Everything
Phone II
MIT Course Number Mnemonics
When I first realized it might be helpful to start trying to remember the correspondence between MIT courses and their numbers, I expected a list of mnemonics for this correspondence would be one of those Things That Should Exist On the Internet. I’m pretty surprised it doesn’t. I mean, MIT has, what, at least 100,000 alumni; as far as I know, nearly everybody who goes there speaks the number correspondence fluently, so they have to learn it; and the science of mnemonics has been with us since the ancient Greeks and people who understand its usefulness can’t be uncommon, especially not in such a prestigious institute of higher education.
What gives?
I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just that nobody has posted their mnemonic set on the Internet out of embarrassment? My mnemonics are pretty bad too, but hey, Cunningham’s Law — if you’re reading, feel free to add better ones in the comments, or to criticize my horribly unenlightened and stereotypical characterizations of your courses, to make this thing better. Or maybe it’s out of concern that nobody else will find it useful? I get that feeling but my streak compels me to ignore it now, as it has for the last dozen posts or so. Or maybe they just didn’t optimize for search engine findability, so I can’t find it? I hope this post fixes that.
Actually, I guess the most likely reason is that maybe most people don’t actually have all the course numbers memorized with perfect recall, only the handful of most common ones they and their friends are in, and it’s perfectly fine to ask for clarification when an unknown number comes up in conversation, so nobody ever feels like they need to bother with mnemonics for every single course. Feels sensible to me.
But anyway, I’m not most people.
The most comprehensive resource of courses and numbers, including
their history, appears to have once been at
http://alumweb.mit.edu/clubs/sandiego/contents_courses.shtml.
Many, many links point there. Unfortunately, it is dead and I cannot
find its new home, if it has one. Fortunately, there is an
archived version on archive.is;
on the other hand, I am not sure whether any updates have occurred since
it was archived. A more recent version with course populations from 2005
is
this
chart linked from the MIT Admissions blog post
Numbers
are names too.
Variance
Phone
tl;dr: anybody want to add me on Line or tell/remind me about other phone chat apps? betaveros as always.
Wow, talk about uninspired post titles.
I got a new phone today. Or, well, it’s second-hand, actually. I try to make electronics last a long time, but I think this was justified given the state of my last phone’s screen:
Besides, I’m going off to college and all. Anyway, the phone is pretty cool. It’s a slick shade of red, it came with a cover and everything, and it has one of those fancy 3x3-grid locks. How secure are those again?
Well, we could just find the answer on StackOverflow, but that’s boring.
Chi Banner
US$2,857
= within 15 cents of $20,000/7
= NT$88,661, by Google’s current
exchange rate
= 739 hours of Taiwan’s hourly minimum wage or 4.43 months of
Taiwan’s monthly minimum wage
= 317 hours of Massachusetts’s
minimum wage (7.94 weeks or 1.85 months assuming a 40-hour work
week)
= 1.2~1.7 weeks of
a
list of high tech internship salaries as
featured
on Slate
= 2,955 plates of Sushi Express
= 1,478 cheap boxed lunches (at
NT$60 each), which would last one person 1.35 years at 3 per day
=
1,122 Big
Macs, price in Taiwan, or 596 Big Macs, average price in U.S.
(January 2015)
Self vs. Other
My mom says I blog too much about myself. I am completely guilty of that and this post is mostly not an exception. Sorry.
It’s not that I wouldn’t like to write posts about others and for others. But I know more about myself so obviously there’s more I can write about myself. It’s kind of a habit, and it’s been a very personally helpful habit. I discover lots of things when I write introspectively. But I’m a very weird person and a lot of the insightful things I discover when doing this are things I doubt I can generalize to other people. I tried getting a lot of my friends to join HabitRPG when I discovered it, but it was nowhere as effective on them as it was on me.
What else could I blog about? What else do people blog about?
World-event-inspired topics?
Sheep
Nuclear II
(streak)
This is not any better than the first installment, but I need to post. And then, you know, do homework and presentations and stuff.
Dr. Carver had just managed to drill past Dr. Perkins’s cranium when she heard the door behind her creak open.
“Ha! You walked right into my trap!”
She turned around. Dr. Perkins was standing in the doorway.
She looked down. Yes, they were both Dr. Perkins, she’d know that pair of glasses and spiky hair anywhere.
She looked up. Well, the guy in the doorway was wearing a set of black robes outside his white lab coat, but other than that, they really looked completely identical.
“What?”