To serve. And perhaps protect.

On the other hand, 19.8 percent of players have played 25 cards in a turn, which I haven’t gotten done.*  And 11.5% have beaten a boss on the first turn!?  I’ve never managed less than 3 or 4.

That’s a weird way to describe or classify pi, and I don’t blame you for being confused. What I think they were getting at is that Pi is irrational. It is not the ratio of two integers. It happens to be that ratios of integers (where the denominator isn’t 0), aka rational numbers, have either “terminating” or periodic decimal representations.

To see what I mean about “terminating” decimal representation, try computing ¼. It’s 0.250000000… so it has some various digits first and then just zeroes forever afterwards. We call it terminating because we can represent this as 0.25 and stop.

Periodic decimal representations have a string of digits that repeat. Take for example 3/7, which is

0.428571 428571 428571 428571 428571…

See that text that says “(period 6)”? That means that there is a sequence of 6 digits that repeat over and over again. Period refers to the size of the repeating sequence, and it can be any positive integer. In this case, we have six digits. If you were to start counting up by digit from the 4 just after the decimal place (starting with a 0, then adding one for each digit) you would see that the 0th, 6th, 12th, 18th, (6k+0) and so on digits are all 4, the 1st, 7th, 13th, 19th (6k+1) digits are all 2, and so on.

But pi is not the only number like this. In fact, “most” real numbers are irrational. And by that, I mean that you can create a way to count all the rational numbers one by one, but you cannot count the irrational numbers because there are so many that if you start to count them, you have to skip some. Irrational numbers are so plentiful they kind of overpower the rational numbers. That’s set theory stuff, if you’re interested.

Pi is a ratio though, just not of integers. It’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it’s diameter.

The decimal number which encodes whether or not the nth Turing machine halts using 8 and 7 to denote halting and running forever respectively in the nth digit position is both irrational and clearly does not contain every possible digit substring. (3 doesn’t show up even once!)

It’s irrational, because if it were rational, then to compute whether a given Turing machine halts, you’d only have to perform a bounded number of steps of long division of two constants.

(but also I mean avoiding number theory with turing machines is out of the frying pan and into another frying pan.)

There’s also the other transcendental number I talked about earlier:

\sum_{k=1}^{\infty} 10^{-(k!)}

That’s a weird way to describe or classify pi, and I don’t blame you for being confused. What I think they were getting at is that Pi is irrational. It is not the ratio of two integers. It happens to be that ratios of integers (where the denominator isn’t 0), aka rational numbers, have either “terminating” or periodic decimal representations.

To see what I mean about “terminating” decimal representation, try computing ¼. It’s 0.250000000… so it has some various digits first and then just zeroes forever afterwards. We call it terminating because we can represent this as 0.25 and stop.

Periodic decimal representations have a string of digits that repeat. Take for example 3/7, which is

0.428571 428571 428571 428571 428571…

See that text that says “(period 6)”? That means that there is a sequence of 6 digits that repeat over and over again. Period refers to the size of the repeating sequence, and it can be any positive integer. In this case, we have six digits. If you were to start counting up by digit from the 4 just after the decimal place (starting with a 0, then adding one for each digit) you would see that the 0th, 6th, 12th, 18th, (6k+0) and so on digits are all 4, the 1st, 7th, 13th, 19th (6k+1) digits are all 2, and so on.

But pi is not the only number like this. In fact, “most” real numbers are irrational. And by that, I mean that you can create a way to count all the rational numbers one by one, but you cannot count the irrational numbers because there are so many that if you start to count them, you have to skip some. Irrational numbers are so plentiful they kind of overpower the rational numbers. That’s set theory stuff, if you’re interested.

Pi is a ratio though, just not of integers. It’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it’s diameter.

The decimal number which encodes whether or not the nth Turing machine halts using 8 and 7 to denote halting and running forever respectively in the nth digit position is both irrational and clearly does not contain every possible digit substring. (3 doesn’t show up even once!)

It’s irrational, because if it were rational, then to compute whether a given Turing machine halts, you’d only have to perform a bounded number of steps of long division of two constants.

(but also I mean avoiding number theory with turing machines is out of the frying pan and into another frying pan.)

There’s also the other transcendental number I talked about earlier:

\sum_{k=1}^{\infty} 10^{-(k!)}

Mathematicians: I doubt that

that is lies. this fucker was sitting in a window seat.  I was in the aisle seat, as I always was whenever we sat with each other on the bus.  qed

‘the other window’

that is lies. this fucker was sitting in a window seat.  I was in the aisle seat, as I always was whenever we sat with each other on the bus.  qed

right so I was supposed to write up a summary of my year in college I guess?

it is, however, 8 am, and I am not super-awake, so enjoy this vaguely unfiltered mess instead

1) prereqs are _lies_.  I’ve learned a crazy amount this year, basically bootstrapped myself into graduate level cryptographic knowledge, original research, and being a well-regarded person on a few relevant telegrams/public facing groups by sheer dint of seeing courses I was unprepared for and saying ‘fuck it’, then teaching myself all the relevant math on my own time basically just to solve psets.

2) college might have a higher set point, but the issues with professors are the same – relatedly, anybody who’s going to harvard and is debating taking CS51, anticipate literally the worst governed class I’ve ever taken, and my high school taught the fucking hydroplate theory about the noahide flood to a graduating class of 47.

3) executive function is way more a matter of producing effective routines than any other technique–get yourself into a flow state of assignments/how much time you spend on them daily, and the rest should come naturally.  this does have downsides of being stressed about assignments with 3 days of downtime before they need to get done bc you missed a day of routined work

4) fucking eat and sleep regularly.  i should not have had to tell myself this, but i did.  multiple times.  i thought I was sick like 5 times this year and it turned out to be because i hadnt consumed nourishing calories in like 18 hours. also drink water, and go into the sun.  college doesnt obviate the need for the necessary elements of survival.

5) having multiple consistent social groups is good, even if only to practice going in and out of different personal modalities of interaction

I was looking to take Lin Alg, which required a Calc III prereq, which I figured I could just teach myself, but I hadn’t realized how big a deal vectors would be, which I’d only seen presented geometrically in my physics classes, which is not great, because I have fuckall for visualization. So, I took Calc III, and it ended up being very useful for that. On the other hand, Lin Alg also recommended a “Nature of Proof” prereq, but having a decent logical background + taking some oddballish classes before (two classes, one on Aristotle + Euclid + Descartes, another on Lobachevskii + Godel, essentially), that prereq wasn’t really necessary.

Set aside time for dealing with bureacratic bullshit ever week. If you’re lucky, you won’t have to use it, but if you’re me, you’ll end up needing it. A lot. (I still have a bunch of catchup I need to do on that front). Even if it’s something as simple as returning library books or doing your housing application, I get really burned on those things that are theoretically one-off, but there are weekly one-offs.

Sometimes it’s a matter of resolving to do “just one” thing. A single problem, a single chapter, a single paragraph of writing. Once you’ve done it, then you’re stuck in a place where “well, it’d be easier just to keep going, right?” instead of that stupid “I could get up and find the reading and then get the book and then get comfortable and then start the reading, or I could just refresh Tumblr, it says I have 3 new posts to read!” loop.

Keep some food and water in your room, enough food for to last you a few meals, because sometimes you hyperfocus on Sunday and it’s 6:45 and the dining hall’s closed, so I guess I have to get Chipotle? No, I don’t. I personally like trail mix and noodle cups for this, because they’re simple and cheap, but if you can, Soylent or meal squares might be a better option.

Very useful. I find myself bogged down in mostly one social group, which leads to problems when everyone’s like 2 nodes away from each other (excluding you) and X complains to you about telling A to Y, and Y getting unreasonably upset, but turns out Y ended up being your best friend and X was in the wrong and…yeah, it’s nonsense.

Try to get a campus job. If you find a good one, they’re easy (I’m currently writing this at mine), low stress, and nobody really gives a shit, but it’s a good way of forcing connections without having to go out and explicitly do the Social, as well as spending money, for when you’d like a binder for TAPL which you just used your excess printing credits or you want to take the train into the city to meet up with really cool people.

EDIT: Student jobs are also a lot more accommodating, so I’ve been let off the hook for more than I probably should have, with regard to lateness, while I was forced to quit another job because I was told, an hour after I was scheduled to stop working, that if I didn’t keep going for another hour after, I’d be fired.

startups are cool tho

this post is a lie

a beautiful, evil, cruelly hopeful lie