late update

approximately april-june

i just realized i haven’t made a post of this type since april

• teaching high schoolers at a math program in pittsburgh for the next 2.5 weeks. i haven’t interacted with high schoolers in a long time so i’m not sure if i’ll be able to communicate well with them or be a good influence in general but hopefully it goes well. i’m currently most excited for an activity called “explaining how computers work in <1 hour” where i try to explain the intuition behind transistors/circuits, processors/assembly, higher-level languages/compilers, graphics/displays, networks/internet, memory/cache but this might be a bit too ambitious (also my knowledge of displays and networking is shaky)

• watched a bunch of rom/rom-com movies for the first time, mostly because one of my film friends encouraged me to give them a chance. the genre is better than i expected, though i still can’t say i enjoy it. worst person in the world was good but the parts that shone through were the non-rom parts (i.e. characters grappling with death and impermanence), before sunrise was decent, 500 days of summer was mostly mediocre but had one really great and innovative scene (expectations vs reality), mamma mia was good but mostly because of the song selection

• i realized my time in college has been bookended by shinkai films (weathering with you my freshman year and suzume my senior year) so i went on a shinkai binge and watched all his films. my taste has changed a lot in the last three years - i used to care a lot more about aesthetics and beautiful narratives so my favorite shinkai movie was your name; now i appreciate interesting characters at the cost of messier and uglier plot so my favorites are 5 centimeters per second and weathering with you

• was supposed to go on a road trip with parents for a week after graduation but they got covid so instead i lived in lounges on mit campus for five days (i didn’t want to stay at friends’ places because i thought i might’ve had covid myself). the main challenge is to find ways to sleep while avoiding the custodians who work at night (most custodian encounters are fine but you don’t want to risk one of them being in a bad mood and alerting the police). you learn to use various clues to infer whether the cleaning staff have been in an area or not - eg. lights that dim automatically after a period of inactivity, the scents of urinals and toilets, leaving a sheet of paper on the ground and coming back later to see if it’s been picked up. in general i had a good time, but i also realized i had a lot of misconceptions about the custodians and was wildly overconfident on a subject i didn’t know much about. for instance:

  • i thought the custodian shift was from 11pm-2am since i’d previously seen their activity die down around 2am, but they actually work the entire night shift from 11pm-7am

  • similarly i thought they didn’t work friday or saturday nights because i’d seen classrooms that had not been cleaned over the weekends, but it turns out they still do a small half-shift

  • i learned that many buildings test their fire alarms at 5:30am and probably shouldn’t have been as surprised as i was that various building maintenance functions happen in the early morning

• reminds me of this study where they asked participants to give 90% confidence intervals for 10 trivia questions (you can take the quiz here) and if your confidence was calibrated correctly you would expect to answer 9 questions correctly but almost everyone got at most 7 questions because they were severely miscalibrated