My classes this term provided an antidote to last term. A biocomputation class rejuvenated my love for bio (Life!). I discovered how easy programming in C is in CS110 and found a higher level language to love in CS109L ("a" is the key word. One higher level language is enough). I took a class on Jewish philosophers only to discover that "Jewish philosopher" sometimes means "Zionist" (the class might categorize me as a self-hating Jew despite how hedonist and self-loving I am). I met Richard Stallman and watched him take off his shoes in CS302 in addition to discovering how much Apple hates the Freedom of Information Act. I met a laundry list of celebrities in EE190 (including my professor who made the internet secure) and learned that US nuclear weapons policy is as dangerous as if I lived with 1000 nuclear power plants in my backyard.
I transitioned to being the sole director of Hackathon and learned that, in comparison to the planners of the biggest party on campus, I'm introverted. Next year's Hackathon will be AMAZING: my staff already has as much work done as I did by October or November, and we have some very cool projects, one of which might turn into a published scientific paper.
The coach-to-student ratio on the Palo Alto HS policy team will be very good next year, and the kids are putting in a ton of effort this summer at camp. They've managed to keep me occupied all the way in Cambodia.
For Queer Straight Alliance, I sent out thousands of emails to get progressive candidates elected, kept a second set of books (the first set is the crooked one -- honest!), raced to dress in drag (after much discussion as to whether it would constitute a party or not), and learned about the 'motorcycles' at straight camp (the secret about straight camps: the ex-gays are really just closeted).
To prepare for my trip to Cambodia, I got shots, soap, shoes, and medicine that didn't make me hallucinate. Also, I learned that the secret to taking a pill is to not drink water and use Google.
I saw the first female president of Ireland (she brought condoms to the people. She's also substantially more popular than Obama, who is popular by US standards). Obama's old Energy Czar talked about how juvenile prisons cost as much as expensive prep schools and trips to Europe (he wasn't actually advocating sending juvenile delinquents to Europe, though that would be better than the status quo). He also talked about some colors -- green was pretty important. My biology professor from last year didn't think that hearing voices coming from burning bushes or washing your hands for 7 hours every day were good signs of mental health. An atheist thinks that it's more important to ban broccoli than to ban gay teachers (as a vegetarian, I'm obviously offended). I think that broccoli might be a phallic symbol.
I saw a play about a religious madman (hint: the religion is universal love and the madness isn't bad), one about first generation Stanford students, and one about a lot of things. I was rejected as an RA for being eaten by a swamp monster. I increased my nerdiness to bond with friends, to help my debaters, and because nerdiness is its own reward. The Story of Stuff has new videos: watch them! Despite some food drama this term, my horizons continued to expand (you say tom-ay-toe, I say yum). I can finally say that I am one of Google's paying customers (it feels good).
Next term, I'll be shooting for a Truman scholarship. Wish me luck (or help me edit my essays; either way)!
The goal of my conclusion was to be inconclusive. Check out how inconclusive it was even if you don't read everything (anything) else!
This term was much better than last, even though the schedule is similar.
CS110: MWF 10-1050
CS110 Section: Tu 215-305
CS274: TuTh 315-405 (sort of)
History287e: M 115-305 or F 145-4
CS302: F 11-1215
CS109L: Th 415-530
EE190: Tu 415-505
EE190 Lecture Series: Tu 7-9
CS198 Helper Hours: W 10p-12a
CS198 Monday Meeting: 445-605
CS198 Section: Th 215-305
Terra Cook: W 315-6
SEE Meetings: M 7-9
Stanford Debate: Tu 8-9
QSA: W 8-9
Paly Debate: Th 7-9
CS110 is the class after CS107 from fall term. It's a class about doing lower level (meaning that you're telling the machine exactly what to do) programming and about the design of complex systems.
The idea behind the class is that in computer systems, the limiting factor is not any law of physics (well, that might be the limiting factor for the speed of computers), but complexity. When a program gets to be millions of lines of code, it would be impossible to keep the whole thing in your head at once.
I think that the core of it is abstraction and modularity. Modularity means that you write your code in modules, and if someone else wants to use the code that I wrote, they only need to know how to access my module rather than rewriting the same thing that I already wrote. Abstraction means that, when accessing someone else's module, even if that module is very big and complicated, I only need to understand a small and well-specified interface to that module (ie, in a car, you don't need to understand how an engine and the starter and all of the internal components -- you only need to understand your interface to the car: the keys, the wheel, the gas pedal, etc).
Layering deals with how modules interact with one another. The idea is that each layer should be as independent as possible from other layers. That way, when you change something in one layer, you only need to tweak it to work with the layer above and below it, and you don't need to change anything with the other layers. It's like having replaceable parts.
We also went more in depth on a few different systems, including file systems, networks and security.
I thought that the class was lacking something. It was a good experience because I like lower level programming, because the topics talked about were useful, and because the stories that the professor (who made VMWare, a really cool virtualization software that lets you create a 'virtual' computer that you can run your operating system on) told were interesting. However, because of the good, it left me wanting more. I feel like the assignments should have been bigger or more numerous and that the lecture material should have been more closely tied to the assignments.
Last term, I took a bio class because I was interested in bioinformatics, and I was disappointed because the focus was on memorizing unimportant things.
This term, I took a class on bioinformatics, and I was overjoyed to discover that the games that they make us play in Bio 42 are not reflective of the real world.
The class was not live. The professor, Russ Altman, was on a sabbatical or something this spring, so the class was taught using the recorded lectures from last year, supplemented with live lectures by Sean Mooney, and administered by a set of TAs.
Russ is an MD PhD, and when he's not teaching or researching, he's also a doctor. He has made a lot of impacts on biocomputation, he runs his own conference, he has invented state of the art algorithms, and he's generally a very cool person.
Most importantly, he's a real human. Taking bio gave me the impression that being human and premed were, to a large extent, mutually exclusive. Our lectures came from some people who literally wrote the textbook, and their lectures were often close to recitations of the textbook, backed by very fast powerpoint slides which must be memorized. Russ is not a textbook. The reason that I like computer science is because the emphasis is on knowing what you need to know, which means developing a good intuition, and being able to look up the rest. That was how Russ taught the class, and that was how Russ was as a teacher. He would tell us the many places where there was no consensus. He would admit that he didn't have most of the things that he taught us memorized -- but he still knew them. He would explain things intuitively and practically. For instance, when telling us about the running time of a particular algorithm, he said that the running time was about a coffee break: the algorithm wasn't instantaneous, but it would be done before you got your cup of coffee. It was the least abstract computer science class that I have had. It wasn't just about algorithmic complexity; it was about real problems that bioinformatics people face and what they do to solve them.
In other words, Russ showed me that I shouldn't give up on my goal of being an MD PhD so quickly.
Russ' lectures covered a wide array of subjects. Some were more biology; some were more computer science. I was pleased to see that, despite my B in Bio 42, I was completely comfortable with all of the bio that he talked about.
Some of the topics covered:
DNA Sequence Alignment: given two DNA samples, can we figure out how they line up? If we do this with three samples, it can tell us about their evolutionary interactions. If we do it with two and know some biological facts about the two organisms, we can better identify what DNA corresponds to what biological function, which can help us more easily identify things like risk for disease and drug interactions. For seeing how related two species are, you would probably use 'global' alignment, which means looking at how similar two strands of DNA are, and for identifying biological function, you would probably use 'local' alignment, which looks at 'local' segments of each strand of DNA to find the best match.
Gene Expression Analysis: lets say some biologists poked around some genes (ie, on a microarray slide) and measured biological function in different experiments. In order to make sense of the experiments, we can cluster them to find out what biological functions are related and what genes are related. For instance, with any type of cancer, there are multiple subtypes with varying treatments and severities. With lung cancer, biologists originally thought that there were three types: large, small, and squamous. When the bioinformaticians looked at the gene expression similarities and clustered them together into different cell types, they found four clusters: one for small, one for squamous, and two for large. Those two clusters for large cells have different treatments and different survival rates.
Computing 3D Structure of Proteins: it's really expensive to determine the 3D structure of a protein using empirical measures (ie, xray crystallography), so we try to guess what proteins look like using computers. This is useful for just about everything because when you know what a protein looks like, you can play around with it. It's like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Because of the jags around the edges of each piece, you can figure out what fits together. If you didn't have those, it would involve a lot more guessing. Drugs that interact with a protein will often fit nicely into the protein. The same is true of vitamins, minerals, and other proteins.
Some things that we can do with 3D structures include:
-looking at the distance, bond angles, or dihedral angles (basically, the angle between four atoms rather than 3) to evaluate similarity of proteins
-compare the physical structure with hand-made classifications of biological functions ("GO Codes" or "Gene Ontology Codes" that are made by Alexei Murzin, who has looked at and categorized every protein known to humans. There are tens of thousands of them)
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Every lecture had a topic like one of these, along with an algorithm or two that will help.
Sean Mooney, who works at the Buck Institute, gave 4 live lectures. It was a little bit awkward: because the course was offered online, people weren't very used to physically going to lectures, so I don't think that there were ever more than 4 people, including myself, at one of his lectures. That did mean that I got the chance to interact with him individually. I even got him signed on for a project for next year's Hackathon!
Sean tried to complement the material that we were going over in class. Because Russ' lectures cover so much different material, we don't get a lot of chance to go in depth on it, so Sean focused his lectures around one published paper each and talked about all of the concepts that it involved. So, when Russ talked about functional classification of proteins, Sean talked about an example of classifying proteins from start to finish: what machine learning algorithms they used and why, all of the attributes that were used to determine similarity of proteins and why some were better than others, etc.
The exams were interesting. They were open note, open computer (closed internet), so you could search through your notes. The exams were fairly painless because they tested knowledge of the lecture material and I had taken good notes on the lecture material. They weren't quite as interesting as exams in some other classes -- I didn't feel like taking the exam made me learn anything new.
The assignments were pretty good. The class recommended doing the assignments in Python, a higher level programming language, rather than in a lower level language like C++. The theory is that it's easier to code in higher level languages, which makes up for them running slower. I gave Python a try, and I now have a functional proficiency with it, but I still don't like it. It has some nice features, but my code ends up clumsy. The last assignment was doing 'molecular dynamics,' which means simulating actual physics on every atom in a protein and all of the interactions between the atoms to figure out how a protein really moves. This is really computationally expensive, so if you use a higher level language, you will notice how slow it is. I don't like programs that run slowly, so I decided to write it in C++. It was such a refreshing experience. Regardless, it was good to become familiar with Python.
The first programming assignment was using dynamic programming (taking a big problem and solving small parts of it right away rather than looking at all of the different possible combinations between the parts) to align dna sequences. It seems like this was a cornerstone of the class. In at least half the lectures, Russ would make some mention of using "project 1" to achieve some function. In biocomputation, there are 'gold standards' of truth by which approximations are judged, and the "project 1" sequence alignment can often create a 'gold standard' for other algorithms that make more guesses.
The two projects in the middle were clustering genes and identifying functional sites of proteins (the places in a protein where the action happens).
The programming in general felt good. We would often run our programs on real biological data, so we could see how useful the algorithms were.
In addition to the programming assignments, there were also some familiarization assignments -- learn about some topic and answer some questions about it. These were a little bit less interesting than the rest of the class, but they were very educational. We learned about the online sources of biocomputational data: GenBank, GEO, SwissProt, PDB, PubMed, PubChem, and a few others. We learned about gene mutations. We learned about free, general purpose machine learning software (Weka) and about creating proteins using Hidden Markov Models. It was sometimes frustrating because sometimes they would be looking for a specific answer to a question that seems like it has many answers, but it wasn't too bad.
I will be taking many more biocomputation classes.
Interested in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I took a course from Professor Arie Dubnov, from a university in Israel. The course description had Levinas in it, though the syllabus did not.
Arie's interest was in intellectual history. Rather than focusing on events, he focuses on the development of ideas and thinkers: a history of philosophy.
The course focused on four thinkers: Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Isaiah Berlin.
It wasn't quite what I expected. I'm interested in history because it's fundamental to understanding how the world works. I'm interested in philosophy because it determines how I live my life. I'm not terribly interested in the history of philosophy except for the same reasons that I'm interested in history, but learning how five thinkers thought didn't quite teach me about how the world works.
Also, I don't think that I agree with the methods in the class. Many of Arie's lectures began with a critique of the philosophers that we were reading because of their incomplete understandings of history. That is a valid critique if we're discussing a policy to implement today, but when we're discussing what made a thinker tick, I agree much more with the literary disciplines when they take the thinker on their own terms.
Ironically, the class made me much more critical of Jewish Modernist philosophy. Despite the ethical undertones of many of the thinkers, they seem to be very callous towards the suffering of others, particularly regarding the question of Palestine.
CS302 was a lecture series about the legal aspects of intellectual property, computer science, patents, etc. Every Friday, there would be a different speaker. One of the recurring themes that struck me after this course was the disconnect between technology and law about technology. Often, a case will be decided based on a (wrong) technical definition, or a patent will be given where the strategy would be obvious to anyone in a room full of programmers (like Apple's patent for figuring out where someone's finger is on a touchpad. You just have to look at the maximum and minimum electrical connections on the touchpad. And they have a patent on that). It was saddening.
The first lecture, and one of my favorites in the series, was by Fred voh Lohmann from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Interesting tidbit about the EFF: the iPhone developer license had a clause in it that said that you can't tell anyone else what the license says, which means that people can't talk about all of the crazy things that it mandates. EFF didn't like this. Their solution: they discovered that NASA made an iPhone app, and they filed a Freedom of Information Act request on NASA for the license. Now, anyone can see the license.
Lohmann's talk was about walled gardens, the phenomenon of non-general-computing platforms where one entity controls the applications. The EFF sees computers as an avenue for free speech, so walled gardens like the iPhone where one organization can deny certain types of applications based on political or business interests is fundamentally a problem of freedom. Two solutions to this problem are increasing data portability so that if I want to move from the iPhone to the Droid, it is easy, and increasing API neutrality, meaning that when someone makes a programming platform, they shouldn't be allowed to deny someone's application because it competes.
A book called "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It" by Jonathan Zittrain is available at http://futureoftheinternet.org/download and has a larger description, along with some ideas of how to make the internet stay free.
Another highlight was on 4/30 when Richard M. Stallman came. Stallman created the Open Source Software movement and the GNU operating system, which Linux uses. He has some funny mannerisms -- he managed to take off his shoes when giving his lecture. He also used his lecture as an opportunity to action off a book and to sell some shirts to raise money for the Free Software Foundation (for which he is a full time volunteer).
He is very much an ideologue. In a pre-lecture reception, he got mad at a student who was trying to flesh out his argument. He also disagrees with the terms "open source" versus "closed source" when referring to software that he agrees or disagrees with; instead, he prefers "free software" versus "proprietary software" because the issue is one of freedom. His response to the argument that free software might decrease innovation? We shouldn't value innovation over freedom, so it doesn't matter if we reduce technological innovation.
In his defense, I do agree with the overall spirit of his arguments. Without free software, people can do nasty stuff. Some folks argue that companies have a reputation, so they won't do anything nasty with their software, but Microsoft has a backdoor for law enforcement, Sony put a rootkit in some of their CDs, some phones can listen in on you, and Amazon ironically deleted copies of 1984 from people's Kindles after they had already bought the book.
He also tied his argument in to more traditional limits on freedom, such as those discussed by the EFF. He talked about how the EFF was fined $11,000 per day for a link to a political website, and how they even censor websites that list all of the websites that they censor.
He dislikes software as a service. That removes even the nominal freedom of being able to look at the assembly (the ones and zeros that the computer sees when you run a program) to see what the program is doing; you don't know when the software changes; you have to send your data to an external server, and you don't know what they're doing with your data; external third parties might get access to the data. He only disagrees with software as a service if it is something that could reasonably be desktop software, though. For instance, since I could not reasonably crawl the web and index it, Google Search is not software as a service. The same is true of email services and collaboration services like Wikipedia. What I don't entirely understand is what would still qualify as software as a service under his definition -- even Google Docs (which he identifies as bad) has a strong collaboration component.
All of these fall into his idea of four freedoms (described more in depth at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). The first freedom is to run the software as you wish (ie, I can use the software to criticize the developer of the software if I want to). The second is to review, change, and remake the program using its source code (if I had the source code of the Kindle, I could remove the ability of it to delete my books). This is one of the reasons why he identifies a difference between free software and open source software. Even if software for the iPhone is open source, it is intrinsically not free software because you have to get your software from the iPhone app store (unless you jailbreak it), so I could not easily remake any iPhone software and run it even if I could look at it and see what I wanted to change. The third freedom is to redistribute the software. The forth freedom is to redistribute the changed software so that a person does not have to have technical expertise to benefit from the openness.
Some terminology: Apple is Free Software's nastiest enemy; Microsoft is Free Software's biggest enemy, iPad = iBad, iPhone = iGroan. Terms of propaganda: "piracy" -- Stallman's response when asked about piracy is that attacking ships is bad and sharing is good; "counterfeiting" -- unauthorized software isn't counterfeit because it never pretends to be anything other than what it is; "protection" typically means restrictions, such as "technical protection measures" which are technical restriction measures, or digital handcuffs; "Intellectual Property" lumps together a dozen different unrelated laws under the guise of property law, even though some of the laws under intellectual property, such as copyright, were designed to promote innovation, not to protect property rights.
On 4/23, Pamela Samuelson talked about Supreme Court cases and patents. There is a currently pending case (it may be decided by the time you read this!), Bilski v Kappos, that has to do with the patentability of business methods. Samuelson knew from moment 1 that Bilski would lose because the justices were asking the lawyers for some nuance, and none was given. When asked by Scalia if a method for winning friends and influencing people was patentable, when asked by Kennedy and Roberts about the patentability of alphabets and actuarial tables, when asked by Sotomayor about speed dating methods, when asked by Breyer about teaching law, and when asked by Ginsburg about jury selection, the lawyer said that all of those should be patentable. Those were troubling because if human communication is patentable, free speech would wither and if the law were patentable, it would cease to be public, so the law would no longer be, even theoretically, about legal truth absent money.
She also talked about the history of patents. It used to be that Intel wasn't a fan of patents, so in Gottschalk v Benson, they said that computer algorithms should not be patentable because math is not patentable. In Parker v Flook, it was found that conversion tables are not patentable. In Diamond v Diehr, it was found that a rubber curing process involving computer calculations is patentable, setting a precedent that "everything under the sun made by man" is patentable.
Patentable subject matter includes: machines, manufactures, compositions of matter (like rubber), and processes. Non-patentable subject matter includes: printed matter (text), business methods and mental processes, and abstract ideas (math, science). Where do computer programs fall into this? They are copyrightable, but they are really just mathematical algorithms and text, so they shouldn't be patentable.
Part of the lead up to Bilski was that the federal circuit court, in order to perpetuate its existence, is very patent friendly, so they give patents on everything. In State Street Bank v Signature Financial, it was found that any process that yields a 'useful, concrete, tangible result' is patentable, and nothing has ever not met this standard. The Supreme Court didn't really like this move by the federal circuit court, so they decided to hear Bilski.
Samuelson ended with some of the more troubling extensions of patents. For instance, products of nature like Genes are unpatentable, but when people isolate genes, they can get patents on them.
On 5/21 (the last lecture that I made it to), Karl Kramer gave a more general discussion of patents. Kramer was a good lecturer. He identified 10 things to do with a patent. There are cheap things (keep it in your files, frame it, throw it in the face of your old high school English teacher, sign it over to your company), things that cost tens of thousands of dollars (sell it to someone, license it to someone, use it in negotiations to avoid paying for someone else's patent, send it back to the patent office for reexamination or reissue), and things that cost millions (threaten to sue someone, sue someone).
Kramer talked about how a good idea does not make a good patent. If something is unpatentable like a scientific discovery, it doesn't make a very good patent. If you miss the window of time -- patents are only good for 17 years -- then, it's not very good. For instance, Stanford invented public key cryptography (specifically, Hellman, my EE190 teacher) and would have made tons of money off of it if they had waited a few years to get a patent on it since it only became widespread after the internet became popular. Also, if you don't have a good patent lawyer, you probably won't make money off of your patent (though you don't need to have a good invention to make money off of a patent if you have a good patent lawyer).
In order to make a patent valuable, it needs to be incredibly vague. This is because you have an idea at year 0, file for a patent at year 1, get a patent at year 5, and use the patent at year 10. By that time, all of the technology has changed, so if the patent actually referred to the original idea, it would be worthless. A patent that protects what you actually implement is of little value; instead, a patent needs to protect what will be important to you in the future so that you can block others from competing.
There are different types of patent cases. If two companies are in parity with one another (both with similar interest in technology and of similar size), they will both want to settle rather than assume massive risk. If one company is much bigger, they can usually starve out the smaller one (though baby tigers occasionally cause an upset). Last, there are patent trolls that just want money and that can't be counter sued by the company that they sue.
The best patents to sue on involve standards because that way, anyone who wants to follow the standard has to pay up.
The different districts where you can sue vary greatly. The central district of California takes 4-8 years before a trial starts. Northern California takes 3-5. Eastern Texas takes 2-3. Western Wisconsin takes 1-2 years. The international trade commission only takes 15-18 months, and because of international trade, that can have a similar effect.
People generally file suits in the Eastern District of Texas because the district's economy depends on patent suits (they bring in lots of lawyers and experts for a long amount of time). As a result, the jury almost always decides for the plaintiff. It is partially because of this that science goes out the window in patent cases. Some advice that Kramer heard if you need a jury that is intelligent? Count their teeth. Good dental care is a good sign.
On 5/7, Jim Bennett talked about trials. He gave a broad overview of how something goes to trial.
The most significant change in trials in years is email. When there's a trial, you ask for all of the emails that a company has on record and spend a year going through them. In those emails, you find lots of things that people wouldn't have wrote in the days of snail mail. The critical issue in intellectual property trials is not who said or did something, but who thought or knew something at a particular moment. Emails provide a record of people thinking out loud at almost every moment.
He also recommended some movies (12 Angry Men, Inherit the Wind, A Civil Action, The Verdict, Anatomy of a Murderer, To Kill a Mockingbird, Witness for the Prosecution) and some websites (scotusblog.com, blogs.wsj.com/law, law.cornell.edu/world).
On 5/14, Peter Brantley talked about the Google Book Search settlement. I wish that Google would move it along faster so that I could have digital access to every book ever.
One of the things that he discussed was orphaned books. The rights to many books is unknown. The way that book rights work is with papers stored in big warehouses. When publishers go out of business or get consolidated, when authors buy back their works from publishers, or when any number of other things happen, those papers are fairly unorganized (if they ever were organized in the first place). It's hard to check if a book is actually claimable by a publisher. Because copyright has been extended to an obscenely long time, that pretty much means that we need to go back 100 years for anything in the public domain, and it would be impossible for Google or any other digital library to function in an opt-in manner because the many orphaned books would never be able to opt-in.
One funny thing is that the publishers guild tried to get Google to write them a large check based on the revenue that Google Search brings in because of all of the machine learning that Google does with the digitized books (ie, because Google can look at a book and its translation, their translation services are amazing). Since the publishers had no hope of winning that, Google said no.
I'm just glad that physical libraries came into existence before copyright law and copyright lawyers. Otherwise, there would be no way that they would be legal.
There were a few speakers that I didn't get a ton out of. On 4/9, Paul Grewal gave a broad overview of intellectual property. On 4/16, Chris Hoofnagle talked about identity theft.
In spring quarter 2009, I took CS109, which is a class on statistics for Computer Science majors. This spring, I took the lab component of it (which wasn't offered last year because there wasn't yet anyone to teach it), which teaches how to use R, a statistical programming language.
Programming languages are very similar.
All of them have variables and functions (commands to make your program do stuff). Most have something similar to objects (collections of variables and functions. Ie, a car object would have variables like "number of passengers" and functions like "accelerate" and "turn"). Most of the tricks that programmers use to make programming complex systems manageable are shared among programming languages.
There are two big differences between languages like R and languages like C++. First, R is a higher level "scripting" language, whereas C++ is a lower level "compiled" language. I might write something like "int x = 5" in either language, meaning "create an integer variable, call it x, and assign it the value 5." However, in C++, before I ran that program, I would have to "compile" it, which means change it from being words and symbols into being 1s and 0s that the machine can easily read. In R, or other scripting languages like JavaScript, Python, or Ruby, the machine would not have to turn it into 1s and 0s beforehand; instead, it does that on an as-needed basis. This also means that it can't look at the program as a whole and optimize certain parts as easily. In my experience, scripting languages are about 10 times slower than compiled languages.
Second, R is a "functional" language whereas C++ is "object oriented" and C is "procedural." Procedural means the computer just reads down a script of instructions from top to bottom, which is very efficient because the computer doesn't have to do anything extra. The other types are implemented using a language like C because that's all a computer knows how to do. Object oriented languages are similar, but there is some extra organization. Functional means like functions in math -- if you give them the same inputs, they'll result in the same outputs. This means that you take away some of the freedoms that you have in other languages -- in order to guarantee that a function will have the same outputs with the same inputs, that means that the data all has to be encapsulated and that one function can't mess with another function. Functional programming is very efficient when you want to divide a big computation between a bunch of computers because each computer can easily do part of the task and come back with its results to be merged -- because of the functional nature, the results of one function don't depend on the other computers' computations, so they can be done at the same time.
Also, R is a much higher level language in that it has a lot of nice syntax and extras built in. This is what makes it a good statistical programming language: pretty much everything about statistical is built in to R. You can get the mean, variance, min, max. You can get data from or analyze data from any distribution (normal, exponential, geometric, Poisson, binomial...). You can do logistical regression and other machine learning. You can do graphs and plots. And the best part: creating an array of the numbers 1 to 10 is as simple as typing "1:10".
The one annoying part: variable assignment is usually done like "x <- 2" rather than "x = 2". (technical sidenote: this is done so that the equals key is reserved for passing named parameters in functions because many functions will have gazillions of parameters, and it's nice to just be able to say the name of the parameter you want to pass in).
I originally decided to take CS109L because there isn't a lot of focus on functional programming in the Stanford CS curriculum, and I wanted to give it a try. I really like it. You can do so much in one line of code in R by composing functions (just like in math you might say y = f(g(x))).
I also like the syntax -- the way you write in a programming language -- of R.
I still like C and C++ better than R, but I certainly like R as a language. It has replaced my calculator and graph-plotter. I love R!
Apart from learning the actual language, the class was good as a refresher on the material from CS109. Statistics is really useful. This class surprised me at how much I still remembered and how much more I wish I remembered. The teacher is good at integrating the material in CS109L with CS109, going more in depth on some of the places where CS109 could only give a little bit of attention.
Right around the time when I was picking classes, someone sent out an email about a one unit class on nuclear disarmament taught by Martin Hellman, the inventor of public key cryptography, the technology that makes the internet secure. He's really famous.
I had read one of his papers on the risk inherent in a world with nuclear weapons the previous term. The paper is written to be extremely accessible: it's available at http://nuclearrisk.org/soaring_article.php, and I highly recommend it.
His basic argument: we constantly hear arguments about how nuclear deterrence is key to our national security, and it would be extremely risky to live without them. However, surprisingly, no one has done an actual risk analysis of nuclear weapons -- we're just relying on ad hoc theories. Hellman, trying to fix this problem, did his own analysis (there's a link to his methodology in the article I mention above).
To get a rough ballpark of how safe people think the world is, consider this: if we continue living like we did in the past century, with things like the Cuban missile crisis, the conflict over Ossetia, 9/11, North Korea, and Iran, do you think that the world could survive for another 10 years? 100? 1000? 10000? Most people seem to say that we would last somewhere between 100 and 1000 years. If we will probably have a nuclear weapons failure sometime in the next 1000 years, then that means that a child born today has a 10% chance that they won't live out their natural life due to a nuclear apocalypse. For comparison, that's a level of risk equivalent to everyone in the world skydiving twice per week or living with 1000 nuclear power plants in your back yard (nuclear power plants have regulations on fault tolerance: people actually have done risk analysis with them. That's why Three Mile Island wasn't Chernobyl: the radon gas that leaked was contained). If the time horizon is 100 years, a child will have a 50% chance of death, which is equivalent to skydiving 3 times per day or living around 10,000 nuclear power plants.
The class was focused around on applying this analysis to current events and to deepening our understandings of the issue. The best part of the class was probably all of the speakers that Hellman brought in to talk to us.
On a less formal level, there were also some smaller talks. One of Hellman's goals is to build a critical mass at Stanford of people who care about nuclear disarmament. Trying to change the whole US would be too difficult, so he took the idea of market segmentation and is trying to 'sell his product' in just one segment of the market: Stanford students. He had a lot of interaction with SLE, the humanities program that I was in last year. He gave a talk to some individual students early on; he was signed up as one of the lecturers for all of SLE later on, and he also talked with them at one of their faculty nights. That was one of the more successful ways he had of reaching students, so it will probably be much more of his focus next year.
What surprised me was that so many people who I think of as conservative hawks are on board with disarmament because they have seen just how risky nuclear weapons are. George Shultz, the Secretary of State under Regan, William Perry, Secretary of Defense under Clinton, Sidney Drell, Deputy Director of SLAC, and Philip Taubman, professor at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, came together to give one of the earlier talks. Taubman was working on a book about the work of Shultz, Perry, Drell, Henry Kissinger, who bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam War and supported coups against democratically elected leaders in Latin America as Nixon's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, and Sam Nunn, former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on nuclear disarmament. The talk was accompanied by the movie, "Nuclear Tipping Point," which featured Kissinger, Nunn, and Colin Powell, Regan's National Security Advisor and Bush's Secretary of State. It surprised me that all of them supported disarmament. It's not just the hippies anymore! The movie is also available if you want to see it: http://nucleartippingpoint.kintera.org/DVD
One of my favorite talks was by Joseph Martz, a nuclear weapons designer. One of his ideas is to have a capabilities based deterrence. We don't need to have thousands of insecure nuclear weapons (remember when, a few years ago, we LOST a nuclear warhead for a day? We thought we were transporting a dummy warhead, but because we have so many to keep track of, we were actually transporting a real one) around if we have the capability of engineers making one when needed. He became a weapons designer so that, eventually, we might be able to reach a world with 0 nuclear warheads.
Because he knows the science behind nukes, he talked to us about the aerodynamics of ICBMs (they're really hard to make because accuracy is of supreme importance, and making big ballistic missiles makes them inaccurate, but used to be necessary to get high enough yield... because if it's not accurate, you need a high yield to hit your targets. Moreso than making a nuclear explosion, this is the barrier to states like China and Korea being a nuclear threat to us. With the weapons that they have now, they're about as likely to hit the ocean as a city in the US), the history of nuclear weapons, including videos (fission versus fusion was a BIG change), and the development of tactical nukes (ie, nuclear landmines, backpack nukes, bunker busters, atomic cannons, nuclear depth charges). He has a set of slides with links to youtube videos of many nuclear explosions: http://nuclearrisk.org/stanford/100504slides.pdf
One of the things that was amazing to learn is just how insecure our nukes are. For instance, before Macnamara, there was no PAL system for nukes, so the person who was supervising the nukes could actually use them on their own. When PAL was put in place, the code started out as eight 0s. I remember reading about someone who hacked into Pentagon computers by searching for blank passwords while on his dialup internet connection in the UK. There was a time when are nukes had a blank password too.
Another speaker, Dan Beswick, came to talk about his experiences as a marine during nuclear tests. He was one of the people who sat down in a trench and watched a nuclear explosion so that the army could ensure that their soldiers could still fight in a place that they just nuked. It was a life changing experience for him. The blast was bright enough that, when looking in the opposite direction and with his eyes closed, he could see through his arm as if it were being x-rayed. The heat was intense. So was the shockwave -- the soldiers were told to brace themselves on one another so that they didn't all fall over, and they were given shovels in case they had to dig themselves out if the trench collapsed.
Professor Siegfried Hecker talked about international relations and the situation with Korea (I was gone for his talk, so I got the makeup talk from Hellman). For anything nuclear, you can't just use uranium: you need 'enriched' uranium. That's because uranium comes in two isotopes: U238 and U235. Uranium is 0.7% U235. Nuclear reactors need 3-5% enrichment. Medical purposes need 20% enrichment. Weapons need 50-90% enrichment. Because U238 and U235 are chemically equivalent, you can only separate them by weight (ie, running it through a centrifuge over and over again). That's why enriching uranium during WW2 took up 10% of the US energy supplies: we needed to separate the uranium by brute force. I think that we have slightly fancier methods now that take a little bit less energy, but I could be wrong.
The important part: if you have the technology to get fuel grade uranium, you have the technology to get weapons grade uranium because you just need to run it through the centrifuge longer. Also, if you have U238, you can make Plutonium 239, which is a high octane weapons grade ore (the hard part: Plutonium bombs are more complicated because you need to make a big simultaneous implosion rather than just shooting two globs of uranium together).
North Korea agreed to a nuclear weapons freeze in exchange for energy supplies. When the republicans took control of congress, they went back on the US's side of the agreement (when the US originally agreed to it, everyone thought that North Korea would implode on itself before the US ever had to pay up), and North Korea re-began their weapons production. Before they restarted, they didn't have enough Plutonium for one bomb. Now, they have 24-42kg, enough for 4-8 bombs. In other words, when we were still being diplomatic with Korea, diplomacy worked. Hecker knows all of this because he was personally invited to North Korea to inspect their reactors and look at their supplies -- they wanted us to know that they have a nuclear deterrent. They still have crude weapons, and they're not miniaturized enough to be a serious threat, but they do have nukes, and they have them because we stopped being diplomatic.
The final two talks were by more social-movement oriented people talking about the hope of disarmament. I couldn't make the final talk, but the second to last one was very good. Paul Chappell, a West Point graduate, a soldier for 7 years, and the author of "Will War Ever End?" (very good - I highly recommend it. It's also a short, easy read), talked about why peace is possible. Peace is possible because war is pathological: humans are not naturally violent (if they were, then peace would be naïve).
People don't fight because they are violent. The greatest problem of any army is to stop soldiers from running away. People's natural reaction is to run, not fight. At West Point, they teach this, and they teach how to make people willing to die. The secret is to use love. People love their buddies, and will sacrifice their lives for their loved ones.
Even when people don't run away, they still hate killing. During the Civil War, we recovered rifles that had multiple bullets in them (meaning, people kept loading their guns without actually firing) rather than 0 bullets. During WW2, we were fighting Nazis, and only 15% of soldiers who had the opportunity to fire their weapons actually shot. During Vietnam, no one knew why we were fighting, but 90% fired. Today, nearly 100% fire. The difference is that now, we have realized that killing is unnatural and must be trained. We no longer have soldiers fire at round targets; now soldiers shoot at human targets in training.
"On Killing" by Dave Grossman discusses this further (the book is required reading in peace programs at universities and is require reading at West Point). To kill, we must create distance between ourselves and the people that we are killing. We will not kill people like us. Three types of distance are psychological distance (they aren't human; they are cockroaches), moral distance (we are good; they are evil), and mechanical distance (it's easier to drop a bomb than to shoot a rifle, and easier to shoot than to stab). This has been used by both sides in every war in history. For instance, the Nazis had the idea of the Aryan, they were fighting the evil impurities associated with things like Jews, Communists, and other lesser beings, and they used gas chambers to kill people. Some people say that they switched to gas chambers because they were more efficient than firing squads. On the contrary: there are few things more efficient than firing squads. The victims strip down, dig their own graves, and the only cost is a few cheap bullets.
The only problem with the lack of distance associated with a firing squad is that the soldiers in the firing squads were literally going insane. In addition to being hard to kill people, it is also damaging. War is hell. People who come back from war have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, they go insane, they commit suicide. If humans were naturally violent, violence would not drive them insane. 98% of people who are exposed to war experience psychological trauma. What is the difference between them and the other 2%? The 2% are already insane. 2% of Americans as a whole and 2% of the military are psychopaths. Everyone besides the 2% goes crazy from killing people.
If war is so unnatural, why do soldiers enlist? They want peace. They join the military because they think that they will end war. All of our superheroes use violence to achieve peace. Soldiers have the same thoughts going in. That's why they joined in WW2 and not in Vietnam.
That's why war is changing. Everyone hates killing, and when the modern media gets wind of killing, it destroys the war effort. Modern wars are about winning hearts and minds. You can't kill your way to victory. Technology forces evolution. Just as tanks destroyed trench warfare, communication technology has destroyed wars that are won by killing. Abu Ghraib is on youtube. If you are unjust, you will make enemies faster than you can kill them. If you kill 1000 terrorists and two civilians, you have lost -- imagine if two American civilians were killed by an invading army: thousands of Americans would be ready to enlist. The same is true when US soldiers kill civilians, but people are ready to enlist in terrorist groups. It also means that war really needs to change to survive because in wars from WW2 to today, most deaths have been civilians, not soldiers.
In a war of hearts and minds, the peace movement can win. Gandhi and MLK were very good at winning hearts and minds, much more so than the best generals. According to Sun Tzu, the pinnacle of excellence is not 100 victories in 100 battles, but defeating your opponent without bloodshed. There are 5 types of war, from best to worst: the war that is never fought (according to Jet Lee, the best martial arts self defense technique is to smile), the war that is avoided (diplomacy), the war without bloodshed (boycotts -- attacking your opponent's economy), the war with casualties, and the war that never ends (the War on Terror). The peace movement might not be able to win in a war with casualties, but it can certainly fight the economy, and a movement can negotiate.
And the peace movement has distinct advantages. War means transforming an enemy into a corpse; peace means transforming an enemy into a friend. Making corpses drives you insane. Making friends is sustainable. War means deceiving your enemy at all times (to have them preparing for your attack when you are resting; to have them resting when you are launching your attack; to have them expecting an attack from the left when you come from the right; etc. Sun Tzu has a long list of ways that you should deceive your enemy); peace means telling the truth.
Someone in the audience asked about what the world would be like without militaries, referencing a book that argued that that the military is key to giving life meaning because, in today's consumerist society, life lacks meaning, whereas the military builds camaraderie among its soldiers (in order to prevent people from running). Chappell's answer: I am not anti-military; I am anti-war. War means forcing soldiers to do something that they find unnatural, but in a peaceful society, the military would be engaged in the things that make soldiers enlist. The military is the only group that can deploy thousands of well trained and coordinated people anywhere in the world in a manner of days. Imagine if they were dedicated to fighting diseases and disasters. That's the type of thing that the military advertises. You don't see any pictures of soldiers killing people in "Go Army" commercials. Martin Luther King's favorite TV show, the one that he let his kids see, was openly pro military: Star Trek. In a world without war, the military can engage in scientific exploration. In today's world, New Zealand's military is like this -- dedicated to humanitarian aid and disaster relief. As General MacArthur said, the greatest soldier prays for peace.
Chappell ended on a hopeful note. In most social movements in the US, less than 1% of society participated. At Seneca Falls, when people got together and talked about women's rights, not many of the people in attendance signed on to the resolution that women should have the right to vote and be equal citizens. Social movements just need a select group of well trained people. The reason that we have war is because the war movement is more well trained than the peace movement. That is what we need to change. If Europe, which was one of the bloodiest places in the world, can achieve peace, than there is hope. As long as we join with the 1% rather than the 2%, there is hope.
I've noticed that a lot of Stanford students have signatures on their email that list extracurricular leadership positions and degree stuff.
Personally, I would feel awkward doing that in an email because, for an average email, my titles are as long as my email.
Because I never get the chance to have a fancy signature, I'll take this opportunity to brag.
Sam King
Associated Students of Stanford University | Deputy Chair of Technology
Haas Center for Public Service | Featured Student
InSTEDD | Machine Learning Programmer
Palo Alto HS | Head Policy Debate Coach
Queer Straight Alliance | CoChair and Financial Officer
SEE College Prep | Chief Technology Officer
Stanford Computer Science Department | Section Leader
Stanford Debate Society | Captain of Policy Debate
Stanford DM Hackathon | Director
Stanford University | Expected BS, Computer Science, 2012
I should note that this is a little exaggerated because it doesn't represent one moment in time (ie, next year I'm dropping ASSU to spend more time on Hackathon and dropping SEE and Stanford Debate to have more time for Paly).
Project Motivation (ProMo) aims to motivate underrepresented groups to go to college. They give tours of Stanford and have panels with a few Stanford students so that they can ask about what college life is like.
Last year, I did one panel. This Spring, I helped with a few panels and tours. They're all in the morning, which is not my favorite time to wake up, but it was a good experience, and I plan to continue next year.
A few weeks into the term, the new student government executive began their terms in office, so my term as deputy chair of technology was up. I helped with the transition, and I helped out towards the start of the new term, but it feels good to be done.
One of the people that I met through Dance Marathon and Hackathon started his own college prep nonprofit, SEE College Prep. He had people interested in helping him out with different tech projects, but they weren't all computer scientists, so he wanted someone to be available to answer questions and make sure that his folks were making progress, so he asked me.
I did everything that was asked of me, and I showed up to their dinners and events, and I'm sure that I helped, but it didn't feel as meaningful as some of the other stuff that I did. I guess my involvement was less active than I'm used to.
Hackathon (see hackathon.stanford.edu or my previous letter) was one of the high points. Of the directors from this past year, I was the only one who wanted to stay on for the coming year, so this term was about stepping into a larger leadership role.
At the end of last term, I talked with this past year's directors to figure out what we should do differently next year. This term, the first thing that I did was recruitment. Like last year, it was fairly self selecting, but I'm very satisfied with the people that applied, and they divided themselves very nicely into the different roles that I had arranged (we ended up with exactly as many people as I had hoped for).
Especially nice: one of my friends, Emin, offered to help if I needed any, so I signed him on, and since I have a close relationship with him and can trust him, he's making the organization a lot easier on me. He's an awesome person to have on board. One of the nice things about working with a friend is that I can just be honest with him and say that I need someone to keep me accountable so that I get my work done (if I don't have someone keeping me accountable to a deadline, I tend to procrastinate. A lot. Thus, because I couldn't get this verbose letter done before I left for Cambodia, it's a month late). It's thanks to him that I've been productive. He also does a ton of good work -- he got all of last year's documents organized, and we got a timeline for the upcoming year made together.
I also sent out a survey to the nonprofits that we worked with this past year, but not too many responded. It's the same way as last year. Next year, we need to get the surveys out the week after the event ends. Another mistake that I made this year: at Stanford, when people recruit staff, they ask, on the application, for the recruit's dorm and room number. Then, rather than sending them an email saying "you're accepted!" like I did, they come to their dorm room at 6am, bang on their door, wake them up, and bring them to breakfast (after having the person who got "rolled out" help bang on everyone else's door). On 4/27, there was the Dance Marathon rollout, which I helped with, but I wasn't able to wake up the Hackathon staff. As it happens, though, one of my staff was up at that time anyways (he had just finished up a CS107 project that night/morning) and felt a strong connection to Dance Marathon also helped out with the Dance Marathon rollouts.
The other big event for Dance Marathon and Hackathon was a staff retreat on 5/8. We went to the beach, got to know one another, and talked about our goals for the upcoming year.
My goals for Hackathon:
1. Last year, there wasn't a lot of collaboration between the Hackathon staff and the rest of the Dance Marathon staff. That's bad, because we're part of the same event, we both can help one another, and Dance Marathon is what makes our Hackathon special and what sets us apart from the many other Hackathons in existence. Thus, I want to ensure that DM and Hackathon are very connected and that all of our staff and our hackers can see that.
2. Last year, we weren't as organized as we should have been. Notably, some of our projects didn't get together until last minute, and the staff didn't have everything set up in advance so that the hackers could focus all of their time on coding. This year, I want everything to be organized beforehand so that hackers can start coding by a half hour after they arrive.
3. There are a lot of schools that don't have public service related hackathons, and there are a lot of computer science students who would be interested. This year, I want to spread the idea of Dance Marathon Hackathon to other schools.
One thing that interested me was a personality test. Stanford's Haas Center for Public Service has a bunch of supplies that they give to any group that needs help, including supplies to have retreats. One of them is a personality test that splits people into four categories. There is green (analytical, academic, focused), gold (strong sense of duty, humble, traditional), orange (energetic, active), and blue (compassionate, in touch with emotions). This time and last time, I scored high on green (duh. However, the question also sets analytic as separate from compassionate, which I disagree with), gold (I dislike a rigid focus on tradition, but duty and humility are very important to me), and blue (not in touch with my emotions, but I strongly value compassion), and very low on orange (I'm not loud. I'm not a party person). Because these personality tests are such a blunt instrument and create false dichotomies, I usually don't like them. However, I was surprised to see that almost every Dance Marathon person was orange. I should have expected it, in retrospect. Dance Marathon advertises itself as the biggest party on campus. It is a fundraiser for HIV / AIDS in Africa, but the reason that it's so successful is that it doesn't just attract the golds and blues -- it gets the oranges, who are extremely energetic, who know how to plan a big party, and who can keep their fundraisers excited. That's also why it's important that we remain Dance Marathon Hackathon: computer scientists are not often oranges, and having a bunch of high energy people dancing around us makes it a lot easier to work for a cause. There were a select few hackers who were annoyed by all of the noise, but the vast majority wanted more of a connection with the dancers on every level (ie, they wanted to have the same shirts, the same food, the same everything).
The other thing that went on was a lot of meetings.
I had two meetings with the Hackathon people. Mostly, we just introduced ourselves to each other and talked about our goals for Hackathon, and I told them my expectations and their responsibilities. Some changes from last year: I expect everyone to make DM meetings, and there will be much less of a focus on Hackathon meetings -- we can get most of our stuff done over email (last year, the meetings were always confrontational and nothing got done. Except towards the end where we had work meetings that took a long time but were necessary).
I also had a meeting with Stephanie Morrison, the director of Dance Marathon this year. It was nice to see that we were on the same page. Most of her concerns were the same as mine -- about increasing collaboration between Dance Marathon and Hackathon -- so the meeting went very smoothly. She'll be a great person to work with!
On 6/2 (right around finals week!), all of the people involved in finances had a meeting with Student Activities and Leadership. They told us about Stanford's rules regarding money, including sponsorship and fundraising. We have to get everything cleared with Stanford's Office of Development, but don't need to do anything fancy with donations under $1500. Also, with Hackathon, things might be different because the exchange is slightly more reciprocal: they give us money, and they get their name out to a bunch of Stanford computer science students (and the office of development doesn't care quite so much about exchanges like that). It does feel a little bit like selling out because we're putting some organizations that I think are morally contemptible on our shirts. I guess the reason that I feel OK about it is that their funds go to something good, we are not compromising our actions for them, and I don't really believe that the advertising will cause anyone to work for them. To some extent, that's like saying that I don't believe in gravity, but I guess the apple hasn't quite hit me on the head yet.
I've also been meeting with external people. Professor John Mitchell wanted to meet to offer his support (coincidentally, he's working with Emin) and give us some advice. He also set us up to have a meeting with Elfenworks on 5/26. Elfenworks provides tech help to nonprofits, and it seems like they would be a great partner for Hackathon. We can help their organizations by working on projects for them for 24 hours, and they can help our organizations by providing continued support after the end of the event.
After the summer started, things have continued to go along well. My project directors have made a first contact with a bunch of organizations that we hope to work with (including a bunch of cool people that I talked with this past term like Professor Sean Mooney for biocomputation and Professor Paulo Bilkstein, who uses computer science for education projects). Emin has gotten the logistics organized for the coming year. My scaling director (who is working on spreading Hackathon to other schools and organizations) has started to get contacts in other organizations. My webmaster has started to play around with the server and our content management system. I'm very satisfied with everyone's progress.
In the spring, the debate season is mostly over. Thus, we scale back meetings and focus on things like recruiting and get-togethers.
Recruiting failed. In past years, recruitment for policy debate happened at a different time than recruitment for LD debate, so we got a different batch of people and it didn't matter that the people doing the recruiting weren't particularly charismatic. This time, they happened at the same time, everything happened without my knowledge (it was over spring break), and in the end, we got about two people, compared with dozens who went to LD.
The things we did wrong: first, in the original recruiting meeting, we had a demo debate, and the people that we chose to participate in it didn't debate in a manner that was friendly to observers. Second, in the followup to that meeting, when we had four people rather than two, I let my partner in coaching, the outgoing head coach, run the show rather than taking over. He is better as a debate coach than I am in many ways, but attracting new people to the activity is not one of them.
The two that we did get are superb, though. One is very opinionated and generally knowledgeable. He also tried out LD after the first (failed) policy meeting and came back to policy because LD bored him and there wasn't any individual attention (because they have dozens of kids; it's no fault of the LD coaches, who are very good). The other is interested in computer science (his friend gave him the ANSI C book by K+R, and he learned how to program in C; he runs Linux and knows about the free software movement; he took his own initiative to write his own scripting language), so I help him out with that in addition to him being interested in debate. He's going to camp at Michigan this summer. In a few years, he will be an amazing debater and an amazing coder.
The one annoying thing about a recruiting fail is that it makes it harder to get support from the school.
On 5/22, we had the end of year party. There were tons of debaters there. There were funny awards, similar to the ones that they have at South, except these awards were given by the students rather than the coaches. Also, there was a slideshow, and I realized how often I wore my home tie dyed hoodie this past year.
Throughout this term and last, we had been recruiting Tim Borgerson, a debater from Ashland, to be my assistant coach next year. He is coming to Stanford and would compliment my knowledge of debate very nicely. A nearby private school was also recruiting him, but in the end, he decided to go for the underdog (we're also a little bit nicer to work with and closer to Stanford) -- Ashland was a little bit of an underdog also. It will be nice to work with him next year.
So far, the summer has been good. We have three kids going to Michigan 7 Week, and one of the new kids is also at Michigan. I heard that the new one isn't getting as much individual attention as I would have liked, but the other debaters seem to be taking care of him, and he is still learning a lot.
I also have a FTP server set up for them -- thanks to the help of Nick Isaacs in suggesting that I look on craigslist and taking me to pick it up, and thanks to the help of Emin Topalovic who helped me get it set up and registered on Stanford's network over the summer while I'm in Cambodia (I got it on 5/29, right before school got out, so I wasn't able to get everything set up before I left).
The start of the term was busy for QSA. Student government elections happened, and I was heading up the Queer Coalition. I also helped out the Students of Color Coalition on an individual level. I sent out about 17358 emails during the election season.
Last year, Students for a Better Stanford ran as a senate slate (check out my verbose letter from a year ago. The Stanford Daily sums them up well: ""). This year, the people in Students for a Better Stanford coached a new senate slate. They called themselves Students United Now to avoid the branding associated with SBS. They also denied any connection to SBS. What was interesting was that their rhetoric in denying any connection to SBS was exactly the same as SBS' rhetoric throughout last year. In the end, SOCC and QSA won a supermajority in the senate, and we have a good executive.
After the elections, we started having meetings with our representatives to educate them about the issues. I was extremely pleased with how receptive they were -- almost immediately after we talked, the executive and some senators started working with Stanford Admissions on rephrasing a question for the sake of trans students and with Residential Education about integrating queer issues into RA training. They also showed up to a few queer events in the spring. The annoying thing is that even though the senate usually steps down once the next year's senate is elected, the 2009-2010 (SBS) senate decided to not relinquish their power until they were constitutionally forced to, so the senate didn't have the chance to get anything done in the spring.
The theory as to why they didn't step down when most do is that they wanted to prevent Fadi Quran, a Palestinian student who graduated this past spring, from encouraging the incoming senators to discuss divesting from companies that violate the human rights of people in Israel and Palestine.
Another positive thing that happened is that, while the Students of Color Coalition has, in the past few years, just been an organization that endorses candidates in the ASSU elections, it really stepped up this year. Even after the elections, they had town halls to get Stanford students talking about how to best serve their respective communities. Ie, best practices in recruiting new members and in maintaining an institutional memory. They also wanted to emphasize community unity, so they brought members of all of the different communities together, including communities that had not directly been a part of SOCC like environmentalist communities, the women's community, and the queer community.
SSE, the organization that student groups have to use to access their funds, had about $50 less in our account than should have been there. I discovered this because I keep my own set of books because I don't trust SSE. With good reason.
What happened: several months ago, I filed to reimburse one of our members for some stuff they bought on behalf of QSA. The reimbursement went through, but because the computer system that they use is horrible, they have issues with basic stuff like two different organizations reimbursing one person. Thus, through no fault of my own, they had to cancel the reimbursement and issue a new one in order to get it to go through.
I discover that it was this charge that was faulty because it was the only one that added up to the amount that was missing. I go to the SSE offices and tell them that their system never canceled the charges because their system has issues with two organizations reimbursing one person. They looked at me dumbfounded and replied that their system has no such issues. I then showed them the screen where SSE had written a note saying, "The system didn’t recognize the 2 different clubs so combined check [sic] caused accounting problems." "Oh." Then, they look at my account and tell me that the charge that was never canceled properly was canceled properly.
After about a half hour, I convinced them that I wasn't incompetent and that I knew more than they did about the issue. They sent me to their accountant. I showed the accountant the line item and, unsurprisingly, they told me that they never finished cancelling that charge. They proceeded to take care of it.
Ugh.
4/16 was the Day of Silence. I think that this year, New Student Orientation didn't conflict with the National Day of Silence, so we didn't have to change the date. Normally, the LGBT Community Resource Center plans the Day of Silence, but this year they tried to get support from other student groups, and they didn't get a ton of responses, so QSA took a much larger role in planning Day of Silence than in the past.
We had shirts and bracelets, a silent lunch with chalking in White Plaza (the center of campus), and a breaking the silence event at Terra Happy Hour. I thought that it all turned out very well, especially the chalking. People really got into it, and White Plaza had a lot of positive messages on it.
Our big event for spring term is Genderfuk, Stanford's annual drag ball. For most of the term, everything was going smoothly. Our advertisements went well, we got a lot of support from the rest of the queer community, we had people signing up for acts, and the campus overall seemed interested. Because of all of the support, the logistics were fairly easy: there were plenty of volunteers to pick up food, deserts, and decorations, plenty of people signed up to set up on the day of the event, and enough funds in the account to pay for everything. The theme this year was Drag Race (the show RuPaul's Drag Race) It took a lot of time to get the equipment reserved, and it was a little difficult to find a date with an open room to reserve that didn't conflict with other Stanford events, but 5/7 seemed to work.
Then, the day before the event, I get an email asking for the security paperwork for our event because all parties need to fill out some security stuff. You see, there are two definitions of a party. The one on the website where you sign up for your event defines it as something with alcohol. Since Genderfuk doesn't serve alcohol, I didn't sign it up as a party. However, any event that goes on in the room that we reserved, apparently, also needs to have security (I say apparently because I still haven't seen this written anywhere). The person who emailed me the day before the event was also supposed to send the email several weeks before the event rather than one day before the event, but she's a nice person, it was more my fault than hers, and she helped me get everything worked out.
When I discovered this, I quickly rearranged my day and spent the next few hours running between four points: Tresidder Meeting Services (which manages the room that I reserved), Student Activities and Leadership (general purpose student group support, including things like security and knowing why stuff happens), SSE (which manages the funds, including purchase orders which are necessary for getting security), and a printer. Everyone was really nice (though SSE was annoying) and helped me get everything taken care of. The one remaining issue was that, because we need to sign up the event as a party, we need someone with a party planning clearance to sign it up, and I had never gone through the workshop because I didn't think that we needed it, so a former QSA leader had to step in and help me out.
After that fiasco, the event went off without a hitch. Turnout was the highest it had been in years, and a lot of different groups on campus were represented in both the performances and in the audience. Everyone had a good time. My QSA CoChair got me a dress and some nice boots. Even the Stanford Review gave Genderfuk a positive review, and they're the same conservative publication that, in the past, encouraged students to request a refund of their Special Fees (which is how QSA is funded) because of the obscenity of an event like Genderfuk. It was a big success.
The CoHo Takeover (see previous verbose letters for a description of the event) on 5/27 was as creative as ever. The flier for the event featured Oprah and her personal trainer, in celebration of them buying a house together.
At the end of the term, the QSA leadership had a retreat to celebrate the work that we had done in the year. We got dressed up, went to Tamarine, a Vietnamese restaurant, and discussed the past year and our plans for recruiting and retention in the coming year. I also had a very delicious mushroom dish.
Early on, AHA!, Stanford's Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics, contacted me about cosponsoring an event where they were bringing in Ted Cox to talk about his experiences undercover at a gay-to-straight camp. The AHA! folks were a pleasure to work with, and they put on a bunch of cool events.
The Ted Cox event was one of the first QSA affiliated events of the quarter on 4/19. The event was very good, and a few of us also went out to dinner with Ted Cox before the event.
He was Mormon through high school. Went on a 2 year mission (in Peru?) until he was 19. Married at 20. Went to college. Took a bio class. Became atheist.
He talked about some funny stuff. In talking about his history as a Mormon, he talked about how they're very serious about cracking down on masturbation. He had to go in to the bishop every few months (weeks?), and they asked him. And since he was told from a young age that they have magical powers to tell if you're lying (he had a fancy name for what they call it), he had to uncomfortably say that he masturbated.
As a missionary, he learned lots of weird stuff. For instance, the missionary before him went to some young boys playing soccer and offered to let them take a dip in his pool. They all went in because it was hot and they were sweaty. Then, he added all of their names to the baptismal records in order to boost the number of registered Mormons. When Ted Cox left the church, he had to threaten legal action to get his name removed.
Marriage is also very important: you aren't allowed to have sex except for in marriage, so there is a strong incentive to get married. Sex out of marriage is a sin second to murder.
One thing that I liked about him was that he used to be a part of the community that he was criticizing. He knows lots of Mormons. He presented them as mostly reasonable people with a few beliefs different from the people that I know. He could talk about how hard it was to move beyond the church.
He writes a lot for Sacramento News and Review. One other notable story he has written was on Furries. According to him, there are a lot of people there for costumes and fun, a lot of people selling furry-porn, and some people there for furry sex.
The speech itself was about his experiences going undercover at a gay-to-straight camp (see http://www.scribd.com/doc/29771138/Ted-Cox-My-Journey-Into-Manhood). It was disturbing and funny. He talked about the evils that straight camps have done: suicides, bullying, and, I was interested to learn, one of the big straight camp people was the cause of the Uganda homophobia bill of 2009.
They have gotten slightly more sophisticated in their argumentation. They don't all say that being gay is a 'choice.' Rather, the line now is that it is because one parent or the other was too neglectful or too close or someone sexually abused you or some other Freudian nonsense (nonsense because it's factually inaccurate. I wrote in an earlier verbose letter about a doctor who talked about the biological underpinnings of queerness if you're interested in why describing queerness as a temporary psychological state is nonsense).
He had audience members come up to give a demonstration of some of the things that they had him do. One of the Freudian lines is that men are gay because they didn't have their father's gentle touch -- a nonsexual, protective, fatherly touch. Thus, to 'cure' these men, they bring back this 'gentle healing touch'. One way is in 'motorcycle' position. The counselor will sit down with his legs open. The gay person will sit down between the legs. The other folks at the camp will give a 'gentle healing touch' on various body parts. According to Cox, when he went through it, the counselor had an erection.
The people who run the camps have often come out saying that the camps are a fraud, that a lot of the success stories are 100% fabricated, etc. One of the men who ran a camp met his future husband there.
Section leading this term was different from last term. Last term, I was teaching CS106A, and this term, I taught CS106B.
One of the differences is that a lot of people with past programming experience take CS106B. As a result, some students are very adamant about things that are bad style (like writing code that is hard for other people to maintain in order to save a few bytes).
This term, for the first time, section was optional. By the second half of the term, I had two students who would show up for section out of seven signed up (they were also both exceptional students -- easily the best in my section), and there was even one section where I had one person show up.
The other difference was the organization. The professor who was teaching CS106B this term had a less hands-on approach to the section leaders. Section leaders have a meeting every Monday where we discuss what happened in the lectures, what students are having a hard time with, the next assignment, and what to emphasize in section that week. We still went over everything this term, but the meetings probably took about half as long. I think that I prefer the longer model -- I felt a little bit less prepared this term than last.
On 5/31, we had the Section Leader End of Quarter Barbeque (SL EOQ BBQ) at Mehran's house. I biked there -- it's actually fairly close. There were Section Leader Superlatives ("most likely to X"). I didn't win anything. It was a good time, though. Good food and good people.
Also, everyone put their favorite reserved word from Java or C++ on their nametag (programming is like writing an essay. Reserved words are words that have special meanings. The programmer determines the meanings of all non-reserved words). It was a good ice breaker. I learned that one of my friends owns the email address [email protected]. A lot of people like "virtual" and "volatile." Mehran had an idea for his family -- "short" for the younger kid, "long" for the older kid, and "long long" for himself (those words refer to the sizes of integers). I chose "in" -- it's not built in to C++ or Java, but the CS106 classes built an add in that would let people use the syntax "foreach subset in some_large_collection" that is common in newer languages like Python and Ruby. I was very annoyed by this because it caused some very hard to trace errors when we used existing code that had "in" in it (notably, we handed out some code in CS106B that use "in," which caused some students lots of errors that were nearly impossible for them to debug and took a long time for us to debug).
Since I decided to work at InSTEDD (instedd.org) in Cambodia this summer rather than with Google working on Chrome / Chromium, I had to prepare for my first experience travelling internationally.
The first big thing was immunizations. In total, I got or already had: typhoid, Japanese encephalitis, meningitis, flu, hepatitis. The typhoid immunization came as a pill rather than a shot. That meant that I had to learn how to take a pill. I had tried a few times before, but I never really had any reason to aside from single pills that people gave me -- I would just request medication in some other form. Since I am faithful to Google, I decided to do a search on how to take a pill. The advice: put it on your tongue and swallow. No water. And it worked. Everyone always advised me to use water, but that was the problem. The water would get the pill stuck to some part of my mouth. The (unconventional) way prescribed by Google has been a great success.
I also got a prescription of Malarone and of Cipro. Cipro is a general purpose stomach antibiotic (thankfully, I haven't had to use any yet). Malarone is the newer anti-malaria drug. The old one causes hallucinations and you have to continue taking it for a month after leaving a malaria-endemic area. With Malarone, you only need to take it for a week after. I think it also sometimes causes hallucinations, but I didn't get any. I only needed to use it when I went on the house building trip (see Pillows for Peace discussion in the blog) because they don't have malaria in Phnom Penh.
The advice that I got from the folks at InSTEDD was to not worry too much about what I pack aside from normal stuff and comfort stuff. They reminded me that Phnom Penh is a city that has everything that I would need.
The only thing that I needed to pick up was a good pair of sandals. And, due to familial coercion, I also shopped for and packed pharmacy stuff. So far, the only pharmacy type things that I have used were, for one day, sunscreen and bug spray. I also went to REI to get a water filter (so that I wouldn't have to use bottled water because it's evil. Phnom Penh has chlorinated water, but some folks say that it isn't quite up to western standards, so I decided to play it safe). I also brought some electrolyte stuff and some bars (protein / snack bars).
Aside from that, I packed a few books, clothes, my wallet, toiletries, and my tech stuff.
Towards the end of the term, I met with the person in charge of the Pillows for Peace trip. She's the mother of a Stanford student in Florence Moore, where I lived in 2008-2009 and where I will live in 2010-2011, and she has been putting on volunteer trips to Cambodia since the 90s.
She eased some of my concerns. I asked her if it was possible to be a vegetarian in Cambodia, and she mentioned that she was a vegetarian (also, Nicolas di Tada, the person who oversees my work at InSTEDD and has been in and out of Cambodia for a while, is vegetarian). She said not to worry about free speech issues. She also mentioned that, while the current government in Cambodia is corrupt, it's probably the person that she would vote for because their people actually work in the provinces to help poor people. She also gave me some Dr. Bronner's Soap. She always compares herself to the guy from My Big Fat Greek Wedding for whom Windex is a miracle cure. For her, it's the soap. It has served me well.
Also, I already discussed this in my Cambodia blog, but I'm making a machine learning service using Ruby on Rails so that other InSTEDD projects can easily me augmented with artificial intelligence.
Every Tuesday, there is a group that gets together to bash Capitalism. Most Tuesdays, I miss it because it's my only free time on Tuesdays, but I think that I was free this Tuesday for some reason.
There were two talks: one was from someone in the humanities and one was in the sciences.
The humanities talk was about psychological damage and stigmatization connected with poverty and wealth inequality. I didn't get a ton out of it.
The science talk was a Malthusian simulation (based on Malthus' predictions about resource shortages). Basically, she took a slave society (massive wealth discrepancies) and a communist society (everyone has the same wealth), programmed in some random weather variation, death, and population growth, and let it run for a few hundred years (there were also a few societies in between, but it all used the same overall algorithm). The slave societies tended to do better because, when there was a catastrophic disaster, the rich people were rich enough to be insulated from the world falling apart, so the 90% of the population that was slaves died, whereas the rich people lived to repopulate their communities. The communist societies did better on average, but 100% they went extinct during the catastrophes rather than 90%. The person who designed the study compared the advantages of societies with wealth inequality to the advantages of societies with war (ie, the instabilities associated with war caused Europe to advance beyond the rest of the world).
Mary Robinson, the first female president of Ireland (Labour Party) and the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, gave a talk to SLE, and I tagged along. She also gave a talk to the greater Stanford community later that day, but I had some prior commitment. Some cool things she did include legalizing contraceptives and legalizing being gay.
She was pretty inspiring. She had an incredibly powerful personality. Her message was pretty much: there will always be people opposing progressive change, so you have to be ready to speak truth to power. The UN didn't pass the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because of the work of soft spoken people making compromises in order to get a weak piece of legislation passed. The UDHR was the result of uncompromising hard work, and as a result, it's something to be proud of.
When I was in SLE, Mark Mancall didn't give the lecture on Marx. He did give the Marx lecture this year, so I stopped by for it. I had to leave early, though, and most of the stuff that I heard I already knew.
One of the last initiatives of the 2009-2010 student government was FutureFest, a day-long sustainability event. There were lots of people with cool sustainability ideas. For instance, there were some solar energy and solar car groups on campus talking about their work. Project Glean, a Stanford group that goes around gleanidng fruit from trees around campus so that it doesn't go to waste, had a booth. There were some solar cookie cookers and bike-powered smoothie makers. There was plenty of organic and local food. Someone had a booth about Tolumne water (where Stanford gets its water from). There was information about recycling, bottled water, and reducing your carbon footprint.
It was also at the same time as An Art Affair, Stanford's annual student art event, so I stopped by the art tents after seeing the sustainability stuff. The highlights for me: one of my friends made her own comic book, and someone made a device that you put around your head and it senses a certain type of brain wave so that you can control a noise machine with your mind (if you focus, it quiets, and if you let your mind wander, it makes noise).
Later on in the day, Van Jones gave a talk. It was awesome. He was the Energy Czar under Obama before Fox News made some libelous lies about him that caused him to step down. The lies were that he was a convicted felon because he participated in the LA riots. In fact, he was hired by his law office to supervise a nonviolent gathering in San Francisco, and the police were so jumpy that they threw him in jail for a few hours. He was later given several thousand dollars for wrongful imprisonment.
He has started a lot of cool organizations. When he was 27, he started his first organization, PoliceWatch, which was the first bar-certified organization to track police brutality (it used a computer database to identify police officers that are repeat offenders).
His other big organization before transitioning to environmental stuff was Books Not Bars. California spends $234,000 per youth per year to keep kids locked up, and they have a 74% recidivism rate. California spends $9863 per youth per year for schools. There are very few problems that $234,000 per year per person cannot fix, so a 74% failure rate means that prisons are an incredibly wasteful way to spend money (not to mention the abuse that goes on in them and the abuse that prison graduates perpetuate later in life). $234,000 could buy vacations to Europe, the most expensive prep schools in the country, expensive psychiatrists, and just about anything else. We can get results with much less. Thus, we should promote books, not bars.
Green collar jobs was the subject of his talk.
His comments:
1) life is all about having choices. Newborns have so many choices to make. Before you die, your only choice is whether to take one more breath. You should make choices which maximize your choices.
I think I disagree with this. As Rob Reich said, you can’t ever do the good now if you’re only worrying about what choices you are foregoing by doing that good.
2) keep it simple! There are two kinds of smart people. One kind makes simple things complicated and the other makes complicated things simple. Be the latter.
He was very charismatic. He really put this point into practice. He broke things down to their common sense ideas.
3) green activism. Don’t go up to people and tell them to worry about the polar bears. People with their own crises don’t want to hear about some other crises. When talking to an educated person with opportunities, go ahead and tell them about the crises, but when talking to a person living in crisis, tell them about opportunities. Like the opportunities in a green economy
4) green economy. The current economy is based on three things: a) consumption is privileged over production. b) credit over savings c) abusing the environment rather than being sustainable and valuing both people and planet. A green economy means reversing each of those.
His simple explanation of a green economy references a book where some big politician is talking to a little girl. She asks why there are poor people. It catches him off guard, and he responds that it’s because some people have a hard time getting jobs. She asks if that means that all the work is done.
5) working hard. He’s a nerd like me! He didn’t drink. When asked about how to balance personal and work life, his response was that you need to find a balance, but some years you’ll work too hard because you have to. When you start a new organization, if you want it to be successful, you'll have to spend a few years working 60 or 80 hour weeks.
After the talk, De La Soul was performing live as part of Future Fest, but I was invited to a dinner with Van Jones. I think that I was invited both as a friend of the incoming student government and as someone who worked in the outgoing student government. There were also a lot of people involved with planning Future Fest at the dinner.
Van Jones was really friendly in person. He didn't want to stop talking with us even when he had to go. He shook everyone's hand, and he let everyone ask questions. Since I'm trying to figure out the role of computer science in social change, I asked him about CS. He said that the Smart Grid needs CS to prevent energy waste.
Bill Gates gave a talk about public service. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that you had to buy tickets for it until about a day after the talk was announced. By then, it was sold out.
Apparently, it was a fairly standard "save the world!" talk.
AHA! (see my discussion of AHA! in the QSA section above) put on a talk by Sapolsky about the neurobiological causes of religion. Sapolsky is a neurobiologist (he gave a few lectures in my bio class in winter term. He was awesome). You can see a previous iteration of this talk on YouTube.
The talk looks at the causes of religion.
Schizophrenia has no direct adaptive advantage, and it is passed on biologically. Yet it continues to exist. Just like sickle cell anemia and beta calcemia continue to exist because the mild versions give resistance to malaria, cystic fibrosis continues to exist because the milder version gives you resistance to cholera, and Tay Sachs continues to exist because the milder version gives resistance to tuberculosis, schizophrenia continues to exist because of its milder version, schizotypalism.
Schizotypal personalities have metamagical experiences. That means that they believe in ESP, telekinesis, reincarnation, and similar things. You see a lot of schizotypal people at sci-fi conventions. Their classic occupation is a lighthouse person or the person running the movie reels.
So what is the advantage of schizotypalism? It makes them a good shaman or spiritual leader. "Shamans are the half-madmen of society." Religion gives a big sanctuary to people who are psychiatrically suspect (babbling in tongues, having visions) at the right times (during a ceremony is good; during a hunt is bad). Why is being a spiritual leader an evolutionary advantage? The association between celibacy and religion is a recent phenomenon; historically, being a religious leader leads to tremendous reproductive success.
This isn't only in primitive societies: western society is run by shamans and metamagic. A quarter of Americans believe in ghosts, more than a third believe in telepathy, almost half believe that scientists have documented UFOs, and almost half believe in a real devil that interacts with humans.
Western religion was founded by schizotypals. It is not good psychiatric health to have heard voices coming from a burning bush. The person in charge of torturing McCain asked him about his beliefs, and McCain told him about Christianity. The torturer couldn't believe that a westerner would actually believe in reincarnation (Jesus), so they continued to torture McCain to get his actual beliefs (yet another example of how torture doesn't work). Again, getting just the right level of metamagical belief is essential -- if you take schizotypalism too far, you get Charles Manson, James Jones, and David Koresh. If you get it right, people won't have to go to work on your birthday for thousands of years.
Schizotypalism is also the reason why ritual is so prominent in orthodox religions. Schizotypalism is about what you do every day. OCD and religion are remarkably similar. The most common rituals for OCD people are, in order of importance, self cleansing, food preparation, rituals involving entering and leaving significant spaces, and numerology. The most common rituals for major religions are, in order of importance, self cleansing, food preparation, rituals involving entering and leaving significant spaces, and numerology. We might think that religions are about community, but, historically, they were about these rituals. Hindus had 6-7 hours per day of washing, rituals on which nostril to clean first, how you breath before and after eating, and what you do before you leave or enter. Jews have to wait hours before eating certain kinds of food, rules about handwashing and ritual cleansing, rules about dealing with utensils, and rules about mixing meat milk. They also have 613 rules to follow, grouped into 365 prohibitions and 248 requirements. There are 365 days in the year, and they used to think that there were 248 bones. There are volumes of Talmud, and there isn't a clear agreement on what the 613 rules are, however there is agreement on the number of rules: the number is more important than the actual rules. Catholics have hail maries and different hymns to sing on even versus odd numbered years. The number 7 is significant for Muslims; 18 for Jews; 3 for Catholics. Religious leaders tended to be extremely OCD. Martin Luther kept on washing and never felt clean, and he kept re-giving sermons because they never felt correct.
Another psychiatric issue associated with religion is temporal lobe epilepsy. Someone with temporal lobe epilepsy doesn't like new things, writes obsessively, and is obsessed with religious or philosophical subjects. One result of this is that many religions are dependent on non-change. For instance, 'the meek shall inherit the earth' -- so don't change your ways. This doesn't necessarily mean 'religious' though, so a psychiatrist shouldn't ask someone if they are religious to diagnose temporal lobe epilepsy. If they aren't religious, you need to follow up with "why not?" because someone who is obsessed with all of the contradictions within a religion is equally likely to be a temporal lobe epileptic.
Also, if you lack a sense of control, you are more likely to have superstitious religious behavior, developing rituals based on random patterns. For instance, if two groups, one that feels in control and one that doesn't feel in control, are given sensory noise (randomly generated data), the group that is in control will recognize that it is noise and the group that isn't in control will see patterns where there are none. If people don't feel in control of their own life, it comforts them to feel like they live in an ordered universe, so they order what is unordered. This is observed in rats and pigeons, too. When they are denied food and then given food at random times, they will see patterns and develop ritualistic patterns around those patterns. In other words, when people don't control something (like the weather), they develop rituals that they think can control that thing even though the rituals have no effect.
He also looked at the differences within religions.
The difference between monotheism and polytheism depends on the environment. Rainforest cultures tend to be polytheistic; desert cultures tend to be monotheistic. If there are thousands of fruits and insects around you, you will believe in many spirits. If you live in a furnace where there are a few species struggling to survive, you will believe in one god.
Because the desert cultures tend to be nomadic and their cultures tend to sell off their daughters and have warrior classes, monotheistic religions tend to reflect these values. For instance, there's the belief that success in the afterlife is dependent on military success.
The nosiness of a god depends on the size of a community. Most gods don't care about the moral behavior of humans, but as human group sizes get larger, the religions of those groups tend to care about the moral behavior of humans. Groups of a few dozen can police themselves; larger groups need religion to police people.
Other tidbits:
Atheism is maladaptive. As Sapolsky puts it, religion tries to get rid of our greatest sources of anxiety, even though it's usually religion that made up the anxieties in the first place. As a result, atheists are less likely to be reproductively successful.
On the other hand, in societies that take care of you, it fits pretty well. That's why one of the biggest causes of secularism is universal healthcare.
It was a very good talk. Most people who are interested in the roots of religion address the issue from the perspective of literature or culture rather than anything biological or sociological. As a result, people tend to talk only about what the beliefs are. I liked the opportunity to see some of the possible roots -- especially given the connection to current society. Of course, the flip side is that, aside from questioning the epistemological basis of some religions, it doesn't help answer the question of what the good life is.
The Black Psychology Students Association holds a ton of cool speaker events, but I'm never able to go. I decided to finally make one of them, which was about the psychological effects of stereotyping, particularly that stereotypes become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It was mostly stuff that I already knew, but it was nice to see the people and have the chance to talk. I also learned about a study where a teacher said "students with brown eyes are smarter" to one group, and everyone picked on the green eyed students and the brown eyed students performed better, and said "students with green eyes are smarter" to another group, and the green eyed students performed better.
Anne Firth Murray, a nominee for the Nobel Prize and the founder of the Global Fund for Women (also a professor at Stanford), gave a talk in part of a series on what matters to people.
Small Stuff Matters.
Doing Stuff Matters. It's one thing to talk about what you want to do, but action is important. From the Talmud: "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now. Walk humbly now..." The Global Fund started as a few women with a few hundred dollars, and it was built on the philosophy that, as long as you're close to the problem and the people who know about the problem are making the decisions, you can make a big difference.
Making Injustice Visible Matters. That's also what Gandhi said. She wrote a book to try to make injustice visible: "From Outrage to Courage."
The Means Matter More than the Ends. Similarly, while saving the world matters, being at peace while saving the world matters.
Women's health was at the center of a lot of her issues. She said that violence was at the center of women's health issues, and Gandhi equated nonviolence with love, so she started teaching a class that focused on love.
Julie Goldman, a lesbian comedian, gave a talk that QSA cosponsored. It was at the same time as a Dance Marathon meeting, but the first part was pretty good. She made fun of the postmodern queerness that is prevalent in the Bay Area.
She went to a lesbian wedding that had workshops about gender. When people were introducing themselves and saying what pronouns they preferred, someone preferred a weird pronoun ("Neerka" or something like that). When it was Julie's turn around the circle, she said that she preferred royal pronouns. "Please address me as 'your majesty.'"
To some extent, I agree with the freedom that postmodern gender theorists discuss. However, pragmatically, I agree with Julie Goldman: if we aren't able to laugh at ourselves when we go outside of cultural norms, then we'll have a hard time achieving social change. This is especially important since activists have to be willing to take their movement one step at a time (ie, gay marriage will probably come before people start saying "Xir" rather than "his" or "her"), and being riled up rather than laughing is a good way to get burned out.
Stanford Says No to War had a student panel towards the end of the year with a bunch of different anti-war perspectives. Some of the perspectives were ones that I wouldn't expect from students. I expect a lot of students to have overcome hardships, but generally I think of hardships in the US context -- a hard home life, poverty, disease, disability, etc. I don't generally think of students as having to sleep through the sound of bombs exploding.
The prime minister of Tibet, Samdhong Rinpoche, and one of the Uyghur (a minority ethnic group in China) leaders, Rebiya Kadeer, gave a talk. It was very cool. Check out http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/06/03/tibet’s-prime-minister-in-exile-visits-stanford/ for an article about the talk. Rinpoche was fairly reserved, though when he spoke, he was strong. Kadeer was amazing.
What ever happened to Free Tibet?
On 4/24, there was a production of Saul Williams' poem, "Said the Shotgun to the Head." It was masterfully done. The atmosphere was perfect: the play was in the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden at night. The actor captured the poem very well, and I only wish that I had a video of it so that I could see his performance again. I bought the poem to read it at my own pace, but it's nowhere near as good as when it's recited.
There's a 10 minute youtube video of Saul Williams reading the first part. His recitation is also pretty good.
The poem is about someone who sees god as the result of a kiss and his ravings. I like the poem because it provides a comprehensive critique of western culture. Rather than looking at only one issue, it looks at everything involved in a society that has lost love: patriarchy, war, environmental destruction, genocide, hypercorporatism, etc. I think that a large part of the play is summed up in: "Oil slicked feathers; putrid stenched water bed / Mother Nature's a Whore, said the shotgun to the head / And it smelled like teen spirit: angst driven, insecure / A country in puberty. A country at war." It is a critique of an immature culture that has lost its way. We have lost our religion and sense of awe and haven't replaced it with any other unifying value. Thus, we are angst driven, at war, with no wisdom, and with no respect for Mother Nature or for our mothers. We are distracted from what matters.
On 5/21, the Stanford Theatre Activist Mobilization Project, STAMP, put on two plays. "Wealth of Words" came from the words of first generation students at Stanford (Stanford students whose parents did not attend college), and "Abraham Niu and the Friendly Fires" was a student-made musical that covered a lot of subjects.
"Wealth of Words" was very real. Even though about a fifth of Stanford students are first generation, the culture on campus is very affluent, and students who can't afford to take the summer internship that is unpaid or to go out to the fancy restaurants with their friends can feel out of place. Especially so since a lot of folks don't realize how lucky they are. I consider myself very lucky, but it's still extremely offputting when I hear someone who has a family that makes $200,000 per year complaining that Stanford doesn't give them a big enough scholarship.
"Abraham Niu and the Friendly Fires" was well done. It had some rough edges because the actors didn't have a ton of time to rehearse (they script was finished late), but the jokes were funny, the songs were good, and the issues were meaningful. The play is centered around an immigrant family, the Nius. One of the sons, Abraham Niu, was timid as a child, and he enlisted to fight in Iraq. He still won't any innocent lives, though, and when he discovers that the US is about to bomb an area where some civilian children are playing, he sacrifices his life to save them.
Some of the play felt unrealistic (especially the language used in the military scenes), but the stuff dealing with the family was good, and Abraham coming to terms with his death (in a limbo afterlife state) was very interesting.
The name Abraham is a (very thinly veiled) biblical allusion. Towards the end, Abraham comments that he never had any children, to which his limbo guide responds that the children (there were as many children as tribes of Israel) that he sacrificed himself for lived (it is unclear whether or not they all died before that point), and will live on as his children, brining in a new age of peace (because of the media outrage over bombing children and because Abraham goes down as a martyr).
Because I took 3 introductory seminars frosh year and went to Sophomore College, some Stanford folks wanted me to be a part of an introsems focus group. I guess they really do care about undergraduate education!
The results were pretty much as I would have expected. There were some good experiences with more discussion-based seminars and with seminars that included things like field trips and some bad experiences with more lecture-based seminars. People's experiences were almost entirely dependent on how good their professor was, thus reinforcing my advice to take classes based on word of mouth as to how good the professor is.
On 5/26, Common, the rap artist, gave a talk. He also spent a minute or two freestyling. The talk was pretty much the generic "you can be great if you work hard and follow your dreams" talk. The unique parts: he was inspired to greatness when the ghost of Emmett Till talked to him, and he was the first person that I have ever heard who, while giving a talk to a thousand people in a packed auditorium at Stanford, made a fart joke.
I was planning to be an RA next year. I made it to the first round of interviews on 4/10. This round was mostly a rehash of what I put on the application, and I made it to the next round.
There were group interviews on 4/24 where the folks who made it that far got into groups and did things like plan skits, plan events, agree on who gets to go on a space ship to colonize Mars, and cross a poisonous swamp (the basketball court) without the swamp monster eating you.
I attribute my not getting an RA spot to being eaten by the swamp monster (along with half of my group).
It would have been rewarding to be an RA, but it will also be nice to have the time to dedicate to my debaters and my Truman application.
My nerdiness became manifest this term.
Folks have been pestering me to start up a game of Dungeons and Dragons for about a year now. I started up a game, only to discover that it was impossible to get everyone to agree to a meeting time, which is what caused me to delay for a year. Eventually, David agreed to take over. He's a good Dungeon Master. And he's moderately good at getting people to meet, though there were only 3 or 4 meetings in the entire term.
Emin, Nick and I played League of Legends, a computer game, throughout the term. It started early in the term when some friends were having a party in their apartment. I stopped by, primarily because Tiq invited me and I was just getting to know him through the student government campaign. The party was at Mirrielees, which is where Nick and Emin live, so I stopped by at 11 or midnight after I made my rounds at the party. They were playing League of Legends -- one of Nick's friends from high school just got him started -- so I brought my laptop over from Terra (Terra and Mirrielees are close), sat down on Nick's bed along with Emin, and started playing. I think that we stopped playing at about 8am. Our nights later on in the term weren't quite so late, but we still had many epic games.
Unfortunately, the time difference in Cambodia has make it difficult to continue playing over the summer.
It was nice to get back in touch with Nick and Emin, since we hadn't seen each other very much this past year. My communication with Nick did improve. Last year, we would always joke that Nick would mumble such that no one could hear what he says, and my hearing is bad enough that I can't hear what anyone says. By the end of the year, we developed our own language. It involved a lot of BAWKing (now, I can't remember if a bawk meant "I have too much homework tonight. Why did I take so many classes?" or "I'm done; let us begin the wild rumpus!"). That pant of our communication just got louder (thanks to the peacocks that Nick met). But we also developed more. For instance, in order to clarify my intent, Nick would often ask if I meant that something was good or bad. For instance, if were to say, "that test was brutal," Nick might ask, "good brutal, or bad brutal?" This form of communication even works half way across the world. As I was walking down the stairs the other day, I stopped to tie my shoes. I thought, "this probably isn't the best place to tie my shoes." As a debater, I must leave no thought unchallenged: "Then again, it also isn't the worst." ... "Good worst or bad worst?" I made Nick laugh.
Towards the end of the term, one of the student leaders of the Palo Alto HS debate team let it slip that she was collecting money to get gifts for the coaches. Since she let it slip, I playfully asked what I was getting, and she asked if there was anything that I wanted. The team really needs an FTP server so that we can easily manage our evidence, so I said that money for a server would be nice, and I started looking for servers.
While I originally wanted to build my own server off of NewEgg, Nick suggested that I look on CraigsList since I only needed a cheap (used) computer. I shortly found one for about $80. It didn't come with a monitor, but one of my friends in Terra was selling his old 19" monitor for $15, which I quickly snatched up. The computer itself was a very good deal. It only has 512MiB RAM, 80 GiB hard drive and an old video card (I'll certainly upgrade the RAM and hard drive. If I want to play any games, I'll probably get a new video card), but it has extremely high specs for a server. The only reason that I'm upgrading anything is that I want to use it as a desktop computer also. And the processor is excellent. It's a Pentium 4, 3+ GHz, and I discovered that it's hyperthreaded (in other words, it's one processor that, with the magic of Intel, pretends to be two processors). When I was picking up the computer, I thought that it was just a regular processor. I looked at the system specs and asked the person who was selling it to me if the computer had two processors; he didn't know. In other words, it was all a bonus. It also came with a mouse, keyboard, and built-in speakers.
I got Linux installed on it, and it's sitting in Emin's room at Stanford now. He has been helping me administrate it while I'm out of the states. Now, I have an FTP server for the debaters running. I'm also running Linux in a virtual machine (meaning my Windows computer is running a Linux computer inside of it) on my laptop for programming at InSTEDD -- it's a pain to develop on systems other than Linux, and the only thing delaying me until now was that Stanford has Linux machines that students can program on remotely. Coding on a machine that's across the Pacific ocean is a little bit slow, though.
My previous roommate went to Tokyo for Spring, so I got a new one. Since Terra is a gender neutral co-op, I ended up with a female roommate. We were in the same Noam Chomsky class last winter, and it was nice to see her again. We get along well, and I got to know her better than I did my roommate from fall and winter term.
Ana does a lot of cool stuff on campus. She writes on the Stanford Daily's Editorial Board and she does a ton of sustainability things. She's also studying a mix between ecology and anthropology (I think it's within the anthropology department) -- her classes seem very interesting.
For next year, Nick and I realized that we had been apart for too long. Since Emin got the RA position in Faisan, Nick and I signed up for a room together in Faisan.
It will be annoying to live away from the friends that I made in Terra, but I'll be sure to visit. My biggest friends in Terra will be making all of their big food decisions, too.
I discovered that the Story of Stuff has several new videos, including the Story of Bottled Water and the Story of Cap and Trade. Both are really screwed up. Almost as screwed up as Stuff in general. And Stuff is really screwed up. They're short, informative, and all available at storyofstuff.com. Check them out!
Also, re-checking the website, there is now also a Story of Cosmetics. An uncle of who works at a major chemical company told me that if I knew what was in hair dyes, I wouldn't want it anywhere near my head. That's pretty much the thesis of the Story of Cosmetics.
The person who made Story of Stuff also came out with a book (*hint hint*) and some other resources.
This term, I cooked for Terra again. At the start of the term, I was the only person signed up to cook on Wednesdays. That would have been awkward. Thankfully, a few people, including my QSA CoChair, stepped up to cook with me.
One of the people in our group dropped out halfway through the quarter, so we had a few days cooking with one person short, but we worked very well as a cook crew, so it wasn't a big deal.
A few dishes that our group cooked and I liked:
-fancy mac and cheese: lots of macaroni, cheese, pepper, seasoning. Maybe a little bit of ketchup.
-fancy quinoa: sauté oil, onion, garlic. Add quinoa and vegetable broth. Add cumin, cayenne, salt, pepper. Boil. Simmer for 20m. Add drained black beans. Enjoy.
Also, I decided to stop being picky about tomatoes, avocadoes, and mushrooms, and I like them all now unless they're poorly prepared. I think that, now, the only foods that I don't like are squash and really artificial stuff like nacho cheese.
I have bought Google's storage plan. 1 year, 20 GiB, $5. I now have 8.1 GiB used (7.9 GiB a month ago). The free cap is 7.3.
I wonder when I'll need to upgrade from the 20...
Hm. Well, since this letter came a month late and I've already started blogging about Cambodia, it would be weird to write about Cambodia and InSTEDD in the future tense.
I'll be applying for a Truman Scholarship next year. It's pretty much the big scholarship for people committed to public service. This was prompted by a meeting about fellowships in early may and several followup meetings with my academic director. I need to get three letters of recommendation and write a 500 word policy proposal and about a dozen short essays. It's just like applying to college, only now I have much more to talk about!
I'll be back from Cambodia on 8/25 (anyone have tips for going through customs?). The plan, then, is to spend a week with the family in Eugene, spend a week visiting some relatives, head down to a debate tournament at Wake Forest University with Palo Alto HS on 9/10, and probably go directly from there to California about half a week before school starts.
I'm not sure what classes I'll be taking in fall. I will take Intro to Feminist studies. I will probably take bio (even though I don't like how it's taught at Stanford) because I'm excited about biocomputation. I will probably take one or two biocomputation classes (one of the ones that I want to take conflicts with bio. Ugh.). I'll probably take one normal computer science class.
I'm planning on senior section leading (it's like section leading with extra work) and spending a lot of time making sure that my debaters at Palo Alto HS have all of the support that I can possibly give them. In the coming year, I hope to be as focused and determined as I was this past year.
The Dalai Lama will be coming to Stanford in mid October. I'm trying to work out my plans since he's talking on Thursday and Palo Alto HS has a debate tournament in New York on Friday. Hopefully, I'll be able to catch a red eye.
My conclusion isn't as creative as last time. I guess I don't understand the need for neat conclusions to inconclusive stories, of which life is one example. Stories with conclusive endings might feel complete, but they don't feel real because they aren't. What I try to offer is a peek forward at the next beginning in my saga.
Avatar and Wall-E begin with dystopian futures but still end with "And they all lived happily ever after. The End." When you have a conclusion, it should be meaningful. There are very few real conclusions in the world. That's why Dr. Larry Brilliant's story (the foundational story of InSTEDD) is so powerful. It is the true story of the final chapter of the worst disease in human history. It is one of very few true final chapters that I have ever seen.
The stories that I like lack neat conclusions, too. They will, perhaps, close a chapter, but as the book ends, the next chapter is in sight. The end of "Seasons of Migration to the North" is the beginning of a new outlook on life. The end of "The Road" is one of many days on the road. The final paragraphs of "The Plague" take what might, otherwise, have been a final chapter and remind the reader that the story is one of continual work because the plague never dies: "perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."
The question, then, is not how to make a conclusion to my verbose letters, but how to remind the reader that the final page is only one of many in writings that will continue indefinitely. The challenge is that the reader must also realize that any final conclusion would cheapen the intrinsic value in the unending work that must go on. The final page should exist in continuity with the work described throughout the narrative. The most that a conclusion can hope for is to inspire the reader to exist in continuity with work that never will be final.
Until my work yields something as beautiful as a conclusion, I hope that you won't see this page as an end, but as an invitation to join with me in creating one.