The Skye Is Falling!

Lizard!

2010-06-07T23:28:00.000-07:00

My friend Matt and I are living together in a Sontag suite next year. We've been looking into pets for a little while now (Matt wants a pet that he'll have for a long time, and I'm fine helping him take care of it), and we've decided on a blue-tongued skink. This is because blue-tongued skinks are awesome.

Why are they awesome, you ask?

First, they get to be a decent size. They grow to be about 2 feet long. Like this one:

That means they'll eventually get longer than Matt's dog. Wild!

Second, they are omnivores. Their diet is a little over half plant material, and a little less than half meat. This is different from other popular lizards, like the iguana (an herbivore) and the monitor lizard (a carnivore). You can feed them collard greens, mustard greens, mangos, worms, and mice. Neat!

Third, as you may have guessed, their tongues are blue. And unlike other color-named animals (like the "red-tailed hawk", which is really the "reddish-brownish tailed hawk"), it's a really bright blue:

Fourth, they are generally both pretty laid-back and pretty smart. We are pretty sure that the combination of those two factors makes them awesome.

Anyway, we are really excited about getting a blue-tongued skink! We've been doing our research to find out what they eat, what they look like, how long they live (30 years! Matt says he is fine taking care of a lizard for that long), what we should keep them in, and so on. We'll spend about the next month or so looking for good places to get equipment (heat lamps, substrate, food--although apart from things like superworms we can get most of it at a grocery store for humans, tank, UV lamp, sun rock, hiding places...), and then buy it once I have a car (around the 18th of July). We will hopefully be picking up the lizard around the 31st of July, so that will give us two weeks to buy the tank, set it up, test temperatures and humidity, and fix things if we need to.

We are getting a lizard!

The Perils of Cooking Regularly

2009-10-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned earlier, I'm on the 8-meal plan. At the beginning of the semester, I was "making" my own breakfasts and lunches, and eating dinners at the Hoch. This wound up working not quite so well. Breakfast was not the problem---I just need to eat a non-zero quantity of food, which is usually a bagel or a bowl of cereal. The problem was lunch. I would make myself a sandwich, or a veggie dog. While these were delicious and nutritious choices, I would wind up being hungry again halfway through the afternoon, when on most days I have class until 5:30 or so. Now, I'm eating lunch at the Hoch, and making my own dinners. Again, I'm using the term "making" fairly loosely. I usually have some kind of pasta + some kind of sauce + some kind of frozen vegetable, or some kind of instant meal from the grocery store. The funny thing is, even with instant food, this is still cheaper than eating at the Hoch. Each meal at the Hoch costs about $10, if you divide the number of meals in your meal plan by the amount of food you eat. A box of cereal, a half-gallon of milk, a few pounds of pasta, some veggies, and some boxed food come out to about $30 a week. My food-cooking system is therefore lazy, but economically sound.

Starting School

2009-09-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

And the school year begins again!

My schedule this semester is fairly abnormal. I'm taking two core classes that I've never taken before (since I dropped E&M my sophomore year, I never took it as far as the registrar is concerned), two off-campus humanities classes, one off-campus CS class, and two on-campus "classes" that meet once a week and are worth 1/3 the credits of a normal class. So even though I'm in my 5th semester, I'm not in a full-credit in-major course on campus. On the plus side, this semester increases the number of campuses I've taken a real class at by 3: my logic and computing class is at Pomona, my music theory class is at Scripps, and my history/gender studies class is at Pitzer. If you count PE classes, then by the end of this semester I will have taken a class at every single one of the 5C's.

Other things I am doing this semester:
--I'm the GameSHMC treasurer! That means I'm in charge of buying club video games, club board games, and food for club events.
--I'm running ITR Games, which vaguely resemble tag. We play them in the rather maze-like basement of the academic buildings. When I told the deans that we were holding the first ITR Games a few weeks ago, they asked us to make sure the doors were shut when we were done. In general, the administration here trusts students to not break things, and to tell people when the do. Which means we get to run around in the basement on Friday night.
--I'm grading CS70, the data structures class that I took last semester. It's a pretty big time commitment (about 8 hours a week) but it's a lot of fun. I get to tutor underclassmen! Huzzah!
--I'm also still a CS staffer. One of the jobs of CS Staffers is to name computers when they come in, so that we can keep track of machines when "the third one from the left side of the counter" becomes "the computer we put upstairs." When we got a bunch of new computers the week before school started, I named them all after flowers.

Also, I am living in Sontag, on the 8-meal plan. This means I have dinner at the Hoch and I make my own lunches and breakfasts. Which I am about to do now.

Summer At Mudd

2009-08-17T20:10:00.001-07:00

I've been at Mudd most of the summer, working as a staffer for the CS department. (Yes, that's what I did for part of last semester. And I'll keep doing it in the fall.) My big project for this summer was writing inventory tracking software that could talk to a Bluetooth barcode scanner, so that the CS department can keep track of its stuff with minimal effort on the part of humans. I spent about 2 weeks writing the initial software and another 2 weeks working out the bugs, and last week, we declared it initially finished. This is my first really big software project, and I'm really excited that it actually works in the way we intend it to. That's something that's surprisingly hard to do, so this is a big accomplishment for me.

Over the summer, I've been living in Sontag, the dorm I'll be living next year. I had a single for most of the summer, which was about the size of a very large table. On the plus side, I had a suite lounge with a couch and a TV, and I had a kitchen---vitally important when you're off the meal plan, as you are all summer. A few days ago, I moved into my fall room, and another person moved into my summer room. I had a little more than 24 hours to move all of my stuff, and I agreed to take care of a few things (like a set of Guitar Hero drums) for some friends, so my suite is mostly full of boxes at this point. After last Friday, when the last summer resident moved out, I've had the suite all to myself. Since I'd been living with 3 other people for the rest of the summer, this feels pretty weird. To counteract the weirdness, I've been cooking with a friend of mine who has an apartment about a quarter-mile away from Mudd. So far, we've made lasagna, macaroni and cheese, eggplant parmesan, enchiladas, and curry. Our food has been pretty tasty so far, and also creates enough leftovers that we can eat it for two or three nights.

School starts in two weeks, and when it does, my brother will be living in Case as a freshman. I'm really excited for him!

What Do You Learn In CS70?

2009-05-04T18:31:00.001-07:00

My parents keep asking me what exactly it is that I learn about in CS70. This question was hard to answer until class last Wednesday. We had an in-class review session where we wrote down topics we'd learned about on sticky notes, and then stuck them on the blackboard and arranged them into categories. (Clicking on a picture will take you to a larger image.)

A Week in the Life

2009-04-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

For next week's post, I will answer questions. If you have a question you want me to answer, leave a comment here, or send me an e-mail ( sberghel [at] hmc [dot] edu). I will then answer the question on this blog! If you want me to send you a reply and not put your question here, that's OK too.

I will also talk about jobs next week. Stay tuned.

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In case you were wondering what a week at Mudd is like, here's mine. I'm taking 16 credits worth of classes (essentially 5 + 1/3 classes), and I have two jobs.

Monday:
I have 3 classes--a core math class (which changes every half-semester), a biology lecture, and a CS class on programming, data structures, and code style (referred to at Mudd as "CS70", or simply "70"). I have a dinner meeting for one of my jobs, and then I finish the larger of the two Algorithms assignments, which is due Tuesday. I also meet with my partner for CS70 and do some work. (All work in CS70 must be done in pairs. While this limits the time that I can do my homework for that class, it also means that we can help each other figure out what we're doing wrong. Since the class homework mostly revolves around writing and fixing complicated code, pair programming actually makes the class easier.)

Tuesday:
I have two classes---my algorithms class, and a macroeconomics class. Until recently, I also had a class that met in the late afternoon on Tuesdays only. (That's the 1/3 of a class referred to earlier---there's not a lot of homework, and the class meets once a week for 2/3 of the semester.) I meet with my CS70 partner again, and do more work. I also get started on the smaller of the two weekly Algorithms assignments.

Wednesday:
In addition to my Monday classes, I have another dinner meeting---this time for the class that I'm grading. If my partner and I aren't done with CS70 yet, we work until 11:59 (since homeworks for this class are due at midnight) or until we're finished, whatever comes first. I then finish my Algorithms homework (due Thursday), and start on my math homework if I have time.

Thursday:
Thursday is when my week starts lightening up. I only have two classes, and I have no homework due Fridays. I usually work on my math homework and run errands in the afternoon. At night, I hang out, goof off, or (usually) both. Since some of my friends are seniors who don't have morning classes on Friday, the biggest challenge is to get to bed at an appropriate time for a morning class.

Friday:
I have a math class in the morning, and a staff meeting at noon. My CS70 partner and I start work on the next assignment before dinner. After dinner is free time, which I usually spend hanging out with my friends.

Saturday:
Afternoons are for math and algorithms homework. Nights are for doing many things that are not homework, including going to the grocery store. (Vons, the local grocery store chain, closes at midnight.)

Sunday:
Like most Mudders, I spend Sundays doing work--in this case, math and Algs, since both are large assignments due at the beginning of the week.

2009-04-07T08:48:00.001-07:00

The post scheduler appears not to have published my post from last week. That's odd. I'll see if I can recover it after classes today.

2009-03-27T17:34:00.000-07:00

I've heard admissions decisions are out! As always, people with questions about Mudd can either leave them on my blog or e-mail sberghel [at] hmc [dot] edu.

Note: I plan on updating at midnight Friday night (technically 0:00 Saturday morning) from here on. This means I can write my blog post either Thursday or Friday night, when I don't have homework to do, and then have Google publish it at midnight. If I decide to write other posts, they would probably go up at midnight on Sunday or Tuesday nights, depending on when I write them.

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I have a summer job! I'm doing staff work for the Computer Science department. Basically, it will be my job to make sure that the computers work, and to fix them if they don't work. There's usually a big "project" that the staff does over the summer, but I'm not sure what that will be yet. If I had to guess, I'd say we would be writing a new inventory tracking system.

I'll know by next week where I'm living in the fall. I have a roommate for next semester, and we want to have a kitchen if at all possible. We're hoping to get an efficiency in Atwood, which is a double with a stove top, a kitchen sink, and a refrigerator and freezer. We're picking a room halfway through when rising juniors (current sophomores) pick a room, though, so we might not get one.

Spring break has just happened, and work hasn't really picked up much since then. The one exception is my Data Structures/Programming class, which has most of its difficult assignments in the middle of the semester. We'd been working on this assignment for 8 hours already, but still couldn't get our code to run until half an hour before it was due. People who have taken the class before tell me that the hardest assignment is next, and then the rest are relatively easy. This should work out nicely, since work in other classes tends to pick up a few weeks before finals are due.

Later tonight, I'm going to the April Fool's ITR games. ITR games, by tradition, are passed down by word of mouth, so the most I'm going to say about them is that they're like a very, very complicated version of tag. The April Fool's games are even sillier than usual.

I might update in the middle of the week with a post about jobs and Mudd, and how the two work together.

New Semester

2009-01-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

I guess it's time to start blogging again, now that the semester has begun in earnest.

The trip to England for my Dickens-Hardy class was really fun. We spent our first week in London. My roommate for the trip and I went to the British Museum, Hyde Park, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, and a lot of other places during our free time. The class did a lot of walking tours in London that were Charles Dickens-themed: we got to see the different places that Dickens lived and worked, as well as the places he wrote about. We also spent time wandering around London---we had unlimited-ride tube passes, so even if we got really far away from the hotel, we could get back without walking too far.

We then spent a week in Dorset learning more about Thomas Hardy. We saw the cottage where he grew up, the house in which he lived later in his life, and quite a lot of the landscape that he wrote about. We also got rained on quite a bit, which was part of the fun.

It's very strange being back in California. It's light out for much longer than it was in England, it's always above freezing, temperatures are in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius, it's not raining nearly as much, and I can't spend an hour walking in any direction and then catch a once-every-3-minutes tube to get back home.

This semester is looking to be substantially less brutal than last semester. My hardest two classes this time around are probably CS70 (a data structures / programming design course) and Algorithms. Algorithms is very fun so far---the professor is quite clearly excited about the course material, and his enthusiasm is contagious. My Economics class is looking like it won't be too hard. The Core Math course I'm in right now is enjoyable---it's another class taught by an enthusiastic professor. (I'll be changing courses at the half-semester mark to a new Core Math class with a new teacher.) I haven't been in Biology class more than once thusfar, and therefore can't really make a judgment on the course just yet.

I'm hoping this semester I'll have more free time than last semester, which I spent most of either doing homework or sleeping (but mostly doing homework). We'll see how that goes.

In closing, here is a picture of my tour group at Stonehenge.

Choosing a Major, or, What Can Indecision Do For You?

2008-11-21T14:09:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago was the deadline for 3rd-semester declaration of majors. (Mudd has two deadlines -- you have to declare by sometime in the spring of your sophomore year, but if you want an advisor in your major when you're choosing your 4th-semester courses, you need to turn in your form around the end of October.)

A lot of the people here know what major they want to be by the time they get here. (This doesn't necessarily mean they know what major they're going to be, though. For example, when I came to Mudd, I knew I wanted to be an engineering major. One year later, I had realized engineering wasn't for me, and I declared for CS a few weeks ago.) Not everyone does. (If you want an anecdotal non-representative sample, of my friends here at Mudd who are in my grade, about 1/3 declared for the major they thought they wanted when they were new frosh, 1/3 are deciding between their original choice and another major, and 1/3 are considering a double or joint major with their original choice and another major.) So while a lot of sophomores have stuck with the major they preferred as frosh, a lot more are asking upperclassmen how to keep their options open.

This is both easier and harder than it sounds---it's not particularly difficult if you're trying to decide between, say, CS and Math. Those two majors have a lot of overlap, and you can even have a joint CS-Math major if you enjoy the intersection of the two. However, if you're trying to decide between Chemistry and Engineering, it gets more difficult. The two majors share no classes, and it's strongly suggested that you start preparing for each major early (by 2nd semester in the case of Engineering, or 3rd semester in the case of Chem). This isn't to say it's not doable, but it will be difficult.

There are also people who come to Mudd and then decide on a non-science major. Again, this isn't too tricky to do. I have a friend who recently decided to be a Literature major with a math minor. (At Mudd, you're either a science major with a humanities "concentration"---which is like a minor---or you're a humanities major with a science minor.) The most difficult part, according to her, is meeting with a professor from another campus to discuss your major. Because of the way Mudd is set up, a humanities major is an off-campus major---so my friend is a literature major via Pomona now.

On the other hand, I have a friend (who's a junior) who was a physics major and a math major, and decided to be a CS major sometime around the beginning of this semester. He'd already taken CS60 (the intro-level, non-core CS class), so he didn't need to "catch up." (With its chain of prereqs, you have to start taking CS60 in your 4th semester to finish the CS major without overloading/pain.) So, long story short, you don't have to know what major you are until your 4th or 5th semester, so long as the classes you're taking will "work" for all the majors you want to be.

Culinary Adventures

2008-11-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

The food at the Hoch isn't bad, but the menu's on a weekly rotation. What usually happens is that the pre-frosh think "Wow, this food is pretty good!" By the eighth or ninth week of first semester, you realize that, while the food is good, you sure have eaten this a lot. By sophomore year, you find that even when you're on vacation, you wake up Tuesday and expect to have tacos for lunch.

To help combat this, some of my friends and I make our own food every Friday night. Our "recipes" usually look something like this:

What Is This Stuff? It Tastes Pretty Good Soup
(Serves you and 10 of your closest friends)
Ingredients:
whatever vegetables at the grocery store looked good
a couple cans of beans, for protein, I guess
some soup that none of your friends are allergic to

1) Mix all ingredients in large soup pot. Begin cooking.
2) Realize you need spices. Add the ones that smell good.
3) Remember that you bought parsley. Add parsley to soup.
4) Realize that soup is not thick enough. Find rice. Add rice to soup until you think you've added the right amount.
5) Wait until rice is cooked.
6) Serve. Avoid all questions as to what recipe you used.

We're also masters at making "this is kind of like applesauce but I forgot the potato masher" and "weirdest pancakes ever" (like normal pancakes, but fluff the eggs and use yogurt instead of milk). I've also discovered the magic of microwaveable macaroni and cheese with bell peppers that you cooked in your friend's electric wok. And the longer I stay at Mudd, the more creative I'm becoming about my food choices. Ritz crackers with cream cheese! Cheerios with strawberry jelly! I wonder what will happen if I add this to the spaghetti sauce! (I have, in fact, eaten all of these things. Cheerios with strawberry jelly is a better food than one might think.)

On another food-related note, I'm staying at Mudd for Thanksgiving. Enough Easties do this that we have our own Thanksgiving meal, for which we cook a metric ton of turkey, vegetables, and pies, and take over most of the kitchens on campus to do so. I'm making spiced carrots and a lemonade pie.

2008-10-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

This semester is kind of hectic. Update coming this weekend.

2008-09-28T21:34:00.001-07:00

There will be no immediate post this weekend. I was sick last week, and right now I'm doing all of my makeup work. I'll try to post twice (that's right, twice!) this week to make up for it.

2008-09-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Well, now that I've been back at school for a few weeks, I can start updating this blog again.

My literature class so far is really interesting--we're reading a lot of books by Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, and we're also learning a lot about Victorian England. On Wednesday, I gave a presentation on "changes in perceptions of time, speed, and distance in the Victorian Era" with three other people in the class. It's much more interesting than it sounds. For example: did you know that people thought the telegraph would solve all the world's problems by allowing everyone in the world to talk with everyone else? Or that the invention of the telephone was seen as an unimportant step in the process of improving the telegraph? Or that France wanted there to be a Paris Mean Time instead of a Greenwich Mean Time? See, more interesting than you thought, isn't it?

This semester, I have also discovered the joy of cooking. You see, at Mudd, you can sign up for getting 8, 12, or 16 meals a week from the dining hall. Last semester, I had 16 meals a week. This semester, I instead decided to opt for having 12 meals a week, a minifridge, and a microwave. (And since I bought my appliances from other students, a refrigerator and a microwave cost $20.) Since some of my friends have kitchens and others have rice cookers and electric woks, I've started to get more creative with my meal replacements. I can make macaroni and cheese with bell peppers. I can make sodas using seltzer water and juice. I'm probably making banana bread sometime soon, since my bananas are going brown faster than I anticipated. The possibilities are not quite endless, but I find them more appetizing than the food at the dining hall.

I also built a desktop at the beginning of this semester. It was a lot more complicated than I anticipated--a good 4 hours elapsed between when I opened the boxes and when I turned the computer on. I'm right now trying to figure out a way to make Windows work without making all my USB ports stop working. On the plus side, I now know the identity of every part in my computer--something I never knew before. This is also the first time I've built a desktop from scratch, so now I know how all of the hardware fits together.

[Edit:] Apparently building a computer is also a laboratory assignment for E85. Kind of neat to know.

End-of-Semester Recap

2008-05-16T17:16:00.000-07:00

Right now, I'm taking a break from packing. About 75% of my room is currently in either the packed or almost-packed stage. There's folded clothes on my bed waiting to go into a suitcase, boxes waiting to go into storage, and trash waiting to be, well, taken to the trash. As I'm going through my stuff, I find all these things I'd forgotten about--"Wow, that was a good book! Hey, I remember taking this (now-returned) test! Oh, look, math notes!" And, well, it's been a busy semester.

Classes I've Taken:

Math 14: Every math class I've taken at Mudd has had a spectacular teacher. Math 14 was no exception. Sadly, Prof Gupta was a visiting professor, and will be gone next semester. We'll miss him, and the lemon squares he baked for his classes.

Chem 22: It's Frosh Chem! For once, some parts of chem--like Quantum--made sense. Others--like Thermochemistry--still didn't.

Physics 24A: This year, for the first time, there was an advanced section of the Mechanics Physics class. I'm really glad I could take it, because it meant we spent less time on things like energy (which I understood) and more on rotational dynamics (which I didn't understand).

Intro to Social Psychology: This class was awesome. Really, really awesome. It almost turned me into a Psychology minor. (At Mudd, we call them concentrations. Really, it's the same thing.) I also read two really good books, The Lucifer Effect and The Power of Persuasion, for this class. It was more work than some of the other Hum classes, but I learned a lot, and it was definitely worth it.

E4: E4 had its ups and its downs. On the one hand, I made some new friends and built a compost sifter. On the other hand, it was a lot of work.

Jazz: I had to drop my jazz class halfway through the semester, because spraining my finger meant I was out of practice for a month. I'll be going back Spring semester of next year, because Jazz is how I destress.

Other Stuff:

Coding: From hanging out with programmers, I've learned a lot about coding. (For example, that Python alarm clock I wrote with Aren a few weeks back. I'm still working on porting it to Linux.)

Writing: After not writing for a while, I'm finally writing short stories again. Most of them aren't good, but it keeps me sane.

Computers: I have a new computer now, and I'll probably be building a desktop next semester. I've figured out enough about hardware that I'd feel confident doing so.

Fun: Despite all the work we have to do here, I've had a lot of fun: watching anime with my friends, having fights with foam rockets on the lawn in front of East, watching bad movies, and playing truth-or-dare.

This summer, I'll be in Memphis, getting a job and spending time with my Memphian friends. If anything Mudderly comes up over the summer, I'll write about it here.

Hard Drive: Dying (& Python alarm clocks!)

2008-05-03T22:30:00.000-07:00

The hard drive on my computer is dying--for certain definitions of "dying". Here's what I've gathered from my knowledge of hard drives (which is not a lot compared to most Mudders but a fair amount compared to the average person):

My hard drive is partitioned. This is basically the hard drive equivalent of rooms in a house. Some houses have one room--you can get to all of your stuff without changing rooms, but you have to share a room with all your siblings, and if that room gets messed up, your entire house is a mess. I partitioned my hard drive to have 1 partition (like a "room") for Linux programs, 1 partition for Windows programs, 1 partition for stuff (like music, videos, and schoolwork), and 1 partition as a swap (which artificially extends your computer's memory, but is slower than real memory). For some reason, Windows gave itself a partition of its very own, separate from the one I made for it. From what I've gathered, it has important OS stuff like "how to make sure Windows actually runs."
The Windows program partition is destroyed.
The Windows OS partition is beyond destroyed. Metaphorically speaking, it was set on fire. Then the fire was put out and it was demolished. Then it was set on fire again.
The data partition is sort of working. There's some stability issues leaking through from the Windows program partition, but so far everything seems to be intact.
The Linux partition is just fine.

What appears to have happened is that the part of the hard drive that reads the rest of the hard drive can't read most of the Windows stuff. According to some Eastie folks, the entire hard drive will be gone within a week. I have another hard drive in the mail from the friendly folks at Lenovo, but putting all my stuff back on the new drive (& reinstalling Linux) is going to be pretty time-consuming. It's a good thing I don't have class next week, or I'd probably be without a computer until the summer.

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In other news, another Mudd frosh and I have written an alarm clock for Linux in the programming language Python. It takes the time you want to wake up and a file path to a song (or video) as input. Then, it figures out how many seconds it is until you want to wake up, and waits for that many seconds. Then it turns the volume on your computer down to 0, opens a media player, and tells the media player to play the song (or video) you gave it. After that, it increases the volume every few seconds until it gets to maximum volume. Sure, it would be simpler to use a real alarm clock, but this is a lot more fun. Over the week that we don't have class, I'll probably be tinkering with this program to make it work in both Windows and the Mac OS.

Building a Compost Sifter

2008-04-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

My E4 team has been building for the past few weeks, and our compost sifter is finally nearing completion! All we have left to build are the cam (which will lift and drop the frame) and the screen holder.

Here are some pictures of our accomplishment!

This is Claire, standing in front of the lumber we used to build the compost sifter. We used 4 by 4's for the front post and 2 by 4's for the rest of the frame.

Some of the wood we just screwed together with 4" screws. (We had to drill pilot holes first, or the screws would get stuck.)

For corners, we used brackets to hold the wood together and then screwed the brackets to the wood.

This is Daniel bracing the frame of the compost sifter while someone (not shown in picture) drills on another part of the frame. Our sifter will be a little over 4 feet tall when we're finished.

This is the almost-finished sifter (minus screen and cam). When it's finished, there will be an aluminum pole on the front with a cam on it. When the cam spins, the frame that holds the screen will raise and then drop, forcing the compost through the screen.

That's a picture of the screen-holder frame lifted up from the rest of the sifter. The rubber that will cushion its fall (to make it not deafeningly loud) is from an old bike tire that the Pitzer bike shop gave us.

.............................................

E4 has, at times, been really fun. Building this compost sifter was fun (for the first 2 consecutive hours in the machine shop; after that, I get bored and have to take a break). My current group is really awesome--we're pretty laid-back, so it's easy not to get stressed even when we have a lot to do. Other parts of E4 have been less fun--for example, being in the shop at 11:30 on a Saturday night, trying to learn how to do carpentry for the first time (while building), and not knowing the physics you need to know to model all of your designs (some of which have pretty complicated physics). The engineering curriculum here is a lot of work. When I say a lot of work, I mean a lot of work. My team spent most of Friday and Saturday building. (We did it in 2-person shifts, so we didn't all have to be there the whole time, but that's still a lot of time in the machine shop.) We still have some building to do, and then we have to finish writing up a tech memo which sums up everything we did and then make a presentation detailing everything we did. If you really enjoy every part of the engineering process--not just the design and the building, but the write-ups and the presentations and the organizational things--then you'll love it. If you're like me, you like designing and building things, but not all the other stuff. I'm changing my major to CS because the other stuff is a substantial enough portion of the engineering curriculum to deter me. I still like building stuff. I still like figuring out how things work. I just can't make myself interested enough in all the other parts of the engineering curriculum to really enjoy an engineering major. I really liked CS my first semester. Programming and engineering are really quite similar--you're trying to make a [thing] that performs [function]. So, in a sense, I'll still be making things. Just different things than I thought I would make when I first came to Mudd.

Schedule

2008-04-23T00:55:00.000-07:00

Other Mudder bloggers have been posting their assorted schedules. Mine's actually going to be pretty typical for a frosh changing majors to CS.

As a background note, Mudd has a core curriculum. Most students have finished it by the end of sophomore year. The core schedule is quite nice the summer before freshman year, when your friends are all talking about having to rush to their school's website to sign up for classes before they all fill up. Core classes take up progressively less time in your schedule as you go through more of the curriculum and help you figure out what you want to major in.

Electricity, Magnetism, and Optics (abbreviated as E&M): The final core physics class. I'm also taking the associated lab for this class.
Multivariable Calculus II & Introduction to Probability and Statistics: Core math classes, half a semester each.
Introduction to Computer Science. I decided near the end of March that I wanted to major in CS, so I'm taking the first non-core CS class.
Discrete Mathematics. This is a requirement for CS majors, but is also reputed to be quite a fun math class.
Dickens, Hardy, and the Victorian Age. This is the unusual class in my schedule. Every 2 years, Professors Groves (a literature professor) and Eckert (a Physics professor) teach a class that consists of reading, discussing, and writing about books written by Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. The class culminates in a trip to England over the second half of winter break.

This is a pretty normal schedule for a third semester: it contains the core Physics class (and its lab), two half-semester core math classes, a class in a major I'm seriously considering, a humanities class, and a fifth class.

Common variations on the third-semester schedule:

Some freshmen take the rest of the core math program over the summer, opening up 3 hours of space(an average class) in their schedule. Most of them fill that space with a technical elective.
The "fifth class" is STEMS, the core engineering class. Most of the people who do this are engineers, because STEMS is a prerequisite for a lot of engineering classes.
The "fifth class" is the required Biology class. This frees up 3 hours of space in the spring.
The "fifth class" is a Humanities class. People who do this are usually taking E&M and two difficult technical classes. Whether or not this actually decreases your workload is debatable, but it does give you more space in your week wherein you're not doing problem sets.

Prefrosh Weekend

2008-04-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

I was going to put up a bunch of pictures of happy laughing prefrosh. But most of them didn't want me to take their picture, so instead:

Mudders, looking for prefrosh, so that the Mudders can show the prefrosh where their dorms are.

Yay, it's Prefrosh Weekend!

Other than that, it's time for some Fun Mudd Facts!

Fun Fact #1:
Mudd has 4 "quad" dorms. They are shaped like the letter "U" and are the closest to things like the dining hall and the classrooms. They are laid out and named like this:

South-----------------North

West------------------East

There's actually a reason they have those names:
In the beginning, Mudd had one dorm: East. It was called "East" because it was the eastmost building on campus. North and West were built after East. North was north of East, and West was west of East. So, of course, those dorms were called "North" and "West." Then Mudd built a fourth dorm. Mudders, seeing that there was a fourth dorm and four cardinal directions, began calling it "South."
South was, and still is, the northernmost of all the dorms. But Mudders don't let that stop them from calling it "South."

Fun Fact #2:
Mudd has a relatively large building known as "Platt." The first floor contains offices and a large open space with lots of couches. The second floor has Jay's (a pizza place), the offices for Facilities and Maintenance (F&M), and a large music practice room.
Platt used to be Mudd's dining hall. Platt is no longer Mudd's dining hall because Platt is way too small to be Mudd's dining hall. But it makes a pretty nice building for offices and the Platt living room.

Fun Fact #3:
The Mudd campus gently slopes downhill from the dorms to the classrooms. This makes skateboarding (or scootering, or bicycling, or rollerblading) to class very simple. Based on a completely nonscientific visual survey of people I see going to class in the morning, I'd say between one-third and one-half of all Mudders take some sort of wheeled transportation to class. Of those, about half are skateboarders. Of the remaining users of wheeled transportation, about two-thirds use bikes, and most of the rest use scooters. I also regularly see two people who rollerblade to class.
(It's also highly recommended that you use some form of wheeled transportation if you take a class at another of the 5Cs, especially if you take a class at Pomona. Why? Pomona is about a mile away, and you have 10 minutes between classes.)

There may be more pictures during the weekend (especially if my E4 group begins building this weekend). If not, look for my update next week!

Assorted Update

2008-04-10T21:32:00.000-07:00

A while back, I went to the Getty Museum with a friend of mine. As it turns out, getting to the Getty without a car is time-consuming, but not too hard. We took a train to downtown L.A., then took a bus to another bus to the museum. Our motivation: the Getty is free.

This is a fountain at the Getty Museum. The Getty is one of the few art museums I've seen that is artfully designed, instead of being an assortment of blocky square rooms with tan and gray walls.

This is the view from the top balcony of the Getty museum, which is on top of a hill near downtown L.A.

The Getty has a nice permanent art collection as well as good traveling exhibits, so we got to see a lot of quality art while we were there. (There aren't any pictures of the art, because it was all inside.) I also got to see some illuminated manuscripts, which was really neat.

Second: Some friends of mine are going to be Time Suck next year. Time Suck is a suite in East, traditionally made up of sophomores, whose job is to entertain East Dorm with movies, small parties, marathons of TV shows, and the like. I'm pretty excited, because this means I'll be able to help organize all the fun that Time Suck plans.

I've been inundated with coupons for pizza and Bed Bath and Beyond recently. (Tip: if you want a lot of coupons from Bed Bath and Beyond, have them ship you something. They will send you coupons for the rest of your natural life.) This puts me in an interesting situation for two reasons. First, the pizza coupons are all things like "10% off a medium pepperoni pizza and a side of chicken". I'm a vegetarian, so I'm definitely not ordering a pepperoni pizza anytime soon. Second, I'm never going to use my Bed Bath and Beyond coupon, because I don't have a car and I already have everything I would buy from Bed Bath and Beyond (with the possible exception of a chair that, despite my liking for it, would take up too much of the remaining floor space in my dorm room). I'm giving the BBB coupons to next year's Time Suck, on the grounds that Time Suck could always use one more bean bag chair, but I still can't find anyone who wants a cheap pepperoni pizza.

In other Mudder news, this Sunday starts the Accepted Students Program. During this program, the campus gains an extra 150 to 200 people--prospective students (known as "prefrosh") who've been accepted to Mudd and have decided to visit. (Although prefrosh can visit at other times, the school has a lot of special prefrosh activities during ASP.) Although I can't host prefrosh (because I currently live on Scripps), I'll be taking prefrosh to their host's dorms on Sunday morning and entertaining the prefrosh that all of my friends will be hosting. I'll also be carrying my camera around, so look forward to pictures of prefrosh weekend sometime this week.

That's all for this week, folks. I'll see you next week with tales of ASP.

Quick Room Draw Update

2008-04-06T06:57:00.001-07:00

All of my friends have guaranteed rooms in places they'd be happy living. Huzzah!

Room Draw Room Draw Revolution

2008-04-03T11:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a while because we had Spring Break and then I realized the week after that it was Room Draw Season.

For those unfamiliar with the term, Room Draw is the process by which Mudders obtain rooms for the next school year. It's also one of the most stressful parts of the year. You see, we Mudders are not competitive people. Teachers don't grade on a curve, so you don't have to beat your fellow students to get a good grade--you just have to do well. The same cannot be said of Room Draw. There are, in fact, a finite number of rooms on campus. This means that if you get the room you want, you're keeping someone else from getting the room they want. This is especially true of singles, which are the most coveted rooms on campus due to their one-person occupancy. Through a strange series of events (which started when the person I'd been planning to room with decided to room with someone else and ended when, after the 4th person I wanted to room with said she'd be leaving Mudd, a rising senior decided to pull me into a single), I have an East single for next year. This is pretty unusual, because I'll only be a sophomore next year. There were some juniors who were upset about it, because they wanted to live in an East single next year and now won't be able to. They'll be over it pretty soon, but there was quite a lot of tension over it for a week or so. Also, because of the way Room Draw works, I already have a room, but most of my friends don't. (Rising seniors pick rooms first, then rising juniors, then rising sophomores.) I'm not worried about most of them, but there are a few who are picking rooms late (room draw order is decided randomly) who may wind up living in a dorm that really doesn't match them. Everything should turn out okay, though.

In case anyone is wondering, the typical Mudd housing cycle looks like this:
Freshmen live in every dorm on campus. They're assigned rooms based on the personality of the dorm or suite they'll be living in. With a few exceptions, freshmen have doubles. (A few have triples, but the freshman triples have about as much space per person as a typical Mudd double. A few others live in singles in South.)
After freshman year, you pick your own room. Because there are limited quantities of nicer rooms, this is what usually happens:
Sophomores generally live in doubles. A few choose to live in triples or quads, because triples and quads have more space per person than the average Mudd double. (The tradeoff is that, if you live in a triple or a quad, you have 2 or 3 roommates, instead of just one.) Sophomore rooms and freshman rooms are about the same size. (My situation is unusual, and is the result of Eastie folks being nice. All of my other friends will be living in doubles. One will be probably be living in the same room she's living in this year.)
About one-third of juniors live in singles. The rest live in doubles. Because juniors pick rooms before sophomores, many juniors usually wind up living in larger doubles than sophomores and freshman. (For example, "L doubles" and "long doubles," normally inhabited by juniors, have about as much floor space as 2 singles. Some inhabitants of long doubles and L doubles put up curtains that effectively turn the double into 2 singles.)
Almost all seniors live in singles, because there are about 200 singles on campus and about 170 people in any given senior class.

My E4 group is building a compost sifter for Pitzer for our final project. We'll probably be prototyping in a few weeks, so there's a good chance I won't be updating then. After all, prototyping is the part of the design process in which you and your friends spend a weekend in the machine shop.

Cool things

2008-03-12T02:16:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with the new computer for a day now. Here are some of the things I've been playing with:

Desktop Cube. It's a thingy that comes with Linux that essentially gives you multiple virtual monitors. I'm on the Internet, I hit a button, and everything rotates to give me a new, blank screen. I open a word processor, start typing, hit a different button, and it spins back to the Internet. The way I set it up, I pretty much have four different monitors inside my computer.

Paint Fire On The Screen. Self-explanatory. Also, it stays there until you hit the "please go away" button, and it still looks like it's burning. Distraction, but fun.

Sadly, I can't find a good picture of the "rain on screen" button. (Raindrops land on your screen with the same effect they would have if they landed in water. Also, there's a windshield wiper effect that you can enable once "rain" is enabled.)

And now, the most useful one:

On Macs, it's called Expose. On Linux, it's called Scale. It zooms all your open windows way out. Then you click on one, and all the windows zoom back to the size they were before, with the one you clicked on on top of the pile. Useful. Awesome.

I'm still playing with my new toy, so if I discover more neat things, I will share those as well.

New computer; apologies if this winds up looking funny.

2008-03-11T02:48:00.000-07:00

To show what a day at Mudd is like, I took some pictures. Here are the 5 that Picasa let me upload this time around:

The East Dorm Lounge, at night.

Super Smash Brothers Melee: the pastime of the East Dorm Lounge.

("Mom" is the nickname of an Eastie who everyone has adopted as their "mommy.")

When it's time for a homework break, it's time for Mario Kart.

Occasionally, we Mudders need to take a nap.

Mudders also eat in the dining hall.

As I said, Picasa only let me upload 5 pictures, because I'm running Linux. (Why? Because my computer came with Windows Vista. Vista took 5 minutes to boot up, and then it took me 15 minutes to find the "yes, I really do want to connect to a wireless network" button. Solution: Install Linux, an OS obscure outside of the technical world.)
More pictures will probably be uploaded sometime this week.

Paging Tech Support, Line 1

2008-03-05T13:36:00.000-08:00

Apart from my sprained finger, there's been another reason you haven't seen an update from me this week. What is the reason, you ask? My computer broke. My laptop, which brought me the Wikipedia article on differential equations as a study guide, which held over 3 kabillion songs, my portal to the world outside of Mudd, is gone. And we all mourn its loss.

...Okay, I'm being terribly overdramatic. In reality, the laptop is working fine, except for one little problem: the screen is black. If I could see the screen, all would be well in the world of computers. Unfortunately, the backlight has stopped working. (Definition for the less geeky among you: You know how laptop screens glow faintly? That's because the image is "written" on the screen, and then a very small, very bright light bulb shines through whatever image is on the screen, so that you can see what you're doing. If that doesn't make sense, think of it like this: It's like holding up a thin piece of fabric and shining a flashlight through it.)

Fortunately, this is Mudd. I had a cabal of computer experts who knew how to fix a computer. Unfortunately, none of their tricks worked. The uncrashable was crashed--including a rescue disk made with the specific intention of being uncrashable. Simple commands that the computer was given would fail in increasingly epic ways. I camped out in the East Dorm Lounge for several days, with my broken computer plugged into a borrowed monitor, backing up my computer, before I let anyone take it apart.

(As a side note, my finger was sprained and in a splint during all this time. I couldn't write because I'd sprained a finger on my writing hand, and now, I didn't have a computer. Fortunately, East Dorm is a veritable computer graveyard, so I'm borrowing someone else's old laptop until a better solution presents itself.)

Finally, after days of dealing with "Unspecified Error: Halting Copy," everything important (my music, my pictures, my writing, my math notes) had been copied over to my hard drive. After I was sure that nothing had been left out, I told a friend of mine (who, by this point in the year, had already fixed one laptop and taken apart his own several times), "If you get tired of doing your homework, feel free to figure out what's wrong with my laptop." He jumped at the chance to procrastinate meaningfully and spent an hour slowly dissecting my laptop's screen.

Then he came back upstairs to the room where we were studying with the proclamation: "I think it's your graphics card."

For those not familiar with the setup of laptops, graphics cards are glued into the computer, making them essentially unreplaceable. If you want a new graphics card, you generally have to get a new laptop.

This is exactly what I did. I have a new one in the mail, and this time, I decided the extended warranty was worth every cent.

.............................................

P.S. Look forward to my next update, "When Cameras Attack." I just got a new digital camera, and I will be using it as much as possible.

Explanation for the Upcoming Lack of Update

2008-02-27T00:21:00.000-08:00

There may not be an update this week, because I have sprained my finger, making it difficult to type.

"What do you do on the weekend?"

2008-02-26T02:14:00.000-08:00

I met up with a lot of my friends while I was home over Winter Break, and invariably they would ask me, "What do Mudders do on the weekend?"

This isn't really an unreasonable question. As I've said before, Mudd is a small school. You would think being around the same 700 people all the time would put a damper on the local social life. There also exists a rumor that Mudders, being scientists and self-proclaimed nerds, don't enjoy parties. (This rumor is completely unfounded. One Mudd dorm in particular is legendary amongst the Claremont Colleges--the 5 C's--for the parties it throws.)

If you like parties, one of the benefits of the 5C's is that, on any given weekend, there's probably a party on both Friday and Saturday night. These are usually "parties" like the ones you see in movies, where you and several of your closest friends are talking, dancing, and listening to music in an open space. It's crowded, it's loud, and it can be terribly fun.

There are also smaller weekend gatherings, usually dorm-specific. For example, East Dorm, where I spend most of my time, shows a movie at midnight every Saturday and has some sort of small party every few weeks, with themes ranging from fondue to Halloween. At any given time between 9 AM and 4 AM on the weekends, you can find someone willing to play board games, card games, or video games somewhere on the Mudd campus, generally in either their dorm lounge or the lounge of their suite. Each dorm also offers something different on the weekend, ranging from board and video games in East to a typical college party (music, lights, and so on) at West Dorm. Suites--a collection of student dorm rooms with their own lounge--also throw their own parties, with themes and activities that vary even more widely than those of the individual dorms. With so many things going on, I usually find myself facing difficult decisions like "Do I want to watch a zombie movie with my friends, go to the formal party, or play another round of this board game?"

In short, unless you're only interested in extreme underwater glow-in-the-dark salamander basketball, there's always something to do at Mudd on the weekend.

An introduction, of sorts

2008-02-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

I'm Skye, and I'm a Mudder. ("Mudder" is slang used at the Claremont Colleges for "a student who attends Harvey Mudd College.") In case you have stumbled across this blog without any knowledge of what this "Harvey Mudd College" is, I have a brief summary:
Harvey Mudd College is a small liberal arts college with a strong emphasis on science and technology. However, science isn't all we Mudders do; in order to graduate, each of us have to have a concentration (similar to a minor) in a Humanities or Social Sciences subject in addition to a science major. (Some students take an off-campus major, in which case they must have an on-campus concentration.) If I go into much more detail than that, this post will be at least 20 pages long, so I have a link to the HMC website on this blog. ("HMC" is another one of those terms that means "Mudd.")

Who am I? I'm a freshman at Mudd. I currently live in a Scripps College dorm; however, I spend most of my time in East Dorm at Mudd, where I want to live next year. I'm planning to major in engineering and concentrate in music. I'm one of the few jazz bass guitarists who's also a classically trained flute player. I took flute lessons for several years at the University of Memphis, which is about half an hour away from my house, which is about 1,800 miles away from Mudd. My training on bass guitar comes from a hodgepodge of sources--myself, my uncle, books, teachers, and the Internet.
I came to Mudd for a whole host of reasons: the professors are approachable, the professors are good teachers, the students are friendly, the students do more with their lives than just math and science, the administration is responsive to the needs of students, and the Mudd community is very close-knit and accepting of its members. I went to Mudd and not a school more focused on science because I didn't want to have to give up music and literature in order to become an engineer. I went to Mudd and not a liberal arts college because I wanted to become an engineer.

There is one problem with the above description of myself--it fits into a neat narrative, and I don't. I skateboard across campus--partly because it's a downhill ride from the dorms to the academic end of campus, and partly because it's fun. I have a bike that's currently broken in at least 3 different ways. I really like my engineering class and my psychology class, and I'm beginning to suspect that I like them for the same reason--"Oh, that's how that works! Neat!" I like to read, I like to write, and I like to take things apart and put them back together.

I am one of the many Mudders on campus, and one of five whose blogs are being linked back to the Mudd Admissions website so that those curious about Mudd can hear what it's like to live at Mudd. And since there are five of us, it's likely you'll hear very different things about what Mudd is like. Just remember that they're all true, even when they contradict each other. Every person's life at Mudd is different. Every person at Mudd is different. Everything I write here can only be representative of the way I see things. If you think what I'm saying is strange, you can check out the other Mudder's blogs to see what they have to say. (Or you can look at their blogs anyway, because they're fun to read.)

So, in conclusion:
1) My name is Skye.
2) I am a Mudder.
3) This is my blog.

Any questions?