the arc of software bends towards understanding
For various reasons (mostly PhD-related) I will be traveling a bit over the next month.
Let me know if you’re any of these areas and want to say hi!
It can be hard to understand the appeal of spending three days, without sleep, solving what some have called “the hardest recreational puzzles in the world,”; but over this weekend, hundreds of people converged on the MIT campus to do just that, as part of MIT Mystery Hunt. To celebrate the finding of the coin, I’d like to share this little essay that I found in my files, which compares Mystery Hunt and the scientific endeavour. (If you are not familiar with Mystery Hunt, I recommend listening to the linked This American Life program.)
It still feels a little strange how this happened. Not a year ago, I was pretty sure I was going to do the Masters of Engineering program at MIT, to make up for a “missed year” that was spent abroad (four years at MIT plus one at Cambridge, not a bad deal.)
But a combination of conversations with various researchers whom I greatly respect, nagging from my Dad, and an inability to really figure out who I would actually do my Master’s thesis under while at MIT meant that at some point about a month and a half ago, I decided to go for the graduate school admissions cycle this fall. Oh my. It feels like undergraduate admissions all over again (which was not really a pleasant experience), though this time around, what I need to write is the “Research Statement.”
I recently concluded a year long study-abroad program at the University of Cambridge. You can read my original reasons and first impressions here.
It is the Sunday before the beginning of exams, and the weather is spectacular. Most students (except perhaps the pure historians) are dourly inside, too busy revising to take advantage of it. But I am thrust out of my den, constructed of piles of notes and past exam questions, in order to go to one final revision with our history supervisor, Mirjam. I cycle down Grange road, park my bicycle outside Ridley Hall, and am greeted to a pleasant surprise: Mirjam has elected to hold the revision outside on a cluster of park benches flanked everywhere by grass and trees, and has brought a wickerbasket containing fresh fruit, small cupcakes and other treats, and also sparkling wine and beer (perhaps not the best drink for what is ostensibly a revision, but we avail ourselves of it anyway.)
Yesterday I cycled from Cambridge to Ely, and back again. The route is a glorious 38 miles (round trip) of British towns and countryside. The cycling around Cambridge is quite good, because there aren’t very many hills, and in the farmland areas you get to see the tractors rolling by. The longest I’d ever cycled before was the Springwater Corridor in Portland, the segment of which I did was only about 10 miles.
The bug bit me in early 2009, during MIT’s independent activities period; really, it was two bugs. The first was 6.184, the re-animated introductory computer science class taught in Scheme—for obvious reasons. But I don’t think that was sufficient: I seemed to recall thinking Scheme was interesting but not a language I actually wanted to code in. The second was a comment made by Anders Kaseorg after I finished delivering a talk Introduction to Web Application Security (one of the few things that, as a freshman at MIT, I thought I knew well enough to give a lecture on). One of the emphases of the talk was all about types: that is, the fact that “string” doesn’t adequately represent the semantic content of most bits of text that float around in our applications these days. Haskell came up as a way of making your compiler make sure you didn’t mix up HTML with plain text.
This picture snapped in Paris, two blocks from the apartment I holed up in. Some background.
How do you decide what to work on? I started thinking about this topic when I was wasting time on the Internet because I couldn’t think of anything to do that was productive. This seemed kind of strange: there were lots of things I needed to do: vacations to plan, projects to work on, support requests to answer, patches to merge in, theorems to prove, blog posts to write, papers to read, etc. So maybe the problem wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to do, it was just that I had too much stuff to do, and that I needed to pick something.
I will be in the following places at the following times:
Plans over the New Year are still a little mushy, so I’ll post another update then. Let me know if you’d like to meet up!
Non sequitur. I went to the Mondrian exhibition at Centre Pompidou, and this particular gem, while not in the exhibition itself (it was in the female artists collection), I couldn’t resist snapping a photo of.
In which Edward travels France
Many, many years ago, I decided that I would study French rather than Spanish in High School. I wasn’t a particularly driven foreign language learner: sure I studied enough to get As (well, except for one quarter when I got a B+), but I could never convince myself to put enough importance on absorbing as much vocabulary and grammar as possible. Well, now I’m in France and this dusty, two-year old knowledge is finally being put to good use. And boy, am I wishing that I’d paid more attention in class.