I'm applying for a couple summer camps right now, and one of the applications included this prompt:
What person or event in your science and mathematics education has been the most influential in your decision to pursue a career in science or mathematics?
Here's my response. I think it speaks to my core philosophy pretty well:
...tags: life
The average small friend-group discord server starts simple, starts close-knit. And time passes, friends of friends join, eventually forming a distinction between the 'old' and the 'new'. More time passes, and the climate slowly changes; no longer quite so close-knit. Then inevitably, one of the first original members leaves. And this is in most cases the beginning of the end, a change that can only be delayed, not reversed.
As more members leave, the server drifts farther away from the vision it was set out to be, and more and more of the core members go inactive or leave entirely. Once this reaches critical mass, the server either burns out or overturns its members, its focus, its goal.
This is a pattern I've seen countless times in online communities. Much like any other social space, they are in a continual, inevitable state of change, in cycles where they are born, mature, grow old, and eventually die.
But though the same sort of patterns happen across nearly all social circles, every cycle's start is unique, its middle-age plays out unlike any before, and ends in its own way, too. So perhaps such a pattern isn't about the rigidity of social norm, but a meta-pattern in human behavior itself, and the way we respond and adapt to changes in ourselves, those around us, in the way we all interconnect; Seeing that larger, more physically-based communities still experience these same effects but over a longer timescale, what does this imply about the world we live in today?
tags: life
Here's to the ones who dream,
foolish as they may seem...
- "Audition", La La Land
Wow, school is starting soon!
Last year at the start of the school year I made a promise to stop procrastinating. It didn't hold. The year before that I did the same. It also didn't hold. I am again making a promise to stop procrastinating, so surely by induction, it won't hold...
tags: life
Hey yall. Been a while :P
My schedule has been kinda strange ever since coming back from road trip - firstly I started a project with some friends over that trip, SARA, which took up a decent portion of my first few days back. Then I had to deal with some school related stuff, and got involved with a new project after that... and all in all I haven't had had as much time to work on contest recently, or update this blog.
Finally decided to allocate a block of time to updating blog, so here we are! (hence the title)
Also, now that most of the projects I've been working on are at reasonably complete stages, I can talk a bit about them here! This is a short overview of what I've been up to recently:
...tags: programming life
Over the course of the past week, I've had a lot of ideas come through my head that I haven't been able to incorporate into blog posts of their own. I'll try to put them out here, and hopefully some meaning can be derived from my ramblings...
tags: life
I've been having trouble falling asleep recently.
No, it isn't anything physical - I'm not sick, and my sleep schedule isn't quite erratic enough to be the cause. What keeps me up at night is the future.
...tags: life