- i’ve been spending a lot of time on my nanotech and program synthesis classes, which are both confusing
- nanotech is a bit out of my depth; i spent a week learning how to cad and getting familiar with autodesk fusion 360, spent another week cramming optics and trying to understand how lenses and microscopes work, and most recently have been learning quantum mechanics because we’re exploiting quantum effects to make lights or something like that. i have no issues with having to learn all this material though; it’s more or less the crash course i was hoping for
- program synthesis is less breadth than nanotech but there’s still a lot of program analysis to learn. we’re also using sketch, a programming language written by the course professor which has built-in synthesis capabilities, but it’s not a very intuitive programming model because you need to have a good understanding of what parts of the program to write explicitly and what parts to leave to the synthesizer
- john green came to harvard to give a talk on climate change last week. it was significantly more religious than his usual output but i enjoyed it, and it was nice to finally see him in person 🙂
- i liked the discussion of how our world is much worse than the (biblical) apocalypse – because the apocalypse cannot be stopped so inaction is excusable, but we could stop climate change if we chose to, and this means that we deserve all the blame for our failures. also something about “humans have the power to destroy ourselves but we do not yet have the power to save ourselves”
- there was an argument for why christians should care about climate change that i hadn’t heard before. it roughly goes along the lines of christianity is the first religion that promised to protect and reward the weak instead of the strong, and climate change is a phenomena disproportionately caused by the rich and affecting the poor
- i’m thinking about all the content i consume (books, movies, music, etc.) and how much signal i get about strangers when they tell me they enjoy something i enjoy. out of all content i think people liking vlogbrothers has consistently provided the strongest signal that i’ll get along with them
- i’ve been talking a lot to the free listening guy (a person who camps outside the main entrance to mit with a sign that says “free listening” on it). he’s given permission for me to blog about some of our conversations so i will be doing that sometime soon 🙂
- on the explore-exploit spectrum i’ve started leaning heavily towards exploit when it comes to socialization. i haven’t really met new undergrads this year and spend most of my time talking to people i already know, this year when i go to dining halls i mostly eat alone instead of starting a conversation with a random person, etc. i don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing – it makes sense given that i won’t be at this school for much longer – but i do wonder if i could be making better choices
- i might be close to resolving a series of related questions about what to do after college. no definitive conclusions, but some preliminary takeaways: a) i’m now fine with not living in sf or new york (previously i was feeling an obligation to choose one of the two) b) i’m more at peace now with making significantly less money than i would if i worked in finance (previously i was mostly fine with it but still somewhat upset, and now the tension has died down significantly)
A Slice of My Mind 