On my flight Boston-Keflavik, I picked up Freakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner. It was a fun read that I highly recommend. But a few things struck me about it, so I figured I'd write them down rapid-fire.

(1) "Despite [his] elite credentials, his approach is notably unorthodox."

I'm not sure what bothers me more: the widespread stereotype that eliteness is inextricable from orthodoxy, or my sinking suspicion that it's not entirely false.

(2) "He is ... an intuitionist."

In mathematics, "intuitionism" is a bit of a dirty word. In layman's term's, an intuitionist rejects the idea that a double negative is a positive, and so considers as invalid the logic:

It's appealing, because disallowing proofs by contradiction of the negation (i.e. the above form) means that every proof of "X exists" necessarily gives a mathematical construction of X. By contrast, traditional, analytic logic sometimes produces proofs that some object, logically, must exist -- but no indication of how one might make/find/imagine it.

It's widely derided because basic logical maneuvers are excluded, and so many 'intuitive' results can't be proven at all! As a professor of mine once lamented: "[Luitzen] Brouwer became famous for his proof of the fixed-point theorem, but then he became an intuitionist and never did anything useful again."

Anyway. Words have interesting meanings in different contexts. More recently: a friend and I were having a discussion about Humanism, and eventually realized

Monday, Harvard saw an unfounded bomb threat from a student who tried to postpone an exam in American Government. Four buildings in Harvard Yard were evacuated and that day's morning exams were, indeed, postponed. Students were given options to take them later that afternoon, in February, or not at all, either electing to be graded on the remainder of the course's assigned work, or on a Pass/Fail scale. But Eldo Kim '16 confessed to sending the emails, and will appear in US District Court tomorrow.

(1)

A headline like "Harvard Student, 20, Arrested in Connection with Campus Bomb Scare" (from a local paper) feels strangely alien. Of course, I've seen several "XYZ College senior charged with ABC" headlines, and it always felt distant, not like it was real life. In the Harvard Crimson, I'm used to seeing headlines like "Early Action Acceptance Rises to 21 Percent" and "Donning Hats, Capes, and Little Else, Harvard Students Celebrate Primal Scream".

This is, of course, not the first time Harvard has had negative press recently. But stories like "Cheating Scandal at Harvard" and "Harvard Grade Inflation Rampant" and even "Harvard Stripped of Quiz Bowl Titles" seem perversely Harvardian in their accusations: "Cheating Scandal at Harvard -- Even the Best Do It!"; "Harvard Grade Inflation Rampant -- Getting in is the Hardest Part, After All!", and so on. After all, I've complained to more than one friend that "this wouldn't be news if we weren't Harvard".

But "Student Arrested for Bomb Threat"? Today, the

In the wake of the announcement of Harvard's first wave of '18 admits, the Harvard Crimson is reports on the high-school demographics of Harvard's student body. The investigative article sheds some sunlight on just how much inequity exists between privileged "Harvard feeder schools" and the rest of the downtrodden teenaged proletariat.

That is, surprisingly little.

Oh, sure; the graph is concave. That means that...some schools sent more kids than other schools. Huh. How many more? Well, just reading the graph, something like 45% of Harvard students were the only admit from their school, and something like 78% are one of three or fewer kids from their high school. By contrast, the top schools send...15. A whopping five times more. Um. Right.

For contrast, this is what real inequity looks like:

Things on the right are people with obscene amounts of money. For reference, poverty-line America is ~95%tile.

(Yes, they're graphing different things, but the mathematical point remains valid.)

Or, on a brighter note, the cost-effectiveness of different world health interventions:

Things are the right are awesome ideas we can be doing even more of.

So yes, some high schools send ~15 students to Harvard every year. Some send one every ~4 years. The real problem, of course, is the high percentage of schools that never have sent a student to the Ivy Leagues, and never will. Or, for that matter, the gigantic percentage of people in this world who had the misfortune to be born in a place where education through high school wasn't mandatory, easy, or even available. But that, of course, doesn't show up on the Crimson's graph, because that wasn't part of

Today is the would-have-been-107th birthday of Grace Murray Hopper, 1906-1992. If you don't know who she was, then I assume you're capable of clicking the above link, and so you've now learned that she left an associate professorship at Vassar to enlist in the Navy Reserve (only after securing an exemption for being underweight at 105 pounds), co-authored papers with Howard Aiken on the Harvard Mark I, and later declined a full professorship at Vassar to remain a research fellow in CS at Harvard.

When Navy regulations forced her retirement at age 60, she was recalled to active duty, and later promoted to Commodore (or Rear Admiral) by an act of Congress. Why did she remain in the Navy until age 80? Because that's where the most interesting computers were, and damn all the rules telling her she couldn't be there. As an alumnus of my high school once said: "Walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They are there to stop other people!"'

Today, my office in Maxwell-Dworkin sits directly across from the "Grace Hopper conference room", but her legacy also surrounds me in my daily work: compilers, language standards, and the now-obvious concept that code should be "readable". ("But Grace, then anyone will be able to write programs!")

Perhaps it's

1. My mother, whom I resemble more and more like every year. I only hope the trend continues.
2. My father, who's been supporting me more than I realize, longer than I knew, and with no signs of stopping.
3. My Grandma Mary, who has got to have at least twelve hearts, one for each of her grandchildren.
4. My Grandpa Bob, who I never knew in my adult life, but who I know is the reason my mother made it to Harvard.
5. My Gpa, who makes me proud to be a third-generation scientist.
6. My Gma, by whose grace I can afford to attend the school I love.
7. My Uncle Christopher, who still has new conversations for me, even after all these years.
8. My Titi Mari, who will always be family.
9. My brother, with whom I grew -- and continue to grow -- up.
10. My cousins Roman and Camilo, who gave me Star Wars, Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, and Starcraft, perhaps against the best wishes of both my parents.
11. My cousins Marshall and Brendan, for whose sake I remembered how to play for years after I else would have forgotten.
12. Marie desJardins and John Park, my second parents.
13. Heather desJardins-Park, who can't seem to get out of my life, and who's always been a dear friend.
14. Music, such a wonderful memetic accident, which has kept me sane in dark times.
15. Ballroom dance and my physical ability to dance, which has kept the dark away in recent times.
16. Poetry, which

So, I was forced to write a letter home to one of my robotics kids' parents yesterday:

I was inspired, I suppose, by that Taylor Mali video. Not that I'm that awesome yet. Someday. I recently read a quote that I hope sticks with me for a while: "It's harder to be nice than clever." But then again, this letter wasn't even remarkably nice; it was just the honest thing to do.

And then I gave the student a bag of Hot Cheetos and some bite-sized candies. At which point, he informed me that I was "all right". Which might have been the best thing I've heard in a while:

"Ross, you all right."

I couldn't help but smile the entire bus ride back to Harvard.

(1)

Planning this week's lesson (#6) was tough. Last week was a disaster. Having split up students by the missions they were aiming to accomplish, we divided the groups between Diane (to do some programming) and myself (for building).

Those that didn't just walk away from my building table (I let them, not having the heart to tell them not to program) stuck around only to distract each other by building model cars, motorcycles, or other (neat, but off-task) things. On the bright side, I suppose, Diane said that programming made some progress. Still, not good for a full 10% of our time with these kids.

So, we met with Danielle (our new TA) and decided that we were going to go back to the old, broken model of Programming Team, Building Team, and Project Team. So much for changing things up from the old Chocobots team. We put off making the actual divisions until my and Diane's weekly planning meeting on Sunday night.

Of course, the planning meeting hasn't happened on Sunday night for the last few weeks; it's been ad-hoc postponed until Monday at least twice before -- today, we did one better and spent so much time psetting in the Eliot dining hall that we gave up and set the meeting for lunch the day of.

So the two of us are sitting in the Queens' Head Pub beneath Memorial Hall, --