Milk Hero

That's a cup in the foreground. I wish I could play this every morning.

Perhaps I should flip a coin?

I'm working out my class schedule for the upcoming semester, and I've run into a bit of a dilemma. Two classes are at the exact same time. Both clamor for my attention. Both are only offered in the fall, and this is my last year. They are as mutually exclusive as it is possible for two classes to be.

THE CANDIDATES

• 7.32 Systems Biology: This field is a sister to synthetic biology. I'm interested in to the point of wanting to pursue it in grad school. The Silver lab, where I'm working, is a systems biology lab in more than just name (although it's certainly not typical, being focused on engineering). Networks! Switches! Stochastic behavior! Dynamics! Oscillators! Pattern formation!


• 21A.212 Myth, Religion, and Symbolism: This class looks like it's going to hit one of my biggest avocational buttons. Despite being atheist/agnostic/nonreligious (damn labels), I've always had a fascination with the power of ritual and storytelling -- the roles they play in our lives and how they adapt to non-religious contexts. How did I manage to not notice this class existed before?

THE ARGUMENT

I want to study systems biology in grad school. Therefore, I should get started. Taking this class may help me with my continuing work in the Silver lab, and might even help me get into a good grad program.

THE COUNTERARGUMENT

I will have plenty of time to study systems biology in grad school. (And if I really get an itch, I can always pick up Uri Alon's book.) I should take this chance to explore a humanities topic that I'm really interested in, while I'm still an undergrad, because time is short.

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So, what do I do? Both of these arguments are fairly convincing to me. Which one wins? Or, are there other arguments I've missed?

Meal planning: harder than it looks

Today was ET's Brunch in the Park, an event we throw every year for the current actives and alumni. A bunch of us made various breakfasty dishes. Watching the meal planning and preparation process was quite interesting. Most people went with something very simple, such as "pancakes" or "bacon", where the planning reduces to "Step 1: Buy a lot of whatever. Step 2: Cook all of it." I volunteered to make eggs, but I unwisely decided to get all fancy and make oven scrambled eggs with lots of mix-ins on the side.

My crucial mistake was not bothering to figure out the proper ratios -- I just went to the supermarket and bought "one" of everything: one head of broccoli, one 3-pack of bell peppers, etc. It turns out that one head of broccoli has significantly less mass than three bell peppers. It also turns out that it's hard to pan-fry things when all the stove space is continuously occupied by the pancake makers.

The worst part, though, was that the eggs were far too little and far too late. I cracked 25 eggs, but I should have done two or three times as many (or used an equivalent amount of that egg stuff that comes in cartons). We had around 30 people and only about 10 of them could have gotten an adequate amount of eggs. (As consolation, I can offer the fact that eggs + sauteed mushrooms + fresh basil = awesomeness!)

This episode gives me a whole new appreciation for the work our cook Karen does in planning meals and specifying what needs to be bought. She specifies the week's shopping list very neatly -- 4 pounds of broccoli, 3 cans of butter beans, foo units of bar, baz units of quux. Of course, she's had at least 20 years of practice, so I shouldn't be surprised that she's expert. After all, 2h/meal * 7 meals/wk * 20 full academic years works out to ~ 10,000 hours.

I just hope I can devote that kind of time and energy to some kind of lifetime pursuit or career...

Invasion of the possibly useful jargon

Every time I take a class, I semi-consciously pick up its jargon and use it for all kinds of unrelated things. I'm aware that this is very common among nerds/hackers -- after all, I hang out with lots of them. I, too, speak of "pinging" people in real life, and of the "failure modes" of couches and suchlike. But because I'm a biologist hanging out with mostly non-biologists, it stands out a lot more because everyone else isn't using jargon from their biochemistry classes. I don't know many other people who use words like "inhibit" and "saturation" and "depletion" and "steady state" and "modularity" on a daily-to-hourly basis. (OK, maybe the last two are more widespread than I think, and I just need to hang out with more MechE or EE people.)

The most recent one is "timescale", or "on the timescale of". I picked this one up from my biomechanics class, which analyzes bio-materials of all different sizes from single molecules to whole organs. In order to keep ourselves sane, we have to take into account the size of the object in question when choosing an analysis method. Should we speak of the stresses and strains in a rod made of continuous material, or of the entropy-driven behavior of a randomly meandering chain? Can we ignore thermal motion of molecules, or the transient behavior when you begin applying force? It all depends on the length scale.

I find the word "timescale" very useful in my daily life. It's much easier to say exactly what I mean if I say "on the timescale of weeks" rather than "in the medium-term". I would love to say that it helps other people understand, as well, but unfortunately no one else seems to have picked up on it yet, so I will have to wait and see.

Strangely enough, the jargon-adapting habit seems to be largely involuntary. However, the success or failure of a given word is definitely related to its usefulness, to the usefulness of the metaphor. There's not that much difference between a feedback system in a cafeteria and a piece of complex software, so it makes sense to speak of both of them as having "failure modes". I guess this is what the "seeing-as" theory of intelligence is all about. (Something I read in one of Hofstadter's books... I don't remember which it was, and I don't know what this is all about.)

Addendum: jargon-adapting is also not particularly widespread among people who aren't part of hacker or twinkie social circles. Or, at least, I don't encounter it very much, and I often get laughed at (in a kind way) when I'm hanging out with my friends from Bioengineering and I speak of rainwater "saturating" a drain, thus forming a puddle.

Exhaustion

This semester, I've been mentoring a team of two freshmen working on designing a cooperative system of biofuel-producing algae and nutrient-recycling bacteria. It's a really neat project -- in fact all three of this year's 20.20 projects are really interesting. They have more of a focus on system dynamics / population engineering, where my year we focused on devices. I think this may be due to having Ron Weiss instead of Drew Endy. (Another indication of Weissitude is that we're all modeling our systems in MATLAB... sigh. I am not fond of MATLAB.)

I don't actually know much about biofuels, synthetic cooperation, or complex metabolism. I also don't know much about mentoring a team in the sort of hands-on, hands-off style that's appropriate when the point is for everyone to learn and stretch themselves. So it's a challenge, but an extremely satisfying one. I have watched my team drink the synthetic biology Kool-aid in the most remarkable way. There was a palpable transition from naivete to relative understanding;

Mentorship is important, but providing it at this level is also exhausting. Every day after class I feel physically tired (actually, that may have more to do with my sleep schedule than my mentoring schedule).

Gaze Direction, or How Your RSI Prevention Software Can Distract Other People Too

The other day I noticed something funny happening. To set the scene, recall that humans are wired to detect other humans' gaze direction as a method of figuring out where the important stuff is happening at the moment. Robots are working on this too.

For the last several months I've been having problems with eye strain after using my computer for too long at a time, so I've been using RSI prevention software to remind me to look away from the screen every so often. (I use TimeOut (review here) because it doesn't reset its timer if you leave the mouse alone for 10 seconds while you're reading something.)

When anyone else is in the room and I look up from my laptop to stare fixedly at the opposite wall, about half the time they will look up too, wondering just what is so interesting about that light fixture or Periodic Table poster. It usually takes them several seconds to figure out that I'm not actually looking at anything in particular... we're just so used to thinking of gaze direction changes as highly meaningful.

Of course, this indicates to me that almost everyone I know needs to look away from their screens more often. Do it right now (seriously, I don't mind waiting) ...................................................................
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you'll be surprised how your eyes feel when they refocus.

Impressions

The water dispenser outside my lab has a cold spigot and a hot spigot. The hot spigot dispenses water which is actually quite hot. However, I couldn't figure out how to use it at first... until I realized that you have to put the handle in a certain position, which is not its natural low-energy gravity-ordained position, and then press it. It's a safety interlock! Good thinking! *makes tea*

I drove in snow for the first time recently. Well, not snow, but there was some kind of sleet-like substance on the roads and falling (slowly) from the sky. It was also the first time I ever skidded (a small amount). I've been on a skid mat, but it was a while ago and I remember it very poorly. I think the problem with the skit mat was either that I was unable to actually skid, or that it made no sense out of the context of a street and the slight hazard of hitting parked cars. There's no spatial reference on an infinite frictionless plane, after all.

Plates of fermenting bacteria on a phenol-red containing medium have this wonderful tendency to grow into miniature sunrises (although they do develop a rather off-putting smell).

Figure 1: Like viewing the sunrise from a mountaintop outhouse.

I just reread Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, and I really liked it. He gives the sort of lovely far-off impressions of the world of the clacks towers that I want to go there but that might destroy the mystique -- you know, the same thing people always say about why the Silmarillion is written in such a dreamy mythic tone. And if Thief of Time is the Discworld's The Matrix, then Going Postal is its Jargon File.

Courses for this semester

This semester's coursework has two themes: "Let's Read And Discuss Primary Literature", and "Time To Stop Abstracting Away The Physical Nature Of Biology". Both of my required bioengineering core classes are about cells, molecules, and tissues from a mechanical engineer's perspective. All three of my electives are literature-discussion classes on various topics.

• 20.310 Molecular, Cellular, and Tissue Biomechanics - think introductory mechanics, only all the examples are biological things instead of, you know, steel beams or something. Up till now, I've been accustomed to thinking of DNA as a string of digital (AGCT) information, or maybe as a helical molecule; now it's time to think of DNA as a charged elastic rod, or a randomly-walking polymer. How much force can a motor protein exert to pull a vesicle where it's going? What happens when you push and pull on the cytoskeleton? What's the effect of pressure on cells? How do bones reshape themselves in response to forces?


• 20.330 Fields, Forces, and Flows in Biological Systems - fluids and E&M, only again all the examples are biological things. How do things like diffusion and electrophoresis work? How can you model the cell membrane as an RC circuit? What's the best shape / flow pattern for this sample chamber so that the most protein binds to the sensor on one side?


• 20.385 Advanced Topics in Synthetic Biology - this is paired with a freshman design/seminar course, 20.20, which I took two years ago and which rocked my world so hard. It's a great introduction to synthetic biology. The frosh get to do design projects, and because it's surprisingly hard to do this when you've only had introductory biology, the upperclassmen mentor the frosh teams. And when we're not busy mentoring, we have synthetic biology journal club. I'll be presenting a couple of papers and I'm super pumped.


• 7.25 Biological Regulatory Mechanisms - this just sounds fascinating. All the different ways gene expression or protein action can be controlled. Apart from being cool, this is also highly relevant for synthetic biology. Even apart from that, I'm excited about the lectures. This class involves picking apart the experimental logic of papers in a more rigorous way than I've ever had before, which I'm sure will be good for me as well as being fun. We're focusing on demonstrating results and excluding alternative explanations to an extent that seems to be missing in the modern age of "let's generate a zillion data points and then sift through them". Plus, it's a chance to pick the brains of some aged, sage professors. All in all, it really reminds me of ((my interpretation of) what Raffi said about) learning Talmud.


• 7.346 RNAi: A Revolution in Biology and Therapeutics - yet another paper reading class. I know nothing at all about RNA interference, but it's extremely important both theoretically and (potentially) medically. I'm also interested in using it to make synthetic-biological parts that don't crosstalk as much as protein-based parts do; we'll see if that's feasible.

I plan to blog a lot more about the papers I read in these classes. It probably won't be a full Journal Club post for every paper because I'll be reading about 6-8 papers a week, but I'll at least try to summarize them. (This is partly for your benefit and partly for mine -- I expect that writing paper summaries for the blog will help me read and understand the papers better.) But I will do full Journal Club posts for the papers that I find most interesting, and definitely for the ones I present. I might also write about interesting things that happen in the other two classes.

Do I get a Home Improvement merit badge now?

I didn't grow up tinkering or making things or using tools, and this has always sort of bothered me -- especially since coming to MIT, which is full of tinkerers and makers, even in the more theoretical majors. And, the DIYbio movement notwithstanding, mainstream biological research is not exactly hands-on or building-intensive. I've learned to program a little and taken an excellent hands-on circuits class, but that's about it. So you can imagine my trepidation going into Help Week, in which the pledges of my fraternity kick the initiates out and devote lots of time to home-improvement projects.

My pet project was to install a towel bar in the women's bathroom so that people have someplace to put their washcloths that dirty water won't get all over the shelves. At the beginning, I knew absolutely nothing about how this was done. I spent some time deciphering the pictorial instructions that came with the towel bar, then went to the Internet and learned about using plastic anchors to put screws in drywall.

The trouble started when I realized I didn't know what size hole to drill in the wall. The internet said to use a bit "a little smaller than the diameter of the anchor", but it didn't say how much smaller, and the towel bar package didn't specify a bit size appropriate to the anchors that were included. So I just guessed too small to start with. After enlarging the holes once or twice, I attempted to hammer the anchors into the wall. The first one went in fine, but the other three didn't go in straight. It was here that I discovered I was using craptastic cheap anchors -- when I hammered on the last one, it bent and broke rather than going into the wall.

So now I had to figure out how to get them out. I had an idea, but I wasn't sure it would work, so I went back to the internet. It suggested (a) pulling them out with pliers, (b) pushing them all the way into the wall with a screwdriver, or (c) cutting them away with a drill in the process of enlarging the original hole. I was able to pull out three with no trouble, but the fourth wouldn't come out. So I pushed on it -- no progress. So I drilled on it -- also no progress. (Why? Was my drill bit dull or something?) So I went back to the original idea I had before consulting the internet: screw a screw halfway in, then pull it out using a regular hammer. Thankfully, that worked.

However, I was now without anchors. A quick search of the hardware closet found no extra anchors, and I was just about to start getting upset when I realized they must have been taken upstairs by the person who was working on fixing the banister. Sure enough, there they were -- actual quality plastic anchors with actual mechanical strength, able to withstand hammering, plus matching screws. And get this, the package even specified the appropriate drill bit size! I attacked the wall for the third time...

...and luckily, before I hammered the new anchors in, I thought to test the depth of the screws. Turns out they were too long for the wall. What to do now? I went back to the package and looked at all the mysterious numbers written all over it, and eventually decided that "#10" must refer to the size of the screw shaft. Then I looked through our Big Box O' Screws and found some more #10 screws that were shorter.

It was amazing how much better the new anchors worked. They went smoothly into the wall with no trouble, and I had the towel bar on the wall inside five minutes. Hey! I did a thing with tools and screws and stuff! I performed an act of home improvement by myself! Why isn't there a Science Scouts badge for biologists who step outside their academic bubble like this?

Figure 1: Hells yeah. That towel bar ain't going nowhere.

Open Courseware is not the be-all and end-all

MIT's Open Courseware gets a lot of press. And a lot of it is well deserved -- it's fairly comprehensive, and does a good job managing the technical side of throwing vast amounts of material up on the internets (hooray for PDF). But it's not everything.

The past few days I've been stressing over various topics from my genetics class, mostly yeast tetrad analysis. Going to lecture hardly helps; for this class, it's been generally true that the more confusing topics are very poorly explained. Usually the textbook does a good job of explaining things, but it doesn't cover yeast tetrads hardly at all. And I have a test in two days.

(Yeast tetrad analysis is pretty interesting, by the way. I might write a post about it if I ever actually understand it.)

Turning to OCW didn't help, because more or less the same professors have been teaching the class for N years, so the lecture notes are exactly the same. I can get practice problems (old homeworks and exams), which are very useful once I actually understand something, but not in this case.

So I turned to Google. And lo and behold, googling {yeast tetrad analysis} brings up several universities' intro-genetics webpages about yeast tetrad analysis! With clear, coherent explanations and well-drawn diagrams! UC Berkeley (pdf), Indiana U (pdf), U of Saskatchewan, and U of Rochester, just to name a few.

(Even better, some of those are straight-up webpages. Better than everything being PDF, although not better than everything being .doc, which sometimes happens.)

I often hear, second or third hand, how people from other schools use MIT OCW all the time. And I'm not denying that OCW is awesome. But it's not perfect, and there are other places to go if the OCW explanation of a topic happens to be consistently lousy.

Sign of the times

I finished my last final exam today (woo!!!), so now instead of staying up late studying, I get to stay up late sorting through all my junk and packing some of it in boxes with copious amounts of duct tape -- aka 'packing'. I'm moving to a new dorm on the other side of campus next year, and I'm heading back home to California on Saturday, so I have to hurry up and get all my stuff boxed and hauled across campus before then.

Just now, I was making safety sheaths for a set of cooking knives I bought and never used (because they're mediocre quality, and I just used my pocket knife for everything anyway). Take several sheets of paper, wrap around, duct tape, fold the end over, duct tape again, et voila. It works surprisingly well. For day-to-day storage, these sheaths work fine as is; for longer-term storage, duct tape the knife handles to the sheaths so they don't slip out.

Clearly, though, it is a sign of the times, of the era of online publishing, that I used printouts of PNAS papers to do this. It's the rare, rare paper that I'll print out to read, what with PDFs and having an institutional subscription to everything. Anymore, the only papers I print are ones that I need to read and reread in quite a bit of detail -- say, if I've got to write an essay that addresses the content of that paper specifically. (Intro Psych, I'm looking at you!)

Yes, kids, science saves lives! It keeps you safe! Were it not for science, how would I keep myself from being slashed up by kitchen knives??

Math lagging (or leading) physics

Senior year of high school, I took AP Physics C and AP Calculus BC concurrently: allowable, but not advisable, the admins said. For a good part of the year, I struggled with physics because I hadn't `really' learned the math yet. Reading the textbook, I'd just skip over derivations that I didn't understand, and hope that the end result was something I could memorize, if not comprehend. Mr. T held a session or two of `physics math', which helped a little, but didn't make me feel less intimidated.

Last semester, I was in pretty much the same situation, only with line and surface integrals instead of all integrals. Oh, we never had to evaluate any -- they were always of the simple kind that reduce to multiplication problems -- but it took several tries to be able to recognize those situations, and remember how to reduce them to multiplication problems. Didn't solve the intimidation problem, either. On the final exam, even though I knew what to do and how the problems worked, I still felt like a trespasser for writing down those fancy-schmancy closed-surface double integral signs, knowing I didn't really know how they worked.

At one point Prof. Hudson said something (can't recall the exact words) that gave the impression this math-lagging-physics business was a dreadful intractable plague, oh me oh my, whatever shall we do. And at the time, struggling to understand everything, I was rather inclined to agree with him. But since then I've somewhat reversed position, or at least become neutral.

Back in high school, after I'd learned to fudge my way through integration, I had a much, much easier time with it when we `officially' learned it in math class. This was especially noticeable in the case of integrating (still in a single variable, though!) over 3D objects. We'd been doing this routinely in physics, to find the moments of inertia of various shapes. So while the rest of the calculus class was struggling to put together the relatively new concept of integration with the relatively new concept of bizarre-shaped objects in 3-space, I could relax.

Recently (within the past two weeks), the same thing happened for me in multivariable calculus. I'm in 18.01A/18.02A, which is a blend of two courses: a quick six-week review of single-variable, and then the regular multivariable curriculum, finishing over the January term. Because of the way things are timed, I never saw a line integral in 18.02A until just now, well after the end of my physics class. And the same thing happened: I'd learned to fudge my way through easy line integrals, and that gave me a leg up on people who'd never seen them before. I had a well-developed intuition about what line integrals meant in terms of the real world, which kept me from getting confused. That in turn allowed me to focus on the complicated aspects that we hadn't worked with in physics.

Given these experiences, I don't think it's a very bad thing at all that math education tends to lag physics education. It can often be a good thing: physics is leading math, to frame it positively. When you tackle something complicated and abstract, having `live-fire' experience with simple cases and workarounds can hardly do anything but help.

This comes with some caveats. It's a classic example of delayed gratification: I sure didn't feel happy about math lagging physics when I was actually struggling with the physics, and it was only a month later that I was able to grin to myself in calculus recitation, watching the people around me struggle with a problem I'd found obvious. (Schadenfreude, too, is not necessarily a good thing. In my defense, I do help my peers if I can, and if they're not already being helped.) And naturally, it's a tradeoff; who can say if knowing the math beforehand would have brought my physics grade up a little?

But most importantly, if physics is going to lead math, physics has to be taught right. I approve very strongly of Prof. Hudson's philosophy here: conceptually difficult problems with easy math = win. If you absolutely must be bashing your head against the wall at midnight the night before the problem set is due, it shouldn't be because you can't solve a differential equation. It should be because you can't figure out which way the induced current goes. Physics can be taught adequately without using too much complicated math (though of course the definition of `complicated' will vary with the physics). You learn just as much integrating (read: multiplying) over a sphere as you do integrating (read: flailing) over the surface of some crazy-shaped thing.

You wouldn't expect it, but knowing too much math can be a problem. Last semester's physics class was taught in a rather unusual format, about which more later. The relevant thing is that I spent the whole time in a group of three. There was me, there was S, and there was L. S had excellent intuition, and tended to approach problems by thinking them through qualitatively first, and then seeing if the math bore him out. This was really a very effective strategy -- a lot of the time the math looked right, but his intuition cried foul, and then we found the sign error twenty steps back. L, on the other hand, was advanced in math, and already pretty far beyond what the physics course used. She approached problems very mathematically, instead of with intuition like S. Even when something made complete physical sense, she wasn't satisfied until she justified it mathematically -- even if it was a qualitative problem and didn't have any equations in it to begin with. and because of how every other thing is backwards in E&M, she tied herself into an awful lot of knots. (Not that she wasn't brilliant; I think she outscored both S and me on every test.) L and S complemented each other, and they were a great group to work with. But I have to say that S's intuitive method was the more effective. To the same question, S might answer "because the charge is over here so the potential is higher here, and then this happens"; L might answer "because the potential is [insert equation here] and the electric field is the negative gradient of the potential."

I admit that this is based on my own experience, and what's better for different students will vary. I said that it's easier to learn complicated abstract math if you've first grounded it in physics; you could just as well say that it's easier to learn physics if you're well practiced with the mathematical tools already. But I think the first argument is more valid than the second. It's easier to abstract from the concrete than it is to learn the abstract first and only then get concrete examples. You see the same thing in computer science classes: pick up a copy of the blue wizard book and on every other page you'll find a discussion of how to abstract some instance, not how to instantiate some abstraction. Even though physics was made genuinely more difficult by not knowing the math, I'd still rather have done it this way around.

Feeling a teacher's love

In high school, we had a teacher, Mr. T, who taught computer science and some of the advanced math courses. And he was wonderful. Everybody loved him. I've never encountered so much infectious enthusiasm, even at the ungodly hour of 8am on a Monday morning. He could light us on fire by drawing box-and-pointer diagrams. We had a party the day we learned the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Mr. T was a mentor, a friend, a father, a rock; his room was a haven for geeklings. Everybody loved him, and he loved us too.

I understood his love in a rather abstract sense back then, and up until this morning. But this afternoon, I understood it from the inside.

The research I'm doing at the moment involves teaching pairs of people a constructed language by immersion, and then having them take a test. (More details on this (very interesting) paradigm in an upcoming post!) Today was only the second time this experiment has ever been run, so I'm also happy just because it worked. We ran two pairs of people.

I had an awfully hard time teaching the first pair. They just seemed to fundamentally not get a lot of the grammar. It was very difficult to keep myself from grabbing one guy and telling him, loudly and in English, that "the way to turn a sentence into a question is NOT just to say the sentence with a rising intonation at the end!!!". And so on, and so on. Teaching them was frustrating, occasionally painful.

And then the second pair came in, a pair of undergrads, and they more than made up for the first pair. It only took them twenty minutes to get to more than adequate proficiency, where it had taken the first pair almost an hour to get to less than adequate proficiency. They seemed to pick everything up right away. It was like watching a rose bloom in time-lapse. My favorite moment was when I taught the question form, using only one verb in my examples. When I prompted one of the participants, she immediately came up with several correct question-form sentences, and she generalized to all the verbs we'd learned, not just the one I demonstrated with. If we hadn't been in an experiment, I might have proposed to her on the spot.

I graded the four tests just now. The first pair had decidedly mediocre scores, no surprise there. But the second pair did extremely well, and they both did just about perfectly on the part we're most interested in. I was overjoyed to see them using linguistic terminology correctly to explain their answers (even though their knowledge of terms had nothing to do with how well they acquired the language). When I was done grading, I spontaneously picked up the last test and kissed it.

Tonight, I think I experienced a little of what made Mr. T such a good teacher, what made him love his students and his work. It's not an easy feeling to articulate. Pride and joy in students, enthusiasm for the subject, and a little bit of self-satisfaction that, yeah, I taught them that. The feeling was very powerful, even though the teaching I did today wasn't very real. What if I were teaching material that was beautiful and meaningful, instead of an arbitrary constructed language? What if I could teach for an entire semester and witness long-term progress and synthesis, instead of bidding goodbye after an hour? What if I were teaching students who learned for love of the material, not because they were paid to be subjects in a study?

For the record, this is not the first time I've taught, nor the first time I've found it satisfying. For a couple of years I tutored 6th graders in math and Japanese, and it was always great when they'd get a flash of insight after a long hard slog. (They were remedial students, so it wasn't often.) And in the Karate club, it's traditional that you help teach the people who rank below you. I was co- leading brown belt my senior year, so that meant I taught just about everybody. I always enjoyed seeing some yellow-belts perform a technique really well, and thinking "Yay, they remembered X subtle point I taught them about!". But I've never felt a teacher's love as strongly as I did today; certainly not strongly enough to merit using the word `love'.

If I follow the track I'm planning to follow, I'll end up a professor. I understand that teaching is mostly tedious, frustrating, and difficult, not full of brilliant-student-love. But it's the possibility, the hope that springs eternal, and when it's fulfilled it makes up for everything else.

Finals

I know it's been a while since I last posted. It's finals week, which means I'm basically studying all the time. I have a bunch of posts in the works,

I just took my first final, physics (8.02, intro electricity & magnetism). I felt really good about that one; everything seems to have come together really well and comprehensibly in my head in the past several weeks. I give the credit to the professor's very intuitive style of teaching and understanding everything, and to his fondness for conceptually difficult questions with easy math. That is how to teach physics, IMHO. (I have a lot more to say about the course format, TEAL ("technologically enabled active learning"), but that's a whole nother post.)

I'm not really so worried about tomorrow, when I have my midterm in calculus (18.02A). I'm in a kind of funnily-put-together course, where you spend the first six weeks reviewing single-variable calculus at high speed, and then follow the regular curriculum for multivariable calculus, finishing over the January independent activities period. It's primarily intended for people who took AP Calculus AB. I took AP Calculus BC and passed the AP exam with a high score, which would qualify me to jump straight into 18.02 (straight multivariable calculus), but at the beginning of the year I felt like I needed the review. I could have done without it, but it was nice to have. The only problem was that it put me farther behind in terms of math lagging physics (a perennial problem), but the math in my physics course is not actually that hard (e.g. all the line or surface integrals we ever have to do are simple cases that reduce to multiplication problems).

The one I'm worried about is chemistry (5.112), on Wednesday. Most of the content on the test will be drawn from the last several weeks of the course, and that's the material I understand the least. The course is taught by two different professors -- one does the first half and the other does the second half -- and the second guy is very difficult to understand, for various reasons which I will elaborate in the future. It's a blessing that it comes last, really; I have about twelve hours this afternoon/evening for studying, and I don't intend to devote all of them to calculus.

MIT really treats its students very well during finals week. There are free breakfasts in all the dorms, as well as one in the lobby of the building where the biggest finals are held. (And not cheapo lousy free breakfasts, either -- good ones. This morning, for the first time all semester, I had eggs and pancakes! It was awesome!) There are a few free lunches and dinners scattered around, and all the food vendors in the Student Center are giving discounts. Alpha Phi Omega holds "Finals Coffeehouse", with snacks in a room of the Student Center that used to be a 24-hour coffeehouse but is now just a sort of miscellany room with tables. MIT Medical holds relaxation seminars, even. This is characteristic of MIT, really: they pound you into the ground academically, and then they reach down and lift you back up...so they can pound you again.

More content to come over winter break. I've got a lot of saved-up commentary on various aspects of the teaching here.

Gmail, how I love thee

Forgive me for taking a moment to extol the virtues of Gmail. I appreciate it a lot more since coming to MIT, because I get about ten times as much email as I did in high school. And no, I'm not getting paid for this. But people here complain a lot about the volume of email, and if more people would use Gmail then the amount of sniping would drop five-fold.

Gmail has tags instead of folders. Tags are so much better than folders! I have two major ways I categorize my email: by where it was sent to (me directly, my MIT email account, certain mailing lists) and by why I should save it (it points to a resource, it contains someone's contact info, it's one of those "please retain this email for your records" messages). So, to a first approximation, pretty much all the messages I save falls somewhere on a two-dimensional grid. A lot of messages fall in more than one place, and there are miscellaneous tags, and all kinds of stuff you just can't do with folders.

(I'm always a little annoyed by blog platforms that say things like "This entry filed in [list of tags]". They're just trying to pretend tags are the same as folders, no idea why. Inertia perhaps? Bah! Embrace the tags for what they are!)

Since Gmail has tags instead of folders, to get things out of your inbox you just hit "Archive". This puts the conversation in a big all-purpose bin, and you can find it later by searching for text, tags, or sender.

There's also a really nice filtering setup. For instance, I have all my email from my MIT address forward to my Gmail, and I have Gmail tag it `MITmail' so I know what was sent to where. I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists, and I have many of those automatically tagged as well. One list in particular, the Reuse list (for recycling / handing off old computers, furniture, unneeded coupons, etc etc etc...), gets a lot of traffic, and I don't generally want to see Reuse messages in my inbox unless I've got free time to go pick something up. So I have Gmail do two things: tag the messages `reuse', and archive them directly, so they don't appear in my inbox and get in the way of more important things.

On top of tags, you can also mark converstions (or individual messages) with a little yellow star that shows up by the subject line. This is really helpful because I keep several types of messages in my inbox (instead of archiving them): reminders for events, reminders for things I need to do, and messages I'll need to refer to within the next two weeks or so. Reminders get starred, so they stick out visually and I actually get reminded of them. References don't get starred because I only need them when I'm looking for them specifically.

Probably the best feature, though, is this: Back-and-forth emails with the same subject line are organized into conversations. This is just fantastic. It keeps everything related to one topic in one place, instead of having individual messages in several threads scattered randomly throughout your inbox. You can read an entire thread on one page. If a new message appears while you're backreading the thread, Gmail pops up a little "Update Conversation" box so you don't reply redundantly. And since the whole thread is on one page, Gmail hides each message's quoted text, all the lines that begin with piles of >>>s. And you can delete an entire flamewar with one click. Can't beat that.

I know a lot of people are concerned about the direction Google is headed, or that they will end up "owning all the information in the world". Yes, there are legitimate concerns, but I think the danger is way overblown, and Gmail seriously saves me a lot of time and aggravation. (Are you listening, stupid Yahoo email account that I keep for signing up for potentially spammy things? Grr.)

Who Pays For My Food

One of the great things about being at a major research institution is that you can always find work as a guinea pig. There are flyers all over the place, advertising this or that experiment, usually for $10 an hour, which isn't half bad for one-time easy unskilled work. I've been a subject in a bunch of different neuro/psych experiments, and it actually does a decent job of paying for my food. It's not steady work, but there are benefits to that -- I don't have to commit to anything major, it's not very many hours a week, I can schedule it around my own schedule, I get to look at what lots of different labs are doing.

Don't worry, I'm not imbibing dangerous substances while guys in lab coats watch to see if I break out in a rash or something. Most of what I've done involves looking at a screen and pressing buttons. The most biologically involved thing I've done is get fMRI'd.

I like to think of guinea pigging as "learning about experimental methodology from the inside". Reading the Materials & Methods section of a paper is really boring, and it's often hard to get an idea of what an experiment was actually like. Now that I've been through a bunch of experiments, I'm developing a sense for what a protocol will feel like from the subject's point of view, and I know something about how to design an experiment so it isn't agonizingly boring. I've also learned a bit about recruiting subjects. All of this, I hope, will come in useful when I start doing my own research, if I'm using human subjects. Or maybe even if I'm using monkey subjects -- they deserve a workable interface too, after all.

I have done a negotiation roleplay while thinking I was on caffeine. I have sat and read in a chair for hours while specialized earplugs play sounds in my ears and measure the echoes of my ear canals. I have identified grey shapes on colored backgrounds as quickly as I possibly can. I have described upwards of a hundred superballs. I have lain in an fMRI for two hours watching sentences full of made-up words. I have had my auditory and tactile thresholds tested and retested and re-retested.

(By the way, getting fMRI'd was actually quite nice. You're in the machine for two hours, and they want you to move as little as possible, so they take pains to make you comfortable, with padded head restraints and a foam block under your knees and a blanket. It was so comfortable that, after a while, it felt like my body was disappearing because it wasn't sending my brain any discomfort signals. Which was incredibly relaxing, but also trippy.)

The most exciting thing, though, has been when I'm actually interested in what the experiment was about, and when I can make contacts this way. A couple weeks ago, I spent a Saturday doing loads of different tests in a psycholinguistics lab. One of the experiments had me listening to ten minutes of sentences in a simplistic constructed language, trying to decipher where the word boundaries were. (Sound easy? Listen to ten minutes of sentences in a language you're not familiar with, then come back and tell me with a straight face that it didn't sound like a continuous stream of speech.) I was surprised to find a conlang being used in a serious research context, since I'd been given to understand that most linguists are dismissive of conlangs and conlanging in general. But I asked, and we got into a neat discussion, and then I asked if they were looking for undergrads, and they said yes! Exciting! More on this in a subsequent post.