Selfish Crab

I love immigrants. I do. I love these people that would leave all they know and travel to a foreign place, subjecting themselves to danger and racism and a furious unknown. All this for the possibility of a better life? Of a better future for unborn children?

The flip side of any immigrant story is its coda. Every child of an Asian immigrant that I know seems to deal with this issue. What to make of a life made better on the backs of those who love us? Do we flitter around seeking happiness? Roll up our sleeves and continue to forge life as it was for us?

I’m growing suspicious of life made too easy. Everyone should have to struggle. Everyone should be denied their desires at least once, denied a toy for Christmas, rejected at school, or spat upon as unpopular. Struggle must be the soil for character and drive.

I think I need a purpose of life that is external to myself.

…I don’t know where this post was supposed to go; but I had to get it out of my system. Everytime I sit down to write my personal statements, I squeeze out turgid little gems like this. It’s an awful affliction. The admissions process favors storytellers, people who can crystalize their life’s inflection points and personality into rollicking anecdotes. Not me; I just prattle on about introspective nonsense and expound generality upon generality.

# 2005 Oct 30 • From the 'Life', 'opine' dept • #

Last year, I decided I didn’t want to snowboard or ski anymore, so I went out and bought some snowboarding gear.

# 2005 Oct 29 • From the 'Life' dept • #

And so ends Week Two without Anthony. Today is the day I fully understand the loss: I can no longer get enough buy-in to order lunch from Saji’s. No one seems to like it. I suppose this is direct fallout from the precipitous drop in number of east-asian AITGOC‘ers. Don’t think I didn’t notice. I got my eyes on you.

# 2005 Oct 28 • From the 'work' dept • #

First, there was the early period, the classic era. All the original players. Cohesion, team integrity. Not exactly a Stanley Cup powerhouse, but a fan favorite. This is the time that is looked fondly upon.

Then, two players leave to form a new franchise in California. The coach implements a new system; the back office trades for a Russian and a Canadian. The manager drafts some kids from the NCAA (late round picks.)

The captain is sidelined with an injury; the alternate captain steps up. The Russian also misses half a season to injuries. Both players later return, though not 100%. The alternate captain gets hungry for a championship and leaves for a team with a real shot at the Cup.

One draft pick is lured away by free agency to a dismal team that promises to build the team around him. Another young player considers retiring, after sustaining too many concussions on the ice. It’s day to day, really.

# 2005 Oct 25 • From the 'work' dept • 3

Hold the phone, we’re allowed to leave? I thought we had to pay off our boat ride to America first. Oh well, it’s not like I have been looking or something.

# 2005 Oct 20 • From the 'work' dept • #

From the Columbia Spectator article, “At Baker, Beer Boycott Brings Results, Student Councils Cite Success of T-Shirts, Prepare for Second Meeting With Murphy Over Policy Changes“:

Their efforts included giving out t-shirts with the slogan, “Support the team, not the policy,” written on the front. … ESC Vice President internal Daniel Okin, SEAS ’07, agreed that the campaign was a success and noted that all 700 t-shirts were given out before the game began.

Let’s assume 700 shirts is not a misquote. Then let’s estimate that a light blue shirt with black text on both sides costs $4/shirt. 700 shirts x $4/shirt equals ~$2800 of student council money spent to complain protest. That’s as much as an ABC-funded culture club’s entire annual budget.

Aside: the list of ABC allocations reveals some tidbits about clubs’ budgets and debt. Acapella group Notes and Keys, with a $640 allocation, managed to accrue $2,354 in debt. Top honors go to the Columbia Organization of Rising Entrepreneurs for displaying their budgetary prowess for turning their $1,600 allocation into $8,432 in debt. Mm. Tasty.

# 2005 Oct 20 • From the 'Columbia' dept • #

Bill Gates visited Columbia the other day. They filmed it and put up a webcast (wmv) (source: page of Gates webcasts with zero permalinks.)

Also, don’t miss the great Spectator interview with Bill Gates. My favorite bit:

Spectator: Changing tracks a bit in terms of student life: Intel two days ago came out with their list of the top fifty wireless schools. For the second straight year, Columbia’s not on it. What should Columbia be doing to support its students in terms of wireless and, more broadly, what technology should the University be providing to aid in the educational and personal lives of students?

Gates: What do they do? They go around and they find too many wires, they disqualify you?

Spectator: They do it based on access points per person.

Gates: Really?

Spectator: Yeah

Gates: Oh. Okay, but as you go around to your dorms and to your classes…

Spectator: We don’t have wireless in any dorms.

Gates: It’s really hard to be in the top fifty unless your dorms have wi-fi. How hard can it be? I mean some random student ought to just wire it up without anybody even knowing.

Spectator: It happens.

Aside: the awkwardly-named Intel’s List of Most Unwired College Campuses is hard to take serious. The top school is Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. No MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford. The only school that fulfills expectation is CMU. If you have Ivy-envy, rest assured. The only Ivy on the list of Dartmouth.

Anyway, was the Spectator trying to goad Mr. Gates into saying “CUIT sucks. Give them wireless.”?

# 2005 Oct 18 • From the 'Columbia', 'nerd' dept • #

I went grocery shopping yesterday. There was a sale on cereal, 2 for $6.00. The particular cereal brand was Special K; I bought it anyway.

Anyone else eat this stuff? The box is pink. Confident, well-balanced middle-aged women with arms akimbo, wearing jeans up to their breasts, smile from the box, ready to take on the world. Special facts regarding breast cancer bellow forth. The consumer is promised to lose a whole jean size in two weeks (provided you replace two out of three meals with a 100 g serving of Special K and fruit). My god, could they market this product any more directly towards women?

Anyway, I still like the little dehydrated strawberries.

# 2005 Oct 17 • From the 'Life' dept • 1

Apple Trailers redesigned and they finally added a RSS feed. The links on the feed should really point to the individual trailers and not just the main page.

# 2005 Oct 15 • From the 'Links', 'nerd' dept • #

Last week, Yahoo! acquired Andy Biao’s (aka waxy pancake) social calendar Upcoming.org. The man parlayed his well-designed, well-considered personal weekend project into a full time gig at Yahoo!. I’m insanely jealous. I remember when he launched that thing! I got an account and give it a quick spin. Now he’s in Sunnyvale. I need a side project. Something with blogging, social networks, Web 2.0, buzzword_3, and buzzword_4.

(By the way, Mr. Biao has the best-edited link blog around, covering nonobvious and choice bits from the world of technology, gaming, and computer hackery.)

In other related new$, AOL acquired a slew of sites from Weblogs, Inc., (the parent of Engadget) for $25 million bucks!! Then, Verisign bought ping service weblogs.com from Dave Winer.

# 2005 Oct 15 • From the 'nerd' dept • #

When I first joined as an intern, I thought Anthony was an arrogant prick. I later realized he was a nice person. True story. Good luck out there, Anthony AWOL.

# 2005 Oct 15 • From the 'work' dept • 1

Malcom Gladwell writes on the The Social Logic of Ivy League Admissions in this week’s New Yorker, with Harvard dead in his sights:

The enrollment of Jews [at Harvard] began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising….

The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. … Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. … it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn. …. The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life.

Thank god Columbia is only a second-rate Ivy League school and is never mentioned in the article. Though, CU did their fair share of Jewish quotas. I remember reading in Isaac Asimov’s autobiography that he was rejected from Columbia College because they had already filled their quota for Jewish people that year (1930s). (He had to enroll at that time period’s version of GS. He later made CU officially change this degree to Columbia College when they asked him to give a Class Day speech.)

Anyway, admissions processes are awful. There’s a paragraph or two in there about law school admissions. Sigh.

# 2005 Oct 6 • From the 'Columbia' dept • 1

Columbia physics professor and dogged popularizer of science Brian Greene wrote an Op-Ed in the NY Times, commemorating Einstein’s E=mc² equation. last Friday.

# 2005 Oct 6 • From the 'Columbia', 'Links' dept • #

The Freakonomics of Columbia University’s Economics Department, a NY Metro article about Columbia’s boatload of recent Econ hires. Here’s some interesting tidbits:

Woodford negotiated for a 20 percent raise over his Princeton salary—putting him in excess of $250,000 for the nine-month academic year… Even so, the deal almost fell apart when Woodford and his wife became displeased with the apartment the university offered them. … It took weeks of back-channel appeals to the university’s provost to finally land Woodford a spacious penthouse apartment on 110th and Broadway. “It’s one of the premier apartments at Columbia,” says Zeldes. “We were pleased that in the end the provost came through. It was at the last minute, with e-mails flurrying around.”

See, if I were a Spectator reporter, this is the kind of juicy gossip I would go snooping in: what goodies it takes to lure top talent here. Maybe secret backdoor spots at The School?

Don’t miss the list of recruits at the end of the article.

# 2005 Oct 5 • From the 'Columbia' dept • #

Saying intelligent design is an alternative scientific theory to evolution is akin to saying the ontological argument for God is a religion. In fact, intelligent design seem to leave a person with the same suspicious aftertaste as ontological arguments do. The “it just can’t be….” or “it doesn’t seem right that…” talk must be to blame.

I suppose it wouldn’t be that bad if they taught intelligent design in schools. How long would it take, ten minutes? There’s no content! The corpus of work is two sentences; it fits on a 3″ by 5″ index card. It reads:

1. Evolution is wrong because organisms on Earth are too complex to have arisen from only random mutations and selective pressures.
2. Someone omnipotent somehow designed and created the organisms.

Where do you go from here? There’s no body of evidence, no further conclusions, no applied knowledge. What’s to teach? Am I missing something here?

# 2005 Oct 5 • From the 'opine' dept • #

A Student Body
Originally uploaded by engineer.

A photograph symbolizing the struggle between the student and the University.

Observe the bulwark separating the two. Observe the towering presense of the University. And the struggling student, pinned on its back, clutching his studies, helpless and in agony.

# 2005 Oct 4 • From the 'Life' dept • 2

From this rumor article about upcoming new iPods:

Sources believe the new players feature Toshiba’s perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) 1.8-inch HDDs, which are setting new benchmarks for data density. [Editor: emphasis mine]

Ya hear that? iPods are getting perpendicular!

# 2005 Oct 4 • From the 'nerd' dept • #

CU Launches LionLink (“Launches”? someone rollback the tense on that verb. It ain’t released yet.) :

As early as next week, the University is set to debut a new private directory for students in Columbia College and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “LionLink” is the result of two years of collaboration between ESC, CCSC, SDA, and CCIT.

….LionLink, tested by Spectator, is unique in its scope. On first inspection, the interface is sleek and user-friendly, offering pictures and reliable information for all of CC and SEAS.

ldf is definitely to blame for the user-friendliness. It’s been a fun project. One can never have too many applications to support. Application to developer ratio is approaching 3:1.

# 2005 Oct 4 • From the 'work' dept • 3