Dominik’s Blog

So on thefacebook.com, a college social networking site, there’s an option to select your level of romantic interest.

One of the options is dating and the other is a relationship. Of course, the site doesn’t provide a help file that precisely defines those terms, but I thought dating implied a relationship? Can you date without a relationship? What would that be? What would that mean?

It doesn’t help I’m working on propositional logic right now, either… I want to encode these things into neat boolean variables and have at them! Conjunction! Disjunction! Interpretation!

Comments welcomed :)

Life is bigger than its deconstruction, so said an anonymous commenter on Aaron Swartz’s interesting and well-written documentation of his starting days of Stanford. Aaron, like me, has more than a mere tendency to (over)analyze but his thoughts are pretty insightful and a good read.

Returning to the subject of this post, Life is bigger than its deconstruction. This is something I’ve realized over the past year or so. Analysis eventually falls short, because there will always be variables that are inexplicable, etheral or simply impossible to articulate. Love, I’m convinced, falls into this domain (though as I’ve yet I’ve not experienced romantic love, and thus this remains a theory ;). Merely adding together the utility of various life experiences does not constitute the whole of life. Life is more than the sum of its parts :).ringtone raid airringtones nokia 6170ringtones absolutly free verizonnokia 4 ringtone 3310 freefree ringtone 3660 nokialg ringtone free 1100650 treo download ringtone04 ringtone 2002 cingular Mapsex totally movies freeadult preview moviemovies sex totally freemovie pitch fevermovies tit big freelost boys movie100% free sex moviesfree porn bbw movies Map

Did I say it was cold outside?

Sorry, I meant warm. It’s a sunny and pleasant 80 degrees now…

From 6.003 Recitation today: “Pillage then burn. Burn then pillage doesn’t work as well.” Impressive.

Term is picking up, in that there are more assignments due every week. Fortunately I have a nice balance of stuff due on Monday and due on Friday so there are no nasty sudden floods of work. Instead a calm steady stream :)

It’s really cold out. Walking to 9 am tutorial in 50 degree weather made me glad for warm clothing :)

Also, I keep getting gmail invites. So if I know you in real life and you don’t have one, comment below with the e-mail address you want me to send one out to :).

Ballroom went well. Any and all of my fears turned out to be unfounded. Worry is completely unnecessary if a particular event horizon isn’t reached :) Vague physics terminology for the win!web accept unsecured card page creditcredit accredited for degrees experience lifecard accept poker creditcredit card merchant account texas internetcorps business of aged credit linesaffinity credit cardcredit on statements card line aaacredit bureaus all three Map

Well it’s been more than a week of classes while living at Simmons, my new dorm quite a bit northwest of the so-called “heart of campus.” The dorm’s residents are quite friendly, everything is new and shiny (the dorm is only 2 years old!) and it’s interesting to live in a place that still finds it identify based on its unit classification (Simmons the Dorm) rather than some breakdown by hall, lounge or floor (as 120 year EC has firmly established personalities by hall).

Another advantage of living far away from campus is that one spends more time on campus, since dropping by one’s room is a royal pain. Yesterday I was working on 6.003’s matlab part of the pset and since I had a 3 hour gap between the end of 6.003 lecture and the start of 15.075’s recitation (far, far away at Sloan, a good 25 minute walk from Simmons), I didn’t want to spent a net total of an hour walking back and forth when I could just work on Matlab from an Athena cluster. This led to seeing about 7 or so people over the course of the next three hours, all of whom came by the building 12 cluster to do a bit of their own work, check e-mail, print schedules, or whatever. Had I lived at East Campus, I would’ve been back home in 3 minutes and had done the Matlab assignment from the comfort of my own room — but at the same time I wouldn’t have run into all those people.

In the course of my iterations across campus I keep running into people and saying hi, only to not have them recognize me. Apparently my “new glasses” (black-rimmed frames, dating from March 2004) and not super-short hair make me a different-looking person. It’s kind of fun, because almost everyone has the same reaction, a short two to three second pause in which their eyes look almost entirely blank before recognition finally sets in and/or I say something along the lines of “Dominik.”

Signed up for Simmon’s IM Tennis and IM Soccer, and going to go ballroom practice tonight — I think I’ll just dance latin/rhythm since 1) i find it more fun 2) doing just one of latin/rhythm and standard is less of a time commitment. Also need to make Sunday’s meeting at the Tech to get into photography there. My first pset of the semester was handed in today, at 6.003 recitation. The semester can now be said to have truly begun.nokia 2115i ringtonefree 230233330t ringtone motorola vringtone free 231231300 nokia phoneringtone 2312333232i nokia downloadringtone days 3 gracedownloads free phone ringtone 3g6310i ringtone free nokia7.0.2 ringtones hack Map

New icon. Let me know whatcha think, eh?

Beautiful weather here in Cambridge, quite the opposite of the craptastic weather that started the school year. My window faces west so I have full sunshine for hours on end a day, but I have 9 windows (count them!) so the room stays cool :)

In my humble opinion Marilee Jones has done a good job. Freshwomen are significantly cuter on average than I remember freshwomen my year being. One could also argue that this has nothing to do with the student body and is related to my own perceptions and uh, maturity. I’ll go with either one :)

Classes are all cool… a run-down:

6.003 - Signals and Systems - Cool class thus far, with broad-ranging applications on everything from TV tuners, to Internet packets, to radio, to any sort of system that processes information (that’s broad, heck I wonder if I can model a romantic relationship with my class knowledge!) The lecturer initially gives the impression of being incredibly boring, but for some inexplicable reason I find his voice engaging and actually enjoy his explanations, which are very thorough. He just isn’t very dynamic, but is very … persistant? and communicates information across very well. I guess one should expect that from a signals & systems prof, since after all lecturing is a signal… My recitation instructor is teaching the class for the first time, which is nice because he really cares; he’s also quite knowledgable as he’s been a prof here for a long time. Finally my TA (who has godly ratings of 6.3/7 on the UG) is also my GRT and is generally awesome!

6.825 - Techniques in Artificial Intelligence - Taught by my longtime UROP supervisor, Leslie Kaelbling, this class covers material that I love. Kaelbling is a great lecturer, able to be dynamic, informative and humorous at the same time. The textbook is wonderful… I’m taking this class to patch up my rather diversely obtained AI knowledge and give it a solid MIT basis :)

14.41 - Public Finance - Another great lecturer teaches this class (so much easier with great lecturers), Jon Gruber of the Economics Department here at MIT. He worked for the Clinton Administration for a year so he’s well aware of how the government deals with economics, both the rational and irrational ways. The class examines, from an economic perspective, everything from social security to health care and is very timely considering the upcoming election.

15.075 - Statistics - A Sloan requirement, but we get to use SAS and learn how to use real world statistical tools. Might prove useful, haven’t seen enough of the actual course material (lecture so far hasn’t been very hardcore) to form an opinion of much.

Pondering IM Soccer, Tennis, Basketball, shooting photos for the Tech, and maaaaybe Ballroom … we’ll see.

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Why is it that the entries I most want to read comments on never get any, whereas mudane entries asking about why entries don’t get comments get lots?

One cannot script life nor predict it. Acceptance is the first step on the path to wisdom. We cannot know what will happen, and when it happens it often does so in ways we do not expect. Time spent hypothesizing about how things beyond our control will occur is time spent wasted. Worry about elements of life we cannot control is worry without wisdom.

People are inherently unpredictable. One can only know oneself, and even then, rather incompletely, as I for one know that I routinely surprise myself. Even the Apostles point out, we do things we do not expect to do. We do things we do not intend to do. How then, if we know not ourselves, can we even hope to estimate and predict the actions of others? Is it not the height of arrogance to assume that we can know what is on the minds of our fellow human beings? Can we even dream that we know what they think, what they feel, let alone how will they act? All our prognostications are little more than wispy dreams of a world that will never be, for we are not masters of the world. Our best hope is to strive to be masters of ourselves, that we might grow in discipline and wisdom.

One can only take life as it comes. It is useless to obsess and overanalyze the past, it is pointless to speculate about the future. Jesus Himself essentially told us to focus on the present, for that is all that we can ever hope to influence. So it is that we must live life in the moment, focusing on each minute, hour and day, pondering where it is we are going and what it is we are doing. This does not mean we should be fatalistic, crying that we cannot determine our own fates. Rather, our own fates remain firmly in our grasps, subject to the will of God, but our choice of destiny is ours alone. Nor should we be nihilistic, saying all is without destiny or desire. We cannot control the future, we cannot change the past, but we can and ought to work for good in the present. So be it.

A day and a year. Irony.viagra sildenafil substitute 5cheapestalltel ringtonesakon ringtonesamanda harringtonalltell ringtonescarrington alexibonus ringtones 10ringtone 24 ctu Map

All set up in Simmons 741B. New room, new dorm, new semester. Simmons is clean and new and full of surprisingly cordial and social people. Looks like it’ll be a fun semester.

Taking 6.003, 6.825, 14.41 and 15.075 this semester.

My calendar:
http://calendar.yahoo.com/?drabiej