Whimsy

“What horses consider play, monkeys consider business, but to Tom…” — Unknown

Strava

I was running at night one day and thought, “Why don’t I record this on Strava¹ so that DMO can see it?” And then I pressed “Record” and put my phone in my pocket and kept running.

By the time I got back, I took out my phone and found out that my phone was about to pay for an annual subscription to Strava! It had activated the Apple Pay screen and just needed me to double tap on the side and it would have gone through.

Random Chance

It seems like the sweat from my pants was able to conduct electricity and touch the phone in just the right way.

It felt like it could have been foul play, but I can definitely see it happening that perhaps it accidentally ended the run recording and then hit the subscription advertisement.

Why don’t they just sell runners’ data like the rest of the companies? Oh wait, they do.

Typos

I found my first typo in The Iliad, and it’s in the Penguin Classics red cover version of the book on line 410 of Book 21, during a battle between Athene (Athena) and Ares, where Athene hits Ares with a rock and he falls over, and she says, “You stupid food!” instead of “You stupid fool!”

I emailed the Vice President of Penguin Classics about the typo, also mentioning that I wanted to start a book club in case they wanted to provide books.

Process

Art is not all about the finished product, in fact, it’s mostly random what you get out at the end.

Art is a process to be experienced. The ink flows from your hand to the page, continuous consideration and plotting.

I am excited for G and N to also learn to appreciate drawing this quarter.

Of Elimination

PS 12 is one of my favorite classes at Caltech and for good reason. The lecture is simply the most entertaining. This year, 150 students are taking it when only 40 did last year when I took it.

A lot of them are freshmen, and I hope the class will inspire them to become better people. But it means the class is going to be noisier, since freshmen think that lecture is high school where they can just talk whenever they want.

Also, it feels like at least 5 of the people in the room were alumni of the course like me. For example, there was a guy who I remember from last year and a girl who often engaged in the debate.

When I was trying to get into Baxter lecture hall, she also showed up and when she looked at me, she had to do a double-take because she probably also remembered me from last year LOL.

Prof. Kiewiet is as lively as ever, stating that the Athens ostracized people whom they didn’t like by voting on it. And that Caltech should also have such a system, but clarifying that 2-3 ostracisms would probably be enough.

Whimsical Past

I was talking with E about interior decoration, which is something I do not know anything about, as is apparent from my room layout.

However, when I started talking about my childhood room, with all of its stuffed animals, my former whimsy seemed to manifest itself.

Pets

I call my stuffed animals “pets” because it’s more convenient to believe that they are living, kind of like how people call their pets “children” because it is more convenient to believe that they are human.

Now, there are a cast of characters which inhabit my world:

• Joshie, who is a honeybear (cousin of Winnie, the Pooh) pillow from Disneyworld. He is the principal and teacher at Joshie Bear Elementary School (JBES) and Joshie Bear High School (JBHS). Joshie can fly/glide like a bird when he is fanned out. He loves to eat pancakes and honey (and flowers).
• Sealy, who is a whitecoated harp seal pup, related to the California sea lions of San Francisco’s Pier 39. He runs a tomato soup restaurant where he serves only tomato soup, because that is what we ate when we went to Pier 39. Sealy has the special ability of being incredibly slippery and being able to generate water on his body, so that he can escape from any situation. Sealy is actually a shared pet between me and my sister.
• The Jeffys, who are roughly 1000 little bears alternating between yellow, green, blue, and red colors that make up a small blanket. They have the ability to put anyone to sleep by wrapping around them and making them super comfortable. Each of them have various professions and characteristics. Their leader is the blue helping-hand Jeffy, very reliable and trustworthy. They are also all firefighters because they can roll up like a sushi and blast water.
• Flowery, which is a pink flower blanket with a flower and bee pattern on it. Kind of like my sister’s version of the Jeffys. It can also roll up like a sushi to become a firehose. I think it has some other powers but as of late the joke is that Joshie chews on it.
• Ducky, who is a blue duck from Peepz (and is definitely not a chicken) that has the ability to fly by jumping in mid-air, kind of like the Scout, or wobbling back and forth like the Bicycle guy from Happy Wheels. He likes to eat blueberries and also plays the X-Files theme song whenever he’s slithering around because he has no feet.
• Sharkdog, who is a rotund husky-puppy-great-white-shark hybrid with a highly malleable shape (pancake, cylinder, block). He swims by using his tail as a propeller. He sometimes becomes a burrito by being wrapped in a blanket. He is my sister’s pet.

Forces of Nature

Just like The Odyssey, there are monsters and other forces of nature in this world.

• Dot field, who are a bunch of black dots on a blue blanket cover. They can act as the ocean or as sand dunes depending on the situation and have a will of their own. Not necessarily good or bad.
• Feetie Monsters, they come in pairs of two and are the sandworms of the dot field and use the dot field to kidnap and digest prey by enveloping the prey on all sides. They can be defeated by RKO.

Imagination

Now that I think of it, this is basically Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure because every character has a special ability and can use them in unique ways.

I’m grateful as someone who grew up in the iPad-kid-era that all post-Angry-Birds-Go mobile games are just slop, because that gave me the time to spend on developing this world and its characters.

I’m grateful that even though I know nothing of interior design, in a room with white walls, a Minecraft poster, a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp, I can imagine a world full of excitement and wonder.

Yaser

In CS 156b, a machine learning project class where groups try to classify lung xrays as various illnesses/conditions, I was able to make a founder of NeurIPS grin with my interesting feature engineering.

This idea originates from when I was in elementary school when everyone was checked for scoliosis, which I thought might be useful since the spine is in the xray and the spine probably affects the lungs. I found some papers on the subject confirming my suspicion.

Then, I found that there was a metric known as Cobb’s angle which measures how severe someone’s spine curvature is. However, it’s kind of hard to get with image processing.

So, I thought, can’t I just take the middle column of the image and see if it’s dark? Since if someone’s spine is bendy, it won’t be in the middle!

I think the professor and TAs enjoyed this greatly, since they were smiling ear to ear, but whether for amusement from foolishness or fiendishness, I do not know.

The results were decent, but I think applying a real image processing technique relating to edge detection or gradient something-something would probably work better.

Footnotes

1. Pokemon Go for runners. ↩