Skipped CSE 331 in the morning :P as a result of surprising exhaustion! It feels like I’ve been here 2 weeks already :D Did reading for my music class, as well as some research–it looks as though I’ll be able to drop my lab in favor of the seminar.
I tried to meet with Olmstead about that but she was out of her office. I went to the seminar, which started out boring–info theory stuff I’d just learned in Zurich–but took an interesting turn. And I really liked the prof, Armita… complicated last name–she was really friendly and presented the right mix of rigorous theory and incisive intuition. Learned an interesting derivation of entropy from some natural constraints and something I should have learned a long time ago–why entropy doesn’t generalize extremely naturally to continuous distributions :) (It’s intuitively because entropy is a measure of the information contained in a sample, which depends on how fine-grained your resolution is, or what bin size you use. I learned this obliquely in statistical mechanics from Marcel but didn’t make the connection)
I went afterwards to the lab and helped Dei and Elliot muddle through the last bit of it even though I’m probably going to drop. Very friendly nice folks, fun to help. I somehow had early in the game convinced them that I knew what I was doing and then they kept presenting me with interesting debugging problems ;)
After that to Chess Club! It felt very similar to playing online, lots of blitz. Met a nice Scottish guy named Richard. Right across from the MEB where it was held was a Swing meet-n-greet, so I headed over there, on the way running into Akshay and Amrutha :)
The Swing thing was fun! I got a couple dances in. Afterward was Team Food, which was pretty great. I met a guy trying to make a new Kickstarter-like model to help the open-source community field a single, well funded alternative to big commercial software–the idea is that the more users that pledge to support, the more each pays, so that the software can enjoy network effects and not split off into many projects. Interesting. Also chatted a bit with swinger Clarice, who I vaguely remembered from my pre-ETH days :P
Back to the house, whoops, forgot my coat at the MEB! Ran over there and collected it, listening to Uncle Bonsai all the way. I was locked out there, but scrappily tried my student card and surprisingly I guess I have after-hours access!
Back again, got down to some more readings for Music. The readings were long but very interesting. One had a nice refresher on semiotics. All discussed the purpose or social value of music, and the types of relationships that music organizes or strengthens, depending on the context it’s in. The class is “Community Music” after all. Along the way, Trevor and I, who were sitting on the same couch, would occasionally take a break to make a chess move against each other in a correspondence game we just started.
Wrote this log & hit the hay!