Ceaseless Student

People are so predictable. It was a normal evening. All of a sudden people realize that the water’s out. Oh noes. What now? Well… people start to feel exceptionally thirsty. People actually became thirsty because there was no water to be had. It’s pretty weird to think that thirst is caused by both how hydrated you are and your body’s best prediction of future hydration. It makes perfect sense and is an obvious survival tool, but it still seems silly. That being said, I noticed that people were reacting in that silly way, but it didn’t keep me from doing the same. Oh well.

Oh man. The end is near. One more circuits postlab. One UOCD design review. One FBE presentation and one FBE video. For sigsys: a short writeup of our project and one homework assignment. And for Meta… Well OK. Maybe the end isn’t so close there, but that’ll get done too.

Wow. I have a lot of work to do. I just finished taking data for a circuits lab (2 hours starting at 2 AM). Now I think I’ll go do some Meta. Soooo much work. Most of it’s Meta in a variety of incarnations, butt he other subjects are pinging me pretty good too.

Today I learned a little bit about how misunderstandings make people angry. So for our communications paper in Meta, I’m doing the organizing. A few days ago, I sent out the general structure of the paper and assigned work to the four other people working on this in pairs. Now here’s the fun part. A and B are working together; C and D are working together. A thinks my structure is one thing, but C thinks it’s something else. Both groups get some sort of a start and then realize… well it’s not going to work. The paper will not work if the pairs are doing things with a different structure (they’re both doing case studies). So I met with A and C. We talked. And talked. And eventually we reached some manner of compromise.

Then I had a standard rice party and, unfortunately, all of Meta came. I say unfortunately only because of the way things played out. Neither A nor C had talked to their partners since they’d reached a compromise. So, when the topic came up, B and D had different views on the structure of the paper. Things got a little bit heated and the rest of Meta was sort of firefighting. It was good times.

The moral: discuss things. An e-mail can (evidently) be interpreted in different ways. Discussion allows for feedback and we all know that feedback is good.

(Random quip about miscommunication in the communications module; teehee)

In other news, I think I’ll be moving my blog to Wordpress soonish. The rss feed from Wordpress doesn’t butcher my formatting… yummy.

Ugh. I originally meant for this blog to basically answer the question “what did I learn today.” While it has wandered a lot, I still feel this is more or less the main goal for me. Interestingly, people actually read it; thus, I have to actually put up readable stuff. For example, my favorite new nugget of understanding for the day involves how cascodes can be used to increase the gain of a current mirror differential amplifier. I’m sure a couple of you think that’d be really cool, but I feel bad for all the others who end up reading. That being said my goal is to write about what I learned so be warned technical stuff follows:

The quick answer is that Rout increases by about two orders of magnitude. Since the differential gain is Rout*Gm, it too increases by about 100. Yay!

To go through it in more detail:
We have two transistors in series that go from Vout to ground. The top transistor is called the cascoding transistor. Pretend for a moment it didn’t exist. Rout would now simply be r0 for the cascoded (bottom) transistor due to early voltage. Once the cascode is put back in it gets a bit trickier. Using superposition and source splitting, we can get that changing the replica source on the cascoding transistor doesn’t create any currents. Changing the voltage of the replica source on the early voltage resistor, on the other hand, ends up creating two currents. The first one is r0+r0||(1/gs). The other one is a current in the other direction that ends up canceling out part of the first current to yield a total current of dV(1/(r0*(1+gs*r0))). Then we get an Rout of r0(1+gs*r0). Since gs*ro has a typical value of around 100, this means Rout (and thus the differential gain) increases by roughly two orders of magnitude. Yay!

In other news, we learned something today at the Mr./Ms. Olin contest. I think Chandra might’ve put it best: Flexible men are hot. Keoni and Karst both did talents that involved flexibility; badass limbo and badass yoga respectively. Then, as per Chandra’s hypothesis, Keoni and Karst ended up as the finalists. Most intriguing… /me stretches…

What did I learn today? Not much really… but I relearned something and that’s almost as good. Today’s lesson was simple: nothing’s simple. We’ll start this with a case study and generalize from there.

I was playing a game of Magic (a nerdy card game with lots of strategy for those of you who are somehow interested in reading a blog by me and not themselves nerdy enough to know this). There were four players in the game and it was a free for all. I had a weak control deck (and I do love control). This means that I’m not actually capable of stopping people from playing effectively with the cards I have; this means I’d lose if people went ahead and played effectively. Here’s the beauty: it’s not that simple. While I can’t win with my cards, I can almost certainly weaken someone enough for them to lose. One player developed an early strangle-hold over me, so I ended up helping them weaken the other two. Then I pulled a nice little switch, suffered heavy losses and caused the utter destruction of the remaining strong player. This meant I’d let the other two build up somewhat… Rinse and repeat. I ended up winning a game that should’ve been hopeless. There’s more to the game than the rules. There’s intimidation and diplomacy. And of course the power of a reputation.

Reputations are great. They work in everything. My reputation wins me games of Magic and Smash and wins me money in poker. It gets people to ask me for help with classes. I’m sorry to any who are getting this as news: I don’t know any more than you do. I simply learn well by teaching, so I like having people ask me for help. Yay reputation!

I guess what I’m rambling on about is the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies. I claim to be good at poker, people are wary, I make off with their money. Human psychology is great.

The moral (?) of the story: make sure people think you are the kind of person that you would like to be. You just might find that they end up being right.

Quick update. The classes I’m taking next semester are: Anal/Dig, CompArch, aVLSI, Discrete Math, IME2 Economics @ Babson (micro), and Deviance and Conformity @ Wellesley (intro sociology). I guess I was totally lying when I said that I had “dropped the 24 credit idea at this point.” Oh well.

If you’re reading this through planetolin or another feed reader that doesn’t show this as bold. This post reads far better if you click through to the actual post. I’m rather annoyed my formatting doesn’t show…

So this is post actually comes from people asking what I do to keep organized. People are particularly intrigued by Boris, an apparent nerd who’s constantly on his computer, using little notebooks to jot notes. Does he use them to keep organized? What does he write in them? Does he have a record of that time that I… uhmmm… never mind. He has everything on Outlook… are these connected?? Anyhow, these questions and more will soon be answered. Read on fair internet friend.

So here’s my slew of organizational tools:

Real-World (physical)
2 moleskine notebooks
moleskine cahier notebook
pad of small paper

In-Between-World (computer)
Outlook
EditPad Lite
Word
Excel
Timesnapper

Fake-World (interwobs)
Netvibes
Stikkit

Aight. So I use a lot of junk. True enough. Now here’s what it does.

Let’s start with the moleskines. Apart from making me seem incredibly pretentious, these notebooks (yes all three) are constant companions Pocket Notebook 1 is dedicated to school. It lives in my left pocket. It has some of the best notes I’ve ever written. The reason is that I take shoddy notes over several pages of legal pad and then shrink them down to moleskine size; writing things after you see the big picture in a concise format does wonders. This notebook also holds random thoughts about projects, notes on interview with people, class rules, circuit schematic… if it happened to me and it’s related to school, this book wants it. This past semester it has also served as the place that I do my time-tracking (I’ll talk about this s’more later). Pocket Notebook 2 is not dedicated. It welcomes everything and anything to it’s home in my right pocket . Dreams I remember, emo journal entries, directions to your house, bad drawings, the size of my car’s windshield wipers, games of tic-tac-toe. Man this book’s messed up (I just flipped through the pages). At the back, it holds my expense tracking (more later). Cahier is evidently moleskine’s word for super-thin, flexible, cardboard-covered notebook. It is short term memory. I only end up using about half of it because I tear out pages when they don’t allow me to see everything they have on them at a glance. Things here are waiting to be added to lists, schedules, or some more permanent type of storage. This is the notebook that I really don’t part with. I remember one time in recent memory that I didn’t have it on me. I was quite unhappy. I don’t like relying on my memory… My Pad is good for reminders. It is almost always blank and it draws my attention to it strongly when it’s sitting on my desk with anything written on it.

Outlook runs my life. Yay outlook calendar! The other cool thing it does is have a great folder called ‘awaiting.’ When I want a response to an e-mail I cc myself and a rule puts it in the ‘awaiting’ folder marked as read with a green flag. This lets me see at a glance what e-mails I’m waiting on from the ‘for follow up’ search folder. EditPad Lite keeps notes on things. It’s basically notepad with tabs and less memory hogging. Generally these have something to do with an item on one of my lists… I’m actually starting to phase out EditPad for Stikkit, but I think it’s only a partial phase out. Word is used for things that I want to look pretty. Admittedly, this is fairly rare, but sometimes I’ll write up ideas from my notebooks here to be kept for posterity. Excel is responsible for both my time and expense tracking. After writing down whenever I spend time productively, I type it up on Sunday during dedicated organization time. I do the same with my expenses and end up with pretty charts and graphs that make my life easy to understand. Or at least specific facets of it… Anyhow, Timesnapper also helps things easy to understand by taking a screenshot every minute. Great for figuring out how much productive time I should be tracking!

Here’s where the fun starts in earnest. Netvibes holds all of my lists. There’s a school to-do list, a single action list (eg fill out expo form), a multi-action list (eg document olin experiments) and two special lists. One of these, ‘waiting for’ is passive. This is where you go when you’re stopping me from getting something done by not having done something yourself (yet). The other one is the red list. Nothing is n the red list when I go to bed. Things on the red list must be done before I’m done with my day. There are a number of secondary lists that I only check once a week during my dedicated organization time. These are things like ’skillz I want to learn,’ ‘money I’m owed’ and ‘books I want to read.’ And then there’s Stikkit. This neat little web-app has completely taken over the job I had remember the milk doing (SMS reminders) and the job I had del.icio.us doing (tagged, searchable bookmarks). It is also taking a lot of 0f EditPad’s job. Stikkit now holds most of the extra stuff about my to-do list items. These are great b/c they’re searchable, taggable and online. Sorry EditPad, but you are quickly becoming obsolete…

So. Let’s review. All of my notebooks have any information I feel is important shunted onto Netvibes as items on lists, onto Stikkit (or EditPad) as notes, onto Word as something nice or onto Excel to be made pretty. In theory, I should also be using my scanner to get things (including my notebooks) digitized and organizable, but this isn’t happening currently.

Wow. That’s a long entry. Peace out.

Sorry all. Not really feeling up for writing a post. Sneak Peak at the first post after I feel decent: How Boris does organization (moleskines, netvibes, stikkit and more!)

Need Sleep.

All right. So I’ve actually gotten a couple requests for specific blog posts. I’m not going to field any of them today b/c I’ve got lots of work to do and I’ll be in class in less than 7 hours. Yay! Also I’m a little bit sick. Instead I will writ about something fun and exciting. This summer I’d been planning on doing a lot of random learning. In fact, my goal was to do as much work during the summer as I did during the school year. Things I plan to learn include, speed-reading, circuit design and web-design. I also plan on improving thing like my shorthand, unicycling and typing speed. Self-directed learning at its purest.

Enter Mel. Now I’m planning doing this in a more organized fashion. In particular, there will be documentation and constant discussion. Mel and I are definitely overlapping in the web design portion of things and we decided to learn Esperanto too. If anyone would like to join us that’d be sweet. I think I’ll be starting a blog for this unschooling experiment come summer-time. If anyone wants to be added to the authors, please give me a heads up. Also if anyone’s around Boston and wants to join in on just random talks/chats or whatever that’d be neat too. Learn by yourself; share with others. Getting things down in print forces understanding. The particular format is still not even in the works, but the idea exists and if Meta’s taught me anything it’s that the idea and the energy are the parts that matter. The rest is just details that will more or less fill themselves in.

6 hours 20 minutes till I am awake and in class; two more assignments before I go to sleep. This is the first time I’ve taken caffeine for wakefulness purposes since uhmmm… that time in November and before that uhmmm the December before that… yeah… did I mention I was kinda sick?

All right. So Stikkit gets a rating of “pretty badass.”

I decided to give Stikkit a run and see how I liked it. I use only a few of its multitude of functions. I’m a firm believer that a product that does one thing best is better than one that does lots of things OK; to that end, I’ve gotten it to be best for a couple of things, I’ll see if more show up later.

Basically I use Stikkit for:
-SMS reminders
-Bookmarks plus
-Quick, random notes
-Details for to-do lists

SMS Reminders:
This is super-simple and super-useful. I love outlook. It let’s me know what’s up. That being said, Outlook is a pull system. Even Outlook reminders aren’t really push. They only work if you’re at your computer at the time. With stikkit, I can turn on SMS reminders and then just write something like:
reminder name
thursday at 15:00
detail, detail, detail.
remind me
On thursday, half an hour before 15:00 rolls around, I get a nice text message with my stikkit’s text in it. Nice!

Bookmarks:
In Stikkit there’s this thing called the stikkit toolbox. It’s a little button with some neat javascript functionality. You click on it and it pops up a stikkit with the title of the website you’re on as the first line (title) of the stikkit. It puts the URL as the second line. Then it skips a line and adds any text you had selected on the site. This is great for picking up interesting tidbits that you can go back to. And, of course, you can add whatever before it gets sent to stikkit (eg tags).

Quick, random notes:
This is basically self-explanatory.

Details for to-do list:
This one is sweet! So I keep to do lists on netvibes. They’re nice, but they are, by nature, super-short. So, I have one item on my list that say SigSys - hw 8 (thurs). Then I have a stikkit titled SigSys - hw 8 that says:

SigSys HW8
due Fri, Apr 27th

(H8.1) text problem 8.6
(H8.2) text problem 8.8
(H8.3) text problem 8.10 a c
(H8.4) text problem 8.11 a
(H8.5) text problem 8.12
(H8.6) text problem 8.18

Additional problems will be posted soon

@olin,sigsys

I can search for it easily and I have more details within easy reach.

Boris’ fixins:
Here’s how I made it more useful for myself on netvibes (my home on the internet). I made 2 widgets that use the external widget module (). What you need to do is add source code to it for it to do things. The really simple widget is just a nice view of my stikkits and my stikkit bookmarks (this is a compilation of links made from urls in stikkits). I use it b/c the rss feed that stikkit provides has a non-zero refresh rate. Also it lets me see more things at the same time. By far the more interesting and useful widget is my new stikkit widget that lets you create new stikkits from inside netvibes. So hot. If anyone wants me to set them up with stikkit, netvibes, some combo or any other program/webapp that I fanboy all over: I really enjoy making other people’s computers the hotness to doing thing that I should actually do; just wing me an e-mail.

So there’s plenty of features I’ve yet to use. The calendar ends up getting filled with things I put in for SMS reminders. The peeps feature is completely unused. This lets you just keep data on ppl and stuff and seems worthwhile. Also the to-do list feature seems like a nice way to add detail to my current lists that I’m not using. So many features… In fact, I talked to Mel a lot and she has an idea for this sort of database for sharing notes by book and page and lots more etc. etc. I’m going to see if I can make it work with stikkit and s’more programs; the key is machine and human readable…

I read through a lot of Honor Board minutes from the bygone days to the current days. I seriously question how much things have changed. It seems that Olin has always been moved by a small subset of the population. It also seems that our conversations today are just like the ones they had 6 years ago on the board. Sad… I’ll write more on this once I have a more cohesive view on things…

In other news, Mel put up a post kinda in response to a post I made! My name is in the first sentence! w00t! …The idea of an epic intra-Olin flame war in the blogosphere has been floated…
Also random: I’m gonna stop with the [Alt+Shift] tag.

Early post? Yup indeed. I’m going to be driving go karts and shooting peeps with lazers later tonight and so yeah. Early.

Let’s start with numbers. These all come from Promoting Active Learning by Meyers and Jones.

-While teachers are lecturing students aren’t attending to what’s being said 40% of the time.
-In the first 10 minutes, students retain 70% of the info
-In the last 10 minutes, students retain 20% of the info

Well damn. That sucks. So what do we do? Mix it up.

I was talking to Mel and she’s an extremist on this one. She thinks ‘unschooling’ might be effective. The premise [Alt + Shift] is that people are far better at learning things that they find interesting. Unschooling takes this to the extreme sand says “OK, we’ll have some resources, but you figure out what you want to learn and how. Then do it.” That’s really intense. The idea sounds wonderful, but I’m more than a little skeptical about the pragmatic side of this sort of thing. How many people are truly motivated enough to push themselves hard? As hard as school pushes them? I think I could do it. But I’m not completely sure. And I tend to think highly of me in this regard. Learning on your own is hard. It’s also often unbalanced. I think I might spend a disproportionate amount of time lifehacking and stuff or playing Smash. Oh wait. I do. All right so that’s not the issue. The real question is one of content. Are certain topics really crucial to have mastered at a certain point in time? If they are, unschooling does not seem like the way to go.

That all being said, I guess this is my goal for the summer. I’m sure I’ll whine about it when I’m in the middle of it. I have a lot I want to learn. By myself. Because I’m excited. I hope it works. /me crosses fingers

Interesting note about teachers paying attention. Evidently, teachers tend to neglect their dominant hand’s side of the room. So if you want to be the center of the teachers attention, front and non-dominant or front and center are fine. But be wary of the front with weak hand.
Stikkits seem promising; I’m starting by using them to replace del.icio.us among other things…