Just a short anecdote for the
streak today. Hmm, I guess this
developed beyond being just another filler post, which is good.
In addition to preparing my presentation, the other job I have to do
for the math competition I’m attending in a week or so (not as a
participant, okay?) is translating various guests’ speeches between
English and Chinese.
The speeches’ length and formulaicness really get on my nerves, but
then again my standards for speeches were skewed upward by Richard
Forster’s speeches during the
opening and
closing ceremony of IOI 2014,
but on the gripping hand I don’t think it’s that hard to at least
try not to be formulaic and I really can’t see any effort on
their part whatsoever. Off the top of my head, pretty much all the
speeches tend to go like this:
-
Welcome!
-
Math is great!
-
This competition is great!
-
The city hosting this competition is great!
-
The college hosting this competition is great!
-
You contestants are great!
-
Good luck!
Except each bullet point is a paragraph that lasts a minute.
(Ninja edit: Which is not to say they didn’t put any effort into
their speeches at all, but that much of the effort seem misguided to me.
I don’t see how anybody who has been in the audience for one of these
speeches can overlook the same flaws in their own. Unless it’s like, at
some point in the natural life cycle of the human brain, people
spontaneously start enjoying these safe and repetitive speech topics
instead of some earnest and maybe lighthearted advice and anecdotes and
jokes? Like how people somehow start enjoying spicy stuff, or the bitter
flavor of beer and wine, or writing teenage-angsty ranty posts
complaining to nobody in particular like this one? Tough questions.)
Anyway. My mom actually does most of the translation but I am the
grammar stickler post-processor and we work together on the hard parts.
The second hardest things to translate are idioms. The hardest things to
translate are quotes. It turns out that lots of people find translated
quotes to Chinese and it can be incredibly difficult to reconstruct
their English versions. Here is the quote that today’s story is about,
which we were tasked with providing the English translation (or
original) for and which the speech attributed to 克莱因 (trad.:
克萊因).
Nope, still no meaningful post today. Instead here is a pretty diagram of the A* search algorithm (A-star in English, for my search crawler overlords). At least, I hope it is; I spent more time fiddling with the pretty colors than making sure the algorithm I implemented was actually A*. It looks right, though? In the background, red component measures traversed distance from start, (inverted) green component measures difference between the traversed distance plus heuristic distance and the theoretically optimal heuristic distance from the start, blue component measures heuristic distance to goal.
Here are two screenshots of the Android 3x3 grid lock we dealt with in the phone post.
Part of the reason I don’t have a real post today and am instead writing filler for the streak is that I wanted to include this 3x3 lock in the programming presentation I’ve been indirectly complaining about in the last few posts, and I couldn’t find any nicely licensed screenshots to illustrate it, so I made these screenshots myself, and then I spent somewhat more than an hour researching copyright law and listening to a talk about it before posting them.
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.
It’s olympiad season. Taiwan placed 18th in the IMO rankings1. Next day there are news stories about how it’s our “third worst performance in history”, and commenters drawing casual arrows from changes in Taiwan’s standardized tests and curriculum to this result, and the Ministry of Education saying they’d review their procedures or something.
What.
Did you forget our performance last year? Do you think our olympiad training system is completely overhauled on an annual basis, or has even a tangential relationship with the overall education system?
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.
Okay, I think I’m figuring this out. When I make a filler post for the streak, it should be an unabashed filler post, so I can accumulate some of the blogging time I find each day to work on a serious post (and for doing the other important stuff I should be doing!) instead of wasting it right away.
Life. I’m programming something for Dad involving a parser using Jison, and one of the tasks involved stuffing a custom lexer into the parser.
= 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)
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?
Ok I give up I don’t have any material and don’t feel like preparing any because the influx of IMO problems, including the shortlist, is too fascinating. Instead, here is a joke quoted verbatim from TVTropes (CC-NC-SA).
An American anthropologist has been studying a tribe in Africa by living with them for a year. One day, the chief called him into the chief’s hut. The chief sighed. “Well, my friend, it seems that we must ask you to leave.
