The End of an Era

I suspect most of you aren't aware of this, but for the last 2-3 months, I have been fighting a battle with a crafty enemy. Actually he may not be crafty, but I'd rather not admit to extreme stupidity >_>

It was a close battle, with a lot of back and forth, and he always seemed to have the slightest upper hand. Nonetheless, I refused to retreat or surrender. Despite my best efforts though, I lost that battle today.

What am I talking about? My laptop, good sirs. Around winter break time, I caught a virus (I have no idea how) that started messing with and redirecting links on google searches. There was an easy enough workaround to this, but it irked me that I had this thing. With help from you guys (mostly Luke), I pulled together an assortment of anti-spyware/malware software and went after the bastard. Indeed, for a while, it looked like I had driven him out. Then one night, I found that I was wrong. As I was working, a series of error windows started to pop up as the virus tramped through my registry deleting critical files. I managed to turn the comp off and do a system restore, but I knew then that I was in for a nasty haul.

This sort of thing has been happening regularly for several weeks now. On Monday, though, without any warning, I lost everything in the Documents and Settings folder. Nothing crucial, but I was finally starting to get legitimately worried. I backed up everything (finished yesterday night) and was more or less content. Unfortunately, this morning, following a regular shutdown sequence, Windows fails to boot. To make matters worse, the virus had taken out both Safe Mode and System Restore. In short, I am completely shot.

It's kind of sad that I'm writing an entry on fighting a virus, but it's pretty valid. I've had the laptop since sophomore year of high school, and I value it a lot. I'm going to have to get a new one now, and it actually makes me kind of sad. Luckily, one thing won't be changing - my desktop background (yes, I saved it =P).

In any case, until this new machine shows up, my access is pretty much limited to computer labs here, so don't expect me to be online, and if you need to reach me, call.

~jnub

Subject: Wow... okay, I wasn't sure if I was ever going to tell anyone about this,

but it's late and I'm sleep deprived so i guess I'll just write it now and
regret it in the morning

First of all, - just for some background: My mom died right when I was born,
(she was actually really, really hot- but this isn't about her. I guess that's
messed up to say, but whatever.) I actually grew up with my dad's family,
because my dad has all sorts of emotional issues and he bailed before I was
born. So you can see, my childhood was really kind of messed up.

Anyways, growing up I feel like there was always a lot of distance between me
and my sister. When I was about 17 or 18 I first noticed that my sister was a
hottie.

I don't want to go into to many details about it, but basically what happened is
that I accidentally found a video that she made of herself. I knew she didn't
make it for me- but I thought she was so beautiful that I watched it twice.
(probably would have watched it a hell of a lot more, except that like right
around the time I found the video, all this crazy :!: went down and I had to
leave home. (My dad's family who I was staying with got in bad trouble with the
law. I never talk about it).

Sooo... I was totally lusting after my sister at that point. She was also having
bad trouble with the law. She was actually in custody when I left home.

My friend and I went to go pick her up. When I saw her that day, after seeing
the video, I have to be honest, I just wanted to frak her brains out. Looking
back on it now, it's pretty messed up- but I think she had feelings for me too.
She actually kissed me right after we came to get her... and it wasn't a
sisterly kiss, you know? I mean, it wasn't like ridiculously sexual or
anything, but it definitely wasn't sisterly.

After we left, we all went to crash with my Sister's friends. On the trip there,
my friend sort of implied that he wanted to get with my Sister, and I got a
little jealous. He's a good looking guy- and even though she was my sister- I
just felt like he was competition. Not much else happened between us for a
while except some maybe-sexy hugging.

Pretty much everyone in my life at that point was wanted by the government, so
we all moved around a lot. I'm not saying that I'm proud of it or anything, but
it was kind of an awesome time.

My friend and my sister never hooked up I don't think- but I thought there was
some serious sexual tension going on between them. It was around that time that
I got really badly hurt in an accident. It was messed up. I almost died. But
when I was in recovery my sister came to see me, and out of the clear blue sky
she started gives me this awesome, slow, passionate kiss on the lips.

Sadly (although, I guess for the best) nothing ever came of it. We spent some
time apart... and I started to get really religious, so I tried not to think of
her that way. It was actually going well for a long time- like I was totally
over her. But I have to say, like a year or so after all that stuff went down,
we were out sailing (not like a date or anything romantic like that), and she
was wearing like the hottest bikini I've ever seen and it brought back all the
old feelings. Sigh.

A little while later she actually wound up with my friend from before (the
sexual tension guy). I can't say I was surprised.

But even after she was shacking up with my friend, there was one time we were at
a party... my friend was inside, and my sister and I were outside alone. It was
a really intimate moment. I think something might have happened, except that I
killed the mood when I told her that Darth Vader was our father and that I had
to go face him.

Opportunities

I'll preface this by apologizing to everyone who believed in me. I have betrayed your trust in the worst way possible: by selling my loyalty to the enemy. Or so it appears anyway. I hope to convince you someday that I am still pure, but that is a discussion for another day.

Some of you know exactly what I'm talking about; others not so much. To the former, know that I trusted you enough to reveal the dark patch in my soul. To the latter, know that I valued your respect and friendship so highly that I was hesitant to tell you of my treachery.

Here it is then: I am currently enrolled in a class entitled, "The Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans". There are a number of alleviating notes to this point, but as I said, that's for another day. For now, go ahead and bash me. In fact, if you don't, I promise I will bash you for being a business lover.

Now, to the actual post:

At the end of the lecture today, the speaker invited students in the audience to give an elevator pitch, either for a team to join their project or for funding from venture capitalists. One guy gets up and introduces himself as Nico from Harvard. The audience lets out a groan. Then Nico starts talking:

"Most of you watch TED Talks, right? Well, there was recently this one talk by _______ where he's discussing this assignment given to kindergarten students in the UK. The kids were asked to draw what they wanted to be when they grew up. Most of the kids made recognizable pictures of firemen, nurses, etc, but one girl was drawing feverishly in a little corner in the back of the room. The teacher asked her what she was trying to draw, and she responded, "God". The teacher stumbled and then responded, "But nobody knows what God looks like". The girl responded, "They will in a moment."

Just another example of the faith that kids have in their own ability. And they do, definitely. There's kids all over the country interested in and passionate about different things, and they have no way to funnel this passion. Some of them are lucky enough to have great parents, but parents can only offer support, not physical resources. And despite all of the potential these kids have, for one reason or another most of them lose their ambitions as life goes on.

I was one of these kids. I grew up in inner city Detroit, and I worked hard as a kid. I had dreams like all of them, but somewhere along the line things didn't go the way I planned. I dropped out of college after my freshman year and found myself jobless in San Francisco. I had no idea then what I wanted to do with my life, and I spent the next 7 years of my life selling books door to door while I tried to figure it out. I finally got it: I enrolled as a student at Columbia University to pursue an economics degree. While at Columbia, I served as President of student activities (something like that) for two years, and I had a experience similar to what these two VCs have been describing. I met with so many college students hoping to organize events and run programs that they neither had the money or the manpower to execute.

Something clicked. Shortage of manpower? But there are all these interested high school kids who can help! All we need is to give them the chance. What I'd like to do is set up a program to link a kid in Florida, interested in Global Warming, with a kid in Alaska, interested in Clean Tech, to a kid in West Virginia interested in eco-friendly coal tech, and link all of them to, say, the Environment and Energy Initiatives at Harvard.

A survey was recently given to pre-college students asking if they believed that there was a Bill Gates in their generation. More than 80% answered that they did. 62% answered that they actually knew this person, and 25% answered that they were this person. These kids are out there, waiting to make a difference and lead us forward. Let's give them the chance to do it."

I'm just transcribing from memory, and he sounded much better in person, but in any case, it was a very good pitch. I was sitting there the whole time listening to him, agreeing with everything he said, but at the end I was slightly lost. I mean, sure, it'd be great to pair all these kids up with Harvard, but aren't there universities with research and whatnot near their homes, at least comparatively? I mean, there are opportunities, if people are just willing to ask, right? What exactly is he trying to set up.

The answer is, of course, a point that was reiterated so often during the last 4 years of my life that it made me nauseous by the end of it. And yet, looking back, I can't see how it could have been overemphasized, it's so humongous. It's TJ. Partly the classes, even the less than stellar ones, partly the students, and partly just the place. How many college professors would honestly just hire high school students who show up at their office asking for a chance to do research. Don't get me wrong, it's possible, and there are definitely people who do it. But those kids have to work a lot harder to prove themselves. TJ, both by reputation and by actual education, gave us this unerring ability to just get research from the nearby universities.

It's not just that of course. Through math team and the satellites, we picked up so much stuff we just take for granted. Of course, there's a lot more, and the absolute attitude is rather useless, but it's interesting to think about once in a while. And the stuff I learned shows up so often, despite explicitly being taught as "contest math". It's helped a ton with research, from random generating functions manipulations on Boltzmann Distribution Functions to predicting folding of large DNA networks by analyzing the adjacency matrix of interactions between basepairs.

I guess all I'm trying to say is that I can't even begin to express how much I loved everything about high school. Not in a depressing, I wish I were still there kind of way. I don't like getting emotional, so I take a great deal of effort to remain emotionally passive. There are great days to come, but it's worthwhile to keep the past in mind.

Anyway, you guys made TJ what it was for me, and continue to make it so. I just wanted to thank you for that.

~jnub

I feel like I'm approaching this stupidly, so if you have any ideas, I would be grateful. Hints that trivialize the problem are not welcome.

The integers 1 to n listed in order. A swap is a switching of any two elements in the list. Prove that any sequence of swaps that takes the original list to itself contains an even number of swaps.

"Happiness is a choice."

Splash!

So in all fairness, I really don't have a right to post on this. Initially I intended to be really involved, but things turned out a little differently than expected. So while this covers my experience in some detail, the real post on Splash belongs to Jessica. I'd suggest you pester her to actually make this post (especially given that she hasn't posted in so long I think we've all stopped yelling at her for it).

The Event

A brief description of Splash before I begin: Splash is a two day program run by the Educational Studies Program (ESP) here. During Splash, individuals (mostly college students at MIT, though all three of those descriptors (college, student, MIT) are violated every year) sign up to teach classes for middle and high school students. This would be fairly fun as described, but the kicker is: teachers can register any class they want. Anything at all.

So obviously we end up with a lot of "interesting" classes. I actually have no idea if we even have a form of quality control (I'm pretty sure we don't, since at no point did anyone check in with me or my coteacher to review what we were gonna do). Nonetheless, the general atmosphere of the event is pretty exciting, both for teachers and students. For a list of the classes, go to http://esp.mit.edu/learn/Splash/2009/catalog/.

Just like with HMNT, there was a huge preparation phase. Unlike with HMNT, I wasn't involved with it. I'll get to why later, but for now I'll just talk briefly about my class and my admin-y job (which was horribly executed >_>).

Back up a few weeks, maybe a few months, I forget. It was 11:30 PM, 30 minutes before the deadline to register a Splash class. I have some ideas floating around, but I haven't really gotten my thoughts together and come up with a solid class plan. I walk into my neighbor's room to tell him to register a class before the deadline (yes, I recognize the hypocrisy). We sit there for a while discussing class ideas, and as the registration deadline nears, we make a decision: we're going to team-teach a class on Bridge.

Ok, go ahead. Laugh. No, I don't know conventions to save my life, and neither did he, but hey, it would be fun, and we needed to learn at some point anyway. So we registered the class, I tucked my other ideas away for another year, and we went back to psetting.

Fast forward to yesterday night. Realizing that we had done absolutely no preparation (including learning conventions) for our class, we decided to get to work. I got back from doing my admin job for Splash at 10:30, and we set out to find and buy decks of cards. It was a difficult search, but eventually we returned with four decks. We sat down and, despite many distractions, we finally pulled together a basic lesson plan by 2 AM. We ended up not learning conventions, and so we only included the basic opening and first response conventions. Two hours later, I went to sleep, slightly pumped for Splash the next day.

And finally we're here. The day of Splash. I wake up at 11, which is fairly characteristic of me on all days absent a roommate telling me to go to class. I realize my class is in an hour and panickedly run to shower. We leave for teacher check in at 11:40 and then go to our classroom. Surprisingly, the class went pretty well. The kids seemed cool, we pretended we knew what we were talking about, and they played some bridge. I won't lie, watching them play was a pretty big morale booster for me. Then the class ended and, minus the free meals and the admin work that I'll describe in a moment, that was Splash for me.

My admin job was to organize food for the kids coming here to take classes. Turns out I procrastinate. Because of this, this fairly simple task caused a decent bit of stress to ESP. It worked out in the end (or probably will, we'll wait to see how lunch tomorrow goes), but I'm not proud of how I handled it. I ended up buying Dominos Pizza for lunch both days and Qdoba for dinner today. I can now say that I have spent several thousands of dollar on food in college.

Edit: One day, we had to go to a general teacher training session (they just told us about logistics pretty much). On this day, Ved woke me up (he thought I might be doing CPC). There, credit awarded =P.

Thoughts

Splash was fun. I enjoyed my class, and overall the event is pretty cool, but to be honest, my participation was not very high. So why did I choose to post on Splash? Because it's a really cool idea, and one that I would be very sad to see die. So why didn't I participate? Well, frankly, because admin work is not what I joined for. I joined because I like teaching, and I like the idea of everyone teaching. But admin work is not related to teaching at all. Now, admin work is necessary obviously, and I certainly helped out as much as I could for HMNT. I feel that HMNT's prep work was more structured and well defined, but at some level I suspect that I might just have been more invested in personally seeing HMNT come through. Either way, in the future I'm gonna focus more on teaching more and better classes.

Final Notes

ESP runs a lot of programs like Splash, and in my opinion this kind of a service is pretty valuable for the local community. Because of this, ESP has been spreading to other schools. In particular, UChicago, Duke, and Stanford have functioning ESPs, and Harvard is currently trying to set one up. If you go to one of these schools, you should look into ESP, if not to help out, then to teach. Even if you don't go to a school with ESP already set up, get a group of kids together who are interested in running something like this and let me know. There's a company called Learning Unlimited, founded by ESP alums, that provides initial funds and supplies (most notably websites) for new ESPs.

Here's to another long posting draught!

~jnub

HMNT

This space reserved for a post on hmnt, from the activities fair in august to the contest yesterday. It's worthwhile to note that in some sense, this is an anniversary, since this blog opened with a post on HMMT last year. Time passes quickly on long and short scales. In other news, goddamn orgo test tomm >_>

_______________________________________________________________________

Twas a junking August day, in the year 2009. All the freshmen were flooding the gates of the athletic center on their way to the activities fair. I got in and did the most obvious thing: got a free bag and started loading it with the freebies from all the clubs (anecdotally, most of the freebies I still have hidden in various nooks and crannies in my room). However, I was also aware of which clubs I would definitely take up, which I would definitely avoid (top of this list, anyone? =P), and which ones I might consider as the year went by. And so it happened that Jessica and I reached the non-descript booth next to the Undergraduate Math Association table. The booth was manned by Jacob and other people, and was devoted, as you will undoubtedly be shocked to hear, to promoting HMMT and getting people on the mailing list. In the course of the conversation with Jacob, he asked, "Would you guys be interested in organizing the problem writing for HMNT" or something along those lines.

Perhaps HMNT needs a brief introduction. HMNT, or the Harvard-MIT November Tournament, is HMMT for local Boston school kids. These kids have had little to no experience with math contests, and so this sets the dynamic of HMNT apart from HMMT in a couple of significant ways.

In any case, caught up in the euphoria of being silly frosh and our gradeless state of Pass/No Record, we said that sure, we could do that. Then we moved on through the rest of the fair and went back to Baker.

A couple of days later, we get a somewhat official looking email from Jacob letting us know what exactly we had tentatively accepted. Apparently we were to be the "Problem Czars" for HMNT, and it was our job to actually get the contests written and populated with appropriate problems. Now, being somewhat lazy from second sem senior year and being fully aware of how long it takes to write problems (or get them written), I was wary of continuing, but Jessica insisted that we continue, and so we accepted the position.

Fast forward several weeks of problem sessions. Due to Jacob and Shaunak's checking up on us, we had made sure to keep good track of the problems we had been received from these sessions that could potentially be used for HMNT. Coming into mid-October, we announced that we had enough problems to put together the rounds. This was good, since if we had waited any later, apparently things would have been not so great. We spend a stressful weekend texing up problems, editing mistakes we notice, and putting together what we think is an acceptable contest.

We release the four rounds for proofreading, and within two days we get a response: the problems suck, no joke. Not all of them, sure, but there are way too many problems that are either too hard or too easy, most of them aren't "interesting" (at this point, we really had no idea what that meant), and pretty much all the ones that work need to be revised in one way or another. This was fairly disappointing, though I will admit I had suspected that our problems were not so great >_>. Thus began the massive overhaul phase of this event. Jacob and Shaunak initially took over writing the Guts Round, leaving us the General, Theme, and Team Rounds. However, due to our general inability to recognize/write good problems fast enough, we were eventually left with full responsibility only for the Team Round. We finished this and helped out as much as we could with the other rounds. This whole spectacle took us around 3 weeks of hardcore work and, for me at least, staying up till 4:30 every morning.

Finally, everything is written and ready. We spend the last few days before the contest printing everything, collating stuff, and making sure that everything is all set up. Finally, it's the night before the contest. We've just wrapped up everything, and I'm running over to Baker at 10:30 so I can meet up with friends to watch Star Wars Ep 6. We finish this at around 1 in the morning, and I get to sleep.

The day of the contest arrives. I wake at 4, get ready, and am at Random at 5. We spend the next two or three hours moving random boxes with contests, free stuff, and oh so many bags of goddamn juice from Random to Lobbies 10 and 13, i.e. the place where you register and the place where you eat during HMMT respectively. After this, I'm told to go print out as many copies of guts solutions as I can. This is intermittent task and throughout the day I successfully retrieve maybe 100 copies total. At 9 I go to one of the two test rooms to proctor the General and Theme rounds. I read the little "Welcome to MIT...." speech and, despite my horrible timing skills, we manage to administer these tests alright. Then that's over, I watch the kids scramble to find their proctors for the team round, and then I head back out to go do more guts printing. At some point, Lily calls me and I go over to Stata to help with lunch. I eat lunch, do more printing, and then head over to the Guts Round. Despite not knowing the teams, this was decently fun. I decided to run rapidly up and down the aisles holding an answer sheet (sometimes after actually doing the problems) so as to scare the teams into thinking that some other team was doing absurdly well =P. Unfortunately, Jacob stopped giving me answer sheets after a while. The tournament wrapped up, and as all the kids left, I stood outside the guts auditorium and sold hmmt shirts (we almost sold out!). Then, following cleanup, we had a meeting and talked for a while, and then we all went back to our dorms. By this point it's around 10, so I get back to my room, talk to my neighbor and roommate for a while, plop down on the couch, and I'm out for the night.

Not quite the HMMT I remember, but as always, some things change and some things don't.

~jnub