The final countdown

The Rankmaniac 2011 contest is nearly over. This is probably the craziest assignment ever -- the bonus points involved are literally determined by the whims of the ranking algorithms used by Google and Microsoft.

Our group has employed all the strategies in the book to try to improve our standings. You can read more after the jump.

The Rankmaniac contest begins!

Using Wordpress to host my official entry to the Rankmaniac 2011 contest for Winter 2011 at Caltch.

Living Vicariously

— “I WANT IT.” Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 8:01pm —

I feel the urge to write it in caps.

“I WANT IT.”

No exclamation mark, though. I don’t want to suggest that I’m shouting. But I need to leave some emphatic remnant of this moment, because it’s not enough to want it now, at 2 a.m. I know I’ll wake up tomorrow morning in a fog, lost in the early-morning stupor; my mind will be blank and smooth and dull like school silverware. Convictions now burning will be lost, scattered like dead leaves in autumn blown miles from the branch, gone like the music of yesteryear.

A long time ago, I used to be in the habit of really learning music; by habit I became only a halfhearted artisan, a shell. The piano, my art, lost its flavor through numb iteration; it’s the weathered toy that once excited you like electricity but now, aged and decrepit, falls at tempting your interest.

We have low fidelity, grainy videos of me as a young pianist. (We never used the camcorder for much otherwise.) There’s never a trace of a smile as I bow timidly to the audience; my heart hastens like rabbit’s feet striking the earth. I feel terror, and at ten years I’m not yet so self-conscious as to try to mask it. The applause subsides warmly. I seat myself, pull the bench forward; the great black piano is the depth of night, engulfing me like the shine of a lone street lamp. I raise my arms to play.

On two occasions I cried at lesson. Once was when the keyboard cover inexplicably fell on my fingers. The other was after I had played a piece resplendently.

“Oh—but what’s wrong? That was beautiful.” Svetlana’s voice is soothing, lightly tinged with accent.

Through high-pitched hiccups and aftershocks of tears I explain what I don’t even really understand. The piece had been good, incredible even. But didn’t it make her sad that it’s on one occasion—one occasion only—that we play a piece the best that we ever will? And nothing before or after will match it. I can’t play the pieces I learned last year so well as I did then; I might never again know that music so intimately, never again craft those sounds so perfectly in my hands as in the fleeting pinnacles of my study of each piece.

Her answer surprises me. “But that’s one of the beautiful things about music. It’s a gift, you only keep it for a short while. So it means that much more now, because soon it’s gone.”

I guess it’s something that you come to terms with, the temporal nature of everything around us. You can’t hold on. What’s shiny dulls. What’s fresh spoils. What’s living dies. But that’s not the tragedy.

Mom, Dad, and I returned to China for the first time three and a half years ago. Apart from long-awaited reunions with family, my parents liked to take me to see newly erected skyscrapers. Maybe it made them feel something, seeing these massive changes to their homeland that came with ten years’ passing, but I didn’t like it at all. You would stand at the base and crane your neck to watch the rows of glass windows stretch to the sky, you would take the elevator to the observatory floor and gaze at the muted crosshatch of city streets below. You would exit unsatisfied.

Those buildings made me restless and sick like the thick scents of cigarette smoke that roam China’s air at night. I shook my head at the ever-rising skyscrapers’ lust for grandeur, discountenanced their single, hollow purpose of outstripping their predecessors in scale. Beyond the surface lay a sad metal skeleton; angular edges and smooth surfaces that knew nothing, felt nothing, were nothing.

It’s 4 p.m. an icy December afternoon. Winter wears me out. The bitter chill that makes you want to crawl into your comforters and blank out, the discomfort of thick, layered clothes, the darkness that descends at 5 so you’re not sure whether to feel diurnal or nocturnal. I flip the light switch. Plop myself onto the piano bench, heavily for a slim guy. I raise my arms to play; I groan like an old man’s bones.

Something’s very wrong, I realize.

I am a shell. I am interlacing steel beams, grim and unfeeling. I’m the clouds of breath that disappear into December’s frosty air.

I don’t know why I go to school every day and slip through my classes like a ghost.

I don’t know why I procrastinate extravagantly.

I don’t know why I let my room fall into a filthy mess.

I…don’t know why I’m playing the piano now. I let my arms fall lax to my side.


Sometimes you want it, sometimes you don’t. As my piano teacher tells me, “As artists we don’t have the luxury of being inspired all of the time. But we always try to work as if we are.”

Everyone struggles through all kinds of mud in their life, through harshness, bitterness. That’s not the tragedy. The tragedy is when you let your troubles take your life from you.

Every waking moment builds to the future. The question is, what kind of future do you want for yourself? For those around you? Do you care about it enough to work for it when you absolutely don’t feel like it? How badly do you want it?

At 2 a.m. I write to my future self to remind myself that I WANT IT.

— David Zhang (U. Iowa '12)

There are nights when I wake up with my mouth parched. I lie in bed, fully warm and comfortable except for the drought above my tongue and under my palate. A seeming eternity later I finally decide to, urgh, summon all the strength in my body to get up, walk to the kitchen, and get a glass of water. Right now I have that feeling: not for water, but for words.

For inspiration I’m posting this here. Inspiration for what, exactly, will vary based on the context in which I come back to reread this. It’s slightly embarrassing for me to admit that, a year ago, the context of me rereading this note was something quite straightforward and crude, “dating”. Perhaps in the future I may have the good fortune of returning to reread this with the context being “love” - slightly more complicated but slightly more noble.

But for tonight, the context with which I reread this note is far less romantic.

Superposition

For most of this term, the way I understood quantum mechanics was something like this:

Some particle is moving with some momentum "p" at some position "x". We at the outside world don't know either x or p, but we can measure them. However, since the particle being measured is tiny, any measurement we take will require hitting the particle with an electron, which knocks it out of its previous trajectory, and imparts onto it a new momentum, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle thus arises. In my opinion, the particle had a definite momentum and position before we took the measurement; it knew them, but we didn't, because from the macroscopic world we're just too big.

And the way I pictured Schroedinger's Cat was like this: before we open the box, the cat is already dead or alive. The cat itself already knows its state before we open the box (or rather, doesn't know because it's DEAD). Opening the box doesn't changing anything more than a philosophical observation from the perspective outside the box, after which we can collapse a wavefunction from weighted probabilities of eigenstates to a single eigenstate.

Right?

Anyway, that's how I viewed it. And after explaining that to someone else in my class, the response I got, surprisingly, was that I was just WRONG. Apparently at the quantum level, particles really have no definite position and direction; give 'em a brain, consciousness, and self-gauging position-o-meter or momentum-o-meter, and STILL they have no definite position and direction. And Schroedinger's Cat? As the saying goes, dead AND alive.

Enough about quantum; I'm much more interested in the philosophical implications of this idea: that one can actually be in a superposition of states. Like, one single individual, not a weighted average of one person out of a million. For example, what is Alice's opinion toward Proposition 1? The thing is, Alice's idea can change a million times, but in the end all that counts is the way she votes.

I think what I'm getting at is, I've found that our opinions on people can change a million times in a short span of time as well. What practical difference this makes is questionable, because in the end, our "true" opinion is the very one that our actual action reflects. So it doesn't really matter what I THINK is right; my actions will speak for me.

So I guess the moral of the story is, think less and act more; be less like a quantum particle and more like a man.

... and a Two

... Every morning is new. We never live the same day twice, we are never afraid of getting up every morning. Why?"