Christmas Aftermath

Hello all. It's the post-Christmas fallout.

Well, I've been busy. Not with work, mostly with gatherings and special events and trying to grab a few hours of play time here and there. Mostly playing Blokus with my family, which is an AWESOME game by the way. Simple enough everyone can play, deep enough for some strategic skill (my specialty), but not so deep that I can always win (unlike chess).

Back on topic.

Christmas started a bit early with the family opening our family gifts on Christmas Eve. This is because we hosted the Christmas Day luncheon, so not much time to do all the other stuff and entertain guests. Then it was clean-up the house time for the afternoon. Then we performed in the Christmas Eve Candlelight Service for our church. My dad ran the sound system (he's the best of the church, and I swear that's not just family bias), my mom and older sister sang in the choir, my brother played the drums, and I played the flute. Turned out very well.

Christmas Day was the luncheon which lasted until nightfall. Not surprising. We tend to like to hang around, play games, talk about random stuff. My mom also made us sing carols, but being musical my brother and I played on the piano and my dad played the guitar. We're not all that great on the piano, so I had to take the left hand while my brother took the right. Plus, those old hymnals are not meant to be played on the piano, they're meant to be sung. Normal hands can't reach that wide and that dexterously.

Of course, we also had smaller Christmas meetups with family friends on Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday. Monday's was a funeral, though. However, we got to see all of my second cousins from Utah.

Friday was cleaning again. My mom is big on keeping the house clean. We still have the same carpet in our house from our remodeling, which was when I was really young. In case you don't know, that's apparently a really long time. Being Asian and taking off our shoes indoors probably helps. This time, it was putting the house back together and moving furniture. Then we sorted out what we needed to return (wrong sized clothing) and took a little trip to do it. Today it's a catch up and prepare for our trip to Sac/Davis day. That means last of the chores and start pulling out clothes. Apparently it's around 40 degrees up there, so I'm going to have to pack layers.

At least I've been getting over 10 hours of sleep each night.

Plans for Break

Man, I am failing at the prep blog early game.

Anyways, today it's time to detail plans for Break. This is akin to New Years Resolutions where you make a list, feel good about it, try to follow it for about 1-2 days, then lapse back to your old habits. Unless you're still young and in that malleable age where your parents can smack you around and make you shape up.

So, here goes. (in no particular order)

1) Relax. Probably the easiest to pull off. Make sure I'm not sleep deprived.

2) Work on Clinic. Mind you this is rare. Most people forget about Clinic and spend a week when they get back in the Spring remembering everything. Unfortunately, my Clinic, in my personal opinion, needs a jump start and some serious catch up. To make sure stuff goes smoothly next semester, I'm catching up on stuff I need to do. This mainly means getting my processing element completely built, fixing up the code to describe the entire chip (i.e. stable architecture good. See VLSI gripes from last semester about what unstable architecture does), and maybe even getting to know the layout tools early.

3) Games. I've been doing such a good job repressing my gamer side this semester. I still haven't gone through the massive number of games released this year, even the ones during the summer. So, I need to do a bit of catch up. I even have a copy of Fallout 3 sitting in my room, ready to be installed.

4) Family. In case you didn't know, Mudd kicks us out of the dorms for Winter Break. They are locked down and you have to turn in your key or be fined lots of money. So, we're all at home. Except for the crazies who find an apartment or something, but I don't know any of them. Thus, I find myself at home with family. And, my family is very hospitable. Thus, we will be having gatherings and parties pretty much every day until somewhere in the first week of January. We're also going to take a trip up North (i.e. Sacramento) to see some of the rest of the family. If I'm lucky, Michael and I might even be able to meet up with a professor at UC Davis for a little jaunt.

5) Grad School Apps. I've got many more to do. That means more 2500 word essays about my motivations to join their programs. Whee! Luckily I don't have to fill out pages of how awesome I am and my club activities, unlike my brother for undergrad applications. It's pure grades, Letters of Rec, and Statement of Purpose.

Well, I'm pretty sure I'm stuck with 4 and 5 being necessary. I'm also pretty sure I can get 1 done. It's a question of 2 and 3. 2 should take precedence if I don't want to look at Prof. D. Money Harris and say, "sorry, I let down the team again."

Have a nice Holiday Season all 3 of my readers.

Level up to Freedom

Well, the worst is over. Or should I say yet to come.

First, fun YouTube stuff.



Now those look like really badass freeform maps. Too bad I still have to wait for the PC version.

Anyways, back to reality.

It's finals week. Ironically, I only have two finals left. MicroPs, 6502 Chip Research, and Clinic all ended last week. OK, so Clinic didn't really end, I still have a few items I need to get done over break so that the project can continue on smoothly, but I don't have deadlines of death hanging over me anymore.

The last two finals I have are a paper for Philosophy, and a 1.5 hour final for Great Works of Western Music. Definitely not in the same class as the Clinic Midyear.

I also have grad school apps to finish. =[ UCLA was Monday, the next is due Jan 2 but I want to get it in at least a week early. Just in case bad stuff happens. It's actually weird that the graduate school applications are so much shorter than the undergraduate applications. It's mostly biographical info, letters of recommendation, and your statement of purpose. No pages upon pages of filling out what activities you did or anything like that. It's not a question of you being a leader or an activist. It's a question of whether or not you're a good enough investment for their research.

Looking back, the Clinic didn't go quite as far as I'd hoped. We barely got Rev0 out for our processing elements. We wanted to get to Rev2, which requires two optimization look overs of the schematics. I blame the processes not getting done on time as well as some other fun dynamics. Here's a few rules for surviving:

Rule #1: Start early and expect to fail. This is big. Do NOT ever start the morning before. Ever. It will not work. And then you'll be crying and having panic attacks at 2 in the morning. Believe me, one team member practically broke down every Monday.

Rule #2: When the going gets tough, the tough call for backup. Chances are, other people know more than you. As a matter of fact, I can guarantee you that in a team, each will have special knowledge that is useful to the team. So, if you're stuck, ask someone else to help. Bonus if it takes that person one glace to know what went wrong. In our case, this is often Prof. Harris. We've actually likened him to an extra super mind that just intersects our plane of existence. Lolly is actually convinced one day he'll just phase out of our plane for a little while. Michael and myself designed two major processes, so chances are we know what the problem is. We had to do a lot of "shoulder camping" this semester to help get stuff going.

Rule #3: Take notes. Seriously. Forgetting what we said yesterday may be the sleep-dep talking, but you can avoid it by taking notes. Notes last way longer than your short-term memory.

Rule #4: Stay Alive. This means sleep and be healthy. This is directed at Lolly who was in a perpetual state of sleep-dep and sickness for the second half of the semester. I blame her uncanny ability to commit to way more than she can handle. She sometimes handles it all, but mostly she ends up overworked. Well, I consider it overworked. In theory, if you followed the above rules, this shouldn't be too big of an issue since you won't be spending 20 hours a week on Clinic. You'll just be spending more like 13 hours.

In the other front, MicroPs final project was a success. Julien Dage and I built a MIDI synthesizer. We take the MIDI signals from a keyboard and synthesize music out. Sounds easy, looks easy, isn't so easy. For one thing, the MIDI protocol has some weird special cases. It also is a current loop signal. We want a voltage signal. Oops. Then, we have the problem of how to make music. Huh. We used an interesting system where you can move through a hardcoded table at varying speeds to get different pitches. It saves you lots of memory, which means you can store higher resolution waves. Unfortunately, it wasn't as awesome as we'd hoped due to speed and variable size issues. But, we did make it work flawlessly for up to five notes. Later when they post our presentation videos I can link it. Not too interesting, but it demonstrates it works.

Well, that's all for now. I'll be on break after this week, so expect sporadic updates on my travels and holiday awesomeness.

...

There is no useful post today.

I'll see if I can put up something after my two giant deadlines for Monday are done with. Luckily, MicroPs has a light at the end of the tunnel. Clinic sorta does as well, except I'm not sure if it's the end or an incoming train.

The End is Nigh!

It's the home stretch. Last few weeks of school. For some, this would be heartwarming. Last few things to clean up, time to go out and start Christmas shopping (Amazon.com, you are one of my saviors), and all that.

Not true for me.

Let's recap.

In Clinic, Prof. David Harris commented last week we had about "6 weeks worth of work, and about 3 weeks to do it". This is also the same guy who casually looks at the problem I've been trying to fix for the last few days and solves it in a few minutes. So, yeah, we're in trouble. The key factor is to get what we call Rev1 done of the schematics. This first involves getting Rev0 done. Rev0 means your schematics simulate correctly (or at least as expected) in Verilog and SPICE. The SPICE simulations barely got up and running last week. And, as conventional wisdom says, these kinds of things are so simple that they'll work the first time. WRONG. Assume everything will fail, plan ahead, then double the time you expect that will take, and you're still probably missing something. Trust me. Something ALWAYS goes horribly wrong. Luckily, I have Schematics simulating in Verilog. Or, at least I did. Some weird bug has arisen and one of my schematics doesn't work anymore. See? Even when you think it's done, it isn't. Gr.... The scary part is I'm perhaps the closest to finished out of my team. As much as I'd like to pat myself on the back, it also scares me how behind we are as a team. I'm usually the person lagging behind. Then again, I crash if I don't get at least 6 hours of sleep, so I guess they get the chance to lap me by doing all-nighters. Not that I advocate all-nighters, just that it's not a viable option for me if you expect me to be cognizant the next day.

Next, MicroPs. I'm building with another student, Julien Dage, a MIDI synthesizer. It takes in MIDI signals from a keyboard and uses wave tables in the memory to synthesize music. Unfortunately, there's a few problems. First, it takes too long to process each individual note we want to play. I think, according to simulation, that I can get 3 notes. I want 8 notes. Options now include tweaking code at the assembly level, re-writing a part of the code to use a faster system, and slowing down how fast we output music. We also are having issues on the analog side of things. Curse that real world and all it's foolish inaccuracies. I demand more binary values!

Next, Hums. Philosophy final paper, Music final exam. Um. Yeah. Not quite as scary, but I still have a few loose ends I have to tie up. These are the only two classes that I'm either on schedule or ahead of schedule. Go figure.

Next, GameSHMC. I'd like to petition for more money for our budget. However, that means I have to prepare a presentation on why we deserve more money for the year.

Next, Family. Right now I'm at home. Thanksgiving was full of good food. Unfortunately, I can't access all the stuff I need to do the above mentioned work. Well, I can access the Clinic stuff, except it takes five times as long to get anything done. On the other hand, I can't snub my family. We've compromised and I'm heading back later today to do more work. Still gotta schedule moving back after this semester is over.

Next, everything else. I have a giant list of games on my door that I haven't played. Heck, I haven't even played stuff that came out over the summer, let alone the stuff people are raving about that just came out like Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead. Oh, and that Red Alert thing. Sorry, I'm not quite as avid a RTS player, although I do love blowing up the computer with nuclear weaponry.

Anyhow, that's where I'm at. No time left and everyone wants me to cash in yesterday.

Back to work.

You are eaten by a gru

and by you I mean me and by gru I mean Clinic and MicroPs.

On a quick note, there's a few addendums to some prior posts.

1) Scripps is a woman's college. K-12 girls do not attend a school across the street. And if they did, saying this was a good thing might be misinterpreted as me promoting pedophilia, which I happen to not support.

2) On Nov 1, I made a few statements on diversity. To clarify, I was merely targeting diversity purely for diversity sake. Diversity is overall a very good thing. It's when groups put diversity as a priority over things like general well being or performance that it gets a little hazy. I for one am not an avid fan of affirmative action (AA) since it can actually hurt the people it tries to help. With AA, people tend to second guess if they made it in on merit or simply because there was a quota to fill. On the other hand, disadvantaged groups should get compensation. As I said, it gets hazy, and while I don't love AA, I don't hate it either.

3) 35% of the incoming class came from California. That's right, Cali people are the minority. I'm a minority by home town AND race! wooooo! Now if only that meant more financial aid....

That's all for now. Stay safe and have fun.

Sayings Around Mudd

There's a few sayings that are used around Mudd. They're pithy, get across an idea, and while perhaps exaggerated there's a bit of truth.

So, let's look at a few:

There are 3 things you can pursue at Mudd. Good sleep, good grades, and good social life. Pick 2. I think we stole this one from Caltech. Not sure. There's also an addendum that states, "if you're in a sport, that's the 4th choice, but you still only get to choose two." Basically, the idea is that there's a lot to do at Mudd, and you're going to be out of time. In some respects, it's true. I know a few people who really do sacrifice sleep for social life and good grades. I can feel good grades chew out my social life as I prioritize sleep. Then again, most of the time it's more like 2.5 choices. Also, you can switch your priorities around and get a nice blend. Bonus points if good grades just come naturally to you, you crazy smart person, so you can get all three. Speaking of grades, that brings us to the next item.

Take your High School GPA. Subtract 2. That's you new Harvey Mudd GPA. OK, this is NOT true. While HMC is very good at battling grade inflation, we don't destroy everyone and put them into the low B range. I happen to be sitting around 3.0, and I believe a value came out before that we average around 3.3 out of 4.0. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, how ever will I compare with those 4.0 GPAs spewing out of some other college? On one hand, you can't. Some people don't realize HMC's rigor, and will promptly ignore you. On the other hand, it's an advantage. There have been testimony to the fact that many groups actually prefer the HMC GPAs because now they can accurately tell how you did. If you get a bazillion 4.0s, how do you know who's better or worse? Coming out of HMC, they know how strong a 3.0 or a 3.5 should be. Also, these people are not just small startups. We're talking about Sun Labs, UCB, Raytheon, Google. Big groups. Just to put things in perspective, less than 10 students in the 50 years have graduated with 4.0 GPAs.

The odds are good but the goods are odd. One of my favorites. This is mostly from the female side of things. We have about a 2:1 male to female ratio, so as a girl you have very good odds about hooking up if you want to. The problem is the applicant pool is not necessarily full of Tom Cruises. That isn't to say we're all crazy or acne pocketed bottle glasses nerds who get monitor tan. The vast majority of us can operate just fine in normal society, just don't ask us about Star Wars or quantum theory. On the flip side, the guys might seem like they're getting the short end of the stick. However, remember that not everyone you're competing against is that socially able. And, as a bonus, Scripps (an all girl school) is just across the street.

Still no date friday night. Ironically, this is on our HMC T-shirts sometimes. It's placed right after the delta-epsilon proof. This is perhaps the biggest lie ever. As far as social life goes, HMC is pretty vibrant. You should at least be acquainted with everyone in your class, and if you hang around cool places like East dorm, you'll meet plenty of people from other classes as well. On top of that, there are regular social events, parties, and yes people do date. There is actually this weird idea in the 5Cs that we are a party school. Seriously. Yet, we have a lower drinking rate than the other colleges, and a lower rate than the national average. The reason we're known for partying is because we throw awesome parties. One of East's is Funball. We rent a bouncy castle, play awesome dance music, and instead of buying booze we buy loads of candy. Oh, and a funball pit and a cotton candy machine. Other notables would be Wild Wild West, the Suds Party (formerly known as Foam Party), Tax Night, Trick or Drink, Trick or Cheese, and many others. There's this special one that North throws that I can't remember the name of. Club two-something-something. But yeah, we can rock it out all night long if we want.

So, now you know a couple of random sayings and the facts behind them. Cya around.

Searching in the Real World

There's this mythical place where you get paid to do homework and your problems sets actually determine the lives of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. WHOA!

Turns out I need to get into this world soon. I'm a graduating senior (or, at least I hope I've graduating), so that means grad school and jobs. It also means I get to feel really weird about myself.

Allow me to put things in perspective. I have a 3.06 GPA. Cumulative. Floated with some As in humanities classes. Did I forget to mention Harvey Mudd battles grade inflation? Then again, I get to brag about helping build a chip. Twice. Except the first one doesn't work.

Turns out most graduate programs have a minimum requirement of their applicants. Even more interesting is that the cutoff is usually a 3.0 undergrad GPA.

As an extra bonus, I'm interested in chip design and robotics and nanotechnology. Bonus points if you mash all three together. This means I kinda need a graduate degree to progress in the field. I guess I could try being like my dad who worked his way up the ranks and is now the senior systems engineer at his company even though he only has a BS. But, the economy also decided to tank. So, hiding in grad school for a bit isn't such a bad thing.

Then again, what if I don't get into grad school? Don't worry, I'm applying for full time jobs elsewhere! This means spamming my resume and brushing up on my interviewing skills. Oh, and deciding if I'm really interested in moving to Oregon or Texas to nab that job. No offers yet. Here's hoping.

In other fun news, I recently discovered I was building the wrong processing element for the chip for Clinic. Oops. Luckily, everyone else appears to have the correct PE, and it's the simplest of the PEs. Unfortunately the code I currently have doesn't pass the test vectors, so I'm also debugging it now. Oh, and I became head of the microarchitecture, which means I need a full chip in Verilog code by Tuesday. Oh, and I'm heading up the Verilog testing so I need to fix Cadence so it will output Verilog so we can test the schematics. Oh, and there's this MicroPs project I'm working on where we're going to make a MIDI transceiver for a keyboard and generate music. Oh, and there's the debugging of the chip we built last year. Oh, and there's these two other humanities classes I'm in. Oh, and I'm going home for a bit on the weekend.

It's gonna be a busy weekend.

It sounded good on paper....

Today's episode will be covering things you think at first are good ideas, but in reality may not be.

Let's start with a simple one. Pure democracy. Everyone has a single vote, majority wins. Yay power to the people and all that. The only problem is this relies on an informed governed/voter population. Unfortunately, the USA is really really bad at this. We rely too much on the echo chamber of the media for our 30 second sound bites to tell us how awesome this one idea is. So, maybe having smarter people in power would be nice. Problem is, this same population has to vote them in. Oops. Solution, inform your public. Yay mandatory schooling! Just make sure you make people learn. But, that's for another rant.

Here's one closer to Mudd. Clinic. Pretty awesome on paper. You're working with a liaison and as an undergrad you're getting real world experience. Awesome! However, you're trying to solve real world problems while in school. Oh, you mean you forgot you still had to do Hum papers or that lab for the other class? Oops. Bonus points if your liaisons don't actually know what the problem really is. One Clinic team (which will not be named here) has a really cool project. However, we're past the half-way mark and they still don't have a good grasp of the problem. It's a problem that relies heavily on sample data, but they don't seem to have any accurate data. Plus, many times they ask for information, the liaison says "figure it out," they come back and present their solution, and the liaison goes "yeah, that's what we were thinking." As much as I'm a fan for finding things out myself and giving people freedom for creativity, sometimes the optimal solution is already known. Please share. So, be warned that Clinic is a huge undertaking. Probably worth it, I'll let you know at the end of mine, but a giant time suck. Plus, you've got to do it in conjunction with other classes. Unless you were awesome, planned ahead, and don't have many classes during Clinic.

Now, another of my gripes. Diversity. Yay multiple views and experiences. The question then becomes, are we doing things for the sake of diversity? It's become a huge question in the College Application Process if a college is accepting and rejecting people based on nationality or gender. After all, we love having numbers with huge non-white and female incoming classes. Makes the news, good stuff for publicity. However, are you lowering the quality of the incoming class? Cheapening the brand of a degree? This also hurts the minority who have to second guess if they're there because they deserve it or because it was a "diversity" choice. Blargh. FYI, I'm a minority. Unfortunately, Asians have this weird idea that we aren't underprivileged, so we don't give out many Asian scholarships. Also, we're one of the largest minorities in the West Coast schools, so we typically don't get preferential treatment. As the saying goes, UCI is the University of Chinese Immigrants and UCLA is University of Caucasian Lost in Asia. =]

Back to recent events, Halloween was pretty awesome. I hope Kyle posts about his Dr. Horrible costume, because it was made of win. If you don't know what Dr. Horrible is yet, go here. But yeah, I didn't dress up. Thought about it, then decided to be a sleep deprived engineer. Turns out it worked well. =] Other favorites were a Music Pirate, a Hamlet/Westley/Random dude in black with a sword, the entire Evil League of Evil including Bad Horse (another Dr. Horrible reference), a random lady costume as an excuse to wear her corset, and Martin dressed up a Room Draw. Yeah, that thing we're not supposed to talk about. East had Trick or Cheese. Each suite buys Cheese, sometimes crackers too, and you go around sampling cheese. This is the counter to Trick or Drink in West. There was also a group who took tin foil, wrapped themselves up, and went to Chipotle. Chipotle gives free burritos to people who come dressed as a burrito, and since they wrap their burritos in tin foil, well...

Anyways, time to get back to my lab. I'm implementing processor interrupts today. yay!

Lies, more lies, and statistics

Here's some statistics I nagged the Admissions Department to give me. Thanks Raissa!

This post is gonna have lots of numbers and explanations and thoughts. Remember, statistics are trying to condense information into simple numeric values. However, many people have learned the art of exploiting statistics, so you should always be wary of the accuracy and authenticity of this statistics. I honestly believe that the two most important classes you can take are a civics class (understand how our government works please, don't just vote based on your parents) and a statistics class (seriously, where did the newspaper gets these numbers?).

Anyways, Mudd numbers!

Graduation Rate: 80% for class of 2008, oscillates between 77-84%
The 4 year graduation rate is defined as graduating in 8 consecutive semesters. This means it doesn't include anyone who took a semester off. I believe there have been posted numbers of around 86% for graduating in 5 years, but I'm not sure what their definition is of that. It might include 4 graded semesters but 1 year taken off, it might be the 9 semester kids, I don't know.

Freshman to Sophomore Retention Rate: 95% for 2007 to 2008
That's right, 95% of the students who entered in 2007 came back for a sophomore year in 2008. Note that this number needs to reduce to somewhere around 80% in 3 years. In reality, Mudd tends to lose the majority of its students somewhere during Sophomore year. By Junior year people are pretty set, unless they got into a major they don't actually like, and Seniors dropping out is pretty rare. Changing to an off-campus major is more likely, but then again that's also rare.

Breakdown of graduating majors (Class of 2008):
Major      Total %
  
Biology     4 2.37%
Chemistry and Biology   4 2.37%
Chemistry    6 3.55%
Computer Science   20 11.83%
Computer Science and Mathematics 7 4.14%
Engineering    73 43.20%
Individual Program of Studies   0.00%
Mathematical Biology   1 0.59%
Mathematics    23 13.61%
Physics     26 15.38%

Off Campus    5 2.96%

Um.... yeah. Engineers rule. We apparently also like the majors enough (or are too lazy) to make our own major. Also, note that there aren't that many Chemists or Biologists. That doesn't mean the departments are bad, we for some reason just don't have a lot of them. Weird. CS probably stole all of them.

Continued Schooling: 34% for 2008
This is typically around 40%. This includes going to professional school as well as graduate programs like a Masters or PhD. PhDs in Physics are especially high, and kinda required if you want to do something Physics-y with that degree, like be a professor.

Average Debt: $17,957 for 2008
Median Average Starting Income: $65K - $70K for 2008
These two combined are weird. I know for a fact I have way more that 18K in debt. Well, to be fair, they're probably only counting student loans, in which case that's closer to my number, but parental loans tend to be big. So, this statistic out of all of them is probably the most misleading. That isn't to say I have to pay all 40K a year, I do get some nice scholarships and such, but my parents definitely are fronting huge loans to get me through this. Don't forget us Engineers tend to skew the income number, a bunch of CS kids last year got eaten by this 80K paying company, and this number probably ignores students who aren't making anything. I mean, grad student stipend is only around 18K.

Females: 40% incoming class of 2008, 37% graduating class of 2008, 36% current total body
Please note that the last few incoming classes have been getting more and more females in them, so it's not like we're losing females faster than we lost males. Well, we might be, but you can't claim these statistics show that. Note that the incoming class of 2007 had a whopping 42% female class, better than any other major tech school. But, as the saying goes, "The odds are good, but the goods are odd." =] To be fair, the majority of the students can pass off as normal humans in society. Just don't ask them about relativity or anything, and you might never know.

"Top 10% of class:
95% of incoming students who gave a HS ranking are in the top 10 % of their class (mind you 157 out of the 202 gave a rank). Out of the whole class regardless if they gave a rank or not 74% of the students are in the top 10%."

"Top 5% of class:
60% of incoming students who gave a HS ranking are in the top 5 % of their class (mind you 157 out of the 202 gave a rank). Out of the whole class regardless if they gave a rank or not 46% of the students are in the top 5%."
This is for this last incoming class. This is also quoted from the e-mail I got back. Yay for transparency.

National Merit Finalists: 61 out of 202 = 30% of the incoming class
I am not one of these. That's right, I was too lazy (or too stupid) to study for that PSAT test. Come to think of it, did I even study for the SAT....?

Out of State: 35% of the incoming class
This is based on permanent address not citizenship or visa status. I am also not one of these.

International Students:
"This is based on citizenship and visa status not permanent address. So non-US citizens and non-permanent residents, would be 5% of the incoming class. We also have a fair amount of Americans abroad, basically US citizens and permanent residents who are graduating HS outside of the US. That number is 3% of the incoming class."
Go diversity. Oh, did I forget to mention one my Clinic Team members is a French Foreign Exchange Student?

Live on campus all years while attending: 99.6%
Um.... yeah. Everyone is on campus. Seriously. Walk down the hall and bug those upperclassmen, they like feeling important. They also want an excuse not to do their own homework. Also, note you are guaranteed housing all your years on campus. And if the dorms run out, they'll help subsidize a place off campus.

Average Mudd Graduating GPA: 3.2?
OK, the Admissions office doesn't track this, but if I recall correctly there was this other article that posted this number or something close to it. We do indeed battle grade inflation.

And now, for something interesting that got written back to me:
"Usually guide books ask for the most recent year but the thing is they are usually 1-2 years behind by the time they publish. For example the Yale Insider's Guide just asked me for numbers for their 2009 edition. I've given them the statistics for the class of 2012 (folks starting fall 08) and that goes to press and is distributed by early to mid 2009. By the time it's being sold we already have stats for the class of 2013 (folks staring fall 09)."

Cool stuff.

Leave a comment if you want me to go dig up other stuff.

Fall Break

Yeah yea, I know this is late. Not that most people care about my punctuality on this blog anyways.

So, I'm still in the middle of Fall Break. Technically, Fall Break begins after your last class of last week, which for me was Thursday afternoon. It extends until your first class Wednesday.

Luckily, we're not in High School where each teacher seems to think that any kind of break is a good time for the students to work on extra projects. Nope. Most professor have a tendency to go easier and let the students unwind a little during break. Winter break is extra awesome since our semesters actually line up and so there really are no classes that span the break. Unlike High School where Winter Break was the perfect time to work on that History Day Project.

Anyways, you might be asking what kind of stuff we do around here for Fall Break. Well, there's the official events endorsed by the official student organizations, such as today is a Disneyland trip. Since I'm currently writing this, and I don't own a laptop, I'm NOT at Disneyland. Hey, I grew up in Southern California and each year for Band we went to Disneyland. It's lost its appeal. I'll go visit again in a few years.

Then there's those other grassroots things. For example, the East Dorm Purity Test. It's a 500 question survey. For everything that you've done, you make a tally mark. At the end of the test, you count how many "yes" marks you have, divide by 5, and subtract that number from 100. Don't round to the nearest integer. So, higher score is better, or worse, depending on your viewpoint.

There's also my own person event, Extended Crack. If you recall, I organize Crack in the AC. Crack being an addictive item, in this case games, and AC referring to the ACademic computing labs. That's right, AC stands for ACademics. We just happen to localize in the computer labs so we can play games. Extended Crack is a special event every Fall Break where we start at noon and play until people leave. This is not to be confused with 24Hr Crack where players try to game for 24 Hours (noon to noon) with breaks for bathroom and food. Anyways, it was pretty awesome. Our lack of public TF2 accounts restricted TF2 a little, but we had some pretty fun times.

There are also smaller things, such as some people decided to have a slumber party in the dorm lounge. Or, a massive trip down to the Village for dinner. Fun stuff.

And of course, there's that bit of homework that you should do to get out of the way but you keep putting off so you can go mess around. Like Clinic.

*sniff*

It's been a busy week.

Lots of Clinic, lots of MicroPs, a presentation and a paper, and research is still being an enigma.

To top it all off, a cold has been going around the campus. And it looks like due to low sleep levels and off-timed allergy meds, I may have caught it. It hasn't moved into my chest yet, so I might have a chance yet. If it does, I might need antibiotics. =[

So yeah, nothing interesting today. Move along.

Instead, enjoy!



FYI, be careful of sketchy people online.

AND MAGIC!!!!

Photo Blog: Intel Site Visit

Well, we just had our Site Visit to the Intel Campus up near Portland, Oregon.

To get there, we had to catch a 6:15am flight, which meant we left HMC at around 4:45am.









































We made a wrong turn, and wasted some time, but got to the airport on time for loading.




During the flight, we got to spend some quality time with Professor David Money Harris and go over stuff we were still a little hazy on and some new ideas we were working on. Here is Braly going over some ideas for a floorplan for the chip. Sorry, spacing was tight. That's Julien's head in the background.







Being in the morning, we had a nice sunrise as we took off. =]














More quality time, this time going over the delay calculations. I wasn't sure I did them right, but after a brief talk with Prof. Harris, I was glad I estimated as close as I could get. Made me happy. However, Lolly and Julien weren't quite as comfortable, so they got some time to review the calculations while Michael and I tried to take a quick nap.



























We couldn't take pictures in the buildings, so no pictures of the presentation nor the really cool lab. I also forgot to take a picture of the nice lunch we had. It was thai food and Braly approved of the quality, so it must have been the good stuff.

But we did get to take a nice picture with the whole team and our liaisons. Left to right: Prof. Harris, Julien, Michael, Sanu, Ram, and Lolly.

It is now about 4pm, so after a cool lab tour and more ideas on how to make our chip, such as about five ways to have a backup clock for the chip, we started driving back to the airport. These two knocked out before I did. =]

Due to some traffic, we got to the terminal at around 6:10pm for a 6:35pm flight. So, Professor Harris drove up the rental, we popped out, grabbed our stuff and started to run. Down a flight of stairs, shooting across the street from the parking structure, into the terminal. A quick glance around to find the Southwest terminals, print our boarding passes, dashing to security, and as we scurried to the gate

we realized the flight had been delayed. Probably one of the few times you're ever glad it was delayed.

The weird thing was I was in the back, so I kept thinking how epic this looked, the classic mad dash to the airplane with the Professor in the lead, and I wanted to take a picture. Problem was, I was running at full speed too.

Luckily, this meant a quick dinner. I also joked with Julien, who is a french exchange student, that now he'd had a Quizno's sandwich for breakfast, thai food for lunch, and a burrito for dinner. Michael joyfully added, "welcome to America." Interestingly, Julien has quite the appetite and once we got back to Mudd planned on making a trip to Jay's Place for more food.

Out we leave the terminal.

Oh, and by the way, Lolly really hates pictures of her, so by now she was threatening physical violence on my person if I kept taking pictures.

Chilling waiting for the shuttle back to the parking lot where we stashed the Clinic van.

Back at Mudd, safe and sound, much wiser than we left, and a heck of a lot more tired. It's 11pm in this picture.

And that's that. A full day spent traveling and talking with people way more knowledgeable than us. We did get quite a bit out of it, such as some fun times together and learning about how Intel tests its chips. Oh, and we got to see the teraflop chip Intel built a few years ago. Crazy awesome stuff.

Now I just have to finish the MicroPs lab, a presentation on Haydn, VLSI research, Clinic Verilog code hacking, Cell library components......

filler

I'm busy. Clinic + MicroPs + Research + 2 hums = lots of work.

The fact that I still go to Crack in the AC and WarCrack regularly isn't exactly helping. Well, I guess I have an excuse for Crack in the AC since I run the thing.

Quick update, though, I have my MicroPs lab done in record time. 6.5 Hours. Oh yeah. I even have the thing able to take two buttons being pressed at the same time. I'll try to remember to post pictures.

In the meantime, pictures of research! Research testing the chip we made last semester in VLSI. It doesn't work.... =[

Mudd Lore: Camilo

This is actually pretty recent lore.

Camilo was a student of Mudd during my Freshman year.

Camilo was extremely active physically. For example, he had trained under pretty much every martial art out there, and had a love for Chinese Kung Fu. All of the styles of Kung Fu. He was also incredibly buff and would climb trees for fun. Here are a few little stories about him.

Camilo one night was writing his Hum paper, and decided to try and complete it in a tree. So, he climbed up onto a tree branch with his laptop and worked on through the night. He woke up the next morning, still in the tree. However, he had company. A squirrel was sitting on the branch next to him and eying him peculiarly.

There is a special rule in ITR Games called the Camilo Rule. There is a certain mode of the game that consists of a necromancer and zombies. Of interesting note is the the zombies can kill people they touch, except other dead people and the necromancer. Camilo was the necromancer. He promptly found himself a zombie, picked the person up, and commenced running through the hallways using the zombie as a weapon. So, now we have a rule that you cannot pick up zombies as the necromancer unless the person consents and the person getting hit by the zombie consents. No major harm done, just lots of people trying to figure out why Camilo was running around carrying someone under his arm and touching the remaining survivors with it to kill them. More of a balance issue.

Camilo loved weaponry. He in fact was in the process of completing his full suit of armor. It was bits and pieces that he liked from different groups, such as Germany or the Ottoman Empire. He used this armor for a special mock battle event one weekend where people gather and setup huge battle scenarios. He also was bringing Kyle Marsh along this time. However, Kyle had never done this kind of thing before, so asked if they could suit up and practice. So, Kyle is suited up in armor and waiting in the courtyard for Camilo. Someone came by, did a double take, then rushed into their room and sent an email saying "Armed Combat in the quad in five minutes." As Camilo exited his room in full armor, the dorm speakers commenced to blare fight music. On the list, Mortal Kombat, Ultimate Showdown, and others. It was quite the epic night.

Camilo decided we didn't have enough swords around. So, he commenced to teach people how to build a sword out of PVC pipe, pipe insulation, and duct/electrical tape. He also then gave lessons on how to use them in classic German broadsword style. There were many mock battles in the quad. So, people jokingly commented about the training of the East Army. There was also training in martial arts. Good times.

Unfortunately, Camilo is no longer around. He somehow epically failed nearly all his freshman year classes. Most attribute it to the fact that in High School he had never studied except perhaps the night before a test. Unfortunately, that doesn't work at Mudd. So, he took a leave of absence and was considering coming back in another year.

Instead, he's attending college somewhere else and teaching German broadsword for $30/hr.

What I've Learned!

Now to share some cool things I've learned so far!

Did you know that an argument can be valid, but not sound and vice versa? Take for example the following argument: "If it is raining, the street is wet. It is raining, therefore the street is wet." This is perfectly valid. It is logically consistent. However, it is not sound since if I look out my window, it is not raining. Soundness requires the premises to be tested to be true and for the conclusion to be true. In the same token, "I am male, I am right-handed, therefore I can type" is invalid, but every statement is true. Fun.

Did you know that you shouldn't inhale the fumes from soldering? Even though the new modern solder has to be lead-free by the lovely new laws in place, there's a very high chance that giant roll of solder you're using still has lead in it. Granted it's pretty inert in the solder, and it has wonderful electrical and mechanical properties, but people freaked about lead in anything and so we've had to remove it. Stupid politicians. But yeah, it also smells really bad.

Did you know that the way we do secure communication on the internet is through encryption? One half of the encryption key is a public key that you broadcast. The second half is then created and sent specifically for your transaction. One the key is setup, you then have to encode and decode your messages, which can take quite a bit of processing power. So, people have figured out algorithms to help try and make this process faster.

Did you know that there is a non-zero chance for a tied electoral college this election year? What would happen is that the house would vote, 1 vote per state. Yay politics!

Did you know that East currently has no TV mounted on the wall? After the renovations, which got cut short because the contractors took too long, the mounting hooks were not replaced on the wall. Initial theory was that they were buried inside the wall, since to upgrade the dorm for the earthquake code the walls got thicker. However, searching for them with magnets has come up empty, so we're guessing they simply haven't bee put back in the wall.

Did you know that this year's Frosh are especially competent at showering people? Here's some pictures from our first dorm meeting to illustrate!






So, here we have people getting showered, and the requisite hug afterward. And finally, DONUTS! After each dorm meeting, we get donuts. Showerers and showerees get first dibs.

Anyways, that's it for this week. Clinic goes and eats more souls now.

What's Important in Life

At least according to Prof. Jacobsen.



In other news, my Clinic will be to make a shiny chip to help speed up cryptography algorithms. Return to the team Michael Braly, adding in an exchange student Julien, and other friend but not on this blog yet Lolly Simoni.

Oh, and Crack starts up today.

Yay for busy school week!

Politicks

The video is a little dated, but still so true.



Let me be up front. I happen to classify myself as a Conservative. I tend towards conservative social policies and some economic ones as well. But, I hope to stay fairly balanced in this particular post. Apologies in advance.

Let's think back a bit. Back to before I left school for the summer. Back when the primaries were still going strong, and Obama and McCain just started to pull ahead. I was eating at the Hoch and we were discussing the candidates, and most of us agreed that a contest between Obama and McCain would be fairly solid. On one side you've got the fresh face of change, on the other a conservative who isn't off his rocker.

Fast forward to the summer. Obama has the majority, McCain is off campaigning, and we start seeing the weak points in each candidate.

Now, we're in convention mode.

I am a firm believer that the most important class you can take and must understand is a good Economics and Civics course. Why? It's so you can understand the basic workings of economy and government and don't get cheated by fast talking dealers or 30 second soundbites from the news. My economic policy would be to raise taxes and pull down spending. Essentially, let's get rid of that stupid federal debt, or at least stop increasing it. As it stands, simply paying off the interest (i.e. minimum payments) on the debt takes up the largest chunk of our federal budget. Not only is this stifling other programs, but this is just paying off minimum payments. Any smart economist knows that paying minimum payments means you're going to be paying a whole lot more from the interest than the original principle amount. There's the whole compound interest problem, and the fact that it takes forever to pay off the debt. This is why credit card debt is such a huge problem in the US. Interesting fact, we've actually managed to, on average, be in personal debt as a nation, even with crediting our retirement funds. That's negative personal savings. Aren't we such a gluttonous people. Plus, our debt is being bought through bonds by foreign organizations. Not good.

But enough about generalities, let's rip these candidates a new one.

First, Obama. The easiest target is that he's young. He hasn't experienced a whole lot, and probably hasn't solidified what he believes in. Then again, this might be a virtue since he's not stuck in his ways yet and can change his mind based on new data and ideas. My personal concern is his voting record and his speech abilities. He has voted on several issues, and his record shows him to be the most liberal voter ever. He was the singular person voting against the Born Alive Protection Act in Illinois. It wasn't named the same thing, but it was essentially the same bill. Furthermore, there are several instances where he voted as merely present, or even better, he voted present then changed his vote after everyone had voted. Sounds a little sketchy to me.

As far as his speeches, he is perhaps the best orator the nation has seen in modern times when on a teleprompter. He has a great delivery, huge ideals, and the ability to whip his followers up and make them believe that the waters of the ocean will begin to recede at his command. When he's off the teleprompter, he keeps pausing and stuttering and throwing in lots of "um"s and sometimes plain out lies. Recently was the panel with Rick Warren, and let's be honest, Rick Warren is probably gunning for McCain but as far as moderators go he was solid, let the candidates speak, and gave simple concise questions. Yet the big Obama mess ups were his "above my pay grade" comment on deciding when a child gets full human rights, and his claim that he worked with McCain on the finance and ethics reform bills. He may have worked briefly on the ethics reform bill, but the finance reform bill was done and in law before Obama even was elected to the federal Senate. Now, all of my friends can attest to me flubbing up my wording quite often, but Obama really needs to get a handle on this chronic problem. I don't want the messiah, I just want a good President who can candidly tell me what he thinks. None this of trying to have both sides of the issue.

Last thing is the company he keeps. Reverend Wright, his grandmother, Bill Ayers (now convicted), and others that have basically not made Obama look good. As an added bonus, Obama then commences to disown them, or as the conservative radio talk people like to call, "throw them under the bus." I will concede that we can't know everything about all the company we keep, and I'm sure it's a little extra publicity since he's on our newspapers every day searching out all his brief encounters. However, some of them had to have shown signs. Reverend Wright is a very good example. Led a church for many, many years, and I'm sure that's not the first time he made interesting remarks. If anything, I'd hope he turned them down knowing Obama was part of his congregation.

On to McCain. He's old. Very old. Plus, he's not necessarily in the peak of health with the skin cancer and the swollen left cheek. On the other hand, you hope this means he has more experience and knows his way around the government and foreign affairs better, but it also probably means he's more set in his ways. Beyond that, he's a bit of an odd cookie. The reason we liked him a year ago was he was a moderate conservative, but had a pleasant liberal streak sometimes, especially on environmental policy. The problem is recently he's tried shifting right. Really, really right. There was a period where he was agreeing with Bush almost word for word, even while major advisers were saying otherwise. For example, they made statements about not even talking with hostile leaders, while their advisers wanted to at least give diplomacy a shot.

McCain is also a bit hawkish. He's a big military buff, and in a way that's good. A strong military is a powerful show of ability as well as a defender of the populace, plus it's usually what applies all our academic research into something more practical. However, when he made the comment about staying in Iraq for another 100 years, plenty of people were up in arms and with good reason. McCain is big on the military. He fights to win. Unfortunately, as it stand right now, most people don't want our military spread around the world. Getting tangled in too many conflicts is generally a bad idea. Just look at all the major wars in the past. Two front wars end badly. Heck, you could learn that from a simple strategy game.

McCain is also subject to being called the second Bush. We've been giving Bush a bad record for a variety of things, some warranted and some not, but the fact is most of us just don't like our President all that much. Big selling point is Iraq and the perceived trumped up charges on WMD production. Looking back, it is true the evidence was a little shaky, but on the other hand many people in the field still suspected Hussein since he broke his promises before. We also did find a little evidence that the program were ready to start up again, but not enough to really validate the claims. Then there's the slumping economy, which I personally blame on the stupid banks and lenders but oh well. But let's face it, Iraq is widening our debt, he's not the best on economic nor environmental policy, and his "either with or against us" attitude right after 9/11 was probably a bad idea concerning foreign relations. While I don't think McCain is quite as bad, you will have to suffer some classic conservative ideas such as businesses lift up everyone in the economy and growing economy is a good thing, sometimes no matter what cost. Which unfortunately recently has merely squashed the middle class, and prompted a nice recession. Then again, us middle class people always get slighted. Not rich enough to pay for stuff outright, but never poor enough to get much government support. Guess I gotta make it big to get out of here, or go broke trying.

McCain is also the "maverick." On some cases, this is a good thing. He reformed public financing, has been butchering earmarks, and generally is not afraid to go against the party. On the other hand, this makes him a little unpredictable, so you can't take what he says now as the truth. As I mentioned before, he swung way way right for a while. Thankfully he's a bit more sane now, and even had the guts to pull out quite the Vice President choice. He has been solid on a couple of main issues, for example abortion, so you can definitely line up or rail against some of his core ideals.

A minor note. Everyone keeps complaining about this recession. Economists will tell you it's part of the natural economic cycle and a requirement to help trim down the business sectors and make things more efficient again. We skipped our last two, one being around the dot com bubble bursting which was offset by a booming housing market. Not surprisingly, that formed a housing bubble which is currently deflating. So, recession is an OK thing, just as long as it's not a nose dive. Don't I sound like a horrible person, promoting rising unemployment and failing businesses?

Now here's something they're both weak on. Energy policy. On one hand, giving a bit of relief on energy costs would be nice. There's the Alaskan oil, offshore, shale, etc. Why not knock off the speculators a little with some drilling. Just the perceived promises of future supply can kick the prices around quite a bit. On the other hand, just because it's there doesn't mean we should use it. I'm impressed the American people finally got out of their cars for once instead of being the gas gluttons we usually are, and as a result the price of fuel dropped. Basic economics at work.

The truth is, we should move to less polluting and more renewable areas, like solar, wind, and so forth. Problem is solar only works where there's sun, and we only capture around 12% of the energy right now. Wind is OK, but they can be an eyesore and you need strong winds to make it worth it. Something that only happens in select regions. Nuclear is nice, but unfortunately the capital costs are huge, and there's the small matter of what to do with the bloody nuclear waste. Water generation is actually the best in efficiency, but setting up dams and getting the giant turbines are huge, not to mention the destruction of the riverbeds by the giant lake you form. The thing is that these potentially pollute less than continually burning gas and oil for power, not to mention we're taking advantage of the more natural forms of power available in nature.

I will be the first to admit that none of these sources of energy are perfect. None are the perfect panacea to our problem. Some are actually a little impractical, especially since energy harvesting systems and batteries aren't quite there yet. But that just means research needs to get on top of this issue. Many other nations are starting to catch up or even overtake the US in terms of research and academic abilities, and we need to step it up. For example, we're losing the biogenetic research to Asia. They house their scientists in the latest labs with huge amounts of funds and almost no restrictions. We lock them into academia with bureaucracy and them scrambling for fellowships and grant money. Nothing wrong with competition, but the spigot could be loosened a little.

So now we come to my problem. Who the heck do I vote for? Also, in case you didn't notice, I contradicted myself by saying the government should spend less, but then I advocate more research funding. In the end, there is no perfect answer. All the economically sound ones are unpopular with the general populace. How many like hearing that unemployment is a good thing? However, all the popular ones (like health care for all) are economic suicide, not to mention most major government projects to "help" the underprivileged have a bad habit of backfiring in some weird way. So, you do need to cut the candidates some slack because neither of the poles are going to work perfectly.

I personally happen to agree with McCain on more issues than Obama, and I simply don't think Obama is ready. He feels a little too tricky and changes his mind too readily. Maybe next time when he's solidified a little and shaved off his more radical ideas. Then again, I'm not enthralled with McCain and how some of his policies are flat out wrong. Not gonna be a great next four years either way.

Here's my wimpy advice. Stay away from the soundbites, from the sensational news, and take a look at the facts. Try to not listen to the current claims, they're propaganda to get your vote. Take a look at their past voting history, their decisions, and what they've done. As much as they swing around now, they'll return to their old ways. For better or for worse.

And even if you hate both of them, what can you do? It's still a two party system, and you might as well throw away your vote because Ron Paul is not gonna win.

Welcome to the 50th Percentile

or below.

Perhaps one of the most surprising and yet most obvious things about Mudd is that there's smart students here. The obvious factor is, well, quite obvious. It's bragged about, stories are written about it, and the statistics support it. The surprising part is what students do when they get here.

They think it's gonna be like High School.

You know. The place where you're the best of the best. Maybe valedictorian, top 10, National Honors, smartest person around, impressive and gawked over by teachers by your natural insight and talent. Plus, you've probably got some other talent, such as being involved in Band like I was, or art, or a sport, or taking over the student government. You were on top of the class. Maybe a little socially ostracized, but you were excelling nonetheless.

The problem is that everyone at Mudd was the same as you. They all were near the top of their class, they took advanced courses, they have special talents, and they're also here to prove their mettle before stepping out into the real world and dazzling it with their brilliance and awesomeness.

This presents you with some interesting circumstances. Best case, you're still the brightest in the class and breeze through your homework. Lucky you. For the rest, you're not on top of the grades, you're dreaming of As while you shoot for that B and sometimes settle for the C or even the D. You're not admonished with proposals to do extra work or to be on the team for the big project. Next best case is you've still got that special talent. You wow people with your guitar skills at parties or your ability to frag anyone on the net. You dazzle the halls with art or show the competition who's boss on the court.

But then again, maybe you're not. For perhaps the first time in your life, you have to be the average person. Or, even worse, you're the baseline, the minimum passing grade, the straggler.

The question is what to do?

I've mentioned before that you don't want to become the attention seeking jerk who annoys everyone, so here's some alternatives. Be content that you're the 50th percentile of the top 10% of the nation, and perhaps even the world. Improve yourself so you still shine in the areas you want, even if you're not the best. Diversify and pick up new things that interest you. Reach out to others. Do something. Do not sulk about not being the best around.

Personally, I'm somewhere just below the 50th percentile. The thing is I've never quite been on top. I was in low end of the top 10 of my class, but couldn't move up no matter how hard I tried. I never made first chair Flute in Band. In some ways, I always knew I wasn't gonna be on the top. Coming to Mudd solidified that idea. Now I live with Cs on my report card, and I'm OK with them. I've chosen some areas and hobbies that I enjoy, and have diversified my resume. For those who know me, they know I'm quite interested in games. I enjoy games for their novelty, the competition, the balancing, the strategy, and even the critique of games. Even though I almost never top the scoreboard. Perhaps more surprising is that I didn't play many video games before arriving at Mudd. I've also worked on my musicianship. I am still a far cry from my musical peers who can tear up the room with amazing ingenuity and skill. I've decided that I won't give in to failure, and will enjoy myself and do my best while I'm at Mudd.

It all boils down to this: don't sweat it. Yes, coming to Mudd is difficult. It will most likely challenge you. People have been scared away by this. Most people will break down and cry eventually during the course of their education at Mudd. There have been stories of people who had to be forced to come back to Mudd.

However, you are also coming to one of the most accepting community imaginable. You don't have to go out of your way to prove yourself the best. Just do your best and make sure to have some fun along the way. I'm sure you can find yourself a niche if you really wanted. Even if it's just being the person who hangs around the lounge too much.

Oh, and on a brighter note, the two people that I know of who were forced back to Mudd eventually found their place and graduated from Mudd, content and glad they came back.

Don't Panic (?)

While the witty Douglas Adams placed this little gem of wisdom on his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we have to ask ourselves why not?

We live in a time where there’s plenty to panic about. There are global items, like global warming and theories of peak oil and that California is long overdue for a giant earthquake that will eventually split us off from the rest of North America. There’s local stuff, like the fact that both Obama and McCain don’t seem to be all we thought they were, or the state of the economy and the housing bubble bursting. Then there’s personal stuff. You’re moving up in life, getting a job, moving out of the house, heading out to college. Face it, there are plenty of good reasons for why we might go running around the neighborhood grabbing dried and canned food and buying plenty of weapons and ammo and a shortwave radio.

Of course, we haven’t yet. Most of us believe that there’s no reason to go nuts. It’s either in the future so we’ll worry about it then, or we can handle it, or there’s nothing we can even do about it. After all, giant meteors crashing into Earth is a very real threat, but the probability of it happening is close to nil and there’s not much you can do if it does come along. Same with the Sun going supernova, although they expect we’ve still got a couple million years to go, and we should have intergalactic space travel by then.

But here’s a question. Should we panic more often? Or, conversely, should we never panic at all?

In the past, there was a famous theory that the population of humans would increase exponentially, and the food supply only linearly. Basic math indicates this would have caused a giant famine, and the only way we would survive would be by portions of the population dying by war, famine, or disease. Well, we’re still around. Why? It is because we’ve been able to increase the food supply to match the needs of our exponentially growing population and not because we’ve managed to kill each other off for that little bit of food. Ah the wonders of science.

Economists have often been called the scientists of doom. Inflation will not stop, and eventually things will spiral out of control as the inflation compounds upon more inflation. That is, at least according to classic economic thought. Mind you that’s a huge oversimplification, but we’re still alive. Sure the inflation rate is high, the dollar is getting weaker, and oil prices are higher than we’d like, but there hasn’t been a giant communist revolution nor have there been huge upheavals of the economic system. Well, unless you count those couple of stock market crashes.

One might argue that the only thing that fuels science, or any advancement in general, is fear, and to an extent a bit of panic. Or, to borrow another saying, necessity is the mother of invention. If there is a need, and someone cares enough, it can probably be fixed. Except if the need is faster than light travel (or some FTL drive) without the folding of the space time continuum. We’re pretty sure that’s impossible. Thus, it is sometimes a good idea, and even healthy to panic just a bit.

Let me give a more practical example. There’s a saying around Mudd that you should take your high school GPA, subtract 2 points, and then you have your new Harvey Mudd GPA. Probably you’re panicking about getting a 2.2 GPA average and how horrible that will look to the scholarships and graduate schools. So, what should you do? If you allow yourself to panic just a bit, perhaps you’ll work harder and exceed that prediction and maintain a 3.5 GPA instead.

On the flip side, there’s stuff you shouldn’t panic about. Meteors are a prime example. Even the Harvey Mudd GPA curse isn’t that big of a deal. After all, the average GPA is closer to about 3.2 at Mudd, and graduate schools are glad for Mudd not having grade inflation. It makes those grades have weight and they can understand much better your abilities just from a look at your GPA. They also understand that there have been less than 10 students who have graduated with a 4.0 in the history of Harvey Mudd College.

So, what am I getting at? Fundamentally, a little bit of panic and worry is healthy. It keeps you going and helps put stuff in perspective. There are things you should panic about, like the energy concerns or nuclear war or your checking balance. Then there’s stuff you can loosen up a little bit once you know all the facts. Trust me. Those headlines on the newspaper are just to sell pages. If you actually read the whole article, thing’s aren’t quite as bad as you may be led to believe. Especially with some of those more slanted papers. But I digress.

In closing, be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

In moderation.

Thing I Wish Existed in Real Life

OK. I'm sorry. I claimed I would be giving updates regularly and epically failed yesterday. Will try to do better in the future.

To the topic of the day, stuff that is not in real life that I wish did exist. This is not a definitive list, and again probably has very little to do directly with Mudd.

Magic. In the most basic of definitions, this is pretty much anything that bends or breaks what we consider reality. For example, invisibility potions and being able to conjure up fireballs and all that kind of stuff. There's actually been some interesting pieces of work that consider what the world would be like if magic was the norm and you even went to college to learn about magic and elven history instead of thermodynamics and quantum physics. But yeah, that would be kinda cool. Of course, knowing me, I'll be the moron with little to no magical aptitude and have to make due buying wards and enchantments from the local shop.

A Soul/Spirit Analyzer. Maybe it's just me, but being able to analyze and detect qualities of the soul/spirit/spirit would be really cool. For example, you could do a scan and find out that your anger problem stems from a certain incident or preconceived notion, and then perhaps it would zap it or you could deal with it. Something similar to perhaps how in Psychonauts you go into people's brains and help sort out their issues. Maybe it's because I have too many issues myself or it's my self-improving nature.

Lightsabers. Seriously. Best weapon evar. Cuts anything except another lightsaber. Has this really cool hum. And it can deflect laser blasts. LAZERS! You just don't get any cooler than that.

Gundams. OK, I know they break physics since they're the biggest robot around and yet are the most agile, but the very concept of a giant battle machine with weapons and beam swords flying around and doing ninja-esque moves is pretty sweet. Space combat is also really fun since there's no natural "down" so in effect you have to watch in all 6 directions for enemies. Read Ender's Game for some interesting theories about Zero-G battles.

Zero-G generation. Zero-G chambers, directed zero point energy, lots and lots of magnets. It doesn't matter. Being able to float around and be weightless is pure awesome. Enough said.

Heads Up Display. Eventually the Cyber Warrior program will equip our soldiers with something like this. The idea is a HUD which provides useful information. Stuff like health status (heath bar?), quest log, overhead view of surrounding people, highlight useful objects, infrared overlays, and of course a reticle and ammo readout just in case those terrorist wanna bring us a traditional war in our home towns. Everyone suit up with your carbine rifles and shotguns, and the HUD will even help highlight enemies, allow team communication, and notify you friend from foe. Even just an automatic "quest log" to keep track of your to-do list would be sweet.

So, there you have it. Fun stuff that could be really cool to have around in real life.

Oh, and check out Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog. You won't regret it.

Being a Band Geek

Now for something not Mudd related.

I happen to be musical in ability. Granted, I couldn’t make a living out of it, but I can play instruments competently and sing not horribly. In High School, I played in the Band. I in fact played the flute. Yes, I am in fact a male flute player.

Being very involved in Band in my recent past, I still have quite the affinity for it. Having a younger brother who is also in Band doesn’t exactly hurt either. Recently we got to see a Drum Corps show at Mount Sac. For those of you non-band geeks, a Drum And Bugle Corps (we tend to just call them Drum Corps) is kind of a better marching band. However, as its name implies, there’s only drums and bugle instruments. Drums encompass all percussion, so there is a pit line. There is also a Color Guard team that performs with them, adding color and cool rifle tosses to the mix.

The key is that they are really really good. If you check out teams like Blue Devils or the Santa Clara Vanguard on Youtube, you’ll see just how awesome their formations are. Trust me, getting formations correct is really really hard. The thing you’re missing is the sound. As cool as they sound on screen, it’s nothing to a live performance. Think wall of sound. Surround Sound. Dolby 5.1 Bose speakers movie theatre sound. It’s insane how powerful these guys’ lungs are. Cool stuff. So last Saturday we got to see the Blue Devils and the Santa Clara Vanguard blow away the competition. Sure it’s the beginning of the season, so they’re not quite up to their usual stuff, but it was still really cool.

In more recent news, the Band marched in the local Fourth of July parade. Luckily (or unluckily) my brother is the historian for the Band. This means that near the end of the year he’s going to get very little sleep and free time as he edits the giant Band Slideshow for the end-of-the-year banquet. It also means that we need to start getting footage now, in the forms of me walking along the parade route with the Band taking video and my dad taking pictures. So, kinda hot and a good leg workout. Hopefully the camera wasn’t shaking too much. We throw away footage that will make the viewers motion sick.

I guess you could say I’m still a Band geek. I still play the flute on occasion. It was weird when I found I was marching in sync with the Band, left foot on the downbeat. I bet I could still out drill-down most people. And being old and graduated, I get to moan and groan about how my days were so much better than the current Band. It’s kind of a right to be able to say “in my day.” Partially it’s mocking the stereotypical elderly person in the movies, but we seriously marched uphill in the sun to conditions ourselves. Both ways along the field. With horns up.

For your viewing pleasure, some Drum Corps videos:
Blue Devils 2007 1st Place DCI Championship Show

Santa Clara Vanguard 2007 DCI Championshhips show

Yokahoma Inspires, one of Japan’s new Drum Corps

Food Glorious Food

I’ll be trying to update about once every other week. At least until school starts. Or I run out of ideas. Whichever comes first. You can also use the RSS feed feature to check up for when I update.

One of the biggest concerns for most people is what you’re going to eat when you go away. First, let’s get something straight. Your mom and dad are no longer around. So, you’re not going to get your favorite lasagna dish or fresh soup or favorite sweet and sour pork chops. If you’re a regular on-the-town kind of junkie, well, feel free to run rampant in The Village or a quick trip down to any of the other food joints around.

As for the rest of us who prefer food that doesn’t come off a menu or waiting in a giant line for reservations, we have the dinning halls. You might still have to wait in line to get your food, but at least you’re not paying gas to drive out. Convenience is nice and sometime people shy away from going down to Pomona to eat because it’s too far. See how lazy you become when you get to college? OK, to be fair, it might also be because you don’t have time to spare due to that giant project that is due tomorrow, but usually it’s because we’re lazy.

The meal plan is a required part of your life at Harvey Mudd College with the exception being if you live in Sontag or a special Atwood suite, and are not a freshman. Basically you choose a number: 8, 12, or 16. Bigger number means you pay more. It also corresponds to how many meals you get per week and how many Flex dollars you get. Please note there is NO rollover, so on midnight between Saturday and Sunday your amount gets refilled. This leads to a phenomenon knows as “Flexing out” where you go down on Saturday night somewhere and check how much Flex you have left. Then you try to spend as much as you can. Be sure to get there at least before 11:30pm, or else the line might be long enough for you to not Flex out in time. Flex dollars are usable for a variety of things, including snacks, drinks, more meals at dining halls, muffins at the breakfast cart, chocolate on Scripps, etc.

Meals are used one per meal, and only up to one per meal. Since all meals in their eyes are created equal, breakfast costs less Flex than dinner but both are worth a single meal. So, if you plan on using Flex to supplement your meals, use it on earlier meals. The meals themselves are actually pretty good. They do have a tendency to be a little greasy or over flavored, like how their idea of Asian food is throw as much soy or teriyaki sauce at it as you possibly can, but it’s better than a lot of colleges. It’s also buffet style, which is a blessing and a curse. Be very wary of the Freshman 15 here. They also have a decent rotation of foods and a few staples that you can fall back on if nothing appeals to you. I have seen some people eat cereal for dinner. One of my friends eats nothing but white bread, chocolate chip cookies, bananas, milk, and vitamin supplements. I’m not sure why, but the guy isn’t diabetic yet. They have served stuff like hamburgers, pot roast, curry chicken, soup bread bowls, lasagna, gyros, Swedish meatballs and noodles, and turkey cutlet to name a few. Don’t worry if you miss a dish, it’ll be rotated back in eventually.

One of the coolest things is that the chefs have been given plenty of freedom. It’s become a familiar event when one of the chefs concocts something new, like a Mexican pizza or something, and offer it up alongside the usual fare. I strongly advise you try them at least once. Not only is it nice variety, but usually they make good stuff. Just goes to show they can cook and not just mass produce a recipe.

Now, Harvey Mudd has its dinning hall called Hoch-Shanahan, or the Hoch (pronounced like “hawk” in Mudd slang). However, we’re right across the street from Scripps College, which has its own dinning hall, and a few blocks from CMC with their own. And lucky us our meal plans work on all the Claremont College Campuses. So, if you’re tired of the hamburgers from the Hoch for lunch, enjoy a nice trip down to CMC and their giant sandwich bar. Pitzer is known for organic options. Pomona is more of what you’d expect in an older back East College. Mudd tends to be a bit more fast-food in nature. Plus, you can use your Flex at their shops as well. So, you can head down to Pomona and the Coop and buy stuff there as well as the stuff on Mudd at Jay’s Place. This actually creates something interesting, since they get money based on attendance. By spending your meals or Flex on another College, Mudd has to send part of your meal plan payment to them, and the same thing if an off-campus student spends their meals on Mudd. Thus, it’s an incentive to make good food that the students like to attract more students, thus earning them more money. Pretty cool, huh.

If you get off the meal plan or have access to a kitchen, there’s also your own cooking, which is very much subject to the chef’s abilities. Or you can get yourself a microwave and lots of Ramen, but I wouldn’t advise that. At least bring a rice cooker and some furikake, although that’s not too healthy either.

In short, you won’t starve here. Or if you start looking starved, we’ll track you down and force feed you.

Being a Real Engineer

Double feature today.

Now that I’ve been in a real job for a while, I can make a few statements about a job and how well Harvey Mudd prepares you for it. OK, it’s not a real job, it’s an internship, but I’m getting paid to do it.

First, a quick overview of my job. I’m an intern at CornerTurn. They’re a small company that broke off from a larger firm so that they could do engineering without all the bureaucratic methodology. They specialize in special application boards, although they’ll do a variety of tasks. One of their claims to fame is a special internet router designed for boats. People on their yachts want high speed broad band internet, but that requires a giant satellite dish. So, they designed a special router that can use multiple antennas and combine their signals into a single internet connection. This means that they can use a couple of small antenna, and treat it as a single Ethernet connection to your computer. Pretty neat, or at least I think so.

My particular job is to do whatever they want. This so far means that I’m working on three separate projects in parallel. First, I am building a printed circuit board for monitoring liquid levels in a storage tank. Second, building scripts for hashing data from a remote sensor that’s been acting up. And lastly, trying to understand and apply energy harvesting for another remote sensor.

The cool thing is I’ve actually been helpful. Not in the thanks for doing the grunt work helpful, but some of my ideas have actually found important results. Looking at the second project, I’ve been building MATLAB scripts to parse data that we get from a sensor. It’s supposed to find itself using GPS, and then report. The problem is that for some reason we’ve been having periods where there’s no GPS data in the database. So, I’ve been parsing NMEA protocol and console dumps trying to help track down the problem.

One of the things I did was to use what I’ve termed gap analysis, or plotting the duration of the time gap in the signals. I’ve recently learned that gap analysis is a term for something else, so probably delta analysis would have been better. This creates an interesting graph where these peaks show up, indicating a giant gap in the data stream. I’ve also created ways to compare these gaps in the NMEA packets the database makes with the attempts of the sensor to try and transmit a GPS fix, and to track throughput of packets. One key element we found was the sensor would try to transmit, but either it’s getting lost or the database drops them. It’s still unsolved, but hopefully we’re moving forward.

As far as Mudd getting us ready, I think the answer is they’re doing a good job. I have had to put my knowledge of energy and computer science into practice already. I’ve done some physics and mechanical applications. As a bonus, the theory has given me a really strong base. Sure I don’t know everything, but they can start explaining something and I’ve figured out what’s going on and what they want by the end of their explanation. Plus it’s not all spoon feeding, I’ve been working mostly on my own to figure out the energy harvesting, and that’s been quite the experience. It turns out that there are lots of options, not just solar cells. There happens to be vibration and heat as well, but those only seem to work well if there are strong driving forces. Not so great in the middle of nowhere, which just so happens to be where we want this sensor to be.

All in all, it’s been pretty good. I even get my own desk that’s getting filled with lots and lots of datasheets. That’s right, better get used to scouring datasheets people, they’ll be with you for many years to come.

Home Away From Home

No, this is not some philosophical insanity about where your home is or touchy feely piece about being far away from home.

I happen to live in Hacienda Heights, California. For the non-locals, that’s about 30 minutes drive southwest of Harvey Mudd. San Gabriel Valley region. As such, my perspective on the whole living in the dorms and away from my home and family is pretty lightweight. In fact I go back at least once a month since I have duties running Powerpoint for my church.

Since the school year has ended, the dorms shut down for everyone except the summer researchers and Summer Math kids. Summer Math is an opportunity to take your entire sophomore year of math in about six weeks. I personally thought it was intense, awesome, but not for everyone. Especially if you mess up your sleep schedule on Monday and have to wait until the weekend to reset it. Back to my topic, the dorms shut down. So, everyone has to move somewhere else. For me, that was back home to Hacienda Heights. For others, it was off to apartment for jobs or internships or summer camps.

It’s a weird transition moving back. One of the best things about college, at least for me, is the freedom; the ability to set your own timetable, your own rules, and reap what you sow. As I discussed in a previous post, you have to set priorities about how you spend your time. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), Harvey Mudd College is not a place where you can have it all; unless you’re some weird mutated genius protégée who can do all the homework for all the classes for the whole the week in one hour.

Coming back home to where you live by the rules of your parents, the bills, the chores, the siblings, and of course no more college high-speed internet, which I might add is very important for some of us, can be a little jarring. I can’t stay up until midnight anymore, although that’s from the requirement I wake up at around 6am for work. I can’t just walk down the hall and check out what the lounge is doing. I can’t take a bike ride down to the Motley or see a performance from an orchestra.

On the other hand, it’s back to the real world. Yes, there are such things as rising gas prices; and they’re rising like WHOA. There’s this thing called money which you’ve been hemorrhaging to pay for tuition that comes in handy for stuff like food and electricity bills. Oh right, and you will not live perpetually in a world where all your friends live about a five minute walk away. Sorry. And no more F&M means you have to vacuum the house regularly.

So, I’d have to say it’s a blessing and a curse. I get to do more real world stuff like make money for a change and learn to cook, but I can’t chill at 2am in the lounge watching people get drunk. Wait, that’s a plus as well.

In Review

End of semester.

I should have seen it coming. Granted, I did see it coming. I saw it and survived. Doesn't change the fact it was painful.

This last semester was E102, E106, E158, E166, MUS080, MUS084. In order, that's Big Stems, Material, VLSI, High-Speed PCB, Music Theory I, and Jazz Improv, using the shortened nomenclature. I'm not going to say "Introduction to CMOS VLSI Design", more typing means you have to read more random babbling.

Overall, it doesn't look that bad. 16.5 credits. Recall that the maximum is 18 before you have to petition for an overload, and to graduate you need to average 16 credits per semester. Plus, the music theory shouldn't be bad, I've played piano and flute for many many years and Jazz Improv is a similar thing.

The kicker is the Engineering classes. Specifically, High-Speed PCB and VLSI are project based classes, which means the second half of the class is mostly devoted to doing something big and shiny. E4 is an entire semester of projects, some of which, I might add, were a really really tough this semester. I just built fences my year. Fences that had to stand up to people climbing over them and leaning on them and had to be freestanding. But I digress.

Also, turns out I'm not a super musician. I have what looks like a lot of hours, but in reality doesn't boil down to that much skill. Piano played second fiddle for most of High School and Flute was mostly employed in the Band. Granted I was one of the best flutes, Section Leader even, but that doesn't translate to being able to pick up Flight of the Bumblebee or something. But Theory. I should be able to handle that. Well, except the whole sight singing and dictation part. Plus, Jazz improv isn't like playing Bach's Invention No. 1.

I'm not saying it was a bad semester. It was pretty awesome. I helped build a chip. When I talk about crosstalk, the interviewers get confused as to why an undergrad knows these things. I have learned Masters level stuff about systems and control. And I can kinda jam on the piano, or write four part counterpoint. It's just there were definitely times when I felt at the end of my rope. Mostly due to time constraints.

The best part is, I now go off to an internship. So, I probably won't post anything for a while unless I feel bored or something really Mudd-y happens. And when I get back, I get to do Clinic, MicroPs, Rigid Dynamics, Intro to Philosophy, and Nationalism and Music. Plus some independent study testing the chip we built.

You'd think I'd learn.


In the meantime, enjoy: