finals begin tomorrow

Final exams are coming for my third semester. I have a very weird feeling, a kind of knot in my stomach. At the same time, I am very excited. For someone who rarely feels 'good', I have to say that the blend of fear and anticipation is perfect.

There is the obvious cause: that these few short days are going to determine a good chunk of my grades for this semester. They're going to say (well, as best as formal education can) whether I ultimately won or sucked this time around. I think I'll like this challenge, more or less. Ballin'.


So there is that. But there is the broader excitement of seeing my life's locomotive engine slowly chugging into motion. As I'm about to turn 20, nearly all of the 13 through 19 years old bullshit is over. Hell yeah! With age, wisdom is starting to take hold. I'm no longer quite the pretentious piece of shit I used to be. (Still very arrogant, but nowhere near as pretentious.) I'm starting to get fairly elite at math despite years of stalling. My GPA is consistently high, having reached 3.4 at its lowest. I even have a halfway decent job.

AND I have just one more semester here, in the fall. Like I've said before, I will miss a lot of the faculty here, for being my good friends and somehow tolerating my constant weirdness and gaffes. I'll miss a good deal of the students here for the same reasons, but I WILL NOT miss the incredibly loud dormitory rabble, shallow hipsters, perverted otaku and, most of all, the air-headed, expensive clothes-wearing, gum-smacking, cellphone-gabbing, popped collar-sporting Anglo-Saxon prep fucktards that have been the bane of my existence for the past year or so. It kind of sucks that nearly every one of my close brosephs and brosephinas outside of my math and CS classes is or was in the ESL program. Which is not to say that I dislike the foreign students—in general, I don't—but I mean that it sucks that so few of American youths are likable. At any rate, I am quite close to a few of my ESL bros in particular and will, in all likelihood, keep in touch for many a year.

However, I will be very pleased to transfer. Anyone from my school, student or faculty, who would bother to read this entry can rest assured it's not about them. Few of the people I'm knocking here would have the literacy to understand my screed anyway. I'm probably going to transfer to Lehigh. My bro Jerry (who already earned an MS in Electrical Engineering back in Taiwan and came here to speak English better) suggested that I will enjoy the climate of a school like Lehigh more: there will be more self-motivated learners, more people in hardcore fields that I like, and quite possibly more foreigners and first/second-generation immigrants from other countries. All of these factors will contribute greatly to the elitery of the whole experience, in addition to the epic advanced classes I will have to take. I am actually quite enthused over the future.

EDIT - I took the first two finals today and, AFAICT, ran through and promptly slaughtered both of them.

EDIT - Finals are done. FINALS ARE DONE

why I'd like to specialize in bioinformatics

I was at the local public radio station last Sunday when I met up with Dr. Jack Zilfou, who hosts the Arabic music program then about every other week. He's a biochemist who develops new medicines. If you Google his name, he has actually authored or co-authored a good deal of research cited in other publications. The last time I saw him was when I was in high school and so we caught up. In addition to finding out that he listened to a lot of thrash metal when he was my age, I learned about the growing opportunities in bioinformatics from him.

“Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on.” ― Donald Knuth, noted 31337 h4x0r

I had heard about this field vaguely before, but didn't pay it much mind. Jack speaks very highly of this frontier in science. Apparently, he depends on bioinformatics specialists to glean useful information from scads of raw biological data generated every day. After he explained the field in some more detail, it sounded pretty interesting. I did some research on it and found it even more appealing after a closer look. The algorithms entailed in bioinformatics appear to deal mainly with discrete areas of mathematics that I really enjoy using.¹ I communicated this interest of mine to the professor in Bioinformatics at Lehigh when I was asking about how I could study this field and he said that there isn't a Bioinformatics degree program per se, but there is a relevant track in the Computer Science department and bade me good luck.

So, double win. Since I'm already a CS major, I don't have to make a 180 degree turn. Maybe 30 degrees. Here's the triple win for the trifecta:



Wow. Without the labels, I would have guessed that was the graph of the velocity of something being shot out of a mass driver. There is a great demand to deal with this glut of new data and, if the median salary figures mean anything, a relative shortage of qualified people. I can definitely see myself getting avenged for middle school and a little less than half of high school. Eat shit, assholes! Of course, if I had a billion dollars tomorrow I would still enter a CS / math career—because I love these two fields with all my heart. However:



And on top of that, the excitement of knowing that people in the next room are using cancer-causing restriction enzymes. Dipset!

The single fail in this situation, albeit not an epic one, is that Perl seems to be really popular in bioinformatics. That makes sense since the field is mainly concerned with crunching assloads of text, and esp. a lot of pattern matching. However, Perl has an ugly object system, no exception handling and can easily make a Linear A tablet look like Curious George. If I use BioPerl in my career, I just hope no one on my team likes writing illegible garbage. Because I've seen that shit and it's not nice.

¹ - I am also busting my ass retracing my steps over all the important theorems I learned in calculus that were taken for granted in school. I'm surprised I understood anything at all after we basically skipped over the very basic idea of infinitesimals. I'm virtually certain discrete math will always be my strongest suit though.

haiku for a CS test

I had an exam
It was about assembly
I kicked its dumb ass

classes next semester

So in the fall I'm taking 19 fucking credits worth of classes to make up for my horrible 14-credit pace of the past three semesters. I kind of look forward to the challenge because at the current rate it's boring the hell out of me. Namely, I (tentatively) have Data Structures & Algorithms, Calc III, Physics for Science and Engineering I (1337), Macroeconomics and Ethics & Moral Problems. On top of that, I have Introduction to Psychology (fuck that) as a web class in the summer, just to round off that two year degree so I can get the hell out of here and start attending Lehigh University.

Due to a scheduling conflict, I have no choice but to take Calc III with Ken Krauss, rather than Alex Rolón. Granted, Rolón's classes are pretty difficult, but he challenges us to think hard about what we do and is overall a better teacher than Krauss. Hopefully, the nearly unanimous disapproval I've heard of his classes is at least part bullshit, because I have Data Structures & Algorithms with him as well. The only other class I've taken with Krauss was Comp Sci I and my brain was in power-saving mode for most of the time. Sure, I got an A, but that's only because I had already seen almost every damn thing he put up on the board. I'm not sure I can put up with him for seven hours a week.

Man, I think I would probably already have an associate's degree if it weren't for the all the bullshit electives I've had to take. Of the six classes I'm going to take in the summer and fall, only three are directly related to the computer science / math track. I can't believe Macroeconomics is a 'Western Culture elective' and that I have to take either it or some other even worse class. If that's true, why can't Calc III be a Western culture elective? Newton (England) and Leibniz (Germany) came up with it in its modern form, right? Every country has macroeconomic affairs, and economics has nothing to do with 'culture', at least from an academic perspective. Even so, even Macroeconomics is not as worthless and irrelevant to my major as something like Ethics & Moral Problems. Like I've said before, 'ethics' is a fictional abstraction. I'm not interested in ethics. Can that shit so I can take cool classes.

Come what may, I will continue to kick ass next semester. Dags för strid!