Coming to America

I don't have a crown, and I'm not looking for a wife, but I'm still coming.

Next month is the MIT Pi Reunion in Las Vegas, so I’ve decided to go back to America.  Since I have to leave China for a day on July 10 anyway (because of my visa), I’m just going to fly to Boston on July 10 and stay in the US until the reunion is over on August 2.  In addition to Boston and Las Vegas, I’m also going to visit Ohio and San Francisco.

I already have a number of people I have to see in each city, but I’m not out of time yet.  If you’d like to get together, send me an email or leave a comment here.  I’m really looking forward to this trip and the chance to see all my good friends again.  The last five months have been exciting in China, but I know I must have missed out on a lot back in the States.

Here’s my detailed itinerary:

1. Saturday, July 10 8:30pm – arrive in Boston
2. Tuesday, July 20 noon – arrive in Stow
3. Sunday, July 25 11am – arrive in San Jose
4. Thursday, July 29 8am – arrive in Las Vegas
5. Monday, August 2 10am – depart Las Vegas for China

小吃

Mmm, dim sum is so good. Yesterday, I tried to get a bunch of friends to agree to go to dim sum this morning. It sort of worked. None of the people from work came (maybe it was the company party yesterday? But seriously, I was up at 8:30 and had to wait so long before going out…), but I still got to see Sally, Jaime, and 영희. We went to China Pearl again, and as usual, I tried to order for us in Chinese. It was tough, because I haven’t been practicing much lately – Chinese class doesn’t start again until February. So, I think I was out of practice listening to people speak.

Actually, the hardest part of going to dim sum with this particular group of friends is that the servers always speak to Sally first, and when she’s on the other side of the table, I probably couldn’t hear what they were saying, even if it was English.

Erin likes eating dim sum with me for two reasons: 1. Apparently hearing me speak Chinese is funny. 2. MIT people have interesting conversations. Today we couldn’t help spilling the tea quite a few times, so we talked about how to improve the conventional teapot. I was initially in favor of a mechanical redesign, but by the end of the meal, Sally had convinced me that new, hydrophobic materials were the answer to our dilemma…

Global Warming Board Game

So this IAP, there’s a session about creating an educational board game about global warming.  I don’t really know what that means, and I probably won’t be able to find out, because the sessions are 2-5 during the day; right when I work.  Nevertheless, I love board games and couldn’t help but start to think about how to turn the game-theory aspects of the global warming problem into a fun board game (because if I’m not in the class, why worry about educational when it could be just fun?).

MIT Undergraduate Advanced Project – Complete

Near the end of my UAP, I promised my adviser that I would release the code I wrote as Open Source, so that people could continue to work on it after I left. If you’d like to try out my system or just take a look, it’s at http://daugherty.mit.edu/StoryAde1.0/Documentation.html.

New Photos

Today I looked at two apartments up in Davis Square with Erin. Unfortunately, neither of them was really great, so I think we have to keep looking. On the way back to the dorm, however, I did get some stuff done. I had my camera with me, so I decided to just walk around campus a little and take some pictures. You can see the results on Flickr.

I’m done!

Last night, a number of my senior friends and I had a huge party. Everyone’s finals were finally over, and we are going to graduate! The party was fun and all, but personally, I didn’t feel 100% done yet because I hadn’t actually seen confirmation that my finals went well enough for me to graduate. This morning, I received that confirmation.

After I woke up (late, of course), I decided to check my degree audit online again to see if anything new had been posted, and there it was… I had enough credits! The only piece still missing is the credit for my UAP, but since I personally turned in the UAP grade report and saw the “A” written on it, I feel ok. In 13 days, I will be an MIT Grad. I can finally turn my ring around and move on with my life. I can’t wait.

MIT Undergraduate Advanced Project

As of Friday, I am done with every requirement for an undergraduate degree in computer science from MIT, except for one not-too-troublesome final! I had quite a time trying to get my UAP (senior project and write-up) finished on time… Which didn’t quite happen. However, I talked to Anne Hunter (course administrator) and received permission to turn it in one day late, which gave me just enough time to go through another revision with my great adviser, Barbara Barry.

My project ended up being some work in story-analysis using common sense (provided by ConceptNet, another Media Lab project) as well as trying a new approach to anaphora resolution (basically determining antecedents for pronouns), which didn’t rely so much on common sense.

If you’re really interested, you can download the paper I wrote. I also am planning on releasing the source code to my project by the end of the month, though I want to get through my linear-algebra final first before I clean it up and put it on a webpage somewhere.

Yī diănr Zhōngwén 一点中文（A little Chinese)

昨天我有一间中文作业, 可是我的电脑 不能写汉子。所以我的作业很难。现在，我的电脑可以了。

Zúotiān, wŏ yŏu yī jiān Zhōngwén zuòyè, kĕshi wŏ de diànnăo bù néng xiĕ hànzi. Suŏyĭ wŏ de zuòyè hĕn nán. Xiànzài, wŏ de diànnăo kĕyi le.

I don’t really know enough Chinese to say what I’m trying to say, unfortunately. Yesterday, I had some Chinese homework to do, and the teachers requested that we type it up. However, my computer wasn’t set up to let me input either pinyin or characters very easily, so I had to look up how to do so before I could do the homework. Luckily, Mac OS X comes with options that let me set up the correct inputs pretty easily (under System Preferences/International, using US Extended for pinyin).

Now, I can type the pinyin spelling of a character, press space, then select from all the characters that match that pinyin and pick the right one. It’s a lot of fun… Hence, this post.

Recent strobe lab photos

Last week, my lab group and I took some photos of eggs breaking. These are my favorite pictures from the class this semester. I put them on my flickr site if you wish to see more.

Weekend Illness and Lab

As you may have noticed, I haven’t updated lately. I was pretty sick over the weekend, so I haven’t had much of a chance. By the time I was finally feeling a little better on Sunday, I had to go to lab from 9-4.

This semester, I’m taking 6.163 – Strobe Lab, and Sunday was the orientation day for photography in general (i.e. lenses, image formation, chemistry, dark room procedure, etc.). I actually felt that I learned a good amount of material. I’ve always had a little bit of an interest in photography (as evidenced by some of my experiments with Flickr this summer), but never much experience. I hope this semester will give me the a chance to take some fun photographs and learn skills that I can use in the future. I could see photography being an entertaining hobby after I graduate.

Tonight, I again had to go to lab (7:30-10:30), but this time it was to perform the first experiment. The basic way that strobe photography works is as follows:

1. the room is darkened
2. the camera shutter is opened
3. some process is started
4. a trigger synchronizes a delay mechanism with the process
5. after the delay, a strobe flashes, which records an image onto the film
6. the shutter is closed
7. the lights are turned back on

In this case, the process we studied was balloon popping. Pretty standard (this is the first lab), but useful for trying different sorts of triggers. We had the most success with an audio trigger for the strobe during this experiment. We set up a microphone to record the sound of the balloon popping, which creates a spike of voltage. Once we recorded that voltage, a delay (~1ms) elapsed before the strobe fired. This timing worked well, because the balloon took about 2ms to pop completely. Hopefully the pictures we took turned out, as well… If they did come out, I’ll see if I can find somewhere to scan them into a computer and post a few online.

As usual, I’ll end this posting by promising to write more later. I have already started two more entries, but it’s getting late, and I should try to get some sleep before class tomorrow at eleven. Goodnight, World!