Another Interesting Woman, Milk, and TellMe

So thanks to an anonymous reader(!), I've discovered another interesting woman, Eva Hoffman. I'm linking to a site with an interview because information about her seems to be a little sparse (Google turns up a lot of older links). The site tells me that she's a visiting prof here at MIT, but I haven't heard of her (then again, I suppose the name wouldn't have jumped out at me even if there had been a guest lecture by her). An MIT Google search turns up mostly things from a few years ago... maybe she's retired now? In any case, Lost in Translation (apparently not an unpopular title) is on my reading list now, too.

In other interesting things, there was a recent finding (thanks, National Geographic!) saying that humans were mostly lactose intolerant up to the beginning of domestication and farming. There is now speculation and debate about whether humans started doing so because they could stomach cow's milk or the other way around, but the most interesting thing to me was the fact that the majority of people in the world are lactose intolerant. Sparing the biological details, that means that they lose the ability to digest milk after about age 4. It turns out that 'white' people, specifically northern Europeans, are an exception to this trend. Now, growing up in a northern European country, I was completely bewildered by my lactose intolerant friends when I moved to the US. I thought it was just another one of those weird 'American' trends. Now it turns out it was just due to greater ethnic diversity.

On the techie side, it looks like Microsoft might buy TellMe (serves them right for rejecting me for an internship last semester). Yes, yes, they're just rumors, but the two are discussing it. I don't know whether that would be good or bad for getting an internship there next year. Also, Google Maps now has TRAFFIC!

Finally, here are some fun music videos (thanks, VSL!):
* Real-life Pacman (the song's not bad either)
* "Window in the Skies", by U2 (careful, it's catchy)
* "Enjoy the Silence", by Depeche Mode, because the 80's are awesome

"Drop a class"

So now we're into the fourth week of classes (it was the third when I started writing this post), and I've accumulated so much that I'll split this post into two: personal and... well, the interesting stuff. So after the frantic SATPrep reg preparations of the first week and the work-and-Valentine's-filled second week, then more frantic oh-no-the-program-is-about-to-launch SATPrep work, I decided to drop a class: 6.004, the required lab in Computational Structures. I'd registered for and started taking 6.002 (required lab in circuits) and 6.004 simultaneously, only briefly considering actually going through with both. No, I realized that in order to actually do my UROP this time, and to learn the cool stuff that I'm going to get from 6.863, the kind of stuff that's actually going to make me a viable candidate for NLP work, I'm going to need to........... drop a class. (Around the hall, this phrase has actually become a normal response to anyone who has too much work, and a normal response to me when I say anything at all.)

Regarding my UROP (undergraduate research), and somewhat-related-6.863: it has to be the coolest stuff I've done. I do other classwork only because it is mechanical and pressing. I do 6.863 because I really like it, and I find everything I read so exciting that it takes me twice as long to do any of the assignments for this class because I spend too much time thinking about its applications. What can I say - I have a weak spot for regular expressions now (I even tried them out on 'tyche'; grep and find are my two new friends).

On a non-school note, Nick and I will go to the Bahamas over Spring Break; it looks like the trip won't be prohibitively expensive after all (at least not immediately), which is nice, but it did take us about 7 hours to book the flights and lodging. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that trying to redeem free tickets is next to impossible, especially over Spring break, and especially when trying to do it with two people.

I really will update more often; it's just hard to get into it, and the more interesting stuff piles up here, the less I want to do it - but I think that's just human nature.