Lack

For lack of funny things to say, here are some pictures that have been accumulating on my phone.

This lack of communication ability was found in a stairwell at MIT.. I would describe this as "Nonconfrontational aggressive" tagging. I guess the funny thing was that the light switch was down, but the light was on. And there seemed to be a lot of discussion about whether it should be left on or off. Also note the reference to "Jack Florey".. a fictional MIT legend.


I was walking to school this morning in balmy 32 degree weather, and felt sorry for the people who own this yard. Day after day, they avoided having to go out and walk the dog during the many Boston blizzards, but with spring approaching, their laziness is beginning to catch up to them. I postulate that the exposed dung represents the careless period between January 17 and February 23. As the snow continues to melt, the fruits of the rest of January and December will be exposed. There will be no lack of manure to get this lawn green.


A lack of tactfulness resulted in this very effective advertisement for the new Fedora 14 Linux system at the Washington DC airport.


And lastly, this startling anonymous poll left in lobby 10 during MLK week revealed several startling hotspots for discrimination across the MIT campus. Green thumbtacks represent places where people have experienced equality, and red ones represent places where people have experienced discrimination. Although buildings W1, W2, and W4 appear to have been the site of many discriminatory incidents, there appears to be a lack of consensus of the levels of tolerance or discrimination in the Charles River.

Excise Tax

Boston has a long history of freedom and revolt against unfair taxation.

So I was very saddened when I received mail from the City of Somerville today with an excise tax for having a car.

What? I would have expected that after the success resulting from the stamp tax revolts, Bostonians to have gotten rid of the motor vehicle and trailer excise tax next.

I guess the thing that really riles me up is that Boston is definitely the worst place I have ever driven in my life. And it's not just the traffic. There are potholes all over the place. I practically need a 4-wheel drive car to navigate the roads here.

So the way that excise tax here in Massachusetts works is that every year, you have to pay a certain percentage of the original value as determined by the manufacturer. Any cars over four years old are charged a tax equal to .25% of the original cost. Every year. At least I don't have to pay the 2.25% tax for new cars.

So if I get a new Porsche 911 GT2 RS for $245,000 (I'm saving up for it...) this year, I pay $5512 in taxes that first year, and then 20 years later, I am still paying $612 every year to drive on terrible roads with awful traffic.

Basically, after 23 years of having a car, I have paid 10% of the original price as excise tax.

That makes me sick.

I think it's time to throw some excise tax collectors into the harbor.

Who's with me?

Little Fish II

So I was sitting down to lunch today with some friends at the Whitehead Institute cafeteria (reviewed here).

Initially, a friend had mentioned the cafeteria as a good spot to get a cheap hamburger.

Indeed, the $6.50 Chang burger (Bacon, BBQ sauce, cheese, onion ring) combo meal was well worth the money.

A friend from my grad program came with us, and somehow during the course of our conversation he mentioned that while he was doing his undergrad at Harvard, his dorm had a personal chef who would cook eggs to order for them.

"You went to Harvard?" My other friend asked.

"Of course, you didn't notice his veritas ring he was trying to flaunt to you as he sampled your fry sauce?" I asked.

"Yeah, I was feeling a little overwhelmed and insecure about myself after the first few classes and am not looking forward to doing homework all weekend, so I put this ring on to give me confidence," said my Harvard-grad friend.

This, of course, turned into an in-depth intellectual inquisition into the theory of stuff we don't know that we know that we don't know. But that's material for another blog that isn't about small fishes.

But it was somehow comforting to know that I wasn't the only small fish in the pond. And incentive for me to try to come up with a material reminder for me to wear or carry around when I need a little confidence boost. I'm not sure a CTR ring would do it...

And then my friend made an insightful observation. In undergraduate, the smart kids were the ones who were either

• talented and naturally smart,
or
• extra hard-working

Somehow, they about evened out. The smart kids in the class were the ones who were born smart, or the ones who were of average intelligence and worked extra hard.

The problem with living in the big pond is that in order to be smart, you have to be naturally talented, and work extra hard. Shoot.

And then I went back to my Randomized Algorithms class just for fun. Because even though the homework will kill me, I still think the topic is interesting. And I am secretly hoping to try to swim with the big fish until after the first homework assignment, at which point I will disappears suddenly.

In his research, the instructor, David Karger, is working on an application to increase accessibility and usability of class notes called "nb" where the class notes are posted online and students can annotate the notes and receive feedback from other users or the teacher or whoever reads the notes next. This sounds like an interesting idea. Of course because it is his research project, Dr. Karger lauded it highly. Then he mentioned why it was seeing so much success: Because when students saw that other people weren't understanding the course material, they weren't afraid to ask questions, so everyone in the class had a better learning experience.

I thought that was interesting. I guess it's a common problem for people to remain silent if they don't understand something, and eventually they end up feeling like a little fish.

So I guess I'm still a little fish. But at least there are other little fish here with me.

Little Fish

I had a really bad case of "little fish in a big pond" today.

I could feel it coming on yesterday in my "Information and Inference" class when I spent 5 hours in the library teaching myself about sums of discrete random variables and convolution for the part a of subproblem i of problem 1.1 of the homework.

I'm not joking. It was a huge assignment, and the first two problems (1.1i has 6 parts, and 1.1ii also has 6 parts... I didn't even look at problem 1.2..) were supposed to be review. While everyone else got out their pencils and started scribbling figures and humming happily in class, I stared at the problem, and felt like a small fish.

And then this morning I got up after a minor arctic "event" that had covered the ground with snow and stopped all but the most necessary pedestrian traffic, and walked to my lab at Harvard where I needed to go to a lab meeting. After the meeting, I talked with my advisor, and headed to class at MIT.. And it was somehow raining, although the temperature was below freezing. I'm not sure how that works, but it was doing it. So the ice was slick, and it was covered by a pool of water.

The sidewalks were pretty well plowed, as were the streets, but the curbs and the transitions from curb to sidewalk were large puddles of water/slush..

As I stepped into one of these puddles, after my foot sunk in about 6 inches, I realized that the puddle was deeper than I had anticipated, and found myself unable to retract my foot from the watery monster that was eagerly slurping my foot up like a raw oyster.

Even my brand new waterproof boots couldn't keep out all of the water, and once again, I found myself feeling like a small fish in a large pond.

Of freezing water.

The same feeling happened today as I went to my randomized algorithms class, in which we were informed that the professor hears that his class is extraordinarily hard for entering graduate students, and recommended not wasting our time with it...

I guess this is a big change from undergraduate where I felt like I could basically take any class and do well in it. So upon selecting classes here at MIT, I chose classes that sounded interesting, reasoning that I had taken similar classes at BYU so I didn't need to satisfy the pre-reqs.

So, now I am trying to schedule an appointment with my advisor, so I can crawl back with my tail between my legs, and change all my classes to the simple entry-level classes...

I'm still looking for cures to Little-Fish Syndrome, and I hope it isn't contagious.

But I've heard that a warm climate can alleviate some of the symptoms...