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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

Earlier today, I realized that I was confused about something. (And then mentally told myself: "I realize that I am confused.", so I didn't immediately forget about it, and focus on something unimportant, like the uncountability of the Cantor Set.) My train of thought went something like:

Man, I can't wait to get lunch.

It's a shame that I can't just eat at Annenberg [freshman dining hall]. But at least the food is better in Eliot [my upperclassman house].

Actually, when I get home, what if I just take a nap instead? I'm not exceptionally hungry, and dining hall food is only mediocre at best.

But food is important! More important to you than any other hedonic pleasure, if your blog posts are to be believed...

So why don't you buy better food?

I realize that I am confused.

A fuller explanation requires a little background. I spent a significant amount of time this summer exploring ways to make my life more efficient. Polyphasic sleep was one of those, but even outside of that, my summer roommate and I spent a great deal of time discussing values, terminal goals, and effective operating modes. (For an example of what I mean, he's written up an introspective post on his life goals here. Maybe someday I'll have the free time to do something similar.)

One of the conversations we had was about food, and in particular, Soylent. For those of you not in-the-know on everything crazy, "Soylent" (not to be confused with Soylent Green) is one man's homemade attempt to create an all-in-one foodstuff-drink that includes everything the body needs -- and nothing that the soul desires. (I've

The rambling, introspective, and at times (I felt) dramatic nature of my most recent post has brought something back to the forefront of my mind. While writing for such a disparate audience: family, friends-from-home, friends-from-school, students-from-HSYLC, future-people-I-haven't-met-yet, etc., I want to be aware of the inferential distances I'm asking my readers to jump across.

That is to say, there are mental shortcuts (e.g. "reference class" or "model (of an actor)") and cached thoughts (e.g. "humans are bad at multiplying" or "I should love 7*10^9 people an unimaginable amount more than 1") that seem obvious to me but may not be so accessible nor apparent to my readers. To be completely honest, I suspect that, for most people, "Looking Backwards", "Errata, Food, Reductionism", and "Greetings, Polyphasic Sleep, and Chives" had large sections which were more-or-less opaque with jargon or (seemingly) blind assertions.

But most of what I write seems rather intuitive to me. Which is, of course, because basically everything I write is at most one inferential step away from anything else inside my head. Not so for the rest of my readers. I'm writing from a particular accumulated background: informational (e.g. the many authors -- academic or otherwise -- I've read over my lifetime), cultural (e.g. the parlance, logical abstractions, and norms I've become accustomed to using when talking with my close friends at Harvard or acquaintances in the Effective Altruism or LessWrong communities), and personal (logical leaps that make perfect sense to me, but are difficult to explain to others).

Together, these lead me to something like a a

Challenges in writing about events from the perspective of afterward: Getting things down while they're still fresh in the mind. And so, I figure I'll start with that which is most fresh: returning home.

On the morning of the 23rd, I woke up early enough to see my friends off on their trip to see the Great Wall. I never did get to see it, or the Forbidden City, or the Summer Palace, or the 798 District, or anything else of real cultural interest in Beijing. But that's probably alright; I'll be in China again in the not-so-distant future. It's not like I'm going to see (most of) any of these kids any other time in my life. And so I don't feel so bad about missing a few sightseeing opportunities if it means I got to spend more time with a crop of truly fantastic students.

People ask me "How was China?" or "What did you see?", and my answer to either is "I didn't see much of the country; I only really saw three hundred gifted schoolchildren." Then they say "Oh." and I hastily clarify "But the kids were great, really fantastic." They don't get it, but I really do mean it; they were worth all of the opportunity cost.

My grandfather is fond of saying: "Most things, they can take away. But they can't take away what's in your stomach, or in your head." Which is to say, of course, that when the North Koreans came back to take away your money, they couldn't so easily rob you of what you had invested in your

(The title of this blog post brought to you by "potential romantic comedy plots in five words or less")

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A few months ago, Harvard's George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Mathematics recommended a movie to his freshman Real Analysis class -- on some tangent in class, he noted that "it's a fantastic movie; you should all watch it."

The movie was Spring Breakers. So, the other day, a few friends and I borrowed the Jefferson 250 lecture hall (where we had once-upon-a-time taken RA with GVL Prof. Gross) and threw the movie up on the giant projector screen.

We turned it off after thirty minutes of nauseating dialogue, uncomfortable soft-core pornography, and implausible montages of "college kids" drinking "beer". It was bad. Really bad. I'm really not sure how Prof. Gross managed to sit through the movie himself.

But really, the problem here is that I still don't know why we were told to watch this vapid, gratuitous, teen-star nonsense. What I've considered so far:

• Benedict Gross has never seen more of the film than the opening party scene and the stuck-in-history-class scene, and made a suggestion off-the-cuff. As I recall, he went so far as to reference the latter in the discussion of the fact that no one was going to pay attention to Real Analysis the day before spring recess, anyway.
• The man wished for his students to associate excessive drinking with stupidity. It's true that, speaking to his Linear Algebra class before The Game, he told us "I used to be Dean of Harvard College, so I know what weekend it is. But if I'm walking through the

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It's become apparent to me in the past few days that, when I wrote last week's post on the theory of sleep, I didn't know what I was talking about. Or rather, I had an incomplete picture of the subject at hand, and oversimplified a system that was more complicated than I was giving it credit for.

A little more digging has revealed that there is, in fact, evidence that SWS may be important for consolidating declarative memory, which breaks down into episodic memory (events) and semantic memory (facts). By contrast, REM consolidates procedural memory and spatial memory (both of which are more or less exactly what they sound like). Previously, I had dismissed it as "useless". Oops.

Of course, that's not the whole story, either: non-REM sleep is split into periods of "light sleep" and periods of SWS. Altogether, an 8-hour monophasic sleep cycle includes something like 1-2 hours of REM, 1-2 hours of SWS, and 4-5 hours of NREM2 light-sleep. The goal of the E3 schedule, then, isn't so much to absolutely reduce needless SWS, but to restructure the sleep cycles to reduce NREM2, at minimal cost to SWS/REM. (Note that E3 differs from other polyphasic schedules in this respect; notably, Uberman almost entirely eliminates SWS, and packs two hours of REM into just six short naps.)

Now, it makes intuitive sense that, if the brain is using SWS for consolidating certain types of memory, there's an additional "rest state" where it's actually doing nothing but resting. And so,