Fast forward to just a few days ago, when some guy finds this problem and links to it on his blog. He says he thinks it’s a neat problem, but is puzzled because i say the answer is “obviously” something incorrect. I put the “obvious” line in there as a joke, because it was a hard problem. The day after this guy linked to my post, I switched servers, which invalidated the link he put up to my blog. I finally got this all figured out, and replaced the entry with a note that I did the problem wrong and posted a link to a correct solution.

The neat part of all this is that my blog is apparently the first result google comes up with when you search for “cool physics problem.”

I tried working out the problem just now, and realized I’ve forgotten a lot of the stuff I learned in E&M. I thought the class was kind of neat, but it really wasn’t my bag. It reminds me, yet again, why I love comptuer science so much more than physics. I can jump right in to work I left off several years ago when it comes to computer science theory, but I’ll be damned if I can do a physics problem I would have known how to solve just over a year ago. It seems to me that comptuer science is just so much easier than physics, and that’s why I like it more.

Luckily, Anneliese told me I should just email the departments I applied to and explain the situation; I can’t believe I didn’t think of that on my own. It appears to have been affective. Hopefully, I’ll be OK.

All I really want to do is play my new guitar. I was going to take lessons at school, but it’d cost like $500. No thanks.

I’m sick right now, and that’s no fun. When I try to get some sleep, my nasal drip just gets terrible, and all I dream about is this project I’m doing at work right now. It is actually pretty cool but I can’t talk about it because it has to do with software security >_>

I plan to have a relaxing evening tonight, but I always ‘plan’ that and it never happens. Oh, the perils of an overactive social life.

Today, Rebecca and I went on the paddleboats at Sharon Woods. She asked me ‘if you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be?’ i felt kind of trite, but i was fairly certain that the answer was right there on that paddleboat. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to go see other places, and it doesn’t mean i want to always be there, but i was happy as we sat out in the sun on the lake. It’s good to realize that and snag those moments of happiness instead of spending my time thinking about the future, or about math, or about whatever other useless crap I use to occupy my mind most of the time.

Then i remembered that there were a bunch of high school kinds on campus, and that whoever ran that group usually had them doing some group activity around 10 or so, probably to get them all tired out so that they’d sleep instead of running off and braiding each other’s hair or whatever it is high school kids are doing these days. Thanks a lot, guys.

Reading the news just makes me angry. Free Chipotle pretty every day, though, is a good thing.

Writing super slick python code is just awesome. I’d been doing theory all this summer so far, and working on some actualy coding lately has been wonderful. I found awesome graph theory and mathematical plotting tools for python, which make me want to study graph theory just so I can use the libraries. My python skills have inreased significantly ever since I discovered list comprehensions and how to use them. Them are so georgeous. Last fall I worked on code to simulate random walks on the surface of a sphere, and I used python scripts to generate large numbers of random experiments, then to analyze all the data. I did something simliar today, and I don’t know why but it find it supremely enjoyable to generate large amounts of data, then sift through the data looking for patterns.

Peter coded up a ‘pressure’ algorithm that Kevin and I came up with; I thought of requests for bandwidth as fluids trying to fit into buckets, and modeled some kind of weird potential-energy type hueristic that would select the fluid under the ‘most pressure’ to satisfy. We had no idea how to prove the optimality of the algorithm, and after some thought we found ways to concoct devious instances to make it perform arbitrarily poorly, but the analysis says it works quite well in randomly generated instances.

Work is moving along quickly because I get to (well at least untill yesterday; i might be done with coding … ) spend the day writing code to solve problems. I have tommorrow off to visit my sister and UCI, and then after that there’s just a week of work left to be done. It’ll be weird to leave this place behind, because it has been my life for the past 9 weeks. I have spent pretty much every day with the guys I’ve been working with, and it will be weird to leave knowing I will probably never see some of them again. I’ve gotten pretty close with a guy named Kevin, who comes from missouri and shares a lot in common with several of my friends; he tells me I bear an uncanny resemblance to his room mate. I wonder if we’ll see each other again.

Speaking of people whom I will never see again, I had a ’summer romance’ in a rather odd sense. There was a group of students here from Puerto Rico, doing research on an engineering project. They were part of this exchange program; some Harvey Mudd kids went to Puerto rico for a couple weeks, and then the Puerto rican kids came here for a couple of weeks. They were staying in our dorm, and Jerrah’s friend heather was part of that research group, so I ran into them a decent amount. One of them would sit next to me while i played poker, and I would show her my hand and ask for advice. Every time I did, this she would say “I don’t know how to play” and look slightly worried/confused, which I found very amusing, so I kept doing it. Whenever I won a hand, I would thank her for her advice, and whenever i lost a hand I would complain to her; she seemed to think this was funny, I guess, because she kept sitting next to me while I played.

They invited me to go clubbing with them the last night before they left, and I figured I’d go along because I’d never been to a club before. Here is a picture of us. On the right is Claudia, a UC biomedical engineering major who also happens to be in California. Weird how I keep running into those kids… Me and the girl who sat next to me while i played poker, Aisha, hung out the whole evening and got along really well. We spent the next night together talking and hanging out; it was hard to spend time with someone that I knew was going to leave and I’d never see again, but it was worth it. She left at 4am saturday morning, and I felt pretty crummy. I went to bed and was awakened at 6 the next morning to find out that their flight didn’t leave and they needed someone to go pick them up at LAX. I drove down there, very tired, and picked them up. I had one last day to spend with Aisha, and I knew it was going to be difficult to say goodbye. We went to the park and talked some more, and then we had to go back and get her stuff ready to leave again. There are some things that you can ‘know’ but not know at the same time. I ‘knew’ she was going to leave again, but i didn’t really ‘know’ it untill that ‘again’ was 5 minutes from right now. It was tough. But that’s life. Even the painful things are wonderful if you have the right attitude, i think.

Next saturday, I’m driving up to San Francisco with my dad, who needs to be there on buisness, and while there I plan to visit standford and hang out with my friend Chris Wanstrath. After that, I head out for the trip home; first stop is in Salt Lake City, Utah. That has special significance for me. The only time I have been there was in January of this year, and that was about the breaking point of my relationship with Megan. I wanted to do something while I was there, but I knew that I couldn’t. At the time, it seemed like a far-off impossible wish; a desire on par with wanting to fly a unicorn through space or converse with someone long dead; a desire for something glorious and wonderful that I could never have. Now, things in my life are very different than they were, and that desire is entirely realistic. I will go to salt lake city, and do what it was that I wanted to do so badly on January 9th, 2006. Nothing lifts my spirits like knowing that I am about to fulfill what once seemed an impossible dream.

I get home on August 16th. I will probably just drop my stuff off at the house I’m moving into, since there’s no point in loading it and unloading it twice. I’ll have that evening and the day of the 17th at home, and I’ve already made plans for both days. On the 18th I’m leaving for a whitewater rafting trip in West Virginia, and then I have a week to prepare for school to start. This summer has been great. It is winding down now, and the school year is in sight. The last time I looked forward to the start of the school year with as much anticipation as I do now was the summer before my senior year of school. I think it will be a good year, and after this year comes grad school somewhere far away from cincinnati. Lately I have entertained thoughts of going to Grad School outside the U.S.

This time last year, I dreaded the start of school and the future life that I was sure awaited me. Now I eagerly await them both. I feel like i woke up from a terrible dream and the realization that it was all just a dream has hit me now; nothing can bring me down for any sustained period of time. Before this year, I had no future to look forward to; now it shines brialliantly at me.

The research I am doing is on optical networking problems. It’s very theory intensive, which means that there’s a good probablity I will not write a line of code this summer. I’m not sure I’m too happy about that, which is why I’m hoping maybe I could take the research in a different direction. We haven’t actually decided ‘what we will be doing’ for this summer yet; so far, we have been reading papers on different theories that were proven in optical networking. A typical paper proposes a problem, and then shows that the problem is ‘NP Complete’ which means that it takes a computer a long time to solve. Next week, we’ll be scouring the recent literature about networking to try and find problems that are interesting for us to work on. Most likely, we’ll get a paper out of our work this summer, and hopefully we’ll get published.

The people here are cool. I have been doing my best to make friends, and it has proceeded very well. There’s a decent amount of socialization offered by the school, and I’ve been doing my best to try and make friends outside the program so I can widen the range of potential friendships as much as possible.

I am living out of my parents’ house for the first time ever. I feel like I’m finnally getting to experience what ‘campus life’ is all about, and I have to say that I love it. I am buying my own groceries for the first time ever (instead of just buying for the whole family) and I even purchased my own cup and bowl. I thought about getting some silverware, but for now I’ve just been using a single plastic spoon that I took from the cafeteria. Maybe I’ll get a set or something.

I am happy at Mudd. I think this will be a good summer and I’m enjoying meeting new people. All the same, I will be happy to come home and see my friends in Cincinnati again.

Goodbye, Jacob. You’re probably my closest friend at Xavier. When I first saw you and Kyle, I figured you both for idiots and couldn’t figure out why you were in my math and physics courses. Once I realized you were in CS as well, I realized I’d made a mistake. I enjoyed having lunch with you at after DiffEQ in spring 2004, talking philosophy and just hanging out. In some senses we are very different, but I think we have similar minds in a lot of respects. You’ve been a good friend to me, especially when I needed one and I appreciate that. It seems very likely that we’ll keep in contact, but if we don’t for whatever reason, thanks.

Goodbye, Kyle. I have fond memories of you coming over to eat my mom’s chicken and work on the compiler with me. I remember setting in your car outside the root beer stand, waiting for my friends to show up. You have always enjoyed giving me a hard time, which I appreciate. Thanks for continually trying to get me to be involved with the College Republicans; I think if I was then the way I am now, I would have taken you up on it. Good luck at 5/3. I’m sure you’ll go far.

Goodbye, Dan. We talked politics a couple of times in the physics lounge, and you gave me some good advice freshman year. I don’t remember what it was about or anything, but I remember it being good. When I broke up with Megan and needed friends to hang out with, you were there for me. That night me, You, Rich, and Jessica spent playing euchre and drinking was exactly what I needed. Thanks for checking to see if I had anything to do most weekends. I hope you enjoy Purdue.

Goodbye, Sharon. You are a good friend and (as I’ve already said), I consider you to be quite wise. I can’t put a finger on why that is, but I value your advice. I hope Rice works out well for you.

Ryan, I’m not going to bother saying goodbye because we’ll be living together next year. Thanks, though, for being a friend when I needed one.

Clayton, we didn’t hang out a lot and I regret that. I had fun with you in high school and regret to think we could have had a lot more fun in college had I not been living my life just totally wrong the first 2.5 years of college. If you go to the stanford area with Dave, I’ll definately consider following you guys there.

Goodbye fellas, I’ll miss you.

I dig it.

My dream had something to do with me and some other physics majors wearing big hats to some ballet performance. I don’t remember whose ballet performance it was supposed to be but I’m pretty sure it’s connected to one of two girls I know who are or were involved with ballet. In any case, when I woke up I had the best idea – we should get some physics majors to go to a baseball game with maxwell’s laws (they call them Maxwell’s laws even though all he did was fix the last one… lucky bastard…) painted on their chests. At some time, perhaps maybe two innings in, we’d all take off our shirts and start cheering like crazy. The cameras would look at us and everyone would be like ‘what the heck do those guys have on their chests?’ I thought maybe we’d get on sports center or something. The people I shared this idea with seemed to like it. Maybe we’ll have to settle for a xavier basketball game instead of a red’s game, but still I think that’d be really cool. I want to be ?.

We have an ‘easter break’ for a couple of days, and I organized a group of physics/math/cs students to go on a short hiking trip to Caesar’s Creek park. It should be a fun time. I like organizing little groups like that. It’s fun to plan an activity and watch it come together, and then afterwards you have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve accomplished something that made serveral people happy.

I’ve been doing more of this Abstract Algebra on my own, and I really love it. Right now I’m in the process of working out a proof of LaGrange’s theorem. The cool thing about working out the proofs on your own (the concept was thought up, in much more detail, by this guy named R. L. Moore) is that in the process of trying to figure out how to prove this thing that you’re given, you discover all kinds of other things along the way. I understand what these “group” things are on a level much deeper than I would if I had just copied the proof out of the book and read it untill I understood it. In working on this latest proof I went and looked over a previous theorem that I thought might give me a little insight. I learned this theorem before I started using the “Moore Method” on Anneliese’s advice, and when trying to go over it, I realized that I didn’t understand it nearly as well as I thought I had. I realize now that when you learn things, you can “know” an idea and be able to recite it, without understanding it at all. Unfortunately, our education system seems to prize knowledge much more than understanding.

I’ve known for a while I was going to lose my job. The IT department at AtriCure, a company with 200 employees, consists of one guy working full time, and me, a college student who can put in maybe 16-20 hours a week. They have needed to hire more people for about 8 months now, and back in March the higher-ups finally realized that was the case and decided that they’d fire me, the co-op, and hire someone full time. I was told that when this new guy started, I’d train him and then be out of a job. This was back at the end of februrary; I figured I’d have a job untill mid March or so. I found out yesterday that the new guy starts on Monday, which leads me to believe I will probably be here untill May 1st or so; I lost my job right when school gets out. Maybe I’ll go work at P.F. Changs for a week or so to try and make some cash? The crummy thing about all of this is that the new guy is going to be the Director of IT. This means that Adam, my boss, a guy who’s been with the company for most of its entire existence and works way too much, is now going to be reporting to a ‘new guy’ who he’s going to have to train. Imagine training your own boss. He’s not too happy about it. According to my mom, the same thing has happened to my dad numerous times – they hire some new guy with a buisness degree who doesn’t know crap and put him in charge of someone with technical knowledge but not the buisness savvy / people skills needed to get ahead in the damn buisness world. I’m lucky in that I’m a technically oriented person who also happens to be outgoing and extroverted. Unfortunately, most analytically inclined individuals are introverted and don’t get a lot of recognition. This revelvation of the way things are in the buisness world makes me more inclined to want to be a College Professor.

As much as I had to admit it, this series of events more clearly illustrates to me why so many intellectuals become socialists.

I’ll end on a happy note, though – because I feel great! Pretty much every day since I broke up with Megan, I have a sort of ‘realization’ that it really is over. It’s done. She’s not coming back. I won’t have to be in that situation again. I am free! The thing that I have wanted for so long, the thing I tried to convince myself not to want and tried to tell myself wasn’t really for me is finally mine and it’s much better than I had ever imagined. I am in such a different place than I was a mere 3 months ago, it’s not even funny. I am happy. I smile now.

Oh, and fill out this personality thing on me, please! I want to know what you bastards think of me.

For me, Learning about all of these different things is like being a kid with a new toy. I see all kinds of connections between group theory and languages and automata; I want to find out how deep the connection goes, who has explored this before, and if nobody has, then why not?

Mathematical discovery is such an enjoyable process.

I am so happy right now.