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.

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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, --

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Learning Education

Earlier this fall, I lotteried for  USW35, "Dilemmas of Equity and Excellence in American K-12 Education". But, like 70% of those who tried to get a seat, I was rejected. So, instead, I'm taking a math course in Functional Analysis (Math 114). It satisfies my Analysis requirement for my joint CS/Math concentration. So there's that.

There's also the fact that professor Lurie has taught me more about how to teach at OGPS than I imagine "Equity and Excellence" ever could. (Aside: In no way do I mean this as a slight against Prof. Merseth. I'm sure that her class is fantastic. But the impression I got from shopping week was that it's a very academic treatment of the education problem in our country, and not "Here's how to teach a kid to program a computer for the first time.")

Now, Jacob Lurie is a frighteningly intelligent man. His undergraduate thesis, for example, contains some words that I know.

My critical reading of "On Simply Laced Lie Algebras and their Miniscule Representations" by J. Lurie, 2000

It also won a first place in the American Mathematical Society's Morgan Prize "for superior mathematical research by an undergraduate student". And he earned a full professorship from Harvard at age 31. So there's that.

He's got a fascinating lecture style. At the beginning of class, he picks a point on the ceiling, and proceeds to deliver the entire hour-long lecture at it. (Quoth Nick Watters: "You

Harvard owns a petting zoo.

In the grand scheme of things, this is not exceptionally surprising. Harvard also owns such disparate objects as a hundred-year-old printing press, a forest in central Mass, and a fleet of Harvard-insignia waffle irons.

In Harvardese, "Veritaffle". You can't make this stuff up.

I don't know how long the zoo has been Harvard's; at least, I remember the bunnies being used to promote Leverett House (whose mascot is a hare) on housing day in March, and the full zoo making an appearance at Eliot House's welcome-back barbecue in September. Nowadays, it's become a weekly fixture in front of the Science Center on Thursday afternoons. To paraphrase one of my professors: "There's no more relaxing way to spend 20 minutes on a Thursday afternoon."

Particularly in need of quick relaxation after Math 131, I made my own stop by the petting zoo. At that point, they were just setting up, and the bunny pen was surrounded by people standing around and looking at -- but not touching the bunnies. No one wanted to be the first one to get down on their hands and knees and pet one.

Having no such reservations, I knelt down and lifted out one of the longhairs (being careful, of course, to support the spine and hindquarters -- I owned a rabbit for many years back home in Maryland). Someone behind my asked "Oh, you can do that? Is it going to bite me?"

Over my shoulder to the woman I couldn't see (I didn't want to turn around with a small rabbit on my lap...), I said "Sure, just keep one hand under his butt,

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"Make someone's day better!"

...was my parting words to a friend today, as she left for her afternoon shift at the Science Center IT help desk. I meant them sarcastically. Everyone knows that IT help is useless, and that the people who go to the help desk with problems will never find help in this world or the next. (I may or may not still be being sarcastic, and should probably mention it before aforementioned friend murders me in my sleep...)

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But it got me thinking. What am I doing with my days to make (other) people's days better? What is the marginal happiness that results from an hour of my time spent working on heterogeneous-source, free-text medical data mining? (For those of you who don't know, MDM was my summer research, and it's stuck around as a part-time thing I do sometimes during term-time.) What's the absolute utility of one hour spent ballroom dancing? Teaching at OGPS? Giving private tours of Harvard? Blogging? How about my CS degree? What's that worth to me? What's it worth to the world?

I don't have answers right now, but it seems like the matter is worth a good deal of thought. After all, it might be that the Operating Systems course I'm taking currently is going to change the world by giving me the tools to conduct serious academic research, get me a foot in the door of the Next Big Thing, and give me the leverage to change the course of the future. Or maybe I'll just never touch systems research again, and it's not worth my time to torpedo my GPA with a graduate-level course outside