I hate doing things under time pressure, but I have to admit I do a
lot more things when time pressure exists. One of the things is writing.
Another is posting the things I write. They aren’t very good, but
they’re better than writing that doesn’t exist.
It’s interesting that I can impose time pressure on myself by
declaring commitment devices by fiat and it works. Other people have
developed other methods of doing this — I recently discovered
The Most Dangerous
Writing App, which puts time pressure on you to type every five
seconds or it deletes everything you wrote. There are many other ways
it’s done.
Wow, this has been the longest silence on this blog in a long
time.
I can’t justify it with lack of time either. Interning at Dropbox
takes up all of my weekdays, but my weekends are much freer than I’m
used to. I carelessly let two weeks at home in Taiwan pass by without
doing much about blogging, and once again a lot of my few blog drafts
have drifted into the temporally awkward zone, being too far away from
the events they are about.
Neither is it for lack of things happening. At MIT, there was the
Senior
House turnaround and freshman moratorium. I can’t even begin to sum
up the discussion around this issue, but I think
the
best response I’ve read is this open letter. Then there’s the
official Senior House
response. But that’s enough links, since I imagine the chances that
this issue is relevant to you and you’d need this blog to link
you to them if you’re reading this are pretty low. (Then again, the
chances that you’re reading this are already pretty low. Although the
chances you are reading this right now is 100%.)
After a misstep on the fourth
day I managed to post one post every day, completing the rest of the
streak! This post is scheduled
to go out around the time my plane takes off.
I’m free!
I’d insert a Frozen gif here if I could find a good one,
but I don’t like any of the ones I found and besides, copyright is an
issue. So instead:
IMO2007.C6. In a mathematical competition some competitors are
friends. Friendship is always mutual. Call a group of competitors a
clique if each two of them are friends. (In particular, any group of
fewer than two competitiors is a clique.) The number of members of a
clique is called its size.
Given that, in this competition, the largest size of a clique is
even, prove that the competitors can be arranged into two rooms such
that the largest size of a clique contained in one room is the same as
the largest size of a clique contained in the other room.
Author: Vasily Astakhov, Russia
If you remember where I first posted this to break a combo, you have
an excellent memory and/or spend too much time stalking me. If you
remember the context under which I posted this to break a
combo, you have a better memory than I do.
Was my streak a success? On the bright side, I definitely generated
lots of posts, many of which were radical departures from my old
blogging habits:
Obligatory life update: I have graduated
[from]
high school.
But that’s not what this post is about. I
contemplated setting up a schedule
for my blogging three long years ago, and decided against it,
because I didn’t think writing was a high enough priority for me. Well,
I am setting up a schedule now: I am going to post something on
this blog every day until I have to leave the country (which is
happening once before college, so it’s not for as long as you think; but
I might decide to continue the schedule anyway after I get back. We’ll
see when the time comes.)
