I offered a slice to Li Brunetto '12, who tasted it and replied, very thoughtfully, “This tastes like detergent.”

That's how I lost my fear of cooking.

Li notwithstanding, I ended up becoming the chef on Saturdays at pika last quarter. A bit of background: pika, a 30-person independent living group snuggled in the backwoods of residential Cambridge, boasts one of the most ferocious kitchens at MIT. Knives galore, a meat locker, several fridges, an industrial-grade sink, pots large enough to double as seafaring (riverfaring?) vessels on the Charles, three bread machines, a Costco membership, and a wok that probably appeared during one of the battle scenes in Lord of the Rings allow pika to run a meal plan 7 days a week, year-round, with over 40 members. Every Saturday, I'd arrive at 4:00 pm, brimming with gastronomical illusions, take one look at the unbeautiful mountain of dishes in the sink, suffer a bout of depression, run the dishwasher several times, run downstairs to the pantry/meat freezer/fridge, and then realize that the bunch of fresh organic radishes whom I'd cast as the lead actress in my production of Citrus and Radish Confit was actually a bunch of beets. I swear, I must have been absent on the day in kindergarten when they taught you how to identify vegetables.

*This phrase is the proud winner of the Understatement of the Month Award. Ding!

Anyway, after figuring out why the giant white tomatoes with the multilayered skins were making my eyes water, I'd chop, broil, bake, fry, boil, season, blend, stir, and sample for two and a half hours until dinner was served for 30+ people. By which I mean that I pretended to be Mark Bittman and penned dining section articles for the New York Times in my head while delegating all the actual work to Ben, my cooking assistant. The results ranged from disastrous (oversalted garlic eggplant) to spectacular (coconut curry chicken), but all that truly matters is that Ben inevitably almost lost a finger due to some unfortunate chopping accident and ended up smelling like garlic every week. Did I say that out loud? I mean, all that matters is that every Saturday, we sat down to a delightful home-cooked meal.

(There was also a second chef who did a large chunk of the cooking and bought the groceries, but I'd prefer to not give him credit. Sorry, Jared. You can start your own blog. Besides, you spent like 3/4ths of the time re-organizing the spices to be in alphabetical order by Latin name or something.)

To celebrate Ben's continued ownership of all ten digits on his right hand (I'm not saying anything about the left), here's a list of my favorite recipes so far, each one in ten words or less:

-Apple and sour cream borscht (serve with a loaf of warm, dense pumpernickel freshly kneaded and baked by one of your three bread machines, just like the Russians used to do.)
-Jamaican jerk tofu baked with green apple slices
-Roasted black bean and sweet potato salad
-Savory olive oil, coconut, and pistachio granola (the trick is to use roughly equal parts salt, cardamom, and cinnamon)
-Curried cauliflower flatbread with roasted onions and sprouts
-Korean BBQ ribs (keep it simple)
-Chicken simmered in chocolate almond mole
-Asiago beer bread
-Cumin braised lamb
-Pork chops with apple and red wine reduction
-Coconut curry chicken
-Spicy roasted chickpeas
-Strawberries with balsamic and black pepper (I haven't served this yet, but it's among the most dazzling flavor trios ever, rivaled by only Peanut, Butter, and Jelly*.)

(*Not really. Sometimes, you just don't want that extra comma there.)

Much to my horror, I discovered a few weeks ago that I was slotted to cook for tEpikazoo, an 80-person feast for three of MIT's hungriest living groups (tEp, pika, and Tetazoo). If Ayn Rand had to be a dinner organized and cooked entirely by college students, she would be tEpikazoo. Specifically, she would be Spang's Seitan Pot Pie, which not only stimulated the consumers (pie-eaters) to produce value (pie crusts) but also was large enough to feed a small capitalist nation.

Luckily, tEpikazoo was a tEpikasuccess thanks to the work of head chef Spang '10 and a miniature army of volunteers from pika, East Campus, tEp, Senior Haus, and Random Hall. As soon as I tEpikazoomed over to pika after my last class on Friday afternoon, I was tEpikastounded by the frantic whirl of carrot-chopping, potato-peeling, pasta-boiling, falafel-rolling, apple-slicing, soupmaking, cheese-grating and just about every other compound gerund that happens to sound delicious.

[Editor's note: I've decided that using truncations of “tEpikazoo” as prefixes would not be tEpikacceptable if it weren't so tEpikaddictive.]

Did I mention the automized apple-slicer? It was hardcore enough to core the hardest apples. Zing! I think I've reached my literary device quota for the year.

Maita '10 cooked a trough of wonderful German potato salad. True story: I once failed a calculus quiz in high school because I had no idea what a trough looked like and therefore couldn't integrate over its volume. I think I just assumed that it looked like a rectangular prism, or maybe an ice cream cone.

I baked two batches of beer bread, a form of carbohydrate that contains another form of carbohydrate. (The beer actually replaces the yeast in ordinary quick breads.) I am told that the beer was “German” and “stout” by the purchaser. Anyway, the first batch tasted stout but not as German as the potatoes.

The second was generously smothered in asiago, parmesan, and another cheese from Trader Joe's whose name made me feel suddenly francophobic. Although the homely German stoutness of the bread was muffled by a strong whiff of asiago, just like the German Empire was historically muffled by the strength of the Italian kingdom in the Austro-Prussian war, the creamy-savory blend of flavors was marvelous.

As expected, Spang's prolific Seitan Pot Pie was stunning, sort of like the 100-page rant at the end of Atlas Shrugged except much more enjoyable and buttery.

For dessert, I dished out four bacon apple pies, as featured in the New York Times. (The reporter mentioned it for about 1/4th of a sentence, but I like to prolong my fleeting moments of celebrity.)

For dessert #2, denizens of East Campus set crepes on fire. Classy!

Dinner was followed by firespinning in the back yard.

At some point during the night, I announced my long-awaited decision to join pika by scrawling “I PLEDGE!!!” on a roll of paper towels, which I then hurled into a packed dining room. Unfortunately, instead of sailing triumphantly through the cool autumn air, the banner of extra-strength paper towels broke in mid-flight, leaving me with “I PL” and someone on the other side of the room with “EDGE!!!” One quick-witted observer, who no doubt was a Scrabble champion, pieced together my message and yelled it to the room, initiating a rib-cracking round of hugs and congratulations. As with all spontaneous celebrations, this one inspired blurry spur-of-the-moment photos that, upon closer inspection, are actually sort of creepy.

(I'm the headless pink-and-black blur on the left. That's another sentence I never expected to utter.)

On that note, I'll leave you with the Unrelated Problem Set Typo of the Week, courtesy of 8.07. [Professor Belcher labels this, “one of the strangest trig identities in equation (7.5.2) of Problem 5 that I have ever seen (it is also totally wrong).”]

Anyway, as the kids these days would say, I ROFL'ed.

Geez! you say. That's a harsh claim. Perhaps you might soften it down until it's fluffy like a throw pillow*.

Alright: Let's just say that the week of October 19th left much to be desired. I will elaborate on the details of “much” once I finish therapy.

*Recently, someone I was talking to managed to gently massage this phrase (“fluffy like a throw pillow”) into a conversation of otherwise forgettable nature, by which I mean that I completely forgot the rest of it ten minutes later. I was completely hooked on the colloquial fruitiness of the phrase as soon as it reached my ears, resplendent in its evocations of tacky yet luxurious department-store sofas. Of course, you can barely tell how wonderful of an idiom it makes just from reading my comparatively-dry prose: imagine someone saying it with a gangsta inflection, perhaps in a context that makes absolutely no sense. Like: “Yo, it's raining so hard, my shoes are fluffy like a throw pillow.” See? Pure, vernacular magic. Anyway, back to how much my week sucked.

Three weeks, 13 Nobel Prizes, my friend's semi-spontaneous wedding (featuring a hat parade, an Ethiopian feast, vegan carrot cake, and the coolest farm-owning Canadian grandma I've ever met on this side of the Mississippi), a trip to NYC, three midterms, two papers, Windows 7, three nights of cooking dinner for 30, 105 miles of running, and a lot of Barack Obama have happened since the last time I blogged. The same amount of time has passed since the last night when I slept more than 6.5 hours. Now that I think about it, I don't even sleep while I blog, usually.

Fantastic thing about MIT, #261: Sure, you're miserable on weeks like, say-for-instance-hypothetically-speaking-of-course, October 19-23. On the bright side, it's the best miserable experience ever. If MIT is the Disneyworld of misery, then I rode all the rides this week and didn't even have to wait in line. If you asked me about how I felt last week on a scale of 1-10, I would have said negative 15 +/-2. On the other hand, if you'd asked me how I felt about feeling like negative 15 +/-2, I would have given you a solid 9.5 and then offered to adjust my answers if you paid me 20 bucks for taking your survey*.

*Fantastic thing about MIT, #262, is that you quickly learn to not take surveys unless there's a predicted payoff of at least $10, with exceptions for course evaluation surveys that give you free excuses to complain about your life. If I'm not mistaken, there was a 3.091 class survey last year that automatically deposited $15 into the TechCash account of every student that participated (and there's 500-600 people enrolled in 3.091). 15 bucks! I could have bought 1/15th of the class textbook with that fortune!

Anyway, back to my misery. It was rhythmic. I woke up every morning at 7 am dressed in a fresh layer of panic, bolted outside in 40-degree wind chill, ran several miles, made breakfast and French-pressed coffee, went to school, did work, went home, did work, went to my Black Studies class and talked about the Black Panthers, did work, went to 8.07, worked on 8.07 in the basement of the library, went home, roasted chickpeas and cauliflower, did work, socialized, went to bed, repeat five times and jump to coda.

Over the torturous course of the Week from Heck (am I allowed to say this on the blogs, Matt?), I sludged through oodles of problems. Problems involving relativistic point charges, floating blocks oscillating underneath a dripping faucet, magnetic dipole radiation, proper time in an accelerating reference frame, the Maxwell Stress Tensor (stress makes me tense too! I need to stop making this pun until I pass 8.07), and electron/positron pair formation. But never did I satisfactorily solve the deeper problem of why I cared. Perhaps I never will, but let me tell you what I've figured out so far:

Insight is indistinguishable from imagination. Like all alliterative statements, this is probably profound. Take the example of a mass on a (massless, frictionless) spring. You compress it. In Soviet Russia, spring compresses you! By which I mean that it oscillates. A hummingbird of energy hovers in the liminal space between opposing forces, lingering persistently.

(Can you spot the bad pun? Hint: Sho!)

You imagine a metaphor for your spring. It's a metaphor that looks like this:

You imagine an infinite number of masses, connected by an infinite number of springs. It looks like this:

(If you've ever tried untangling one of these, you know what I mean by infinite.)

Like all reasonable things, your string of infinite springs despise second derivatives. Gently you pluck a second derivative into its limber form, and it responds with a violent, burning hatred for you and all your posterity. In Soviet Russia, string second-derivates you! By which I mean that it snaps back with a second derivative in time. You pull out your pencil and scratch out a new metaphor:

After twisting your imagination up a ladder of metaphors, the waves rippling along the string become rays of light propagating through space at 3*10^8 m/s.

Somehow, in the grind of a pencil on paper, you've crystallized the subtleties of energy.

In truth, the process of squeezing a physics problem through layers of abstraction is a frolic in playgrounds of tedium. Which is why I had a great week, even though it was terrible.

On a happier note, did I mention that I went to New York City for an all-expenses-paid 23-hour field trip with my Black Studies class? Legitimately speaking, my homework was walking around Harlem, eating soul food, appreciating Black Panther art, visiting the African Burial Grounds, downing a plate of conch at a Haitian diner, and sitting through a production of Hair. Fantastic. It was a journey of self-discovery in the sense that I uncovered a secret fondness for plantains.

I attempted to become a critically-acclaimed street photographer in the meantime. The first step to a Pulitzer is to set your camera to greyscale.

(At the African Burial Grounds, where a student pays respect to the history of African Americans in New York by, um, looking up. I guess.)

The ironic part is that I tried to make this entry sound angsty, but it ended up being fluffy like a throw pillow.

On the flip side of the burger (to coin a stupid-sounding idiom), I no longer have an excuse for putting off this blog entry until T_n, where T_n > 5 minutes from now. A week or so ago, Becky from somewhere-recently-visited-by-Quentin-McArthur emailed me a laundry list of excellent questions that I could answer in less time than most questions I encounter on an hourly basis. I started to write back, “Thanks, Becky! It's so nice to make human communication once in a while! See you on the Internet sometime,” and then I figured that she probably wanted me to answer her questions instead of becoming her Facebook buddy. (Curmudgeonly aside: It's a sad, sad world when I get more Facebook friend requests than personal emails. Also, you kids get off my lawn.)

Hi Yan -
When Quinton McArthur came to our school the other day, I asked him a
question about the physics department at MIT, and he directed me to you. I
actually have more than one question, but they're roughly in order of
importance if you don't have time to answer them all.

It's 12:50 AM! Of course I have time.

Questions:

1. UROP seems like it would allow you to do awesome research as an
undergrad. Has this been your experience? Is there anything about physics
UROPs that make them different? Are experimental and theoretical research
opportunities both available to undergrads? How do students make time for
research during the academic year, or do most students do UROPs during the
summer?

UROP, MIT's undergrad research program, has improved my overall standard of living as well as my GDP and average lifespan. My first research group in the Materials Science department paid 11 bucks an hour, which was increased to $12/hour over the summer, for me to build and test batteries that wouldn't explode or melt or otherwise make a huge, expensive mess and ruin everyone's life. I eventually started running out of work to do after one semester, so I adopted a second UROP in the Plasma and Fusion Center writing scripts to decipher NASA spacecraft data and explain the mysterious phenomenon of magnetic reconnection. After one month, I started to think in MATLAB instead of in English, but it was nonetheless an enjoyable introduction to physics research.

UROPs are more common during IAP and Summer, but plenty of people (like me) devote up to 6 hours per week to research, usually after class on weekdays. Think of it as like taking half a class while getting paid. It's a valuable way to learn relevant skills for your field while getting rich at a very, very slow rate.

All professors in the Physics department that I've met so far have been open to sponsoring undergrad research. At least one requires that his students take 8.04 (quantum) before doing research in his group. However, most labs, experimental and theoretical, could always use the extra help with coding and performing routine tasks traditionally reserved for intelligent primates and large, powerful computers. (Well, maybe not the string theorists. Or LIGO, since LIGO was crowded with UROPs last time I applied for one in their group.) You might not get an intellectually dazzling UROP during your first years at MIT, but it's well worth the experience.

2. In a blog post from December, 2007, Lulu wrote that around 13/50 of
physics majors (just for course 8, not 8-B) are women. Do you think this
estimate is accurate? Do you notice this imbalance at all? Does it not
matter because the overall Institute gender numbers are essentially equal?
Does it not matter just because it doesn't matter whether the people
you're doing physics with are girls or guys? Have you had any
gender-related problems (academic or otherwise) as a physics major
specifically?

Gender imbalance has never influenced my experience at MIT. I'm a bit startled by your (Lulu's?) numbers, since at least half of the Physics majors I've met are women. Granted, I spend a lot of time around Undergraduate Women in Physics, which is perhaps not a representative sample of the gender distribution.

Then again, the mere existence of a group at MIT dedicated to providing support for female physicists suggests that your speculations are valid. I've also heard from professors that more men tend to take the advanced versions of intro Physics classes, such as 8.022. However, personal evidence shows that more women tend to wake up in time for lecture. (At least when McGreevy taught it.)

3. I remember at least Chris S. blogging about how his biology psets and
tests test more his ability to think and solve problems than his
memorization skills. Is there a similar emphasis on thinking over
memorizing in the physics classes?

Yes. At least for the intro classes, all relevant formulae as well as useful math identities are provided with each exam. (However, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't understand the derivations in all their gory intricacies.) MIT generally tries to ensure that you will never fail because you spent too much time on a test trying to remember the dimensionless factor in the denominator of the Larmor formula (6*pi in SI units, 3/2 in CGS).

Problem sets, similarly, require a lot of braining. This page of my 8.03 pset aptly summarizes life as a Physics major at MIT.

(After taking a shortcut that failed to reach the intended destination, i.e., the correct answer.)

4. I don't know how well you know the math department, but do you know
where on the spectrum from super applied to super theoretical the math
department classes usually fall? Or are they all over the place? Do most
physics majors end up taking classes at a certain point on this spectrum?

If you look at the math department course catalog, you'll notice sections subtitled “Applied Math,” “General Math,” “Analysis”, “Theoretical Comp. Sci.,” etc. Math tends to be the all-purpose flour in MIT's curriculum pantry. A “typical” math class doesn't really exist; there's more than enough choices for you to fine-tune the level of applicability until it resonates with your interests. Analysis classes tend to be theoretical, whereas applied math is geared toward engineers, which I just nearly spelled “gearineers.” Time for bed.

Also, I know at least one physics major who accidentally took enough theoretical math classes to get a second major in Course 18. Most people, at least those who aren't into intense theory, go with just 18.03, 18.06 (or a variant thereof), and 18.04 or an applied math class.

Thank you,
Betsy [last name omitted to create a feeling of suspense]

No problem, Betsy! Want to see my problem sets for this week? Really, you do? Okay!

To be honest, my problem solving skills this week fell short of robust. The trouble started with the double pendulum problem on the 8.03 (Waves n' Vibrations) problem set, which I naively crammed into the Lagrangian instead of kickin' it old-school with a force balance diagram. I'm one of those people who use the Lagrangian to calculate the net force on an object falling from rest, you know.

Anyway, this happened:

1.5 pages later, the moral of the story was pummeling me in the face. Live and learn but don't Lagrange. Lagrange isn't even a verb.

I reworked the problem later and massaged out the hideous lumps of unsimply simplified terms by dousing everything in a small angle approximation that was much, much smaller than what I consider to be a kosher small angle approximation. It was during Yom Kippur, after all.

The second sign of impending toil came in an email from the 8.033 (Special Relativity) TA last night that basically read, “Sorry, forgot to mention that you need to show calculations for Problems 2 and 3 instead of just drawing diagrams, because you probably skipped art class in high school anyway.” The only problem was that I had already finished the problem set and, like residents of Manhattan slums during the early factory era, I had no space left.

Appendix A turned out to be pretty much the most beautiful thing that I have ever created with my bare hands.

My 8.07 (Electricity and Magnetism II) problem set this week was blissfully merciful, except that everything equivalency statement I tried to prove turned out to be off by either a factor of 2 or a factor of sqrt(c). Did you know that the square root of a meter per second is a fundamental dimensional quantity in both electromagnetic momentum and energy flux? Neither did I.

Sometimes, frustration begs to be cartoonified.

Inspired by Professor Belcher's mathematically gorgeous field line representations (check them out- as a bonus, the animated ones also make excellent music visualizers), I took a break from work to relax, refresh, and reinterpreted a Van Gogh painting as an electric/magnetic field diagram.

Yep, this qualifies as a break from work.

One spoonful of corn chowder was allotted to each resident, provided that the partaker of the feast brought his own spoon and provided that said spoon wasn't unreasonably big.

After each person had consumed his first spoonful of soup, the cooks gave permission for seconds. Unfortunately, nearly everyone was so satiated by the first spoonful of chowder that Pecker was left with half a pot of leftovers, which by extrapolation should be plenty to feed the 14-person floor for the next week or so. Paul Christiano '12 was the token exception, consuming his first serving using a tablespoon and subsequently switching to teaspoons whose volume capacity decreased in a geometric series. It is predicted that Paul would have finished the entire pot given infinite time.

Katelyn Gao '12, who reportedly was “too hosed” with homework to participate in the social event, eventually succumbed to the satisfied murmurs of soup-slurping outside her door and went into the kitchen to enjoy a free dinner.

Remarking on the quality of the chowder, Kenan Diab '11 commented, “Yum.” A Junior currently enrolled in 14.01, he expressed a desire to visit Trader Joe's, a local grocery store frequented by MIT students and hockey moms, for the purpose of buying more chowder and stimulating the economy.

The floor dinner was generally considered a success, feeding 15 students in total for less than 0.1% of the average in-state college tuition for 2008-2009.

-Waves and Vibrations (8.03): Required for major, will keep.

-Special Relativity (8.033): Same as above.

-Intro to Cosmology (8.286): It hurts to drop this class, but four physics problem sets per week hurts even more. Perhaps I'll give it another go in two years.

-Electricity and Magnetism II (8.07): Having spent 6+ hours on the problem set already, I'm reluctant to drop this class. I'm already 3% of the way to completing 8.07! Don't give up now! (Bonus: Thanks to funding from the MIT Class of '22, everyone in 8.07 received a free copy of The Maxwellians on the first day of lecture. On the second day, everyone received an electronic clicker so that the class could answer multiple choice questions in real time during lecture. By extrapolation, I conclude that 8.07 will give me a new car before October.)

-Film Studies: Dropped.

-Intro to Black Studies: Turns out to be surprisingly engaging. Bonus: class participation involves a daytrip to New York City! Will keep.

-Intro to Comparative Media Studies: After an hour of lecture, my interest in comparing mediums had evaporated to the point where I really, really wanted to just go to the grocery store and compare medium-quality produce. I left early and arrived at the grocery store just as an employee was stocking the shelves with grapes ludicrously priced at 88 cents a pound. I'm sure CMS.100 is a worthwhile class, but grapes at 88 cents/lb might be an unfair comparison. Anyway, this class was dropped, and I had grapes for dinner. Twice.

-20th Century Composition Techniques: I stumbled into this class on a masochistic whim and loved it. Whether I add it to my schedule hinges on whether I have time to read the textbook and crank out a handful of Stravinsky/Debussy analyses before Tuesday. Were I taking this class next semester, I'd call this assignment The Write of Spring.

Ignoring the lumped mass of four problem sets, five textbook readings, half a novel, a music composition exercise, and two score analyses currently coagulating on my platter, I've been lately documenting my unreciped forays into experimental gastronomy. Throughout freshman year, cooking served as an expression of self-sufficiency and Ramen-avoidancy; nowadays, I'm trying to tighten my culinary grasp in order to make new and exciting friends. And by “friends,” I mean “food.”

Perhaps the inspiration for food as a creative catharsis came from the unabashedly sugar-saturated “Introduction to Undergraduate Women in Physics” event that I hosted for the Class of 2013 during orientation. Every year, MIT's orientation coordinators organize a themed party/carnival/interactive infomercial in the Student Center for student groups to feed and bedazzle the incoming class. This year's theme was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I freely interpreted as a challenge for student groups to 1-up each other in distributing free candy to the 1000+ freshmen. As president of Undergrad Women in Physics, I armed our humble one-table booth for war with the Undergrad Math Association to the West and the Electrical Engineering Club to the East.

The secret weapon: Edible circuits- the intersection of technology and sugar.

Some people come to MIT to learn the recipe for success. Ultimately, they learn that the recipe includes graham crackers, unpeeled Twizzlers, icing, marshmallows, food coloring, and gumdrops.

Circuits like this one left me puzzled. What's the voltage drop across a gumdrop in series with two marshmallows and another gumdrop, and also in parallel with a bigger gumdrop, which is itself in parallel with the two marshmallows and the other gumdrop? I feel like I missed the 8.022 lecture that covered this.

I'm not sure if I want the real-life version of this circuit inside anything I own, probably because it reminds me of a rickshaw. Honestly, I'm fine with having some device that contains three gigantic, unwired LEDs piled on top of each other in the middle of a circuit board where nothing is connected to anything, as long as I didn't have to pay more than $9.99 for it. It's just that this one looks too much like a rickshaw. Nothing personal, Sheila. I really do appreciate your attention to reflective symmetry.

This was a short circuit. It's also a blurry circuit.

Greg '12, not to be outdone, responded to the above by building a “short” circuit. It's not even a circuit, so Greg loses anyway. Sorry, Greg. Better luck with 6.002.

“MisLED: A Study in Unconnected, Non-functional LEDs” by Symone.

“Wires o'er Wires” by Yan.

Scarcely 5/14th of a fortnight later, Alorah '11 and I threw a bacon party at pika. A bacon party is exactly what it sounds like, except with more bacon. For hor d'oeuvres, I served a tray of grilled melon and peaches wrapped in bacon.

I accidentally burnt the bacon-wrapped fruit in the oven, which added a smoky carcinogenic musk of charcoal to each bite.

In a moment of divine inspiration, I was left unattended in the kitchen in the company of a lovely organic pie crust, an equally lovely bag of organic apples, and a pack of fat-streaked bacon. With a few plentiful shakes of cinnamon, a glaze of agave nectar, and a wink of patriotism, I had this:

Introducing: the Bacon Lattice Apple Pie.

I popped it into the oven until the bacon was crisp at the edges and still dripping with sizzling pork juice in the chewy inner folds of each salt-sweaty strip. For the finishing caress, a drizzled spoonful of melted caramel sauce was swirled over pork and apple like a silky ribbon.

It turned out to be inadvertently delicious too, albeit murderous.

Just like my class schedule.

[See legend at end of post to decode course numbers.]
[Professor Nergis, whose last name is gentle to neither pronunciation nor spelling, is my academic advisor.]

This is my class schedule for Fall '09. There's eight courses spread over a 120-hour canvas; I'll probably drop three of them so that I don't go to bed weeping tears of angst every night. One of MIT's masochist-friendly policies is that upperclassmen are free to register for every single class offered at the Institvte if they should desire a GPA of 0.2/5.0 or so. Conventional wisdom for the indecisive is that you should sign up for all the classes worthy of consideration and then progressively trim the fat from your course load until you can swallow your weekly serving of credit hours. For instance, my dilemma right now is choosing between 18.100B (Introduction to Analysis) and 8.07 (Electricity & Magnetism II). Tortured by a soul-ripping conflict between studying rigorous math and learning where MIT keeps its prodigious supply of educational solenoids, I turned to my ex-roommate, Katelyn (a devout math major who watches Jeopardy, not that this is relevant).

Y: Should I take 8.07 or 18.100B?
K: Math!
Y: I don't know if I want to be hosed trying to prove that 1+1 does not equal the set of irrational numbers greater than Australia.

Later that night-

K: Math is the dressing that makes physics taste better.
Y: But18.100B is like mayonnaise. It doesn't even go on the salad, unless the salad is potato salad.
Y: By “potato”, I mean “theoretical,” and by “salad,” I mean “physics.”
K: How do you know adding mayonnaise won't help the taste of say, a lettuce salad? It may surprise you.
Y: Hey Katelyn. That sounds delicious.
Y: By delicious, I mean “gross,” and by “Hey Katelyn,” I mean “That's the last time I ever invite you to a potluck.”

Shortly after-

K: Your salad right now has too much lettuce. It needs garnish.
Y: Yeah, well, your salad isn't even a salad. It's like a condiment bar.
Y: If you're taking applied math this term, maybe it has some tomatoes.

On the bright side, pika rush* coincides with the first week of school, injecting sunbursts of stressless creativity into a greyish schedule. Who can resist cheesemaking lessons on Registration Day, followed by an all-night Dr. Who marathon? Nobody, that's Who.

*At MIT, the first week of school is reserved for fraternity/sorority/independent living group recruitment. Although freshmen must live on campus, the rush period gives freshmen the opportunity to explore non-dorm housing options for their future years at MIT as various living groups grapple to outsplurge each other on steak and lobster dinners to attract ramen-acclimated visitors. pika inexplicably prefers to shell out for esoteric items like granola and organic nut butters. Probably half of last night's dinner budget was converted into pureed cashews.

My actual schedule for this week:

Legend:

18.303- The classical partial differential equations of applied mathematics: diffusion, Laplace/Poisson, and wave equations. Methods of solution, such as separation of variables, Fourier series and transforms, eigenvalue problems. Green's function methods are emphasized. 18.04 or 18.112 are useful, as well as previous acquaintance with the equations as they arise in scientific applications. [I dropped this class because of a last-minute lecture time change by the course administrators.]

18.100B- Fundamentals of mathematical analysis: convergence of sequences and series, continuity, differentiability, Riemann integral, sequences and series of functions, uniformity, interchange of limit operations.

8.03- Mechanical vibrations and waves; simple harmonic motion, superposition, forced vibrations and resonance, coupled oscillations, and normal modes; vibrations of continuous systems; reflection and refraction; phase and group velocity. Optics; wave solutions to Maxwell's equations; polarization; Snell's Law, interference, Huygens's principle, Fraunhofer diffraction, and gratings.

8.033- Intro to Special Relativity. Normally taken by Physics majors in their sophomore year. Einstein's postulates; consequences for simultaneity, time dilation, length contraction, and clock synchronization; Lorentz transformation; relativistic effects and paradoxes; Minkowski diagrams; invariants and four-vectors; momentum, energy, and mass; particle collisions. Relativity and electricity; Coulomb's law; magnetic fields. Brief introduction to Newtonian cosmology. Introduction to some concepts of general relativity; principle of equivalence. The Schwarzchild metric; gravitational red shift; particle and light trajectories; geodesics; Shapiro delay.

8.07- E&M II. Survey of basic electromagnetic phenomena: electrostatics, magnetostatics; electromagnetic properties of matter. Time-dependent electromagnetic fields and Maxwell's equations. Electromagnetic waves, emission, absorption, and scattering of radiation. Relativistic electrodynamics and mechanics.

8.286- Introduction to modern cosmology. First half deals with the development of the big bang theory from 1915 to 1980, and latter half with recent impact of particle theory. Topics: special relativity and the Doppler effect, Newtonian cosmological models, introduction to non-Euclidean spaces, thermal radiation and early history of the universe, big bang nucleosynthesis, introduction to grand unified theories and other recent developments in particle theory, baryogenesis, the inflationary universe model, and the evolution of galactic structure. [This, by the way, is taught by the infamous Alan Guth, who not only developed the idea of cosmic inflation but also applied it to the stack of papers on his desk.]

SP.417J- Intro to Black Studies. Interdisciplinary survey of people of African descent that draws on the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. Connects the experiences of African-Americans and of other American minorities, focusing on social, political, and cultural histories, and on linguistic patterns. Includes lectures, discussions, workshops, and required field trips that involve minimal cost to students.

CMS.100- Intro to Comparative Media Studies. Offers an overview of the social, cultural, political, and economic impact of mediated communication on modern culture. Combines critical discussions with experiments working with different media. Media covered include radio, television, film, the printed word, and digital technologies. Topics include the nature and function of media, core media institutions, and media in transition.

21L.011- The Film Experience. An introduction to narrative film, emphasizing the unique properties of the movie house and the motion picture camera, the historical evolution of the film medium, and the intrinsic artistic qualities of individual films. Syllabus changes from term to term, but usually includes such directors as Griffith, Chaplin, Renoir, Ford, Hitchcock, De Sica, and Fellini.

21W.785- Communicating with Web-Based Media. Analysis, design, implementation, and testing of various forms of digital communication through group collaboration. Students are encouraged to think about the Web and other new digital interactive media not just in terms of technology but also broader issues such as language (verbal and visual), design, information architecture, communication and community. Students work in small groups on a term-long project of their choice. Various written and oral presentations document project development.

Next up on the MitBlog: Candy circuits, notes from my kitchen experimentation lab book, plus a certifiable tonnage of bacon.

(Alright, so I stretched the imagery a bit to claim the first Google search hit for “unreformed by Ikea.” My goal for the upcoming academic year is to expand into as much unexplored Google search territory as possible without becoming so incomprehensible that I sound like James Joyce editing Wikipedia. Think of it as like Manifest Destiny for my blog.)

Anyway, the fact that I've used a legless couch as a bed and a chair as a desk in the past 2 days is a reliable sign that my standards for dorm room furniture have become practically nonexistent after one year at MIT. I've also quit using alarm clocks, blankets, desk lamps, flat sheets, television, radios, lined paper, and vegetables*. Life changes fast. My excuse for mentioning this is nothing more poetic than the fact that I slept 1 hour and 50 minutes last night, and, furthermore, I strongly believe that there is wasabi powder in my eye. The latter conviction is so compelling that I am trying to finish this blog entry as fast as I can so that I can spend the next hour blinking furiously.

*Just kidding, mom.

I leave you with an exhibition of Roomstalker Haiku, hereby defined as the trans-media art of secretly taking photographs of other people's rooms while they're moving in/out and posting them on the Internet with captions written in haiku form. It might not be hot territory as far as unclaimed Google search hits go, but I'm probably in denial already anyway.

Part I: Random Hall

Freshman year double
Color of photoshopped seas
Walls made me thirsty.

(My room last year)

Knock, knock. Who's there? Orange.
Orange who? Orange you sure that “orange”
Isn't two syllables?

(Jing '10's room, across the hall from mine)

My room seeks company
Of polysyllabic friends.
Refrigerator.

(My room for Fall '09)

Part II: pika

Refraction mural
Want to ask Pink Floyd, why is
The prism opaque?

This room makes the worst
Maze ever. It'd be nicer
If the walls were maize.

Jessica's hovel
Looks like Harvard Square bookstore
Just add bad coffee.

Who cares if the walls
Appear to be mattresses?
Look, it's a skylight!

I once owned some pants
A worthy match for these walls.
I was six months old.

But enough about my autobiography-in-progress. Chances are, if you're arriving on campus within the next week, you have an interest in avoiding starvation in ways that do not involve the Ben Salinas Delight (last Wed. night's snack, if you're interested). In my infinite kindheartedness to this year's incoming class*, I started to compile a list of memorable-but-not-necessarily-recommended-eateries around MIT but suffered a minor aneurysm from food nostalgia overload and decided to stick to just restaurants on the Cambridge side of the river. (Boston deserves a separate blog post. Or six.)

*Seriously, I not only started the MIT 2013 Facebook Group but even refrained from changing the group name to “Harvard Class of 2013” and posting “Welcome to Harvard!” on the day that MIT matriculation decisions were due. It took some serious self-control.

View Dining around MIT in a larger map

Let's start with grocery stores.

1. Star Market: The closest grocery store to most of the MIT dorms, Star Market is your generic, jumbo-sized, ten-flavors-of-Triscuits supermarket. The fruit is an order of magnitude cheaper than at LaVerde's in the Student Center, and sales on staples like cereals, breads, sandwich meat, canned soup, and frozen vegetables are routine. The downside is that the incomprehensible store layout turns shopping for dried split peas into a labrythine task involving three aisles and a compass. Also, one of the employees doesn't know what peppermint bark is.

2. Trader Joe's: Fantastic bread. Fantastic frozen risotto. Fantastic granola bars. The temptation to spend your entire Saturday morning browsing the 3948294 varieties of mustard while downing free shots of coffee is dangerously irresistible. Remember this warning before you get on the MIT Weekend Grocery Shuttle (loops around to most of the dorms and ends at Trader Joe's/Whole Foods).

3. Harvest Co-op: A scarcely-mentioned, community-owned grocery store on Massachusetts Ave., Harvest has the cheapest prices on the following: bagged spinach, loose oranges, bagged apples (sometimes), soymilk, Sabra pine-nut hummus (the Shawshank Redemption of hummus: spectacular and life-affirming.) You can usually get better prices on fresh produce than at Shaw's, depending on the weekly sales.

Restaurants in Central Square (North of MIT along Massachusetts Avenue):

- Toscanini's: Famous for eclectic ice cream flavors like Burnt Caramel and Banana Gingersnap Molasses and Burnt Banana Ginger Molasses with Snapped Caramel (not really), Toscanini's is MIT's canonical provider of late-night ice cream (other than JP Licks, of which we shall not speak*). The three best flavors in the humble opinion of this critic are Tiramisu (picture below), Lemon Expresso, and Khulfee. Belgian Chocolate, Earl Grey, Burnt Caramel, and Vienna Finger Cookie are also noteworthy.

[*Clarification: I have nothing against JP Licks, but the whole JP Licks vs. Tosci's debate at MIT is worth a blog post in itself. Or six. The best thing to do is to try both of them for yourself. Life is hard, I know.]

- Pepper Sky's: Serves the best Thai curries within a stone's throw of MIT, unless you can throw a stone all the way to the Boston University vicinity. I recommend the Duck or Seafood Choo Chee.

- Thailand Cafe: Serves the worst Thai curries ever, but it's literally next door to Random Hall and delivers comparatively cheap late-night fare, which turns out to be edible sometimes once you remove the brown paper bag. However, the Cumin Braised Beef from the secret Sichuan menu (ask for it) is unreasonably delicious.

- Bertucci's: One word- rolls. Skip the salad, pizza, and pasta; just get an eternally-refilling basket of the complimentary bread rolls, and you've got the perfect date. Fine, you can get the three-cheese ravioli too if you want. But only after the eighth basket of rolls.

- Mary Chung: Confucius says, “Every campus has a Chinese restaurant within three blocks.” Mary's is where you will buy dinner for your friends on their birthdays if you're too lazy to plan a party or bake a cake or remember their birthdays until 8 pm on their birthdays. The Dun Dun Noodles with Shredded Chicken (or without, if you're vegetarian) are unregrettably tasty, whether you were ever born or not. Wait, that made no sense.

Kendall Square (Slightly east of MIT proper, close to the T stop and East Campus):

- The Black Sheep at the Kendall Hotel: It's expensive and dressy as any decent hotel restaurant, so you probably should stay away, but let me assure you that the Yucca Mashed Potatoes are the greatest permutation of root vegetable that I've ever witnessed. Black Sheep takes the humble potato and transforms it into an earthy study in textural contrasts, tempering the ambient starchiness with crunchy, buttery morsels. But you still should stay away.

(Ignore the shrimp and vegetables in the foreground; the potatoes didn't just steal the show, they were the show. And it was a good show. You should go see it.)

- Cuchi Cuchi: Flamboyantly gourmet and culturally ambiguous, Cuchi Cuchi refuses to refer to their “international smaller plates to be shared” as “tapas” in the same way that MIT refuses to refer to “the other school in Cambridge” as “Harvard University.” Self-denial issues aside, Cuchi Cuchi serves up semi-haute cuisine that manages to be both flashy and flavorful. It's pricey, but keep in mind that the wallpaper is probably more visually entertaining than some Broadway shows. Great for bringing a crowd for a splurgetastic celebration (graduation, birthdays, passing 8.012 with a C-, etc.). I've had nearly everything on their menu as of May, and the standout dishes are the Bliny (Pancakes w/mushroom filling; topped w/sour cream & caviar), Caspian Heaven (Roasted Fingerling potatoes, crispy oysters, creme fraiche, salmon roe & champagne sauce; picture below), and the Tiramisu (caffeine-loaded and bitter, like the upperclassman down the hall).

- Clover Food Truck: The brainchild of a visionary MIT graduate, Clover Food Labs is revolutionizing the way that mankind buys food from the back of a truck. I assert that only at MIT will you find a food truck parked in the alley behind MIT medical whose slogan is “Everything will be different tomorrow.” I originally interpreted this as an inspirational message about world peace and environmental sustainability and banning chickpea sandwiches that aren't at least 30% hummus, but I think it actually means that their menu changes daily.

Anyway, whether or not Clover wins the Nobel Peace Prize, I will remain a staunch advocate of their menu (local, seasonal vegetarian food cooked from scratch that will rarely cost you over 5 bucks) as well as their business model (involves Twitter and a friendly, candid blog from the owner that gets updated more frequently than the MIT homepage sometimes.)

Last Monday, I ordered the Chickpea Fritter, mostly because I liked the word “fritter.” Lots of nice consonants.

It was essentially falafel snuggled with red cabbage in grain-rich pita bread. Tasty, but could have used more hummus. Keep in mind that I say this about 90% of the things that I encounter on a daily basis. Ex:
- “Hey, how's the 8.03 textbook?”
- “It could use more hummus.”

Other choices include the BBQ Seitan Sandwich:

And the Egg and Eggplant, the sandwich that I would have picked hands-down if only it also contained eggfruit. Alas, the egg triumvirate remained sadly incomplete.

Miscellaneous (One of the locations isn't in Cambridge, and the other isn't within walking distance of MIT except by European standards of “walking distance.” Let's just agree that to first order, this item belongs on the list of Cambridge Eateries within Walking Distance of MIT.)

Elephant Walk: A few weekends ago, Jess Lin and her family met in Cambridge for family bonding time over lunch at Elephant Walk in Cambridge, a French-Cambodian restaurant specializing in making colonialism taste delicious. I'm obnoxious on Saturdays, so I tagged along.

Starters were glorified spring rolls, which were completely forgettable. Skip it if you're ever given the chance.

In brilliant contrast, the second course was a bright, tangy Cambodian chicken soup with sparkling tones of lime and lemongrass. It was like drinking broth in C Major.

For her main course, Jess ordered the unpronounceable Croustillants aux Poires et Crevettes Flambées aux Vin Blanc (Translation: wontons layered with warm Bartlett pear, topped with shrimp with flaming bees and white wine. Pardon any minor errors.). All observable evidence suggests that Jess was ready to take this dish on a honeymoon by the time she finished.

I was less enamored with my main course, the Curry aux Crevettes (curry with Corvettes. I guess the Corvettes made it an expensive dish). Although the sauce was fragrant with the rich creaminess of coconut milk, it lacked spice. Unlike law-obeying citizens, the heat of a good curry should punch you in the face.

Jess's dessert was a passion fruit mousse. By the way, there are far too many double ss's in the previous sentence.

Bottom line: Elephant Walk has one of the most inconsistently wonderful menus that I've ever seen. Great concept, poor execution, just like the Soviet Union except for the great concept part. Considering the price (around 20 bucks for a three-course lunch), I'd rather stay at home and dumpster-dive through pika's fridge.

Speaking of which, yesterday's Franken-lunch of pika leftovers turned out to be a quinoa carrot avocado salad with corn, squash, and zucchini, tied together with a touch of golden raisins and honey mustard. Call it an edible requiem for bygone summer afternoons.

But it could have used more hummus.

1.Sin City: Honestly, this film's cinematography and editing was far more polished than any of my dreams could ever dream of being. I can dream in black-and-white or in color, but not in black-and-white-and-symbolically-important-colors-only. The sad truth is that my periods of REM sleep, no matter how R my EM may be, will never win me an Oscar even if I'm partially Al Gore.

2.Helvetica: It's an esoteric documentary about how the earthshaking invention of Helvetica not only gave aesthetic purity to subway signs but also brainwashed you into buying Coca-Cola. Need I say more?

3.Slumdog Millionaire: I blinked about 3 times per second while eyeballing this raw masterpiece of breathlessly-paced storytelling, trying to scan in every color-saturated detail before I had to face the grey ugliness of December in the Midwest.

4.Shawshank Redemption: Napping had second priority behind bets with myself about which person in my row of the theatre would start weeping first during the rain scene. I won, by the way.

5.Pulp Fiction: Like any normal person seeing this movie for the second time, I obsessively combed through every grain of Tarantino's visual/audio landscape for clues about What Was in the Briefcase. No luck. My best guess is still that it had something to do with magnetic monopoles and/or the Freemasons.

(As a point of reference, movies that I've slept through this year include but are not limited to: Watchmen, Dr. Strangelove, Life Aquatic, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Snape-I-Mean-Prince, Love Actually, and Thank You For Smoking. If you ever want a brilliant critical review of the first 10 minutes and the closing credits of any of these movies*, shoot me an email.)

((*With the exception of Thank You For Smoking, a film which lulled me into a slumber so profound that I did not wake until 5 AM the next morning. Granted, I'd just stepped off the bus from New York earlier that night and was so drop-dead exhausted that I could have slept through the brilliant climactic scene of Helvetica, in which some typographer guy opens a 1950s magazine and starts ranting and bashing on all the non-Helvetica typefaces with violent gesticulations of his index finger. Really, I have no idea why Helvetica wasn't a summer blockbuster.))

Not that I've kept track, but I'm willing to bet that most of the movies I've slept through were viewed on Thursday or Friday nights. A typically-MIT* trajectory of exhaustion goes something like:

*By the way, using MIT as an adjective is pretty much canonical when talking about tiredness/hosedness/motorized shopping carts. Just in case you're interested in those unspoken rules of English usage.

Mon.: Tired
Tues.: Tired
Wed.: Hopelessly tired
Thurs.: Drowning in tired while clinging to last shreds of willpower to floss regularly despite diminishing ability to lift hands past elbow level.
Fri.:
Sat/Sun: Regain ability to english

Minor exaggerations aside, my second thought after signing up for a 10 pm trip last Thursday to Wallace Observatory with MIT's Society of Physics Students was, “Should I bring a regular or extra-firm pillow?” My first thought was, “Mmm, meteors.”

The Perseids meteor shower, like a celestial garbage truck stopping by Earth on a yearly basis, dumps a spectacular load of debris into the night sky every August. Apparently, some people like to drive to scantily-populated areas to watch pieces of stellar trash streak across the sunless skies. By “some people,” I mean me and probably most of MIT's Society of Physics Students. Thanks to Sara '10's vice presidencing skillz, MIT SPS borrowed a van and shipped three vehicle-loads of meteor semi-enthusiasts to Wallace Observatory on the first night last week when the sky was visibly raining meteors instead of, well, rain.

So I grabbed an extra-heavy blanket, an extra-bright flashlight, an extra-warm sweatshirt, and an extra-small Jess Lin and headed over to the Green Building to await Sara's glorious borrowed van. Jess Lin was the ideal last-minute person to bring along because (1) Jess Lin and I could probably share a car seat if x > y, where x is the number of people signed up for the trip and y is the legal passenger capacity of the van, and (2) Jess Lin's family lives about 10 minutes away from Wallace Observatory, so if we got stranded in the middle of the woods, Jess Lin's mom could hypothetically drive to Wallace and bring us take-out Thai food .

Sara's arrival was timelike separated from mine, so I entertained myself by toying with 15-second exposure times on my camera, whose maximum exposure has no timelike separation from 15 seconds, unfortunately. That and my spacelike separation from a tripod precluded the possibility of magazine-worthy meteor shots, I soon discovered.

(Low-angle shot of the Green Building.)

After a while, it was clear that Sara was going to be non-relativistically late, so I started shooting the breeze with Jess and shooting the cement with my camera. That's not a figure of speech, by the way; I ended up with some excellent macros of the cement outside the Green Building. Seriously.

At last, the prophesized van showed up. Inward we piled. Wallace-ward we drove. 40 minutes it took.

Wallace was cold and dark and starry. After a short tour of the telescopes, we spread our blankets on the driveway and sprawled on our backs, eyes hungering for light. Residual splatterings of starlight slowly intensified from pinpricks into lush necklaces of hot glowing jewels on black velvet. I switched on my camera, upped the exposure to 15 seconds, and set the focus to infinity. 15 seconds later, I had a fantastic, high-quality picture of an empty black rectangle on my storage card.

This was the best photo of the night.

This was the second-best photo of the night.

In two hours, I saw three meteors. That's infinitely more meteors per hour than the average over my life prior to August 13, 2009! (The secret to avoiding disappointment is to recalibrate your perspective using irrelevant statistics. Another example: I broke my right arm. That's infinitely better than being one of the 0.0003% of people in the world who go to Harvard!*)

*Actually, I'm pretty sure this statement is comforting not because of the statistic but because it makes fun of people at Harvard.

If you're still disappointed, never fear: the moral of this story is that hope and determination always prevail in the end. After a night of abortive attempts, I was rewarded with:

Meteors galore!

Just kidding. The moral of the story is that if celestial bodies won't move for you, you can at least move your camera to create cheap blur effects that look like meteor tails, because nobody reading your blog can tell the difference anyway.

At least I didn't fall asleep.

Another can of lingual worms spilled over when I stumbled over the following twitch-inducing passage from Faulkner's Light in August:

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

Perhaps there was a time when my brain's toolbox included a robust Faulkner parser, but as of right now, I feel like I need to run MATLAB before I can understand this paragraph. After confessing this to myself, it was hard to deny that MIT does in fact wipe the hard drives of your high school English Lit. education in order to install diskloads of nerdly lingo software on your language processors.

So, for the gentle edification of the incoming Class of 2013, I offer an introductory documentation of conversational phrases @ MIT that are likely to be, um, not-so-conversational at your local grocery store checkout aisle.

Function (noun): No list of overinflated jargon would be complete without this classic, all-purpose noun that instantly makes you sound scientifically saucy in virtually any context. Otherwise known as the ketchup of argumentative conversations, “function” may be overused but it hasn't lost its awesomely obnoxious flavor. Ex:
Person A: Pass the salt, please.
Person B: Is your request a function of the underseasoning of the fish sticks, or is it a function of the evolved need to consume nutritious minerals? In either case, the spacial coordinates of the salt are not within the domain of my arm.

Spacetime separation (noun): The notion of intertwined spacelike and timelike dimensions, as explored by Einstein et. al., is especially useful for sublimating the tritest of excuses/apologies/answering machine recordings.
Ex: Oops, it appears that either I am spacelike separated from my cell phone or you are timelike separated from a reasonable hour for phone calls. Please leave a message at an appropriate temporal distance from the beep.

Vacuously true (adj.): A statement is said to be vacuously true if it is simultaneously true and proudly misleading. Successful conversations between tired MIT students and regular people (parents, doctors, etc.) often depend upon liberal sprinklings of vacuous truths into the slurred speech of the former. Ex:
Doctor: Do you sleep well at least half the time on nights before tests?
Student: Yes.
[The student's response is vacuously true because half of zero is zero, which is the amount of time that the student spends sleeping on pre-test nights.]

Null set (noun): Usually used as an euphemism for a depressing lack of something.
Ex. 1: I had the null set for dinner yesterday because I overslept.
Ex. 2: According to Facebook, you and the null set are now in a relationship.

Nonlinear response (noun): A mild, vanilla-toned label for surprises that hatch like fuzzy baby birds from nullset-minded decisions and quickly mature into giant, grass-guzzling geese that ruin your lawn.
Ex: John isn't here right now because the virus pop-up windows on his desktop responded to his mouse clicks in a nonlinear fashion. We'll just bring him food and water.

Gaussian (adj.): A nimble adjective for describing things that look exactly as they should.
Ex. 1: See how the elevation of the land is highest near the peak of that mountain? The altitude vs. horizontal distance profile sure looks Gaussian!
Ex. 2: MIT's Stata Center is non-Gaussian.

Isotropic (adj.): Admittedly, I'm the only person who uses this word casually at MIT. It's best reserved for situations in which you are completely lost in a hallway that looks precisely the same as every other hallway you've seen in the last 15 minutes.
Ex: I couldn't find your room because all the floors in McCormick Hall are completely isotropic. I swear, even the whiteboards on everyone's doors had the same drawing of a benzene molecule.

Unstructural (adj.): Anywhere else in the civilized world, “unstructural” means “potentially unsafe, likely to suffer mechanical failure.” At MIT, “unstructural” means “run away from this as fast as you can.”
Ex: I hear that East Campus' homemade roller coaster is especially unstructural this year. Better start stockpiling for nuclear winter.

Entropically favorable (adj.): When the disheveledness of your dorm room/ personal appearance/ mental state attains mythic proportions, use of this term subtly transfers blame from your personal laziness to Professor Sadoway, who in all likelihood taught you about the reassuring properties of energetic favoritism in 3.091. Ex:
-Why are you using toothpaste squeezed from a ziplock bag?
-It was entropically favorable, Mom.

Discretization (noun): Discrete modeling of continuous processes epitomizes the philosophy that if you don't succeed at first, you might as well not succeed in smaller segments. Ex:
-Did you pass the swim test?
-I did in fact swim four laps, but the coach regarded my discretization of the pool's length into 32 intervals as mathematically unrigorous.

The list traipses on, but I'll hold the rest for the second edition of The Unofficial Guide to Unstandard MITglish. (Coming soon to a browser window near you! Mention this blog post and get an additional 20% discount off the low, low price of your guide. It's so low, it's actually a member of the null set.) Now if you'll excuse me, I need to debug my Faulkner MATLAB script before I get to Chapter 7.