Off to Long Island

Having finished my mathematical biology presentation and paper about bacterial quorum sensing, as well as my one and only final for my Chinese film class, I am going to embark on a trip to Long Island to visit some relatives. It’s a trip I probably should have made a while ago, as my uncle has always invited me and my parents have always told me to go. I suppose it will be nice to get away from Cambridge for awhile, especially since it seems like our unseasonally warm weather this time of year is going to vanish (the weather for tomorrow in Cambridge is 20-30 degrees colder than it is today which was in the pleasant 50s-60s). It will also give me a chance to finally finish Dorothy Dunnet’s Game of Kings (which, to my dismay, I’m actually liking quite a bit) and to work without college distractions on my physics presentation.

Despite all the work and stress during finals season, I have to say that I do learn things while doing research and studying. On one hand, I am learning the stuff that I’m cramming down my brain, but that’s not really learning anything — that knowledge will be gone in a few weeks.

What I do learn and actually sticks comes from the deeper research that one has to undergo to write papers and make presentations. What I do learn comes from approaching once-difficult concepts through the lens of the entire class as an overall picture (or forest) rather than individual pixels (or trees to complete the analogy).

In the past few days, I’ve also grown to like LaTeX (here’s a link to the Windows build called MikTeX) quite a bit more, especially since I discovered BibTeX and Prosper. For those of you not in the know, LaTeX (pronounced Lay-tek) is a typesetting package which is more or less similar to XML in the sense that you focus on content and set styles and you allow a different package/coder to render your content in the style that you’ve set. For example, I’d write a paragraph and set the style of that body of text to “paragraph” — and instead of worrying how the paragraph looks, I’ll leave that to a computer programmed to make it look pretty. What’s great about LaTeX is that it already comes with several packages which are adeptly suited at rendering math formulas and, in the case of BibTex, for handling bibliographies and reference lists. Sick of PowerPoint? Use Prosper – a LaTeX package designed to create presentations with many of the same features, but letting you render math formula better, and like I said before, worry only about content and not about presentation. Best of all, it’s all Open Source! LaTeX, most programs to help you write and compile your TeX files (ie emacs), and JabRef (as well as various Mac and Unix and Linux analogues) are ALL open source — meaning no cost and a world of tech geeks who are constantly trying to improve the software. I would strongly recommend it — I believe Adrian even joked once that he would TeX up his wedding invitations!

Speaking of wedding invitations, I recently got a wedding invitation. When I looked at the envelope, I was confused as to who would send me a letter in such an artsy envelope. The address referred to an Olive Drive which I remembered being near my elementary school — and then I realized what it was — a stamp which made a reference to Caltech gave it away… To be honest I’m somewhat stunned at how quickly time is moving by. It seems like just a few years ago that Elena and I were at Nationals for Science Bowl, arguing over who’s strategy was better (she was always the cautious one… right, look where she is now … and I always suggested playing aggressive) or competing over who would get the last piece of beef jerkey — and now she’s getting married. I must be getting old …