Blacker Hovse just got a new RA. He sent an introductory email to us all with the postscript: “Prank my apartment now, you know… before I have stuff in it like furniture :)”

There are no idle challenges in Blacker Hovse.

Nothing too suspicious going on here…

A few hours in.

One day in.

Two days in, the man of honor arrives.

ohman this is fun

It turns out to be hard to photograph an apartment filled floor-to-ceiling with 5,000 balloons, so you’ll have to use your imagination.

My favorite part? When sitting on the floor, the bass of the music we were playing vibrated all the balloons—we could feel the music. You know, on albums, the bass drum is sonic support, but in concert, it’s a whole different instrument: a punch to the chest thirty or forty times a second.

Once he gets all the balloons out, he’ll find a little housewarming gift.

Oh, and we removed one of his lightswitches. Just one. He hasn’t moved in yet, so I imagine it’ll be a while before the confusion sets in.

Restaurant Depot makes this easy. 30 lbs of “Veal Mixted Bones” coming up…

My pot is not ready for this.

“Skim, skim, skim!” Keller says.

The now-poached bones, drained of yuckiness

Everyone’s favorite aromatics. And an obscene quantity of thyme.

Back in the pot, everyone! Tomatoes, come join us! The water’s fine!

We need smell-o-vision so that you can know how happy my apartment was with this.

Reduced!

Omitted from the photoset: several phases of straining the veal stock whilst straining with heavy pots.

Not quite as much yield as I would have liked, but I still have 15 pounds of bones. Next time: a roasted stock!

I’ve been thinking about the source of their talent for a while now, and I think it has far less to do with their education than any college cares to admit. Let me tell you a few stories.

My Roommate, the Math Major

A lot of people say they have crazy roommates. They’re wrong—I have a crazy roommate. Not in the sense that he’s unstable or anything. We don’t have passive aggressive post-it fights. Mike’s just truly and frighteningly smart.

At the beginning of the year, I was playing Lights Off and struggling to pass an early level. Mike came over and casually watched me flail about. Suddenly: “Huh. Can I play with that?” After a few taps, he continued: “Oh! It’s degenerate.” He walked over to our whiteboard, scrawled some incomprehensible runes, and then proceeded through the remaining two hundred levels in about three seconds a level.

Mike started to explain the generalized solution, but I was glad I didn’t follow—this way, I can still enjoy the game!

Alex, the Pianist

Until he went off to join the Korean army a few weeks ago, my a cappella group had been graced by the presence of a pitch-perfect jazz pianist named Alex.

Sometimes in rehearsal, he would hold impromptu karaoke sessions, playing grandiose piano accompaniments to any song we could name. Everyone else would sing along and have a great time, but my gaze would never stray from his hands.

Alex added embellishments to every song, making each more musical and impressive than their crude pop songwriters could imagine. Extra 9s, 11s, suspensions, and harmonies danced freely throughout.

Every time he played, I asked Alex how he did it. Well, ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer:

“I have no idea.”

A Programming Tutor

I’ve helped—or at least tried to help—quite a few people write code over the years.

Programming can be a tricky thing because there’s a lot of concepts that need to be learned simultaneously to get anything done: how to “speak” a language, system concepts, and most importantly, algorithms.

By algorithms, I don’t mean quicksort and big-O notation and the like. Just the notion of translating a problem into something a machine can solve.

A common introductory problem for students learning about arrays is to produce the average of a given list. Intuitively, the solution is easy: sum all the elements and divide by the length. Yet I’ve seen so many people suffer with such a simple task, and not because they’re getting tripped up by language syntax. They all miss the critical insight of using a temporary “working sum” variable.

It’s not a matter of being smart. It’s not a matter of missing knowledge, per-se. When I consider this algorithm, I produce the solution without thinking about things like working variables or enumeration steps: I’m just translating between the language in my head and a language the machine can understand.

Why and How

Mike didn’t look through any books to find an answer to Lights Off, Alex didn’t read any sheet music to play his accompaniments, and I didn’t look up sample code to implement my algorithms. We just knew, like anyone who’s good with his trade just knows.

That’s what I’ve noticed during my time here at Caltech: real skill comes from intuition.

And the intuition comes from, it seems, a mixture of experience and innate predilection. Mike’s been doing math since his childhood: he carries around paper and a pencil at all time to work on problems in his head. Alex and I have similar stories about what we do.

Now, the interesting thing is that I’m not entirely sure where education comes into this. I’m sure it’s important, but I think it’s really just a tool, rather than something that actually creates skill. It gives us techniques we can apply to get more experience, but those techniques are useless until we’ve built up intuition.

Sure, a good professor will give his students those techniques a little faster, but I’m convinced a book could eventually lead to the same skills as a six-figure education.

Caltech gives its students the chance to be around others at their level, but I think that’s more fun than educational. My fellow students haven’t helped me be a better software engineer—they just keep me sane.

As you might expect, it’s been an interesting couple of days.

I’m actually not sure how I managed to finish everything on time. Things have kind of been a blur. But now that I’m out, through the other side of the veil, everything’s clear and beautiful. Nothing’s due until Monday. I have four truly free evenings! This has never happened in my time here at Tech.

Is this what it’s like to be a normal college student?

It’s a very freeing feeling. I think I might actually prefer the oh-god-everything-in-two-days scheduling tact: now I have enough time to actually switch mental gears and to code. To enjoy myself!

I’m thinking of trying to arrange my weeks like this more often in the future, but it’s difficult to do sets very early, since collaboration is essentially mandatory, and everyone else is on the one-per-night schedule. Hm.

In other delightful news, I only have one assignment left in each of my classes. It’s been a ridiculous term, but it’s finally drawing to a close. And better yet, it looks like with my current schedule for the next few months, I may actually get some free time.

Here’s to hope!

I never made any kind of pro/con list to decide I wanted to come to Caltech, but lately I’ve been thinking about each side quite a lot.

The Pros

The thing about Caltech is that while it advertises its superior academia and serious research opportunities and so on, I very much doubt that we’re actually better than MIT, Harvard, or Berkeley in those departments.

The reason I came to Caltech is the people: the students here are absolutely brilliant, intensely driven, and they’re insanely good at what they do. No one was accepted because we needed more of a minority: there are maybe three Latino students here, despite the exterior demographics of Southern California. No one was accepted because we needed a great basketball player: we just won our first game in eleven years. And unlike our colleagues to the East, no one was accepted because we need more girls. Even though the ratio is nearly 3:1 male to female.

The real reason I came to Caltech is that everyone here deserves to be here. It’s really exciting.

The Cons

These same brilliant, excited people quickly evidence what’s so wrong with Caltech.

By the end of the first year, nearly everyone is bitter. Really bitter. This is so universal among students that in Blacker, there’s a ceremony in which the one or two people every year who manage to escape their sad fate are honored with the title of “perma-frosh” for the rest of their stay. It’s so striking that when I visit another school, I’m always shocked by how relaxed and happy people are.

Of course, the same reason this place is so great is the reason it’s made everyone so bitter: the same absolutely insane level of difficulty that drew all those students here in the first place.

To give some illustration, most students have about 5-7 hours of homework a night, and classes from 10 am to 4 pm, perhaps with some gaps in between classes. Dinner’s 6-7 pm. And think about it: to get up for class at 10 am and get a good night’s sleep, a bedtime around 1 am is a must. So with 6-8 hours of homework a night, what does that leave? Nearly nothing. An hour or two a day, tops. With even one extracurricular, forget about any extra time at all.

When things get really bad, my days go like this: wake up, go to class, work, dinner, work, collapse. Straight from class to work to sleep, day after day after day. My life went on like this for about a week and a half for me recently, and though I had until then remained steadfast against bitterness, those around me could distinctly see my spirit breaking.

What are a student’s options? Well, he can stay up later to relax some and miss class, but then he just gets behind, and homework takes even longer. He can take a lighter workload, but doing even the minimum to graduate in four years is obscenely heavy—and this “heavy” is heavy for Caltech students, who are essentially all at least in the top 0.1% of their peers.

A huge portion of graduates are so burnt out and tired of science that by the time they leave, they feel like they never want to put on a lab coat again.

The Core

What makes things worse is also what makes things better: the Caltech core. If you haven’t heard about it, our core curriculum—for every student—consists of:

• Five terms of math: analytical and multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, and statistics.
• Five terms of physics: mechanics, special relativity, electricity, magnetism, waves, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics.
• Three terms of chemistry: basic inorganic and organic chemistry, physical chemistry, and thermochemistry, and a basic inorganic chemistry lab.
• A term of biology: a survey, currently physical biology focused on virology.
• A menu class: an introduction to geology, astronomy, or information theory.
• Another lab: solid state electronics, physical mechanics, or organic chemistry.

The first two points are especially insane: the curriculum we cover for every student is equivalent to an entire 4-year program of both physics and math at a huge number of universities.

This is lovely because everyone here has a thorough and broad understanding of many scientific fields. I can talk to any of my classmates about quantum computing, and we all know much of the theoretical background necessary to understand what’s going on. If I’m talking about some obscure machine learning algorithm, even non-computer scientists understand the statistical and probabilistic material well enough to follow.

Despite all its benefits, the core is a huge part of what makes people here so bitter. Take me, for example: I’m a sophomore, and I’m currently taking my first actual CS class. And I’m only taking one this term. For most majors, the real course-load doesn’t start until well into sophomore year.

And it’s not as if these courses are easy just because they’re general, introductory courses: I was two points away from failing Math 1a, and I consistently spent twelve hours a week on my Physics 1c sets.

This is really frustrating. Here’s a real conversation I had with a non-Techer friend:

Him: “Hey, why’s it been so long since you updated Sparkle?”
Me: “I’m really busy with schoolwork.”
Him: “But so many people use it and are waiting for you!”
Me: “I know, but I’ve really got to get this Bio set done.”
Him: “Bio set? What?”
Me: “Yeah, it’s on how HIV fuses with the cell membrane and injects its contents.”
Him: “What? Why are you taking that?”
Me: “I have to. Everyone has to take it.”
Him: “But you’re a computer scientist! It’s not the least bit useful!”
Me: “Believe me, I know.“

It’s often hard to justify going through all this when if I just wrote some software, I’d be making money instead of paying. Especially when having a successful product is better for employment opportunities than a degree, even from Caltech.

Maybe I’m just impatient. The material is slowly getting more applicable to me. I’m taking a course in discrete mathematics that’ll be useful for Sparkle, and the machine learning is very neat. Core courses will eventually go away.

But not before they’ve taken their toll on my spirits, like they have on everyone else here.

The really sad conflict that comes out of all this is that the workload makes everyone here bittermdash;but that all these wonderful people wouldn’t be here in the first place if it weren’t so insane.

I’ve returned to Caltech and moved into my new apartment (which is huge and fantastic). Since my arrival, though, I’ve been very busy practicing with my a cappella group, Fluid Dynamics.

Yesterday, we went to the freshmen orientation camp and performed for the entire incoming class. You might say we were under just a bit of pressure to impress. Fortunately, the show went fantastically well—I think we made a lot of new fans.

I’m still hoping to get a substantial part of Sparkle 2 done before classes start on Monday, but with all the people arriving, I’m finding increasingly difficult to concentrate. Software update is not exactly exciting.

Prefrosh have arrived. They are tasty.

And then Caltech attacked.

I actually did escape my first year at Caltech happy and bitterness-free (this is rare!), but these last few weeks of summer are the only free time I’m going to have for a very long time, so I’m feeling vaguely like a man trying desperately to complete a huge list of tasks before an appointed execution date.

It’s not all stress, though! I spent last week lying on the beach of a gorgeous, peaceful island. The only photos I have are old, as my camera decided to self-destruct on arrival, but you can click the first to see a few more.

Caltech has the highest density of bitter, cynical people I’ve ever seen, but I’ve got a lot going on to keep me relaxed. Between trips to the gorgeous beaches of California, I joined Caltech’s a cappella group to get my music fix. I became a member of Blacker Hovse, one of Caltech’s frat-like dormitories. A lot of interesting things seem to always be happening in Blacker. And, most contributing to my sanity, I have an absolutely amazing girlfriend.

So that’s pretty much what’s going on with me. I’ve acquired quite a lot of great stories from a year at Caltech—if I find time, maybe I’ll share a few.

If you’re new here, check out the sidebar for a little info on what I’m all about.

With a new site comes a new format. andymatuschak.org is now composed of three sub-blogs:

• Square Signals: coding and other Mac-ish nerdery;
• Journal: a plain name for a journal about a pretty plain guy;
• Sparkle: the Blog!: by popular demand, a blog just on Sparkle.

There are RSS feeds for each—subscribe to only the content you want to read. I felt bad before pushing news about my schooling to all you Cocoa hackers. When you open your RSS reader, I know that’s serious business, and I want your feeds to distract you from your work in the least distracting way possible.

Under the hood

On the previous iteration of my site, the design was such that posts were big! Important! Every one of them had to count and had to have an excerpt—which had to be a certain length or else the visual balance would get all thrown off.

So very frequently, I would have smaller tidbits for you, but because of these problems, it just felt wrong to share them. No more! Now the design is lighter, yes, but what’s more, I have support for little asides, which will be mixed in with the stream of legitimate postings. Fear not: they’ll be clearly distinguished as smaller, gentler creatures, meekly offering some morsel of information.

I’ve also switched to WordPress from Typo, and I’ve found it to be much more cooperative in my efforts to bend it to my whim. I moved over some of the older postings, but tragically, the comments perished in the proceedings. Please let me know if anything around here is broken or not to your liking.

Onward and upwards!

Now then! That’s enough chattery—meat is better than meta, and all that. Please find the relevant corner of my humble abode and set up camp.