MIT student blogger Lydia K. '14, MEng '16

Vlogging, Tweets, and a Riddle by Lydia K. '14, MEng '16

The sum of three cats is a dog. Explain.

 

 

A fun problem, from my 10-year-old brother’s Russian math textbook: The sum of three cats is a dog. It only works on female cats, and all three of the cats and the dog must be Russian. There are two solutions.

Here’s a huge hint, in black text on black background, so you can only see it if you want to and you highlight the text:

 

  кошка
кошка
+ кошка
собака

 

I’ve decided to try an experiment: every two weeks I’ll post an informal blog post with a riddle or a math problem, a video about how my week is going, and my most recent tweets. While I love the revision that goes into most of my blog posts, I think it makes me more of a voice and less of a person. Hopefully this will make me more accessible as a blogger and give me a way to post even when I’m hosed. If nothing else, hopefully it will add to your brain-picture of the day-to-day at MIT, something I was very curious about as a prefrosh.

I’m curious to see how your view of me changes once I start talking with my voice. A close MIT friend told me that I seem inaccurately sane and normal in my blog posts; at the same time, a high school friend actually thought I’d stopped being weird until I showed him my blog, at which point he decided I had just internalized my weirdness and put it on the Internet.

Anyway, here’s a YouTube video of me talking. Below it is my Twitter. I’ve never used Twitter so I might be doing it wrong. It bothers me that my tweets are horribly boring (I’m hungry, but I’m too lazy to move, but I’m hungry, but I’m too lazy to move.… Next morning: I fell asleep somewhere between my room and food. Am I kess$ha?), but maybe that’s just because I’m the one posting them. Hopefully they’ll get more interesting when term starts and most of them turn into whining about p-sets, which should be fascinating for at least the first week.

My tweets are below in a box (poor tweets). You might not be able to see them in all browsers, like Firefox with adblocker enabled. In that case you can click here.