Erwaman's Personal Journal - October 2010

Freshman year, I basically took all problem-set-based, technical classes. However, as my faculty advisor then said to me, I should have gone to MIT if I wanted to just take the most technical classes. I was doing a dis-service to myself by not taking any of the humanities classes Yale is known for and that a liberal arts education is about. Since then, every semester, I've tried to balance out my schedule by limiting myself to three technical classes and filling out the rest of my schedule with humanities classes.

As a comparison, here was my schedule freshman year:

• Fall 2008
• Advanced Modern Chinese I: Advanced Learners - level 5 (highest), fulfilled my language requirement
• Introduction to Computer Science
• Intensive Introductory Physics I
• Calculus of Several Variables (aka Multivariable Calc)
• Introduction to Electronics (aka Circuits)
• Spring 2009
• Fundamentals of Physics II - I got a B+ in Intensive Introductory Physics I first semester, so for the second semester, I decided to drop one level.
• Introductory Macroeconomics - terrible class. It made me realize how true reviews of classes are (See bullet #7 of this entry.).
• Problems of Philosophy - Very interesting first course in philosophy - made me want to take more philosophy classes, which I did
• Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory - At the start of the semester, both Kate and I shopped both this class (the proof-based linear algebra class) and the problem-solving linear algebra class. After sitting in on one lecture of each, we decided that the problem-solving class was too easy and we would learn much more and be more challenged in the proof-based one. Well, halfway through the semester, after struggling on many problem sets, we finally decided to drop this class after pulling an all-nighter on one problem set and still not being able to solve half the problems. Kate transferred to the problem-solving class, which was the smart thing to do, but I just decided to drop math altogether, and only had four classes for the rest of the semester.
• Data Structures and Programming Techniques

and here was my schedule sophomore year:

• Fall 2009
• Introduction to Political Philosophy
• Introduction to Systems Programming and Computer Organization - longest course name ever, basically a systems programming course.
• Probability and Statistics
• Japan: Culture, Society, Modernity
• Mathematical Tools for Computer Science - a discrete math course. I had the choice between this version (the CS version) and the math department version, and I chose this one, which I'm pretty sure was a lot easier than the math version.
• Spring 2010
• Philosophy of Religion
• Database System Implementation and Architectures
• Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations with Applications
• Elementary Musicianship I
• Design and Analysis of Algorithms

This, semester I decided to continue the trend of 3 technical classes (though I dropped one) and 2 humanities classes. Here are the classes I've chosen and some brief thoughts about them.

• Vector Analysis - proof-based math class about multivariable calculus and linear algebra. I actually don't need to take any more math classes - in fact, for the CS major, you actually don't need to take any math classes at all - but I've always been a math enthusiast and wanted to take some more math classes just to deepen my knowledge. I also haven't taken any proof-based math classes, except for Design and Analysis of Algorithms (CS) and the half semester of Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory I did freshman year. I think proof-based math classes really test how deep your knowledge of a math topic really is, or at least, they force you to gain a deep understanding. However, just as happened with the proof-based linear algebra class, I also ended up dropping this proof-based vector analysis course (which I did last week). It's a bit sad that I had to drop, but the problems set were just too hard for me, and I am way too busy this semester to invest the necessary time to think through the problems. I guess I'm not cut out for proof-based math. Oh well. Next semester, I'm planning to take a problem-solving-based linear algebra class.
• Asian American History, 1800-Present - This class, and U.S. Lesbian and Gay History (below), are the first two history classes I've taken at Yale. This class is also a writing credit, and after taking this class, I will have satisfied all my distributional requirements needed for graduation. There has been quite a bit of reading for this class, but it has been pretty interesting. One book we had to read that I really enjoyed was the autobiographical novel America is the Heart by Filipino American immigrant Carlos Bulosan. His life is filled with struggles, itinerancy, and discrimination, but yet, he manages to find love for his adopted country and hope for improved conditions and rights for Filipino immigrants in the future. The progression of the class is very coherent and makes it easy to see larger themes and pictures, such as anti-Asianism during the exclusion era (1882-1943).
• Compilers and Interpreters - This is the first programming-intensive CS elective I've taken. We're writing a compiler for the Tiger programming language using a functional programming language call ML (Specifically, we're using the Standard ML of New Jersey version of the language). The theory and implementation behind compilers has been very interesting so far, and the programming assignments have been enjoyable. We have 100 late hours to use for the 11 programming assignments in this course before we start losing points for lateness. However, after 4 assignments, I've already used 79 hours...(I used 66 on the 4th assignment.)
• U.S. Lesbian and Gay History - taught by a great professor, George Chauncey, who is a leader in this field. Pretty non-mainstream, but very interesting history topic. The material is completely new to me. Very fascinating to learn about the development of gay and lesbian culture and homosexual identity during the 1800s and 1900s. My favorite reading so far has been The Well of Loneliness, a semi-autobiographical novel by Radclyffe Hall, which frankly tells the story of a girl Stephen and the development of her lesbian identity. Apart from novels, there is also lots of music, pictures, video, and primary texts about gay culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, which helps bring the history to life.
• Graphs and Networks - This class is taught by the same professor, Daniel Spielman, who taught me Design and Analysis of Algorithms in the spring. He is a brilliant professor (he just won the 2010 Nevanlinna Prize in theoretical computer science, which is only awarded once every four years) and is a very clear and enthusiastic lecturer. However, the class has been very theoretical. He has covered many proofs of advanced graph theory topics published in journals. I do not understand much of his lectures because they largely consist of complicated proofs. Fortunately, he gives students two options for the problem sets - a theoretical track and an experimental track. All students have to do a couple proof-based questions, but then students have the option of either doing a few more proof-based questions or doing an experimental project. I have decided to pursue the experimental track (I have realized I am much more of a practical, applications-oriented person than a theoretical, proof-based person), which involves finding your own graph and performing calculations and analyses of it. For the first assignment, I downloaded a thousand of my old gmail messages; exported the subject, from, to, and cc fields of those messages as a CSV; removed my email address from all header fields; and then "drew" edges between emails that shared a common email address (e.g., if one mail was to joe@example.com and another was from joe@example.com, I "drew" an edge between them). My edges were represented by (a,b) pairs, where a and b are the numerical IDs I gave to the two emails. After I had a list of all the edges in my graph, I calculated some properties about my graph, such as its assortativity and its clustering coefficient. I did all the parsing of my emails and edge generation using Java, and then I did the graph property calculations in MATLAB.

  I think I will change to a different graph for future assignments because this graph of my own emails is not very interesting, since there are WAY too many edges, so the assortativity and clustering coefficients were both very large. Also, I already had the intuition that I send and receive emails from a relatively small collection of people, so I knew clustering would be very high. I think I will change to a graph that I don't know much about or am curious to find out more information about, such as the network of cubers. Hmm, in fact, I think I will use data from the World Cube Association database to create a graph and analyze it for future assignments. As you can tell, I'm very excited about this class and this topic, even though a lot of the theoretical stuff is way beyond me and boring to me.

So there's the wrap on my classes. I've dropped Vector Analysis, so I only have four classes this semester, but I still feel incredibly busy because Compilers and Interpreters is taking a lot of time, and I have to read about a book a week for each of my history classes. It's a tough but wholesome schedule.

I'm interesting in what classes you guys are taking as well! Feel free to share them in the comments or by blogging about them.

Actually, this post has nothing to do with Halloween. I just find myself with a few hours before the midnight Yale Symphony Orchestra Halloween Show, a student-directed silent film with live orchestral music, so I decided to write a post. Andy was here this weekend and it was so refreshing and de-stressing to see and talk to him, but this post isn't about that either. Yale hockey and football teams both won their games this weekend, but this post isn't about sports either. This post is actually about bobby pins (wow, I totally thought it was spelled "bobbing pins" before I just Googled it):

Courtesy of Wikipedia

This post is actually about a specific use of bobby pins. Specifically, the use of bobby pins for extracting ear wax.

My mother introduced me to this use of bobby pins. She picks her own ears using bobby pins, and as my brother and I were growing up, my mother would occasionally look into our ears and see if there was any ear wax. If so, she would ask if she could help us pick it out. If we agreed, we would lie our head down on a table, turned to one side, with one ear facing up. My mother would then shine a table light over the ear and use a bobby pin to extract the ear wax. When big pieces were extracted, we would all be very excited. Sometimes, if my mother had just extracted a big piece from my brother's ear and I was doing something else, she would exclaim, "Anthony! Come over here. You gotta see this giant ear wax piece that came out of Raymond's ear." My brother also likes to sniff the ear wax pieces (he likes to smell things in general). I like to push them around with a bobby pin to test the ear wax pieces' hardness, and then I usually mash them up into small pieces with the bobby pin before disposing them.

Now that both my brother and I are away from home most of the year and don't see our mother much, she doesn't ask about our ear wax much any more. However, I have bobby pins with me at college, so I can pick my ears with them without her help.

Just wondering, does anybody else use bobby pins for this purpose?