Ceaseless Student

OK.

Here’s my website that I was super-excited about: OlinDocs.

This website is for archiving documents made at Olin in a way that’s easy-to-find. The goal is to have an answer to “Remember that expo poster someone made? I think it was about chaos and music or something…”

So you head over to OlinDocs and you type Expo into the search box, you go to refine and type chaos and you’re good to go. Hot.

So. Obviously I need to get some more documents. Right now it’s Meta plus anything I had handy (read new b/c the rest is on my external at Olin and I’m not for the next two weeks) that was worthwhile. If any of you have stuff that you’d like me to put up, send an email to boris@students. I need two things for document submissions.

1-The document
2-Some meta-info

I’d like the meta-info in a file titled db_params.txt it should follow this example:

Class Name
Semester (eg s07 or f06)
Teacher Names (First Last, First Last)
Author Names (First Last, First Last)

Awesome. I hacked together some neat python scripts to put a database together for me, so it’s fairly painless (I’ll probably post about this and the other mechanics of the site later). Oh yeah. If you’re sending in any group documents, could you please run it by the other people first? Sweet.

Edit: If any of the meta-info doesn’t make sense for your document (eg it wasn’t for any classes), just put it down as - (a dash) and include a note in your e-mail. Thanks!

Oh man. So excited.

Make me happy. Send me stuff. Expo stuff, final deliverables, Capstones, OSS papers… I’m waiting for cool stuff. I might even make the mistake of reading through far more of it than is healthy. Anyways. I’m gonna stop ranting. Sooo excited.

Oh man. I’m working on this really cool website…

It’s kinda consumed my life a little bit. I’ve worked on it for 6 of the last 20 hours. I was asleep for about 9 of those…

Oh well. It’s gonna rock. I’d really like to share now, but I need some people to give me a thumbs up first…

Sorry for the tease. I’m just really excited and wanted to tell people. Although only kinda. Anyhow, definitely within two days.

Wow. I haven’t written in quite a while. I’ll blame projects. And graduation. And packing. And this neat website I’m making. And video games… OK. Fine. I’ve just been being lazy.

Soooo…
Graduation.

…

I don’t even know.

This year I was much (much) closer to the graduating class and it seemed like just about everyone that walked across the stage was a key part of Olin. How can we exist? It seems silly. What is randomness without Lee? What are a billion other facets of Olin life without the people that are attached to them?

I can’t believe how sad I got during graduation. It’s quite a shock to realize that the people I spent time with sometimes multiple times in a single day will be people who I might go years without seeing.

Then again, I also got pretty happy. These people. These friends I know and trust are going out to the world. I have no doubt that they will do great good. And that makes me… uhmmm… proud. I feel like pride should be the territory of parents and such, but that is how I feel.

Class of 2007: My hat’s off to you. Thanks for everything.

Here’s a sneak peek of my expo presentation for tomorrow. It’s about gaining insight into pedagogy by using an analogy to communications.

The general gist is that teachers are considered transmitters and students are considered receivers. In between, you have a lossy channel. That should make the first three pics make sense… at least a little bit.
The last slide is from our implementation of the model for simulation purposes. The waveforms on the right are the filters that the students/receivers use to decode/understand the information sent/taught by the transmitter/teacher. The transmitter/teacher is represented by a big q-mark because it/(he/she) is attempting to use the best possible filter/(pedagogical method) to encode the data.

Interestingly, best can be defined in a multitude of ways. Two examples of possible goals I’ll talk about in my presentation tomorrow are (minimizing the total data loss rate)/(maximizing the class’ total learning) and (minimizing the maximum individual receiver data loss rate)/(maximizing the minimum learned by any student).

G’luck parsing those sentences.

Time for bed and then expo.

*Exhales*

I’m done with SigSys. I’m done with everything but Meta actually. I ended up really liking my SigSys end-game. I wrote a sweet paper. It’s 6 pages long, but highly skimmable. Read the intro to the analogy if you’re going to read any of it. It’s about a model of the classroom that implements communications ideas. The goal is to be able to better understand pedagogy by linking it to something that is already pretty well-understood.

Man. I really like that paper.

Moving on to things I don’t like: stupid people. What the hell. I just don’t understand what these people were thinking. This article is about a Vegan couple that’s being tried for involuntary manslaughter for the death of their baby who was kept on a diet of soy milk and organic apple juice. Things like this make me so angry. How can they call this involuntary? Ignorance isn’t supposed to be protective. As parents they had a duty to know what their child needed. They consciously and purposefully failed to do what they should’ve done. Arguably they didn’t know better, but it was their responsibility to know better. People are frustrating.

I’m really quite good at this whole procrastinating thing. Instead of any work today, I’ve been all sorts of other things. I’ve played lots of Magic and Smash, eaten like 5 snacks, watched TV, and, of course, wasted as much time as is easily feasible on the internet. Part of what I worked on was my internet image.

Lifehacker had an article on the googleability of one’s name. Mine returns 50 hits (w/o quotes); the first 22 are me. I love my name. I claimed my blog on Technorati, pinged some sites using Pingoat, and set up an account to get site statistics for my blog at StatCounter.

I’d wasted a couple of hours pretty well, but I wasn’t done. No ladies and gents. I searched for every variant of my name imaginable. “I wonder how well do I show up with just my last name?” etc. Oh man. I was there forever. Also (for any hippies out ther) I came across an environmentally-friendlier version of Google called Blackle. The idea is that people save energy by reducing their monitor’s energy output. Cute huh?

I ended up finding out that some dude with my last name (Stefan Dieseldorff) was on IMDB. He evidently produced a 60 minute film called Kreator: Hallucinative Comas. It doesn’t seem like that movie was well-received. Actually, it barely seems like the movie was received at all.

Anyhow, Technorati alerted me to the fact that my blog had been linked to by a sneaky member of the Olin community who’s blog is not on PlanetOlin. Speaking of PlanetOlin and other rss readers, I doubt my blog counter will end up getting anyone other than me… oh well.

And now folks, I leave you to do some work. Before I go to sleep I will have finished Signals & Systems work. This means that, after my final at noon, I will only have one class left. Meta. Oh Meta. History paper. Communication paper. Final deliverable. Presentation. I might be missing something? *sigh* I feel sadly unmotivated… Time to get to work. I’ll do The SigSys project writeup. That seems awesome still. I’ll problably be posting something about that either soonish or around expo time.

Big plans for rice. We’re getting another rice cooker! In the near future, we’ll hook up Bryce’s 3-cup model to give our 10-cup a little boost (we run out every day). We’ll see if we end up using both of the 10-cup versions. If not, we’re still planning on running this out of both dorm buildings next year so we need two anyhow. Oh man. This is nuts. Just for reference, we’ve eaten about 90 pounds of rice since after spring break. Super-intense.

Great happiness! I’m not moving my blog to Wordpress after all. It turns out that if I put in the html tags [em] and [b] manually, my formatting shows up just fine on rss feeds. Unfortunately, the blogger defaults use things like [span style="font-weight: bold;"]. Oh well. I can do it by hand. No big, I like Blogger better anyways for now.

Kind of random, I need to train up for the Super Smash Bros Tournament!! I’m sooo out of practice; I have no idea which three characters to play. I think I’ll do falcon, pika and jiggly? I dunno. I really want my ness in there, but I’m mostly sucking big-time with him at the moment. Samus is also really nice at this point, but I should probably stick with the three I named. The other cool thing could be Samus, Link, Yoshi. That’d be so many style points… then again, I have a way of getting mad style points with falcon and jiggly anywho.

Not random enough? How about a book recommendation? Everyone should read the Death Gate Cycle (Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman). It super-awesomely-fantabulous. These aret he people that brought us Dragonlance and the darksword trilogy. But this is far, far better. This is what fiction should always be like. It’s a 7 book series (really a 4 book series with 3 more books added) and the 7th is my favorite book ever. I don’t normally count it b/c it requires one to have read the other 6 for it to be so good. Another couple of good books are The Stand, the Dark Half, and Insomnia (all Stephen King). Those are awesome too. OK. enough random add thoughts for now.

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.

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?