Japanese Class

At MIT, we are in the middle of Independent Activities Period, which lasts until spring semester starts in February. During this time, students are encouraged to pursue personal projects that we don’t have time for during the semester. In past years, I’ve helped lead a design class and participated in a lego robotics competition. This year, I’m taking an intensive Japanese language course. So far it’s been much better than I’d ever imagined. Having taken six years of Spanish in school pre-college without that much gain, I didn’t expect much from this month-long class, even if it was supposed to be a whole semester’s worth of material. However, even after the first week I feel like we’ve covered a tremendous amount of material, and I already have a decent understanding of the language.

The teaching methods employed by this class are the best of any language class I’ve ever seen, even compared to other language courses at MIT this IAP. So far, we have never written anything down in class, and yet we are still learning how to write Japanese in addition to speaking and reading. Normally, this would seem preposterous in a language class. But with the time restraint, it became perfectly natural to spend as much class time as possible interactively engaged in conversation with the instructor. The entire class is taught in Japanese, with a few instructions given in English. I believe the students really benefit from the constant dialogue with the instructor and with each other in Japanese, as early as the first day of class. I also appreciate how we have not spent much time on vocabulary. Instead, the emphasis is placed on the structure of the language, so that we can learn whatever vocabulary we need later and simply place them in the structure that we have developed. That way, the small amount of time that we have for the class is utilized in the best way possible. Vocabulary and writing are things that we can practice outside of class on our own, and the time in class is used to interact in this new language. Perhaps it’s the way that the Japanese language is set up that makes it suitable for this learning style, but I am thoroughly impressed with this class, and I believe this is the best way to teach a language class that I have ever seen.

Product Highlight

• This handtruck is amazing. I can’t believe I haven’t heard of it until now:That is exactly what I’ve wanted every time I’ve had to go up stairs with a handtruck or cart or other load carrying thing with wheels. Wheels were a pretty big invention. But unfortunately, the world still has angles, so this is just perfect. I wonder how much power it uses.
• Here’s something new: bombproof wallpaper.
  Best Of What’s New 2009: Bombproof Wallpaper Test from PopSci.com on Vimeo.
• Also, for those of you at home who have some time and need something to do, here’s a do-it-yourself CNC Mill:http://diylilcnc.org/

High Speed Robot Hand

My friend sent me this link, and I just had to post it.  This robot hand from Shikawa Komuro Lab can dribble, catch, throw, and use tweezers, all at amazing speeds.

Petman Update

I found this recent article about the progress of Petman, the robot that’s supposed to walk like a man, currently being developed at Boston Dynamics:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24313/?a=f

The overall idea was to create a robot that greatly resembled a human being in terms of motion and physiological effects such as sweating so that it can be used to test equipment like safety suits. Of course, one can imagine a whole list of other uses for a robot that resembles a person.  The last time I’d seen it, it could barely walk straight for a couple of seconds. Now, if you watch the video (copied below), it’s able to walk competently at 3.2mph and even adjust itself when destabilized (like BigDog). Pretty awesome stuff.

Obama came to MIT on Friday to talk about…something

because it doesn’t actually matter what he came here to talk about. (For those who care, it was about energy) Anyway, the hype is all about the fact that he came here.

For an average student like me, the effect it had on my day? Almost none. I suppose for those on the west side of campus, they had to take some detours because of all the increased security and traffic, but that’s about it.  Basically, some higher up admins and profs got to see him, hand were shook, and faces were saved (from the Chinese saying of “saving face”). The rest of us were made to watch the speech in our own auditorium on … TV… so it’s just as if Obama weren’t here, and we were just watching him on TV talking about stuff.

Yes, it is an honor that Obama visited us. But it really only affected a very small percentage of the people here, which is just unfortunate. I’m sure many of us would have loved the opportunity to be more involved in this event, maybe even meet him, but the truth of the matter is that he just can’t be totally in touch with the common citizen. My mother actually told me to stay as far away from Obama as possible for safety concerns. The more important you are, the more dangerous it is to be around you.

Politicians make efforts to visit different places to keep in touch with “the little people” and to garner votes. But for someone like Obama, he’s only going to see the most important people of whatever place he visits and the people who are traveling with him whom he sees normally anyways. So what’s the point? Is the public so swayed by the fact that he made an effort? Even though he didn’t actually talk to that many local citizens?

I had to drop a class today *sigh*

Okay, that statement needs some background.  So I’d actually already dropped 14.73 (world poverty) a while ago when a spot opened up for me on 18.821 (math project lab), but five classes proved too much for me this term. Even though I’d always done five classes, the fact that four of them are lab classes tips the scale. So today, I turned in my drop form for 2.004 (Dynamics and Control II).

I feel like a kid in a twisted candy store where you’re only allowed to have four pieces of candy, and I want five. Except this analogy doesn’t really work because I didn’t actually like 2.004 and the only reason I was taking it was because it was required. So I was pressured to take on this extra class to finish my degree as soon as possible, and dropping it was very bittersweet.

So this leads pretty nicely into the topic of taking unwanted classes because they’re required.  Would it be so bad if students could just take whatever classes in their department that they wanted, as long as they took classes? The math department does that. Why can’t MechE? The arguement, I suppose, is that they want all graduates to have the same core basic knowledge that they deem every MechE student should know. But what exactly makes these required classes more important than the elective MechE classes? If I were to go into optics, then the optics class is more important than the two semesters of thermo-fluids we were forced to take.  Designating these classes as required gives college education the same problem high school education faces when students complain that they will never use this material in real life. It’s why I think that in some cases a technical education in high school (directed towards specific professions like a professional mechanic) may be more valuable than the general college preparatory route that includes subjects like chemistry and world history that is not going to be useful for everybody.

Bubble Gum Smarties

I realize that I’m really late on this bubble gum Smarties thing; I think it’s been out since at least 2007.  But come on, give me a break, I haven’t been in the candy market for a while, now.  So I picked it out of a candy bowl in an advisor’s office because it looked interesting. And after trying one, it struck me as a confusing piece of candy. The name Smarties implies a hard, chalky candy that you swallow. This one starts out like a regular Smarties, and immediately becomes a soft chewy gum. So do you spit or swallow? Is it a Smarties that’s been made gumlike (so that you can still swallow it), or is it gum in the form of Smarties (so that you spit it out)? Are you supposed to eat the gum pieces one after another and just blend them all together? Or do you now eat them one by one and spit it out each time? I would like to hear what the candymakers were thinking when they made this, and how they wanted people to eat this.

So, after eating them, I believe that the candy is more like gum that is in the form of Smarties, and they were meant to be eaten together such that the gum just becomes a blend of all the colors.  But it still seems strange to me, because it is very tempting to just swallow each individual piece, as  a habit from eating the classic Smarties so often before. Also, I’d prefer to keep my gum colors separate.

Fleeting Love

So after hearing about the Yale student incident, my mother immediately called me to ask me if I were okay. Which is silly, yes.  But I can appreciate why she did that. It is scary to think about how, when you’re living alone, even in a dormitory, no one might notice if you disappeared. At least around MIT, if you disappeared for a few days, most people would just assume that you had some extra work or long problem sets. But a few days is a ridiculously long time for abductions and disappearances. It would be the difference between life and death.  And yet, it may go by unnoticed.

On a lighter note, in nonlinear dynamics we discussed the dynamics of the love affair problem, which takes the basic Romeo and Juliet story and puts a math twist on it (not meant to represent the original story, but just to show a mathematical point). Suppose we have that Romeo loves Juliet, but Juliet is kind of unreasonable (as women are known to be). Romeo loves Juliet more if she loves him and loves her less if she doesn’t love him.  Juliet loves Romeo more if he doesn’t love her and loves him less if he loves her.  Let R(t) represent Romeo’s love for Juliet at time t, and J(t) Juliet’s love for Romeo.  We have dR/dt=a*J and dJ/dt=-b*R, where the parameters a and b are positive. The rest you can look up pretty easily, but basically the system settled into cyclic love with a stable point at R=J=0, where they are each indifferent to the other, which is kind of depressing, like the original Romeo and Juliet story.

It got me daydreaming about the never-ending problem of love and soulmates. I think most people would agree that there are degrees of compatibility between couples.  Some couples just get along better than other pairings.  But you can’t even say for certain that better compatibility implies that they should be together. For the sake of argument, say that two people are more suited for each other if they are more compatible, and every coupling of people has a compatibility parameter. Compatibility can be a sum of how much each person likes the other, with negatives used if a person doesn’t like the other.  Then, for each person, we can find the other person with whom they are most compatible.  I suppose most people would refer to this as a ’soulmate’. But what happens if your soulmate’s soulmate is not you? With the way compatibility has been defined, this situation is bound to occur. Under a utilitarian view, I suppose you can match people up such that the total compatibility of the entire population is maximized.  But utilitarianism wants the maximum happiness, so you could argue the following scenario: suppose A love B, and compatibility is optimized when A is couple with B, but B actually personally loves C more.  We could argue the situation that A loves B so much that A would actually be happier if B were with C, because B would happier. Actually, I guess this just comes from the inconsistency between compatibility and happiness, both of which are very difficult to define. I conclude that what I have to say is best expressed by this xkcd comic: [from xkcd.com]

Angelina Jolie <3 Africa…?

In my world poverty class today, we spent half an hour watching a youtube video of Angelina Jolie’s MTV video diary detailing her trip to an African village. She got some poor PhD sap working on international development there to take her on a tour which seemed to last only a couple of days, at most. I’m still kind of conflicted on how I feel about this whole thing.

For one thing, we spent half an hour watching an MTV program on youtube in class at a school that I pay a bazillion dollars to under the pretense of getting an education. (As a friend of mine said, “college is just a very expensive 4-year long daycare center”) And then there’s the actual question of Angelina Jolie going to Africa with some expert guy. Most of the program was just her being shocked at how poor people were and how bad the conditions were. Oh yeah, and there were shots of her trying to carry water in a bucket on her head and hoeing for about 10 seconds before she joked about getting a blister. Except it wasn’t a joke. She got a blister.

I suppose that, since she is rich and influential, it’s nice to see her bring attention to something important. Out of all the people in the world, she’s probably one of the most capable since she has the resources and fame to make people more aware of things going on outside of the United States. (I guess this means I’m talking about people in America) I’m sure the researcher she went with is getting more press from this encounter than he could ever muster by himself. Oh, and maybe Angelina actually cares about African people. I guess she did wear boots, tank top, and shorts to hike through an African village. (She still had on full makeup, though)

But I can’t help but think of this whole thing as a publicity stunt. We can’t begrudge her for being so rich because, look, she’s helping African people. She’s such a humanitarian. Blah. Honestly, she was only there for a short period of time, and she didn’t actually do anything. The research was the one who actually did stuff.

Oh, Africa. Don’t worry. Angelina will just adopt all of you, and everything will be a-okay.

Pre-School Activities

In the past couple of weeks before school starts, I’ve been quite busy slacking off.

• August 24 – August 28: Discover Product Design
  I was a mentor for a freshmen pre-orientation program at MIT called Discover Product Design.  Students were introduced to various resources available to them at MIT and in the Cambridge area and partook in a couple of small design activities.  One of the projects involved designing a new product for the MIT COOP, who may even decide to adopt one of the projects as a future product.  We set up meetings with various entreprenuers in the area whose businesses exhibited excellent design. Finally, we took them out to Boston for a day, for some fun amidst all the learning. Considering that this was the first year that the program has been run, I’d say everything went pretty well.  No one got in any trouble, and everyone came back with all their limbs intact.
• 
  This past week I spent readying myself for the deluge that is almost upon me by reading, relaxing, and playing video games. I just finished On the Nature of Human Romantic Interactions by Karl Iagnemma, which was a cute little collection of stories. However, a lot of the stories were … depressing in a helpless romantic kind of way, and the one about the Indian agent seemed out of place.  I’m starting The Expedition, by the same author, tomorrow. In terms of video games, I’ve played through Assassin’s Creed and Half-life 2 with a friend. Assassin’s Creed was a great game with great graphics and great controls. I’d have to agree with the general sentiment in that it seems like the developers didn’t quite finish the game.  The levels ended up repeating themselves a little bit, and the ending was more or less nonexistant.  Sure, they want to set the game up for Assassin’s Creed 2, but it still needs an ending in and of itself. Overall: lots of fun, but expected more. Half-life 2, on the other hand, was interesting the whole way through. You fight robots, aliens, and all sorts of beings inbetween.  The environment changes between futuristic urban setting to zombie village. The actual gameplay was very linear, but it was still interesting. Also a very good game.  In retrospect, I probably could have spent my last two weeks of freedom doing something more productive, like finishing my paper from my summer research, but it’s been fun, and it’s nice to have some fun before term sets in. In a day and a half. *gulp*
• Seriously, though, this semester I’m looking at 4 or 5 classes with a research project on the side:

  2.004 Dynamics and Control II
  2.008 Design and Manufacturing II
  2.671 Measurement and Instrumentation
  2.050J/18.353J Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos
  14.73 The Challenge of World Poverty