Return to the Point of Origin

Ok, so I have been a bit quiet. Perhaps too quiet, but lets leave that to the internet tough guy for a final judgment (which coincidentally, by definition, not matter). Last time on this blog, we saw that I was accepted to UCLA, waiting for AP scores and commenting on neurobiology. In the period of null, I graduated high school, worked as an intern at CK12 and at NASA Ames, began networking with the college crowd, completed my first quarter at the University of California, Los Angeles, attended a business party at CommerceNet, celebrated Christmas and New Years at home, then returned to UCLA for quarter two.

This first week has been ok, despite the fact that the chemistry professor has been away on business and will not return to teach until next week, thus allowing the first weeks schedule to show itself to be lighter than normal. Anthropology 7, on the evolution of humans, is so far proving interesting in the reading, with the lectures being based solely off of the reading. Math 31B is going to be a bear, since the professor likes to revise his train of thought midway through the lecture. Since he lacks a microphone (I hear he will get one next week) he speaks like his voice box has a weak capacitor - he starts out loud then becomes very quiet, ramping back up to vocal clarity before fading away, yet again. But so far I've found if I rewrite my notes in front of the math book, I resolve any "data dropouts" that were written into the notes. On friday, at lecture, he put up an example problem - find the derivative of y=ln(x) and asked for the first step, testing all of us. I raised my hand and motioned that he should raise both sides to base e, so that it became e^y=x -> e^y y' = 1 -> y'=1/(e^y) -> y'=1/x. His reaction was to write "Suggestion by Ben" to it before solving it, then showed us what the book wanted us to do. To be frank, the books method was a warped chain rule (implicit differentiation versus chain rule; implicit differentiation wins for simplicities sake).

Psych 19 (Fiat lux on color vision) is an undisputably awesome course - we read scientific papers on vision (biology, chemistry, etc) and discuss the implications of the research and how that contributes to the greater understanding of sight as a whole. The professor, in my opinion, is awesome because he doesn't cater to entertaining the students and instead wants us to discuss the science like one does at a conference. Since he was a graduate of UC Berkeley, I am certain he was trained in the "old school"-style of science, a style I find most different from my other profs (not saying anything, just saying).

So far, so good.

UCLA, APs and some Programming

It is that wonderful time of year for AP students at high schools everywhere. A time you have spent the school year preparing for, where two to three hours of testing will determine whether or not you learned the material. Never mind the enormous gap between stuff you learned early on and stuff you learned last week, it is up to you to shape up or ship out. To students like me right now, Advanced Placement is quickly becoming another way to say "provoking a state of restlessness and agitation" [anxiety]. This year I have the pleasure of taking only three AP's, two of which are on the same day. Physics C: Mechanics and Biology, two heavy hitters, and the wonderfully confusing English Literature test (logic-free!). I am not so uncertain about Biology: I took the practice AP last week and have been studying the lectures, study guides and chapter summaries religiously. Physics, however, makes me uneasy. An issue, no doubt, that can be solved with a quick gloss over all the chapters, a detailed read of whatever tests have survived my backpack and frantic worrying over forgetting the little annoyances of simple harmonic motion, which are simple until you have to answer test questions. And finally, English Literature looms with an evil stench. Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying I hate the English language, I merely dislike the logic-free nature of literature analysis.

Now, on to the good news. I have accepted my offer of admission to UCLA. After crawling their site and filling out forms, I now even have an UCLA email address. I find I cannot wait for school to end, summer to pass, until I find myself going to classes at UCLA. Biology and Physics seem more fascinating then ever. I can only imagine the combination of the two. Well, no. Scratch that. I have seen some work already in Biophysics, most recently in a talk at Stanford on the neural networks of the animal brain. Gods, it was glorious, considering the fact that the ambient noise in the neural network keeps it from resonating, a primitive form of an epileptic seizure.

In hobby land, I have finished a little screen-scraping program that allows clubs from DeviantArt to fetch a complete list of all who watch them and formats the output into :devname: notation. It is at http://zbenjamin.telemuse.net/myFriends. Try it out!

Congrats to Andy Fraknoi

Congratulations to Professor Andy Fraknoi of Foothill college for winning "California Professor Of the Year". We've enjoyed his Foothill astronomy lectures and series for many years, hope to see more!

The Revival of the Minolta Planetarium

Better than Google Sky, the Minolta Planetarium gets the new Infinium S projector. With new features, better details, and a faster rendering engine, the Infinium S and the control mechanisms are ready for sky exploration in the twenty-first century. Given a private opportunity to "test drive" the equipment, both my sister Rebecca (see New De Anza Planetarium - Bring your binoculars) and I couldn't wait - and we weren't disappointed.

The Minolta Planetarium, located at De Anza college, was a favorite of our family for 30 years, and has finally reopened after three long years undergoing renovation. In 2004, the MS-15 used was becoming antiquated and less useful. The challenge of maintaining it was rapidly growing, much to the chagrin of De Anza. After contacting Minolta, De Anza decided to renovate the planetarium and replace the projector. The new guy is the Infinium S, and it offers many new features. The most striking lies in the rendering of the Milky Way. Instead of a static image, the Infinium draws every little dot with varying intensity to simulate the three dimensions of the sky.

BarCampBlock 2007

I attended BarCampBlock this week. BarCampBlock is the anniversary of the first BarCamp, originally held at SocialText, and for BarCampBlock, it was held not only at SocialText, but spread out among several other buildings (IDEO, Edgeio, ...).

I arrived after the end of most tracks on the first day. I talked with many developers and technologists after the last track ended. One man wrote a flash application that would allow people to "leave" their voice mark on their friends social network page. Another, from Restaurant Breeze, revealed CrazyMenu, a web-2.0 interface for collaborating on dining and places to eat.

I stayed overnight, an unexpected occurrence to the SocialText people, and prepared for the next day. On Sunday, I attended the Video Compression talk, from DigitalMove, a CDN, and learned about some of the pitfalls of certain codecs. The proprietary codec DigitalMove uses for Quicktime appears to be useful, but for our company, CoolClip, it is not useful as we focus on Flash videos, not the Quicktime media player.

E-Governance was a discussion on integrating modern web-2.x technology with government. I was, and still am, that the basic idea would function, as I feel that governments, being slow moving behemoths, would loathe to lose their beloved paper and grounded processes. The idea was to merge the power of the wiki, blogs, and podcasts with polls, voting, and departments. One thing I found most unbecoming about the E-Governance idea is that it only considers the majority and raw numbers, ignoring the minority and holding the potential to misrepresent others. I am also skeptical that technologists would ever be accepted in the American government due to the oft-remarked upon streak of anti-intellectualism in the US.