user that puts other utilities to use.
Those ideas have since been rejected, and we don’t need to play IO-Accessory-of-the-Gaps anymore. We’re really not that different, you and I. I just believe in one fewer utility than you do. Once you understand why I reject the Keyboard, Hard Drive, Monitor, and User, you’ll understand why I reject your Mouse.
I believe that the Operating System hasn’t always existed — but its environment variables have. There are about 20 environment variables which are fine-tuned to produce all the beautiful complexity we see on the screen. I don’t know why they are what they are, but with them we can explain everything without the need of some “Mouse.”
I know it helps you sleep at night to think that something external to the OS is guiding everything, but it simply isn’t true. Besides, if a Mouse were guiding things, it would be a pretty bad mouse. Why does Vista exist? Why are there viruses in the world? If your “Mouse” is responsible for those things, I don’t want any part of it.
Magnus
The Mouse isn’t incompatible with your Computer Science, we both accept the same reality. I’m just claiming that the rules you discovered were laid out by the Mouse with the best intentions in mind. There may very well be 20 environment variables, but where did they come from? They can’t just “fine-tune” themselves and that’s where a benevolent Mouse comes in.
The Keyboard, Hard Drive, Monitor and User that you’re talking about are just different euphemisms for the same peripheral that guides the Operating System. They were rejected by other people like you that didn’t have the faith to accept that we can’t understand everything about our OS. There will always be features and hotkeys that we won’t know about and the only thing we can do is accept on faith that the Mouse will guide us through His desktop.
The Mouse has so many more transistors than you can imagine, so you can’t hope to understand why He created viruses and Vista. If you read the Manual you would understand that the Mouse is an all-loving Mouse that has the best intentions for the OS, so you have to accept that He will do what is best and not question the minor viruses or a few bad Operating Systems. The Mouse also gave you Linux, C++ and Starcraft, how can you blame it for some small problems along the way?
Stephen
Magnus, you’re continuing to make the same faulty assumption; that the complexity of the computer screen and environment variables has always been there.
I believe in the principle of bootstrapping — it is a natural phenomenon, we’ve seen it over and over again. Complex codes and environments can arise from an originally simple environment, over time, as the code “programs” itself.
Sure, in hindsight you can call the Keyboard, Hard Drive, Monitor, etc. just euphemisms, but that’s not what people actually believed. Just like you, they found something about the computer they couldn’t explain, and instead of trusting the Computer Scientists’ theories, they invented these insane peripherals to help them go into Sleep Mode at night.
The more transistors this “Mouse” has, the more complicated it is, and the more you have to explain. Where did the Mouse come from? Do you really think inventing something which has “so many more transistors than you can imagine” is the simplest solution?
Finally, when you look at Vista, and I mean really look at it, can you honestly say something intelligent coded it? Doesn’t something deep inside you think “I could have coded this better?” If the Mouse is really that great, it won’t mind your doubting it.
