Today, I had someone pull me aside and ask me if I was alright; several people had noticed that I was really worked up about something the other day, to the point of getting angry at one of my coworkers.

It took me a few seconds to figure out what he was talking about, and when I did, I laughed a little. "Oh, Lucian and I go way back; we've been roommates for two years now. We're in the habit of giving each other a hard time; there's nothing wrong."

Afterward, I realized what I should have said -- something like: "Oh. I understand what it might have looked like, but actually everything's okay. We've been roommates for two years now, and I was just giving him a hard time."

The crucial difference: If someone comes to you concerned that there might be a problem, first let them know unambiguously whether there is, in fact, an issue, and then explain. If you put the explanation before the verdict, they'll spend the entire time parsing through what you're saying, trying to determine whether it makes the problem better or worse, before you give them the bottom line at the end. They'll be distracted enough to miss most of what you actually say, and then they'll be forced to change mental gears at the end from whatever conclusions they had dug into to the conclusion you then sprung on them.

The principle, I think, generalizes. If you're trying to tell someone something important (either in conversation, or, as I've found

A year ago, the school (and the city) was just getting off lockdown after the manhunt for the marathon bombing suspect(s). And looking backward, there's a few things I remember quite clearly:

• the spreadsheet of students offering couch space, spare beds, and sleeping bags to 'stranded' students unsure if it was safe to be crossing campus
• the Dining Services workers who crossed a city on lockdown (by bike, as I recall) to come in to work, and the students who volunteered to work the dining hall with them
• the pre-frosh who came to Visitas Weekend despite its cancellation (including mine!), and the hosts who did everything they could to make their stay worth its while (in the fall, the school would announce record yield numbers...)
• the sudden, temporary freedom from work -- afterward, a friend would recall "I've never felt so free as that day we were trapped inside!" I'm not sure what this says about Harvard.
  But there's one thing in particular about what whole bizarre half-week that I'm unlikely to forget, probably ever:

The day that the freshman dining hall, Annenberg, was reopened, someone proposed an idea which caught on pretty much immediately -- at 6pm, in Annenberg, we'd gather as a community to sing The Star-Spangled Banner. It was one of those things, I think, that a lot of us needed, and it just seemed like the right thing to do on that Tuesday night.

There's a scene in Casablanca where the a cafe of Frechmen rise together in La Marseillaise to drown out a handful of rowdy Germans singing Die Wacht am Rhein.

It's a tearjerking moment, and the first (and second, and

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.

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

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I had a surreal moment today. At about 8pm, and OGPS janitor walked in to find me still in the classroom, and asked "Aren’t you too old to be playing with Legos?"

You see, I was busy finishing the FLL game board models (that is, obstacles and scoring objects for the FLL Robot Game) and was completely engrossed in constructing a six-inch-long truck. Now, there are a few answers I could have given:

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No, I’m not too old. No one’s too old.

I was, after all, completely relaxed for the first time in several days. Though I’ve not had a serious Lego project for years, I had managed to slip back into the flow of pieces fitting together the way they should, and the way I knew they were going to.

Incidentally, I’d encountered the same nostalgia earlier in the day, when I was preparing a few demo robot routines for our "Intro to Programming" lesson. I had had my father ship to me the bulk of my family’s FLL collection, and had unpacked the Chocobots '08 competition bot (still in pristine condition) to use for the demo. Now there was a beautiful design. Our team really knew how to build by the end there, and our final season’s robot was compact, robust, versatile, and capable of attempting every mission on the board that year, if I recall correctly. We weren’t winning, but we were being clever, and doing it in style.

I may be too old by far to be an FLL competitor, but I haven’t fallen out of love with problem-solving with my