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 Fortunately, there is an archived version on archive.is; on the other hand, I am not sure whether any updates have occurred since it was archived.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.
(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?”
All through high school I had really high standards for myself. Not the grades, mind you (I admit, humblebrag, my grades were always uncomfortably high, probably as an expected but still sad byproduct of this process (yes, I’m actually complaining about grades being too high. I don’t want my report card to have lots of Bs or Cs, but I really didn’t need to pour enough resources into schoolwork that I graduated as valedictorian, when there were so many other personally and socially meaningful things I could be dedicating effort into creating — but that’s a subject for another post (humblebrags all the way down. Somebody get some internet pitchforks and poke some sense into me))), but simply how I managed my time for doing homework.
In my opinion: not very well. I always spent too much time surfing the internet and doing things less urgent than homework, then ended up sleeping at midnight or one o’clock or whenever often to finish what I should have done earlier.
And yet, compared to many of my friends (definitely not all, though), that’s not late at all and the amount of buffer time I had between finishing work and having it due was positively luxurious. But then, I suppose, I didn’t have the same amount of math homework. But to counter my excuse, I had additional responsibilities such as practicing olympiad problems and preparing weekend presentations and translating the school newsletter. So I don’t actually know if my workload was significantly lighter than average or not, ergo I don’t know whether my time management skills were significantly better than average or not. It seriously doesn’t feel like they would be.
And allegedly, even when I’m procrastinating, it’s more productive than my friends’ procrastination, maybe even Paul Graham’s good type of procrastination. Often when I gripe about how much my former self procrastinated they will ask me what I’ve been doing and, after hearing the answer, tell me this. What have I done to put off homework? Oh, I did some olympiad math problems, committed to my GitHub projects, read a bunch of programming blogs, organized my old chemistry notes from two years ago, and surfed the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Yeah. Total waste of time. Meanwhile certain friends surf 9GAG whenever they get the chance. (Which is not to say that I don’t procrastinate in obviously unproductive ways sometimes — I surf reddit, YouTube, and TVTropes of course. Sometimes I even just read my own blog or dig through old folders in my computer. I’m weird. But anyway.)
我本來還想把這一篇用英文跟中文各打一次來實際比較看看，但這已經被困在草稿匣夠久了。一直做重複、吹毛求疵、沒有效率的修改本來就是我寫心情文時的弊病，如果再要求修改時要保持兩種語言版本的同步的話，大概寫到天荒地老都寫不完。（如果讀者沒有讀過我最近亂發的文章，故事都是這樣的：我覺得我在草稿匣累積了太多寫一半的文章，所以在畢業後，我在六月十一號決定從那天開始每天發文，直到我出國，目的是強迫自己把那些草稿寫完，中間還亂發很多其他我本來大概不會寫下來的東西。其實還滿有成就感的。另外，如果你的中文沒有很爛的話，如果你在任何地方認為我寫的中文不流暢或是可以寫得更好，請毫不留情的留言批評。這也是一件我發現我在寫中文方面很缺乏的經驗，我會很感謝。當然，根據以往經驗，懇求讀者留言沒什麼機會成功。）
If you came to this blog or this post hoping to read English, sorry not sorry. It’s only fair, really, given how many people on Facebook can’t read the massive English textwall posts I’ve spammed them with for so long.
常常有人訝異我的英文這麼好。有時候這些人還會問我怎麼學的－－碰到這種問題我都不知道要怎麼回答。喔，很簡單啊，只要選擇在一個主要說英文的國家出生，然後跟一群從國外回來的同學一起讀有80%的課是用英文上的學校連續讀十二年就好了。
偶爾也有人知道我是雙語部的或在不同的情況下認識我，反而會覺得我的中文比他們預期的好，例如我的駕訓班教練。其實我在雙語部還是上了十二年的國文課，進度理論上跟其他學校一樣（「理論上」三個字要強調），我也跟身旁很多親戚朋友用中文溝通了更久。比奧林匹亞競賽的經驗應該也讓我認識的上普通國語教學學校的學生，比其他雙語部同學認識的多。所以這應該也不奇怪吧。
但是。其實我對這兩個語言的精熟度其實還是差很多。日常對話沒問題，不過我對英文細枝末節的部分瞭解的比中文多太多太多了。家裡有不止一本「常見英語錯誤」類的書，我小時候會當小說讀－－我是一個很奇怪的人。在學校課程中，我編輯自己或他人的英文文章是一天到晚的事情，什麼奇怪的句子跟構造都碰過、想過、修理過。還有些時候，我會很自然的寫出一個英文單字，然後發現我不知道為什麼自己會知道這個單字的意思，但就是有一種感覺告訴我，對，subsist的意思就是「存活於只有最基本的需求被滿足的情況」。跟中文比較：有時候，直覺也會告訴我有某一個成語是可以用的，但我只能清楚想到這個成語的兩、三個字。聽起來很「對」，不過我就是想不到第四個字是什麼，或是怕前三個字換成錯別字，再加上懷疑整個成語意思根本不是我模糊腦袋裡現在浮現的，因為我認得這些字字面上的意思，但無法說服自己為什麼它們合在一起可以解釋成這種意思，最後只好放棄，用國小白話文的措詞就好了。
「總覺得，我在用任何偏離國小程度的白話文的詞彙的時候都是假裝的。」
我在舊一點的草稿寫出了這個句子，不過那一串「的」字讓我覺得怪怪的，現在想想，沒有人跟我討論過寫出這種或其他奇怪的句子時應該怎麼辦。哪一些「的」可以省略？有辦法把句子重寫（recast）避開嗎？還是不管它，我覺得它聽起來很奇怪純粹是錯覺，多讀一點中文就會發現根本沒什麼大不了的？
使用兩種語言的方法也差很多。看看這個部落格就知道了。我相信我在學校雙語部外的大部分台灣朋友不會試著去理解我關於自己長篇大論的英文作文，但長篇大論的文章還是我最認真表達自己的地方。反觀我的中文短文，都通常是那種搞笑、釣讚、裝弱的文。（不，我真的很弱。）我不時會發現自己在網上逛到一個陌生人的心情文，看得津津有味。我們之間的關係頂多是朋友的朋友的朋友，我只知道我跟他應該都喜歡數學這個共同點罷了，但因為語言，我在那些瞬間覺得自己瞭解他勝於瞭解幾乎所有在我身邊講中文的朋友。我自己怎麼看這件事都覺得不合理，有點慚愧。
我回去讀了我第一次寫的關於雙語的文章，可能有一點過火：後來證實，在我的朋友中似乎真的有會純粹為了抒發感情而寫七言律詩的人。而且，我講中文的朋友圈裡，文學類佔的比例本來就應該比他們在整個社會裡佔的比例少很多。在學校跟在生活裡，吸收英文多於中文（而且數學多於英文）是我做的選擇，只是我自己不知道選擇的中介點好不好罷了。是否，我花在跟講中文的親戚朋友互動的力氣不夠？
